How true is this or are we doing the same thing “generation killed industry/way of doing things” that the boomer media is so fond of?

AbeBooks was bought by Amazon in 2008.

Removed by mod

Fascist and populist are not mutually exclusive.

I think this is a common misconception based on survivorship bias and the high cost to entry. Taking your hypothesis as true: you have to have a product that can be sold to ten users as easily as 1000 users (this in and of itself is not a given). That’s where the cost is: the starting up of the business where you have no customers and won’t have any for several years.

It’s a matter of scale. For co-op where we are, you can get “investor loans” but they tend to have a fixed return. Capital wants to gamble more than they want a 5% APR for 10 years.

What we’re currently exploring is an angel loan from someone sympathetic that has historically lived higher up the corporate ladder and we’re applying for some government grants, but Credit Union may be a good idea!

That’s nice and all, but only works for people that already have money. Food isn’t free. Housing isn’t free. Heck, water isn’t free

EDIT: want to go through the maths to extrapolate this privilege.

Let’s say you need one small team to deliver a novel product, say 5 people. Let’s assume they all live in Europe and just need enough to survive - say, 20,000 euros a year. A lot of ground work has been done, so it’ll only take two years to go from concept to R&D to something to show a potential buyer.

So you have about 100,000 euro per year cost to just keep everyone fed, housed, and clothed not including any equipment, software, licensing etc costs. Assuming there are no costs but just keeping everyone fed and alive the co-op needs 200,000 euros in the bank or alternative funding to get the product in a sellable (note: not finished) state.

In project management in tech (my background) a good rule of thumb is staff cost = 1/3 of costs. However, let’s say we’re being super lean and can self-source the more expensive equipment and just have to think about licenses for core software so let’s make that number 1/2 of cost.

So for the two years of operation to get the product into a position where it can be taken to potential customers, the business would need approx 400,000 euros before a product hits a shelf.

And that’s why funding is a problem.

The rise of the worker co-op is definitely something to watch! I’m currently exploring a worker co-op for a tech start up. Biggest problem? Funding. No investors want to touch a co-op.

You’re conflating liberal parliamentary representative democracy with all types of democracy - I was very specific in my post as to which I had the problem with (and it is equally as specific in the UK’s new definition of “extremism”).

I have no problem with democracy and do think it’s the best system. I have a problem with the idea that electing our overlords from a curated list with little to no fundamental difference (i.e. liberal parliamentary democracy) to then dictate to groups tens or hundreds of millions of people strong is democracy.

Just reading it - the constitution of Canada is mostly about land and parliament setup more than anything else (though Constitution Act, 1960 & 1965 are kick-ass).

The rest is “unwritten” and “interpreted by courts” - exactly like the UK.

Germany, from my understanding, is a really different beast from most countries in how it works thanks to the East-West reunification.

That said, it sounds similar to the US Supreme Court, is that right? What are the checks and balances on this court? What’s to stop the bad actor work as seen in America?

I don’t think the judges would like it, but what recourse would they have if the government passed an act such as this in Canada? I could see a judge saying this act breaches X treaties, but then just withdraw from the treaties (edit: which this act is likely a precursor to).

The system of parliamentary liberal democracy is an inherently flawed system.

The idea that a government can instruct the courts to ignore human rights legislation shows how fundamentally broken the liberal “democracy” system is.

This from the government that just made saying “I am intolerant towards the idea of liberal parliamentary democracy” an example of extremism but saying “foreigners don’t deserve human rights” is not extremism.

Ahh just misread then, all good :D

Not entirely sure what you’re saying, sorry if I got it wrong, but it seems like you’re implying I said the opposite of what I actually posted.

My point was there is no genetic predisposition to being bad at language learning but that the language education in the UK is woefully bad. I’ve spent more time learning how to learn Spanish than actually learning it because we’re not taught the skill of language acquisition from childhood.

The reason the government hasn’t invested in language skills is because it’s the lingua franca (the irony of that phrase isn’t lost on me), but the argument of “weak aptitude for language learning” used in the article is patently false.

weak aptitude for language learning

This is such bullshit. As a Brit abroad, our problem is weak language education. We are taught to such a poor degree and we are not taught how to learn a language. It’s been the biggest struggle of my adult life trying to get conversational and after a year I am still way behind my cohorts - it’s not some genetic predisposition to being bad at language learning, but a lack of language infrastructure in childhood.

We have to learn from Germany’s mistakes: armed resistance is legitimate in the face of fascism.

Aha good spot

With all my knowledge intact? Hell yes! I’d keep all that bitcoin instead of spending tens of thousands of it (about £100) on Silk Road in uni.