I don’t know if I’m going for hoity toity, I apologize if I did. I will say I am going for, or experiencing and processing loudly, an angry place of “everything could be better if we got loud and violent” so there is a little intentionality to me being like “I got the same job at the same company in a different county and everything miraculously got better, imagine if you also formed a union and demanded things” or a basic and passive rebuttal to the "if you pay kitchen staff and waiters what they’re worth food prices would sky rocket and there’d be general anarchy and blah blah blah.

You’re right to say I wasn’t assuming it’d be better for everyone. I’m aware there is some problematic racism and sexism and classism here. That being said, statistically most people would be better off here even if dealing with those -ism’s. Not like the US doesn’t have its fair share of systemic and personal representations of those -ism’s. There’s plenty of Indian, Turkish, Asian, etc people here so it’s not exactly unlivable as you sorta suggest. Most people, regardless of color, religion, or sexuality do fine here and are safe. Always room for improvement and in this case (as in most countries everywhere right now) massive room. But that’s not here or there, I’m not recommending everyone move to Germany. I’m recommending everyone in the US read what I’m saying and realize that things could be drastically better and that it could happen overnight if the people fought for it. The fighting itself would take time of course, and this is an ideal thought experiment, but the point stands there is no reason the US doesn’t have an average of 30 paid holidays per worker, or free healthcare, or public transit, or or or… We have the technology and the money and will, we just need the power.

So much!

The things that I immediately felt:

• I sold my car, I walk or travel by train/bus everywhere. It’s less dangerous, it’s more calm, I can write or read or game while going anywhere, and it costs me a flat €50 a month which is far less than gas+insurance+loan+maintenance of a car.
• related but I moved from a suburban environment in the US to a city environment in Germany. There are multiple grocery stores, restaurants, parks, and hobby spaces within 4 blocks and there’s not a single patch of harmful grass anywhere lol. Hated living in identical boxes with Monolithic grass borders and absolutely nothing nearby - felt like a constant reminder of our societal failings. Now I pick up groceries by backpack and recognize people in the city.
• as a renter I had to buy my own kitchen, sounds like a negative, is a negative in some ways, but now I have a well designed kitchen with an induction stovetop and a steam+convection oven. No more poorly designed kitchens maintained by landlords that don’t care with cheap appliances. No more forced gas stoves or electric coils. I cook nearly every day and the change in stove was a meaningful upgrade in my life, even coming from a kinda nice gas stove (cause gas is just that much worse than induction).
• I kept almost the identical job, my pay stayed the same and my purchasing power went up and my costs went down, I was automatically included in a union so my job security has never been higher, and I got 6 weeks of vacation automatically instead of the 3. I doubled my vacation! That is such an unbelievably life changing difference that I’ll do everything in my power to never go down from that value - and honestly make more major life decisions based around getting that number up. I feel like I work meaningfully less and have more time for hobbies and big vacations and if I could give one thing to every American for a year I’d pick this and I’m positive there would be a revolution within a week of it being reversed.
• I lived in KC. By car you could get to St. Louis or Des Moines, Topeka, Wichita, or Omaha within 4 hours of driving. If you’ve been to any of those cities, I’d argue (and I’m sorry about this) but only St. Louis really crossed the boundary of “worth it” as far as “places worth visiting multiple times”. Now I’m 3 hours away from Paris by train. Berlin, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, cologne are all within 5 hours. Zürich, Hamburg, Amsterdam, I think are right on the cusp of that timeline. All by train, less than €100 tickets for all of them which again isn’t far off the gas I’d have paid for getting to St. Louis and back. To get to Paris for cheaper and quicker while being able to do things instead of driving the whole time… I mean that is just unbelievable. So weekend trips or day trips have vastly improved.
• booked multiple dentist appointments for cleaning and wisdom teeth removal. It has always been fast, free, and high quality. Nothing super remarkable because I had “good” “insurance” in the US but here it felt less like a capitalist racket and more like a neighbor who happens to be a dentist taking care of the city.
• Germany does this weird thing where Sunday everything is closed. It’s low-key annoying because that’s one of the two days you have off so like you want to shop and get groceries and what have you. BUT the benefit is nearly everyone has Sunday off so gatherings on Sunday have been Ultra-effektive. I have had multiple DND groups meeting regularly on Sunday, it’s made scheduling so easy.
• I’ve felt the news be slightly better with a functioning government. When I moved here, for the first two years A) things were passing their equivalent of Congress and B) those things were good news like easier path towards citizenship and weed decriminalization and investing in public transit. Now that was the traffic light coalition, which got back stabbed by the traitorous FDP Party (who are kinda likes tea party or free market Republicans, think deregulate everything and help the rich under the guise of being good people and trickle down economics). Unfortunately because of the SPD’s (their centralist Democrats) unwillingness to run on wealth inequality and general slow nature, we’re back to a CDU based government (their Republicans pre-trump) with the threat of the AfD looming large (their Republicans Post-Trump but also in some ways more extreme and in others less extreme (this comment may not age well with the US’s current trajectory)). So the news has once again turned sour and I once again feel like I’m in a country of people losing the information and class war and we’re hovering over the slow self destruct button. BUT FOR A MOMENT IN TIME, the first time maybe in my life, I experienced a working government doing generally good things for its constituents and it was inspiring.

