Thanks a lot!

Accuracy for the western world and for an academic who comes from the working class. Most people I work with are academics and see things different, because they could always afford a lawyer and/or had and have connections themselves. Their whole life and lived experience tells them another truth.

I feel sad, that I have to disagree with you on the honest signal, I see several problems here:

• Define ‘disinformation’: There are obvious black-is-white lies, but most propaganda in the west is not ‘disinformation’, it is simply emphasizing the facts that favor your point of view. If you add another signal, you are just one more signal producing propaganda (although most probably I would be very happy with your propaganda)
• Cryptography … even IT people have trouble understanding this, and even worse: You cannot solve a social problem with technology
• ‘good people’ - a handful philosophers in the west alone had a very thorough discourse about ‘good’ over the last centuries. The discussion is still going on. ;-)
• One of the most important insights is, that it is harder for a group of people to agree than for a few to take power and enforce it. If this wouldn’t be a human/social truth, our western societies wouldn’t be such a shit show by now.

IMHO one of the roots of the problem is how humans are wired and how bigger societies develop in a sociological way. The best way we have found (so far) is democracy, and AFAIK especially democracy with a mostly even wealth distribution (see the northern countries of Europe). AFAIK it is a social rule, that as soon as a group gets bigger, subgroups will be built. It is a human rule that attractive people will be treated better than non attractive one, you will want to help your friends even when it comes at a cost for someone you don’t even know or dislike.

My recipe would be a more even wealth distribution and a way to stop the wealthy force others to do labor for them. Thanks to police and military, I have the strong feeling, the ones with the guns and military will win.

p.s.: I recommend the following books if the topic interests you:

• The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics
• The Established and the Outsiders: A Sociological Enquiry into Community Problems

Thanks a lot for your kind words! :-)

I think it is pretty accurate of the system we have in Germany and perhaps in other western countries.

The problem is, one has to experience for oneself a lot of this things, to really understand them. By the time most people understand enough of the system, they probably have children/other liabilities which force them to play along. (Sadly I am not the exception.)

Life is short and ignorance is bliss.

Perhaps, because by now enough people feel a real impact on their life and fear for the ruling classes is not there anymore?

Just a few examples from direct, personal experience (I am German, so what I enumerate has a German/Euro perspective):

• Constitutional state? Does not matter, as long as powerful/influential people can literally buy laws or prevent even discussion of laws in the parliament
  • Easy way to figure out who is favored by one law, is to check who has to prove something and how hard it is to prove
  • Best part about this is, people in power can always point out to the law and that ‘we’ agreed upon that law
• Systematic discrimination against the worker class/people not owning things: Thing about laws, taxes, …
• Every media has an agenda and is propaganda (In the west, propaganda means mostly being selective about the information presented and how to build the narrative. Only idiots in the west will outright lie about things. It also means, who gets to talk in the media, where to position news (headlines ore somewhere else) etc. Media are owned by rich people or the state owned media are controlled by people with strong affinity to political parties
• Corruption on all but the lowest levels, especially in the government (In Germany corruption on the lowest level is uncommon und has a high penalty, but go up the level a little bit and ‘you scratch my back and I scratch yours’)
• Nepotism on all but the lowest levels (Worked in many different companies and the bigger the company the worse it gets. Working class kid does not get an intern position although it would technically be the best choice? No worries, some kid with the right parents and no clue will have that opportunity.
• No feedback loops: In Germany, we have professional politics which have extremely good conditions for their pension, whose children do not visit public schools and who have private health care decide, what in their opinion is appropriate for most of the people in the country concerning this things…
• No real political influence: We just had the clown-show of voting. Guess what, I can only vote between Nazis and non-Nazis. Can I vote for more taxes for the rich, a sane economic agenda which not benefits the rich, and full military support for the Ukraine? Sorry, I am out of luck. Of course I am free to build my own party. Let’s see how successful that is without massive investment of money and good connections to the ruling classes to get positive media coverage.

