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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • The predatory credit cards in the US should be not legal. They are exploiting people who don’t have so called “financial literacy” and encourage wasteful spending.

    In Europe the US style credit cards don’t really exist and people just have debit cards. Also there is a social safety net, so people don’t have to rely on keeping money in the bank for when they become unemployed.






  • I (originally from the US) moved to Germany with a Swiss girlfriend, so we visit Switzerland frequently and know the cultural/politics.

    I find Germany to have much better social policies than Switzerland, such as better worker rights/conditions, public health insurance. The Swiss people voted against having minimum 5 weeks vacation and also just rejected caps on the private insurance minimum costs. The politics are much more conservative/individualistic compared to Germany. On a positive side, Switzerland probably has the best public transport system in Europe.














  • I mentioned game consoles as an example of consumer electronics that function without having yearly updates. This is largely due to giving game devs a performance tagtet to hit, but it shows you don’t need marginal updates every year. Mobile app software could probably benefit from not having better hardware every year, forcing devs to write better software.

    From a software standpoint, iPhones are locked down like gaming consoles, focused on consumption and not general computing devices. Apple controls what software runs on their devices just like Nintendo.

    I think yearly car updates are also wasteful and the car industry has adopted a fashion style model where the changes are mostly atheistic and they try to make people’s cars feel outdated/obsolete and for them to buy a new model. Cars are viewed as a status symbol, so this works.

    Apple has been applying the same play book as the auto industry, though they can actually obsolete hardware through their software.