Same. I am not the biggest fan of his music, but from what I’ve read, he seems like a somewhat decent human being

Got it, I will set my dating profile to me programming while naked. Ideally at 3 am, after a healthy diet of caffeine and chocolate and not having slept or showered for 48h. Surely that’ll attract all the hot, nerdy girls.

From some unrelated nonprofit experience, companies seem way more cool with discounting goods and services than donating money. Probably something to do with contribution profit margin, where selling some more at a loss is still better as it covers some costs you have anyway. That plus creative tax write offs, and they probably earn money from giving you a huge discount AND feel good about it / get free PR

I mean, the design is to force drivers to slow down. Looks like they fulfilled their requirements.

Isn’t that just James May?

Absolutely. I am very fortunate to have very supportive parents, both financially and interpersonally, but they told me and my brother after school, in very clear terms, to learn a job that can pay the bills. For me, learning a trade, where you need to show up every morning, on-time, sober, wearing a clean t-shirt and smelling okay, probably saved me from becoming like your friends. Sadly, that ship has sailed for your friends. Now, pulling themselves out of their hole will be harder for them. I don’t really have good advice.

You are a good person for caring, and as long as you take care about your own wellbeing, there is nothing wrong with trying to get someone to be a better person. Imagine it like this: If you were helping a human who fell into drug addiction and homelessness recover, would you be a good or a bad person? The only difference here is the circumstances of your friends being more comfortable.

While it must suck for you, I am kind of jealous of that strength. I don’t even have a vagina, yet the thought of being able to break medical equipment with my private parts… dude…

Nope, I have never lived and worked for a longer time in the US, therefore, no first-hand experience. I have relatives who lived and still live in the US, and so far I haven’t heard anything to the contrary.

I did have the joy of almost having to pay a non-trivial hospital stay out of pocket here due to some insurance shenanigans, and a (iirc) 5-day stay with 3h surgery and a bunch of extras (due to “Privatversicherung” rates, difficulty, MRI, CT etc.) came out to less than 10k€. I don’t remember the actual costs, since in the end the insurances did finally agree on who had to pay, but it must have been something like 6-7k total. From what I heard, that is roughly similar to US out-of-pocket costs, except that due to insurance, I paid 0€.

If you have a good argument against my point, I’m happy to hear it. As I said, our health care system is a mess right now. The boomer generation retiring is going to make things very difficult. Bureaucracy is exploding, for several reasons. The two-class system with private and public insurance is disgusting bullshit and quite the opposite of what I believe “social democracy” should be.

Idk, hanging out with nice people makes me feel less lonely.

not that you claimed that, but i will pretend you did and argue against that

uh, what?

For the record, I’m German, and I am like a haircut and some gym hours away from being able to play the SS officer in a ww2 movie. That and I probably lack the acting skills of a christoph waltz.

That being said, I don’t think anyone left of the center (and, therefore, realistically, anyone on lemmy) would disagree with you, I am not sure what you are trying to argue then. Yes, we have widespread casual and institutional racism. Sexism is also still a thing despite decades of efforts. Surprise, people here are people, so they subconsciously prefer good-looking people that look familiar. Our government is corrupt and conservative-populist, the government before it was corrupt and “liberal” (in the US sense), our economy is basically clinging to combustion engines because they missed the jump to EVs, right-wing extremists are on the rise and are already winning local elections, and every now and then someone commits something bad enough to make evening news. We’re selling weapons to everyone who asks, bonus points if you promise to only hit the bad civilians with them. Oh, and if I’m lucky, I won’t have to worry about climate change as I’ll bleed to death in a trench in Poland.

Yeah, shit sucks. But that is not an excuse to not clean your own house. I believe that there are many good things here that the US should take some inspiration from. Our healthcare system is a bloated mess, but it’s miles better than the US. Workers rights, tenants rights, the welfare system (or whatever is left of it after the neoliberals and conservatives took turns gutting it for 30 years), a somewhat sane multi-party voting system, half-decent separation of powers, a constitution that is more modern than the 18th century, the metric system, proper gun laws (even a bit too strict in my opinion), an expectation of public transport (excluding Deutsche Bahn, they can go fuck themselves), just to name a few.

So, to cut a long ramble short, saying “this country has some good things, we should look into them in that other country” and “this country is perfect, nothing is ever wrong here” are two completely different sentences.

But horny. And lonely.

I kind of thought of him as a high-functioning psychopath with some autistic tendencies. He does not really care about the consequences of his actions, and derives his meaning in life from doing a good job only. If that includes helping people, nice, if not, oh well.

Women as well, I had a relative die of (maybe curable) breast cancer, who had avoided screenings because she was scared they’d turn out positive. Yeah. To be honest, I am not much better, I should get some check-ups done.

Assuming you mean microwaving… Microwaves sadly aren’t magical, their sterilizing capabilities are mostly just the heat. So make sure to evenly heat it through, the same way you’d do it on the stove.

The Dems are the conservatives, they want the status quo with maybe some mild reforms.

The Republicans apparently are the radicals, they want to change society (in a direction that I think is completely stupid, but still)

And it’s an EV

Another factor that hasn’t been mentioned: I’m young and healthy, I don’t want to have salmonella, but I’m pretty sure I’d probably be okay. If I am sick or cooking for people who have weak immune systems for whatever reasons, I do much stricter than for my lazy bachelor self.

Otherwise, I live by “if it smells and looks good, it’s probably good”. Obvious conditions apply of course, in hot, humid weather, I’m trying to leave nothing out, in cold weather, I’ll happily eat cold pizza from the day before.

Don’t we all

Been there, done that, decided that I won’t slave away my remaining time on this earth in search of the mythical six figure engineering job :)