Before the eastern block fell apart, at least in Europe/Germany, there was always the fear of the ruling class to experience another (French)revolution. Since this fear is gone, they literally have nothing to fear…

Is it possible to change anything about the situation? I am more than cynical by now:

• Most everyone is struggling to keep their level of wealth/position in society, so the middle class fights hard to be a little bit better of then the lower class, don’t even mention the upper middle class, which fights with nails and teeth for every little advantage and privilege they have
• The higher you go in hierarchies, the more sycophants you’ll discover, which don’t mind selling out other humans for status/privileges, and there are even true believers, so brainwashed by neoliberal agenda, that they will fight for the privileges of rich folk they will never belong to
• There is no way to organize enough people in real life to force any political change (especially not with an aging population)
• The ruling class figured out for a long time in western world, that instead of fighting facts/the truth, they just have to generate more bullshit, discussions, alternative narratives and lean back, because people will discuss and not agree
• Nearly all change to the status quo is opposed and fought by some group, which benefits from the status quo
• Neoliberal propaganda and views are so ubiquitous and pervasive in our media, stories, etc., that a lot of people cannot even think about alternatives any more.

That’s just for the western world, let’s not start about the dictatorships/regimes supported by western governments with money, weapons and knowledge, where things are even more shitty.

I don’t even know the German word, but can confirm, wood stoves are a thing in my neighborhood, as I am reminded every time I open my windows in winter time. ;-)

Indeed, I have heard of spelling bees, but never thought about the reasons they exist in the US. Thanks for enlightening me! :-)

Thanks for the info concerning the pneumonia vaccine, I’ll check with my family doctor next time I am there.

Yeah, we have the annually flu news-cycle, too. This year they claim it is worse for children, because the hospital beds for children are supposedly at their capacity, and also in my team at work nearly everyone was sick within the last 4 weeks.

Just a heads up: I learned it is ‘flu’ for the disease and ‘flue’ is like a device to let go of smoke. Sorry for spreading my bad English!

Wow, nice! Do you have to pay for the shots or do you get them for free?

Sorry, ‘flue’ is just my incompetence at using the English language, it seems I also learned that it is ‘shot’ and not ‘shoot’.

I have a super bad German accent when I speak English, and although I hope I have a descent understanding of the language, I couldn’t write a sentence with correct spelling/grammar if my life depended on it.

Thanks a lot for chiming in!

Thanks a lot for the information! Damn, Canada really deserves its great reputation! :-)

Nope, I am a total boring office worker and the company I work for is not related to health care.

If there is a yearly refreshed pneumonia vaccine, I never heard about it being offered in Germany. (If it is a one time thing, I would trust everyone open to it got it already.)

Exactly what you said is at the heart of my question: Is it an economic consideration to not recommend the covid yearly update shoot or a medical one.

To further elaborate: The flue shoots are provided for free and paid for from the public health care, so in Germany you can just visit a regular family doctor and get it for free, or the flue shoots are given out at universities etc. In summary, while you nearly have to make an effort in Germany to not get a yearly flue shoot, for covid shoots you even have to sign a paper to the doctor to not sue them for vaccination problems, unless you are in the vulnerable group (elderly, asthma etc.).

How does it work in Denmark, if you would ask your family doctor for a covid shoot, will they simply give you one, no questions asked?

Thanks, one follow up question: In Germany (where I live), for flue vaccinations, it is kind of ‘free for all’, at my work place they even send doctors to vaccinate the employees (who are willing to take it).

This is the confusing point for me, as in Denmark, covid is treated like a flue by now. So why is there the difference between the recommendation between covid shoots and flue shoots?

Thanks for clarification, my question was indeed missing the point, that 2 vaccinations are recommended.

I am asking, because we have a wave right now and I see people, which most likely are vaccinated (or I know got their two shoots in the past), get sick for one or two weeks.

Please allow my follow up questions:

• Flue shoots are kind of free for all in my country (Germany), even if people are vaccinated and they also get refreshed every so often by the real thing (right now we have a flue wave in children) - is there a reason why there is a difference between flue shoots and covid shoots?
• From the individual point of view, is there any reason not to get a covid shoot, especially when the person already got vaccinated in the past?
• Is the benefits of further vaccinations vs. the risks a monetary/effort evaluation or a medical one?

