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Posts
30
Comments
131
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I'm not sure how a personal budget app can help you keep track of a Heizkostenverteiler/heating cost allocator. There's many unknowns during the operation time and even the landlord is given a year to crunch the numbers before they bill the tenants.

    What is progress is that people on district heating now get their kWh consumption readings every few months.

  • There's a rather considerable current of leftism that is libertarian. Over-regulation of what a person can do, especially with something as, well, personal as appearance, is at odds with left-libertarian values.

    Left-authoritarianism is of course compatible with such regulations.

  • Cost or supply are one thing, but Germany definitely has strong tenancy rights.

    Cyprus likes to pride itself as having strong tenancy rights too, but it's not even half of what I enjoy in Germany. I didn't even have to get permission to hang a picture on the wall.

  • Leftist parties should talk a bit more about the same stuff that the right-wingers do. Would rather have a left-wing party bait people into voting for them with immigration rhetoric, instead of the fash.

    What is then going to happen is that leftist values-voters will abandon those parties, so the parties deflate and still can't govern. And if the new voters who were "baited" stay for a second electoral cycle, they then take control of the party and turn it into what we didn't want to exist in the first place.

    You win voters by convincing them that you have the best answers to their problems and the expertise to implement them.

  • It honestly feels like a very high price to pay for the sake of rapid expansion. It doesn't feel appropriate to remove the unanimity rule before the EU becomes a true union of federated states. The usual Polish existential populist rhetoric notwithstanding, it is the wrong approach to European integration (broken clocks occasionally being right, etc). At this point, for me it's enough to reject this report.

    For fairness: It is positive that the report suggests giving the right of initiative to the Parliament. The plan for the Commission is also an improvement although it sounds a bit confused.

  • And while I apparently should read up in the Cyprus problem, I cannot know about every territorial dispute everywhere

    Precisely: you do not need to have an opinion on every territorial dispute everywhere. In this case, if your goal is to mount a (well-warranted) criticism of Erdogan's rule in Turkey, you can focus on those aspects of Erdogan's rule in Turkey that you are actually familiar with, and leave Cyprus out of it.

    If you are going to have an opinion on Cyprus though, yes, indeed, you should inform yourself about the historical background as a prerequisite for construction your opinion. Our history, politics, and war legacy deserve to be taken more seriously than just be used as rhetorical crutches for an argument that isn't about us.

  • The second half of your post precisely shows how the Cyprus Problem is just demoted to a rhetorical device for people who want a weapon to fight a different battle.

    Someone who is actually interested in Cyprus would know that Erdogan is a latecomer to the whole story and that Turkey's interests in Cyprus have been the same even in the hight of pro-western, -secular, -NATO sentiment. To frame it as an Erdogan problem betrays that someone only started "caring" about Cyprus in the last decade.

  • There's 75 years of history in that conflict. Very few Cypriots nowadays deny that it is more complicated than that, and this does not have to excuse the invader.

    There's no reason to lose all nuance over the Cyprus problem, it's doing no-one in Cyprus a favour - and if someone wants to use the Cyprus Problem entirely as a rhetorical tool to fight a different conflict, then that's in extremely bad taste.

    All that being said, the unilateral declaration of independence was the biggest mistake of the Turkish Cypriot political class, since it doomed any efforts to collaborate across the green line due to the fear of "accidental recognition" - and at the same time any recognition of that declaration is not forthcoming because of how profoundly and transparently illegal it was.

  • Although I never used it, I am aware that Calibre can serve books in your local network. I imagine that this offers some position and annotation sync.

    Also, a bit off-topic for this sub, but… how do you read? E-readers? Tablets? Software choices?

    Unfortunately, there was never great ebook hardware. I use a tablet with Android. KOReader for ePub, constantly trying new Android PDF readers but finding nothing decent.

    While not intentionally, running Syncthing between all my computers means that my PDF annotations get synced across devices. ePub ones do not; afaik KOReader uses its own metadata format that it stores as a standalone file.

    Before, when I was still in university, I used Zotero also for annotation management. Feels like an overkill nowadays since I only read for leisure.

  • I think the examples in the article are a bit too high level, although accurate - even more interesting when they affect grammar, like both MS Office and Grammarly leading a crusade against the passive voice.

    More interesting to me though is how Microsoft Windows (not just Office) lead to the extinction of a whole punctuation point in my native Greek. The "Greek semicolon" was not included in the default Greek keyboard layout for Windows. While it remained as an option on the IBM keyboard that big organisations could choose to order, it vanished from retail and therefore from home users and the language simply lost an entire punctuation mark within a decade.

    If there's a clear example of how technology can drive language change (to the extend that writing is part of language), I feel like that's one of the clearest examples.

  • Why was there this law in the first place?

    In Europe at least, it was often explained as "same-sex marriage and parenthood are not allowed, and a legal gender change cannot be a loophole to that". But it appears to be a post-hoc rationalisation since the forced sterilisation programmes have many more targets in the past until it was progressively abandoned for more and more groups. It was also becoming untenable since more and more countries were legalising same-sex parenthood.

    So, if we are being more honest, it's eugenics.

  • Germany @feddit.de

    An ambivalent experience with the Deutsche Bahn that left us feeling slightly bemused but overall satisfied

    Germany @feddit.de

    Germans drinking more alcohol-free beer

    LGBTQ+ @beehaw.org

    Pride Month wrapping up, have you seen any company or organisation do anything remotely meaningful?

    City Life @beehaw.org

    Public transport determined to win hearts and minds | Cyprus Mail

    Germany @feddit.de

    German rail union to hold ballot on unlimited strikes

    Germany @feddit.de

    How To: Get a public insurance therapist in Germany

    LGBTQ+ DE @feddit.de

    Jens Spahn ätzt gegen das Selbstbestimmungsgesetz

    Brandenburg @feddit.de

    Golm: Kommune zieht sich zurück, rechte Teenager übernehmen

    LGBTQ+ DE @feddit.de

    Sollte ich ihn noch einmal einladen, oder ist das ein stilles Nein?

    LGBTQ+ DE @feddit.de

    Alle Daten und Termine für Pride-Events und CSD Berlin 2023