What is something that definitely should not exist?

Public transport too. It really seems like every time a public service is privatised it goes to shit, almost as if for-profit motives aren't aligned to public interest.

Knew it was DE before I saw the instance domain.

In Germany, state-recognized churches collect taxes from their members in order to finance their activities as well as wages. Everyone who is a member of an officially recognized religious group automatically gets a percentage of their monthly wage taken from their paycheck. Usually, this amounts to around 9% of income tax — with the exception of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, where the church tax amounts to 8%.

For native Germans, church tax is often automatically collected. Many Germans are baptized at a young age and thereby become members of a particular church, which means they pay taxes to that church when they begin to earn income as an adult.

If you’re a foreigner moving to Germany, you can declare your affiliation to a church when you register at your local citizen’s office.

9%? That's absurd. Is there a way to remove yourself from this?

Definitely not how that works. All companies are taxed and they don't get any special representation outside lobbying that they were going to do either way and churches do in fact put a lot of the money they should have payed in taxes into lobbying.

Not taxing them hasn't kept their fingers out of the American government.

Far from it.

Hell, the current speaker is trying to convince everyone that the government was always intended to be based on religious dogma.

Please elaborate...

Like, do you think McDonald's as a corporation gets to vote?

Do you think priests and preachers don't get to vote now?

gotta nuke somethin'

¯\ _ (ツ) _ /¯

Pegasus != Unicorn

I had a professor in college who intentionally got infected by a bot fly to see what it was like. That's dedication.

For now, anyway.

New game+

As usual with "where do you draw the line" questions, I suspect there's a reasonable way to do it, but I don't know what it is, and finding a good answer might take some work. It would be worth investigating if there was any possibility advertising would actually be reined in.

There should be life ahead of us and life behind us.

We can see about 10,000 other solar systems with our naked eyes.

We can see 217,000 with a pair of binoculars

5.3 million with a 3-in telescope

380 million with a 15-in telescope

I can't find the number for a 64 node earthwide radio telescope but If we were going to find life it would probably be with that.

Yeah, but we have like a billion years of "observation time" minimum, since there's every reason to think one of the alien species will be expansionistic. They're not here yet, blurry photos aside.

Yeah, but don't you think they exaggerate some of the historical elements even a little? At one point, they used their unrealistically diverse artifact collection (with bobby-dazzlers made from everywhere except China) to promote the idea the ancient Romans discovered Canada (Rome was barely aware of even Iceland).

Yes, American grocery stores sell a product called "uncured bacon." It's bacon cured with celery juice, which is a natural source of nitrates. You can also buy pork belly if you have the right butcher.

No, but people buy the "uncured" bacon because they think it is slightly less bad for them. It isn't.

You have my support.

Well, the 4th was a sequel to deliberately end all future sequels.

I honestly appreciated some of the tongue in cheek self awareness of the 4th movie, but it was overall just another long series of action sequences. The first movie was a movie with mystery and a story to it beyond contrived excuses to use bullet time. The sequels are very low on substance. Not a big fan.

There's other lesser fuckery in different breeds, like shepherds having back legs that are too short. If we had been given breeding privileges as a species, we'd have definitely lost them.

Look for dogs that look like dogs, if you have a choice.

Addiction can be psychological.

if you design a city with the assumption that people won't have cars, you can make it easier to bike and walk to most of the things you need. This kind of urban design is superior to the car centered urban design in that it's cheaper, healthier, safer, and more environmentaly friendly.

LOL nobody said that tomorrow they would be outlawed. People are saying that we can undo the damage that was caused by 70 years of Boomers and their parents who destroyed the world in the name of the open road and "freedom". It was an aberration and we'll be returning back to how things were prior.

Saying it isnt worth up to a 25% reduction is a stupid argument in general.

Lets also not forget about all the money and resources spent on cars and their infrastructure.

Up to a 25% reduction in emissions at minimum is enough to be worthy of action.

I mean, you can do that too if you're into it. But I'm rooting for my own team here.

In practise, we probably don't. But maybe we could speed up a lot of progress if we could remove some obstacles and think about it really carefully.

A perfect system would be able to deal with this. Of course, that's a purely ideological goal which probably wouldn't be reached in practise. But I think we could gain a lot on the road there.

I heard that there are people far in the north that claim that this is already the case, do you mean that?

Good point! I should rewrite it from God to Gods.

Let me say it with a quote of Richard Dawkins on the example of the God from the old testament:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Maybe it's more about the legal requirement for infinite profit due to being publicly traded. This has led to such fun things like, rising costs, planned obsolescence, the general enshitification of everything.

So many people have no idea how finance works, but still comment. It's too bad, because there's things that do deserve criticism, but fly under the radar as a result.

Agreed, but why not attach it to the side of town they're on, or at least give them a normal, full road like all the others if your going to bother the rail traffic?

I'm guessing it was a driveway originally, and crossed the tracks way back when that was no big deal, and became a public road later somehow. It's still cursed.

That's very kind of you to say, thank you. I hope you're doing well.

Same as above.

I don't get the hate for kale. Never would buy it after decades of reading how horrid it is... Decided one day to try it and found it's actually refreshing and tasty, aside from the health benefits

I don't get the appeal at all. Many other perfectly good leafy vegetables. Eating kale is like accidentally chewing on some flimsy decorative plastic that fell into your meal. No thanks.

You don't have to cook fruit and or alot of vegetables. Nuts berries plants and some meats and fish

On one hand, yes, absolutely; on the other hand, when the chips are down, we seem to choose violence over compassion and cooperation. Given how difficult living likely was in the distant past, I would have guessed that compassion would have died in the crib.