How I wish our societies could get there. Agree on a humane and empathy driven system, as you say. Maybe imperfect, but practically feasible and pragmatic. Idealistic in spirit, but not naive. Friendly, but with teeth if provoked. Something that can survive in this world and still be a good place for everyone, without illusions but also without cynicism and hypocrisy.

Yeah I also believe that good communication is key. Communication with everyone we might even strongly disagree with, as long as they are not actually beyond that in their beliefs and are just mislead or uninformed etc., but well-meaning. Such people need to be somehow included and heard and not pushed away into the arms of the extremists…

Yeah you can’t argue with logic and reason of the other side does not accept this language and is always acting in bad faith. Engaging fascists civilly is always helping them gain ground. But not engaging with them becomes more difficult the more mind share they gain. How should not engaging look in practice? All of politics and media would need to stop giving them a platform at once. And again this is something we regular people don’t really have in our hands at all.

Nobody is really trying to stop the oligarchs and their lobbies, it’s the only real political taboo that remains. People watch the right rising and it’s being shown as if that was coming out of nowhere and too unregulated capitalism wasn’t the main driver of the issue. The occasional article points out that billionaires should not have so much power or even exist, but these are drowned in the noise of the media.

Haha nice bait, which I took to get some actually interesting statistics, well executed !

Here is your comment, you deserve it. Now your post made it to “average”! You’re welcome.

(Was there any correlation between upvote count and the comment-based metrics? That could also be pretty interesting)

A beautiful answer, our trajectory was pretty similar, only that we were together and building it for over 10 years before we finally got married last year :)

My wife is my home, my constant, my safe harbor, the anchor of my sanity and peace of mind.

Two planets orbiting each other - I could not have said it better. We’re a unit that is greater than its sum and we grew and continue to grow together as individuals and into each other.

Tochter aus Elyyyysium

Software developer here.

I only recently switched from vim to VSCode and I refuse to use any editor without vim emulation.

Regular expressions for quick and efficient and precise search and replace, modal editing which allows me to type di" to ‘delete inside current double quotes’ (needs vim-surround plugin), typing 123gg to go to line 123, press % to switch between any pair of marching braces, brackets or parentheses, and all sorts of such efficient goodies.

It’s not only efficient, vi has a whole concept, a philosophy how you can build quick editing commands. It’s not like remembering random shortcuts like Ctrl-C Ctrl-V. Once you understand the language, it becomes second nature and you can translate something you want to do into 5 key strokes which would need 100 otherwise or would involve the mouse and clicking and selecting etc.

I’m not even that good at vim, I’m just using the surface features.

It has very good reasons why every notable editor provides some form of vi editing emulation.

Yes, exactly. To make America great again, Americans first have to take their country back from the oligarchs that are destroying it and sucking it dry. Noone else can or will do it for them.

Only a strong and united Europe can successfully stand up against the bullies to the West and to the East.

Right populists might have tried to make it look different, but despite all it’s flaws all countries end up gaining more from the EU than they lose. Looks like many people in the UK were disappointed after effects of leaving kicked in and felt mislead by politicians who pushed the vote for leaving.

We certainly need to reform the EU to be faster, less bureaucratic, and so on, but this is the best we got right now and like democracy, it’s a shitty organisation but better than all existing alternatives, including not having it at all ;)

I never understood all the love for the US when I was younger, now as an adult with enough experience and cynicism it’s clear it’s all just very successful propaganda and the power of cultural hegemony.

Europe was sitting very comfortably in the matrix of the US soft power, and good profitable business has been done for and with the wealthy class. But because life of average Joe was still pretty good, this ass licking arrangement looked like a great deal.

Now the rules changed, and if we don’t get our shit together real quick, we are also pretty fucked.