I wanted to know the answer so I looked it up. The 650bn is paid by increasing the country defense spending. Each country is able to loan more only for the purpose of defense spending. But that 650bn has to come from somewhere so I assume that would mean cutting the cost else were (e.g. of social service). More info: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_25_790

For sure. Arm manufacturers are already lining up to fill their capitalistic pockets. In the meantime, their rare metals are extracted under bizarre conditions in former colonies or China.

But a local autocratic government feels more reachable to change. The EU actually costs you a lot of money - and true, we also earn money by trade and other collaborations so it is not all negative - but after we vote, it feels like things just continue as normal. They interfere in areas where they should make policy for and now they decide that we as EU should spend 800 billion on defense.

Good point. One of the actually valid reasons for the EU to exist, cooperate. Not like the current state where the is basically an unite states of Europe but rather bringing together the countries to work together but still respecting their sovereignty.

Fair point that more wapons dont solve the problem. Didnt think of that. But an easy counter argument will be that as long as others keep investing in weapons, we also need.

It is interesting to think about how to prevent neo imperialism forces taking your country. In the Netherlands even the middle-left parties agree to strengthen the EU. They all somehow want to show their voters they fight for their safety.

I must say that especially the EU and their decisions feel really far away and out of reach. They really don’t see (or don’t want to) see the long term consequences of their actions. A single country can’t make the difference in the EU.

Advice my parents to use outlook. They were using an ISP email service which we had to get rid of. I wasn’t sure if tutanota was ready for them yet and they already were a bit familiar with outlook. It was a bit of a trade off back then.

I have been raised with the phrase that voting a duty because a democratic system is not for granted and the rights to vote have been fought for. I live in the Netherlands and I don’t say it is perfect (far from) but we have a democratic, functional political system. It is moving to the right quickly but as long as I can vote I will. There is no anarchistic party of course but I at least use my vote to vote for left.

I actually started with it this week. It is partially due to privacy but also because I lost a sense for value. It is really easy to press a button online and pay say 20 euro. Not that I am irresponsible with money but the numbers on your bank account feel so meaningless.

I think this is the general conclusion in the topic that it depends on the situation. Maybe at the moment, emotion will also alter your decision at the moment. I suppose I would indeed never accept service to attack another country, only to defend my own country/land.

I personally have no problem with paying for a service. However, if I buy premium to remove the ads, YT has no longer the need to collect my data. But it is Google and they won’t stop collecting. That, plus the fact that Google basically has a monopoly with youtube are the reasons I don’t buy premium.

“Your info won’t be used for ads”. Does that also mean that they won’t collect any info about you? Theoretically, they don’t have any reason to collect data anymore because you pay them.

Same here. It indeed seems to be with the installed versions of websites only. I use lemmy.ml

Ah, on that note, a while ago, I also bookmarked: https://cwtch.im/ I think that is the same of what you mean. But thanks for bring collateral freedom and yggdrasil to my attention. Good food for thought.

I am a bit curious how such a decentralized network would function in terms of performance (especially in the case of many wireless nodes because you need quite some to cover large distances). You can ofcourse use them to get internet over the border of a country that blocked it but I find it hard to imagine how that would function on a larger schale

You also have IPFS. Is that what you mean? It is slowly becoming better and better.

They main problem I have with this is that we don’t have a decent alternative for youtube yet. The main reason I don’t want to pay for youtube is because it is Google. With YT premium you don’t buy privacy (logically you would say with removing ads you also remove the need to track people).

I use an rss reader to follow like 50 websites. The main news sites are arstechnica, the verge, IGN, Polygon and many snaller websites that post less than once a week

And I suppose it is fine that not everybody interacts. They still do something with that knowledge only not publicly. Imagine if those 99% also start interacting. I suppose a community will become messy and people will stop interacting at the end because they don’t feel heard because some people overshadow then with their voice.

“The act of following another account is impersonal and one-sided. Building meaningful relationships with other people is second to amassing an audience.”

This is an interesting statement. While building two-sided relations is indeed very important, it often also is the case that i follow people because they post for example interesting content i want to follow. That person just cant follow everybody back but still provide meaningfull information to lots of people.

That is nice. I never used firefox long enough to find these detailed settings. it is a shame there user share declined so much. It is good to have another browser engine around

Chrome is way overrated, just like edge (a little less) in my opinion. They focus heavily on speed and not on actually giving a unique browsing experience. They dont help you browse the internet efficiently and organized like browsers like Vivaldi do. The appearence of these browsers (and firefox to) stayed quite similar over time. There are better browsers, people just follow the masses and dont even try out new onces.