If they were slaves they wouldn’t have to get any pay.

Paying them the same as in my country would be worth much more there. Anyway, might as well produce locally and have less shipping costs when they’d demand the same anyway.

And another factor for outsourcing work is simply that noons wants to do that work here. How does communism solve that? By forcing people to do it anyway?

What about not enslaving people?

And of course people in weaker economies get paid less, they also need less since everything is cheaper.

I’m not saying that was good either, but middle European countries started with a similar situation and got much farther. I recognise the USSR as a lesser evil than tsarist Russia, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. More like an upgrade from 2/10 to 4/10 while other countries went paths that lead to 8/10

Siding against colonialism: I guess its not colonialism when you’re colonialising your neighbouring countries and using your military to keep them in line / end liberation movements by force?

Siding against national socialism: At first they collaborated to take Poland together, and they made a deal to not attack each other. Only after Hitler broke that deal and attacked, forcing them to fight them, the USSR turned against Nazi-Germany.

… and more?

ad 1.: much worse than in western counterparts

ad 2.: my great grandfather was sent to a gulag for criticising the DDR’s government

ad 3.: another great grandfather didn’t do anything except being an officer in the Hungarian military, so he got killed in the communist revolution (1956)

DDR 1953

Hungary 1956 (fighting for democracy and freedom), peaceful student protest was shot at, police and Hungarian army supported the protesters, they got a new president who promised multiple parties and free elections, as well as leaving the Warsaw pact. The USSR sent tanks to end the revolution by killing protesters, the new president was killed too, many people in the military (doesn’t matter if they supported joining the movement for freedom and democracy or wanted to stay in the USSR) got killed.

Prague 1968 peaceful movement for human rights and basic freedoms -> USSR sent troops to end it

What if you were one of the unfortunate ones who simply got starved? If you criticised the government, or if someone simply accused you of being against the system? What if you weren’t even against the system but simply had a higher position (for example in the military, or as a politician) before your country was made part of the USSR? What about the huge lanes in front of grocery stores when they got new food?

Why were there such huge protests, and why did they have to be bloodily shut down? All owning class people?

I’m going to university for 27€ per semester while getting free healthcare and subsidised housing and lunch. If I were to become homeless I could go to a shelter for sleeping and food. Additionally you get a certain percentage of your salary (starting at ~80%, becomes less as the months pass, but it’s plenty of time to find a new job) after getting fired. Schools are free and there are basically no private schools because there’s simply no need, public education is good. After childbirth you also get money until you can work again, for up to 3 years. There are regulations against monopolies and cartels. Etc etc.

imo this is the ideal system

That’s what most European countries (social democracies) are doing. Safety net so you don’t randomly become homeless (you keep getting a part of your salary for a while, and even without any money there are enough places to sleep for all homeless people, at least in Austria), free healthcare, …

Soviet propaganda is a good thing

Was the USSR good?

I really don’t like apple but their satellite map is very fancy. Just so detailed.

Will use organic maps though.

In Germany it’s the VW ID3, very good replacement for Tesla Y

👍 never had to start over

My daily driver is an nvidia laptop with opensuse, takes like one afternoon to get everything ready with barely any former Linux experience.

Just use zypper (or yast) to add the proprietary nvidia repository (or nouveau) and install your drivers. Install everything else you need through zypper (or yast or flatpak). Familiarise yourself with keybinds, set new keybinds (not needed of course but its nice to know keybinds - if you’re using KDE already they’ll probably be the same anyway). Select KDE’s dark “breeze for OpenSUSE” theme (or some other theme, but breeze for opensuse just is so polished). Configure other preferences (night light from sundown to sunrise, set up Firefox sync (if you use that), connect to onedrive or whichever cloud you’re using, … . Done. No need to wait :)

Jerboa has an option to mark posts as read automatically (when scrolling over it)

It’s a double edged sword, yes. But in times like these (internet) people can present their views regardless, so I’d say its nice when they’re doing it somewhere where well-articulated and science-backed views get presented too and they can be fact checked. That’s how you win back people before they’re too deep in the rabbit hole, on the internet they quickly just fall into an echo chamber, only getting recommended similar articles, videos, … to the ones that they’re already reading/watching.

For people like me in the other hand it’s interesting to see from which kind of people they got some of their world views and makes it easier to prepare arguments against them.

I’d simply say discussions are a good thing for a democracy, I really don’t like the mindset of simply letting people fall out of touch with any mainstream information (which is mainstream for a reason) once they reject it on one topic. That leads to polarisation, radicalisation and a rising amount of voters for the pro-Russian parties.

Trump also would never have won if the USA wasn’t so polarised.

I have a hard time believing that, where did they say that?

And no, it’s simply not true that they’re making that 4 to 1 to the right, unless they changed that since December (haven’t watched R-L-M lately). At least until November it usually was balanced, so the occasional anti-mainstream people got fact checked quickly by the four others.

Would you like to share your experience?

Misinformation, I’ll refer to my other comment https://mander.xyz/comment/17586770

It’s greatly exaggerated, on ServusTV they just have all kind of people, so sometimes stupid people are there too. They have this format „Rechts-Links-Mitte“ (right left center) where they typically have around five people with heavily varying positions discussing with each other. So no, it’s not them supporting conspiracies but rather trying to find people for these discussions. On the other hand it means that the others get the chance to debunk fake news and conspiracies in those discussions, potentially getting viewers to change their position. You don’t achieve that by making these people not watch any discussions because “their guy” isn’t there anyway.

Before our election I liked watching their news since the ORF (öffentlich rechtlicher Rundfunk - our official TV where all the important stuff is) only talked about what’s wrong with so many people to make them vote for the FPÖ (far right party) and how they could be made reasonable again (blame on the people for voting for that party) while Servus TV talked about why people are voting for them and what other parties potentially could change to gain them back (blame on the parties for making decisions that led to losing voters to the FPÖ) (to clarify, I didn’t vote for the FPÖ and never world, I’m heavily opposing quite a few of their policies - regardless I can’t deny that they wouldn’t be as strong if our other parties acted differently, many people simply are voting for the FPÖ to express their protest which is why its good to discuss about what the other parties should change).

ServusTV also has great documentaries (mostly about Austria and neighbouring countries, for example about a group of mountains (sometimes even singular mountains), or about hiking trails, mountainbiking routes, ski touring, climbing, about a river, a lake, a city, a castle, a church, …).

My favourite aspect is that Red Bull heavily invests in sports, sponsoring many people that wouldn’t be able to follow their (often niche) sport without them.

Absolutely not a company that deserves a boycott imo. (I don’t buy anything from them though because I usually only drink water.)

You are aware they’re using the euro?