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• Michael Mans ‘Miami Vice’ 2006. Absolute shit rating is probably to hard, but the reviews back then were underwhelming (I remember ‘style over substance’ as a quote)
• The original XXX with Vin Diesel. It feels that nobody got the joke, that it is a parody of the James Bond movies, although a James Bond look alike literally gets killed within the first scenes of the movie…

Strange Days is one of my favorite movies, ever! Tough I think it got good reviews but failed at the box office. (I stand corrected, it polarized the reviewers according to Wikipedia.

I am an IT guy, so my needs, preferences and priorities are not the norm.

IMHO software is mostly a shit-show, doesn’t matter if property or FOSS. My most loved target of critique is macOS/Apple, because the user experience is so bad for me. (Forced by my work to use it, so I have several years of experience/suffering with it.)

I think it is more about finding software which works by accident (or your training/prior knowledge), as you expect it should work. The biggest problem with proprietary software is that they usually need to up sell, dump down features (hello, macOS window management, finder and everything else) or want to force you into their walled garden.

One easy example where FOSS kicks ass compared to proprietary is managing/installing and updating software: Linux and the BSDs have all sane centrally managed systems for native packages and Flatpaks/Snaps, compare that to the shit-show on Windows and macOS devices. Don’t let me start on provisioning and other topics, where FOSS is by now decades ahead of the stuff one sees in macOS/windows.

One proprietary system which works awesome is Steam and SteamDeck. No questions there and I’ll happily throw my money at Valve.

I had the pleasure of working with great UX designers, but you are sorry out of luck if you are not the persona they target and their decisions are guided by making money and making their manager happy, so a good user experience is at most their 3rd concern, if you are lucky.

Concerning documentation I fully agree with you, with very few exceptions (Arch WIKI, FreeBSD handbook, RHELs documentation), the FOSS world is a sad place.

In the end, there is the potential for great UX in both proprietary and FOSS systems, but when you want to focus on user centric, FOSS wins IMHO for IT guys because they are the only systems which are literally build by their users.

This.

Media has always had an agenda, which even if meant in good faith is manipulativ.

Just speaking about newspapers:

• the topics are mostly chosen for the audience who can afford newspapers (= good/settled middle class)
• the journalists usually have a social background which allows for having unpaid internships and can afford to study journalism at university (e.g. rules out working class people)
• advertisement is a big (paid newspapers) or the only income source (‘free online news’)
  • this implies to not fuck around with the companies/people paying the advertisement
  • this implies also, to not fuck around with the world view of what your readers seem acceptable too much (less readers = less money for advertisement)
• newspapers are owned by rich people which also impacts what topics are covered or not
• newspapers have competition in search engines/internet etc. which they will fight / badmouth
• in Germany at least newspapers/their companies tried to fight adblockers and the peoples freedom to use adblockers in court - w/o making much noise about it. So, information damaging the newspapers reputation are willfully held back.
• every topic I have a little bit of knowledge about which is covered by so called specialists in newspapers is full of shit/wrong assumptions/lacks any kind of deeper understanding

Long story short: Everyone/everywhere has grown up consuming deeply manipulative content from media. Given the bullshit and propaganda we are getting each day by people with an agenda/on someones payroll, crazy hallucinations / generated content won’t make things worse than they are already.

Add to that ‘The Lamplighters Leage’ from HBS.

• Learn a proper tooth brushing technique (Bass, Stillman, etc.)
• Floss
• Strength training 2x a week
• Get some daylight every day
• Have great manners all the time
• Be nice and respectful to people around you (especially the ones you don’t benefit from)
• Read the classic books in literature and your field of work
• Get a hobby and follow it with discipline
• Go to the free health checkups that are provided to you
• Save early and regularly
• Plan your next day, week, month, year
• Have some fun and spent yourself from time to time on your own terms - YOLO ;-)

I stand corrected!

Open BETA on Steam