Those are the things I’ve felt most readily. But there have been numerous statistical improvements that I want to highlight:

• odds of getting violently hurt in anyway plummeted. Of course gun violence went to zero.
• average education went up
• average age when married and having kids went up
• risk of bankruptcy for any reason plummeted
• risk of losing my job went down, but also my salary due to an accident, pregnancy (i can’t but just to be clear protecting women in the workplace is cool lol), major illness.
• cost of healthcare went down, I felt the lack of a monthly charge but taxes went up so it felt more like a wash which is why I’m including it here. The fact that every prescription has been free or less than €20 has been noticeable. Still I haven’t felt the lack of financial shock from a major illness or that whole experience so I’m placing it here.

Moved from the US to Germany in 2023 through my work (and the EU Blue Card). It has been life changing and I want to stay forever, eventually becoming a citizen and renouncing my US citizenship.

AMA

TL,DR: Millionaires over something like 20 million dollars are unhealthy people, either by nature/nurture or by the inevitable corruption that isolating wealth causes. A good society would prevent that from happening, as that’s bad for its citizens and dangerous for its stability. Individuals with nearly no accountability shouldn’t have the power that comes with having 20+ million. Until everyone has 6 million dollars, no one should have 20+.

Full response: I think there’s an amount of money that removes you from the experience of your neighbors, that isolates you from your community, and that gives you more power than should be allowable in a democracy. I think people lose their humanity after a certain dollar amount (and of course they have to - can you imagine having everything you could ever need or want taken care of for the rest of your life and your families life and then NOT giving away the excess to friends and family and your city and charity) and I also think some people who lost their humanity because of systemic issues pursue money and power infinitely. In both cases I think an ideal society, a good society, would prevent that accumulation from ever happening - it would limit the amount of wealth a person or entity can have relative to its peers.

Where is that line? My initial comment said hundred millionaires, but you asked about millionaires so let me perform my thought process for you.

I know billion dollars is too much. You shouldn’t be able to count your wealth in the same units as small countries, that is wrong. If you can afford to rent a city or buy a government election or personally fund a NASA equivalent you have too much money and power.

I believe something like 6 million is fine. If you can make enough money to never have to work again, to provide for your family and pursue your dreams, I think that’s probably healthy for society. In fact I think that’s the goal for human society, to get to the point where everyone has everything they need and want satisfied so they can pursue whatever they’re feeling.

So between 6 million or so and 1 billion I know there’s a point where a person has too much money and every dollar of wealth should be taxed away. So let’s double one and half the other.

12 million is enough to earn 600k a year on 5% interest. 360 on 3%. Both conservative values. I’d say that’s at or approaching too much of a salary every year from doing nothing. Maybe that’s fine but I’ve clearly become uncomfortable with it. At 600k a year I could kickstart any project I have ever wanted to do and just see which one’s hit or miss. That’s on the cusp of okay with me. So maybe my value is somewhere between 10 and 20 million.

500 million is enough to earn 25 million on 5%. That’s definitively too much. If I could, by doing nothing, produce another person each year that I already think should be capped on wealth - I think that’s too much power for an individual with little accountability. That money must be redistributed.

I think if I continued this I’d find that 250, 125, 62.5, 31.25 million are all way too much by my standard. So I want to tax every millionaire above 10-20 million out of existence for their safety and the safety of society and, because like housing or holiday potlucks, no one should get 2 houses/rounds/permanent-livable-wages before everyone gets 1.

