Because many journalists are dumb and buy the official propaganda on the reasons for the mass surveillance.

The Media is really rotting the brains of people.

Indeed, it already starts with the first few words of this article. Nobody who has any brain left would categorise the current day SPD as “centre left”. They sold out the little bit of left left in them under Schröder. They are just one more neoliberal centrist party these days.

I can hear Kohl laughing in his grave.

But the German unions are mostly happy with the status quo and are doing nothing to challenge it, because most union leaders also get to sit on the boards of the companies they are supposed to represent their members against, and have a cushy revolving door with the “Social” Democrat party.

They also keep massively underdelivering in the narrow field where they can act legally, most often not even securing enough pay raises to compensate for inflation. This has lead to a vicious cycle of weak unions losing members due to their weakness and becoming even weaker.

They are doing the entire workers’ rights movement a great injustice, especially considering that unions and strikes were entirely illegal in the past and many people died fighting for making them legal.

The EU didn’t make it particularly hard, they actually were way too lenient and made quite a number of concessions, mostly in order to not escalate the Northern Ireland situation.

It was the UK that kept insisting on renegotiating the Withdrawal Agreement over and over again, and the EU was lenient enough to let them have their way whenever they asked for renegotiation.

Best car I ever had was a 1990 VW Passat with the 1.8 l 4 cylinder gasoline engine, it ran over 450000 km and almost 20 years on the first engine, was easy to service and repair and no amount of abuse you threw at it would kill it. They don’t make them like that anymore.

Even if that had not happened, there would still be the decline of quality coupled with a simultaneous increase of prices.

The corruption lobbying unfortunately is pretty much a staple of every large corporation these days.

They haven’t become lazy, they are taking quite an effort to squeeze the maximum amount of money out of the minimal possible effort. They aren’t optimising for good products, they are optimising for maximum profits. With corporate suits not thinking ahead any further than the next quarter’s numbers and the resulting stock value, they don’t care that reputation is a finite resource that will run out quickly if you’re selling it rather than products that are good enough to actually replenish the reputation.

What made VW big, was building affordable, reliable, good quality cars that could be maintained easily even with limited means.

At some point in the early 2000s, a bunch of suits became greedy and decided to use the reputation built up over decades by their former products to cater to the international upscale market and sell overpriced cars of mediocre quality instead.

For Landlords, especially corporate ones, very well, I’ve heard.

Yes, but the choice is largely an illusion. It’s a bit like reaching into a clogged toilet to pick your favourite turd.

A shift of the public opinion at that scale doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It can only happen if society as a whole tolerates increasingly intolerant messages and behaviour. Those far right rat catchers wouldn’t have much of a platform, if they weren’t tolerated, and their supporters wouldn’t be nearly as brazen if they were told off wherever they dare to publicly state their support.

Our voters have the choice of picking who gets to pull our leg at our expense for the next 4 to 5 years. Very powerful indeed.

Unfortunately, German unions have allowed themselves to become a farce.

Their legal standing is very limited (strikes are only legal in a very limited set of circumstances), people in high level leadership of the big unions often sit on the boards of the very companies they are representing their members against, and there is a revolving door between high level union leadership and the “social” democrat party, which is social democrat in name only and has a more than 100 year history of selling out the working class.

The last time the Nazis were in power in Germany, Switzerland closed its borders to most people trying to flee, so maybe a well tested, but still not so good option…

One of the root causes of of the Weimar Republic’s downfall was the inability of the established parties to get over their constant squabbling, leading to the state pretty much being paralysed. This, combined with an economic crisis, created the perfect environment for fascists to thrive and ultimately destroy the inept state from within. Unfortunately this is repeating, the rise of the AfD is no surprise, and in order to see what this can lead to if left uncorrected, we only have to look back in history roughly 90 years.

The liberals, at least in Germany, have a one dimensional concept of “liberty” meaning only economic liberty of people who can afford it. That includes freedom from taxes, which they want to achieve by cutting as much government spending as possible.

Linux distributions and/or components have been, and will be, shittified repeatedly. Not as badly as commercial operating systems, but pretty bad anyway.

Don’t worry, they’ll invent a new way of milking in no time.

Buying a car new is a waste of money anyway. The second you register it, The Invisible Hand of The Market™ swoops in and takes away a good portion of its value. Especially if it’s a new model, you’re also stuck with all the teething problems associated with any new and untested product.

If you don’t want to be ripped off buying a car, you should buy second hand. If you’re forced to buy an affordable car due to monetary constraints, you actually have no other choice than buying second hand. But even then, a car is only affordable if you can get a decent amount of remaining service life out of it by the time it has become cheap enough for you to buy. If you buy a 10 years old combustion engine car that’s in decent shape these days, you can reliably expect it to last for at least 8 to 10 more years if you give it a little bit of maintenance.

Truly affordable electric cars will come when (or if) the current models are 10+ years old and still have a useful battery life by then.

If there was any indication that they have changed in a meaningful way, it might be possible to look at them differently. Just there really isn’t. The fact that they willingly entered a coalition with the FDP is enough to know everything about them, because the FDP is very well known for doing exactly what they are doing right now: Redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top, no matter the cost.

Going back even further in history gives more data points, especially on the SPD, which has a long tradition of coining itself as a working class party, while repeatedly selling out the working class. This pattern dates back all the way to WW1, where the SPD was very quick to expel anyone who dared to speak up against the war. After WW1, in the early years of the Weimar Republic, they cooperated with far right paramilitaries in order to “convince” striking workers to end their strikes using the very compelling argument that is firing live ammunition at them with machine guns and whatnot.

The Greens are too new to have any long standing history of being such a textbook working class party, but the few data points that exist make them look just as good. The Prime Minister of the German state of Baden Württemberg, a Green, had a little “let them eat cake” moment last year, when he advised poor people to get through the energy crisis by simply using a wash cloth instead of taking a hot shower, while boasting how he made himself less reliant on expensive fossil fuel by upgrading his own house with insulation, solar panels, and a pellet heater. In some other states, the Greens are (or have been) in a coalition with the CDU, which is also very telling.