Yes, this list reads like one a Midwestern high schooler would go through to impress his failed literature teacher, who will write him a nice recommendation letter for the ultra-conformist university of his dreams, dooming him to 25 years of debt and a miserable life working as a consultant
On this topic, I can't recommend enough the movie "The life of Others" (2006). Depicts surveillance in Eastern Germany and the state of sheer fear and paranoia its citizens had to live in.
Stasiland by Anna Funder is also a great read on the topic. And then there’s Katja Hoyer’s “Beyond The Wall” which takes a comprehensive look at the DDR.
It is available from Amazon.de on blu-ray (probably also on Prime Video depending on the country), under the original German title: Das Leben der Anderen.
You can find it on bittorrent: https://bt4g.org. That's a DHT search engine. Put in your query and sort by seeder count, then use the magnet link to load it onto a bittorrent client (e.g. qbittorrent).
I have a tenant who has been living in my garden house for two years without paying rent. It is almost impossible to solve this situation. I am not even allowed to turn off the water or electricity. There are always two sides to every coin.
It was the neighbour whose house had burned down, and my mother let him move into our garden house (because winter was coming). They agreed to make a rental contract. But after he moved in, he refused to pay anything and since then it has been impossible to change that.
In Germany you have to file an action for possession ("Räumungsklage"). But that takes years (I brought it on its the way immediately). You cannot act on your own, it has to be legally enforced. But the legal system in Germany takes ages and human rights are higher than tenancy rights (usually good!). This often leads to deadlocks where nothing happens because you cannot evict someone and put them on the street.
Another case where the ‘winning move’ is to either have enough money small issues like this are in the noise, or no money at all (on the books) so society goes out of it’s way to not do anything.
Also known as ‘on both ends of the economic spectrum exists a leisure class’.
Comparing agents that will go into your home and move things around to drive you crazy and directly torturing you, with a debt registers is not a comparison I see as successful.
It is way more democracy and freedom than living in a state with an entity like the Stasi, a mixture between the NSA and the Gestapo, which is used to curb any opposition, at least.
It's not perfect, but this alternative is way worse.
And in the US, landlords can pull credit reports from private companies, and if the private company says you missed a credit card payment a year ago they'll reject you.
If the private credit score company returns a wrong score because someone else has the same name as you and they mixed up some records, well, it's a private company, you have no recourse.
Since it's not the government, but a for-profit private company, it can and will also sell your information.
If you opt out of this private company's system, landlords can and will reject you.
It is well known that the US is the most free country in the multiverse, so I would say no, having a government do it is not freedom (that's a social credit system like china has), but if instead it's a private company creating that credit score, that's freedom.
What law do you want to have to prevent this? Companies are people, and if your two previous land-lords are free to gossip about whether you paid rent (free speech), of course equifax should be able to sell that information (also free speech). People's right to privacy stops where free speech, and the ability of private entities to profit and raise GDP, starts.
You can sue the credit bureaus for inaccurate information. I did using a contingency lawyer and it worked. Depending on your actual damages, you can win significant money. The FCRA and other laws can be very powerful.
Switzerland and Afghanistan have an almost equal Gini coefficient.
My point is: the Gini coefficient might indicate what your country's income distribution looks like, it however does not tell anything about actual life conditions.
Switzerland has 98 days of maternity leave,
Afghanistan has 90(+15) days of maternity leave
(Wikipedia even puts it at #1 worldwide with two years,
but that may be incorrect?).
In Switzerland, women have been able to vote since 1971.
In Afghanistan, women have been able to vote since 1919
(but interrupted during the *previous* Taliban regime).
The Human Development Index, on the other hand, does. Switzerland is #1 at 0.967, improving at 0.25% per year. Afghanistan is #182 at 0.462 and dropping, the UK is a respectable #15 at 0.940 (between Finland and New Zealand) and also improving.
Sure but that’s a bit silly. Switzerland’s GDP is something like 50x that of Afghanistan. UK GDP in 2025 is much higher than in 2003, too. Of course not 5000%
Yes, and and increases in the price of essentials (food, housing, utilities) have a greater effect on livings standards of the worse off and are not captured in the numbers.
Only 30% of americans voted for him. Yes, that's quite a share of people ready to vote for a convicted criminal, but not to the point where I would say that the U.S. population showed actual agency in this election - and that might be the crux of the problem.
I take that the non-voting population thought they'd be fine either way. Or just the same either way. Now why would they think that, there might be more answers than I can imagine.
My theory was that it was a mental trap of the kind "Meh, he already was a president and the world didn't end so who cares". Unfortunately, right-wing power gets much worse the second time they get the chance to rule.
The mistake this post makes is thinking that sole engineering effort is what makes startup win.
Most of the things you build will end up in the trash can anyway. But what matters is what you get while doing them, like ___domain knowledge, improved processes, actual customers..
If you are ok to scrap your code in order to integrate a better model then fine. Since your model is better and does not need all the software around it, it will take 10x less time to re-do what you have, leaving you more time for things that also matter, like sales.
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