But knowing that the education systems in the western world have systemically produced people who believe millionaires are cool and okay, and especially people who haven’t thought about it long enough to form their own opinions on the matter, I tend to default to 100 million in online discourse because it is a number I think everyone can get behind.

Elect me your whatever and I guarantee to make everyone’s lives better proportional to the power I’m given :D - starting with the just and healthy redistribution of wealth.

Virtually nearly every night I see a friend or two, sometimes I’ll go a week or so without doing this. On the weekends, I virtually see 2-5 of my friends probably 2 a month for the bigger group and 6 or so times for the smaller group (so 6 total gatherings, 2 of which a larger group shows up). Every other weekend I meet in person with a group of 4-5 nearly religiously, to play TTRPGs. Probably once a month I hangout on a Friday with friends from work at like a pub or a beer garden or a pizza place. Once a month (sometimes more) I’ll meet with friends on the week days for dinner or a movie.

All things considered I feel pretty fortunate to have very virtual hobbies so I can meet with people about as much as I want nearly whenever I want to. Still working on getting more friends in my time zone that play the same games as me (I’m a recent immigrant to Germany, most of my gamer friends are still in the US, arc raiders is coming up feel free to PM me if you’re in the EU timezones lol). I’m also fortunate to have made a lot of quick friends at local nerd/queer spaces and am an eternal GM when RPGs are in their golden era. It was/is not hard to find a table of people interested if you fish for a bit in my experience. Honestly I’d like to be doing more in person stuff but my flat isnt fully ready for hosting but when that happens I’ll be adding a monthly board game night and a seasonal party to the mix!

Hope this helps, for what it’s worth.

This is great news! No AfD! We don’t need corporate lapdogs willing to sell their neighbors out in power in this country. I know we have the CDU issue still, but AfD would be worse.

Vote progressive, tax wealth, eliminate hundred millionaires.

I think that’s a very common and logical instinct/bias. I’m fairly confident you and everyone else does this as well. If someone told you two compare two drinks and that one was expensive, the expensive one gets a statistical boon. If someone says this book sucks and the author is an asshole, you’re primed to take previously neutral statements and skew them towards a negative understanding.

I always read before voting but ya, we have bias my guy and talking about them is good.

I don’t know if it’s Lemmy not standing different opinions than: A) some opinions don’t add much value to any conversation except to say “I disagree” and that’s both not super helpful and in a small community I’d argue it’s healthy for positive engagement to be more prevalent than negative engagement. B) some comments disagree or tear down a solution without offering up a good alternative - which leaves the people with solutions feeling worse for their solution, the problem unaddressed in a different way, and if someone likes their solution or even knows it’s superior to alternatives it becomes very easy to down vote a subjectively wrong opinion.

In this instance “going to the website” is not a helpful alternative for a tool who’s purpose is to aggregate many desired websites into one location only when they have new content. “Going to the website” would be less efficient both in time and effort. This person saying they don’t get them, while being on Lemmy - a site aggregator - is to me very funny.

My instinct was to down vote because it was already down voted and for the reasons above, but your comment gave me pause so now I won’t down vote but I also won’t upvote because it’s not content I think anyone should waste their time reading.

Should there be a neutral response on site aggregators for this very circumstance? Never thought about that before.

I bought a Synology after I moved to Germany in a moment of weakness where I wanted a NAS but was dealing with immigrating and wanted something easy.

I wouldn’t say I regret it because it worked out of the box and now I self host a bit. But my next NAS will be custom as I’ve been disappointed with the hardware and the company since.

I’m not gonna shill for any company, so no worries there, but our governments aren’t breaking up these monopolies so we have to. If my options are a trillion dollar company and a 10 billion I pick the 10 billion.

I wonder if a company can get to X billion dollars in revenue and not be bad.

Just chiming in as another kobo guy. I like it’s UI better personally but most importantantly it displays books, holds books, battery lasts forever, and is an eink display - like it’s an ereader, I’m not in the percentage of people who can meaningfully discern between the two.

Kobo being theoretically repairable and not supporting a trillion dollar inshittification machine was good enough for me to swap.

There’s been plenty of historical examples where taxing the wealthy has worked. Assets can’t easily move countries, nations can enforce taxes regardless of a wealthy person’s residence, etc etc etc. Even if this tax is hard to design and implement, it’s the right thing to do and it’s necessary for our future.

Stop doing the work of the billionaires for free. Properly designed wealth taxes will work in Europe, we’re smart enough to figure it out - and again - it’s necessary.