The shopping cart test for a community. […] Culture is learned from your peer group.

Perfect example… Germany universally has this deposit system for their shopping carts but bypassed the handling and inserting of a coin into the cart at the height of covid.

Since then I have barely seen any reversal there. People still return their carts although they don’t need to get their coin back where the system is still disabled. Or they just conveniently forget to use the system and still bring their carts back without locking them there where the system is operational again.

The actual deposit was basically only needed for the learning phase. After this it just works automatically.

Still using an S7E to this day as the battery seems basically indestructable…

The one single weak spot? I actually had to replace the glue.

Basically the US and heavily english-speaking countries easier infected with the same brain-rot the US’ corporate ruling class calls “culture”.

(IOs/Android vs. english-speakers vs. income)

The US in brainlessly-adoring-corporations centric.

Which is exactly the reason while Android is shrinking in the US while Google is growing.

Left and right are artificial, meaningless constructs

Left and right are very useful construct… as a spectrum… on multiple axis.

It just seems completely meaningless, because so much here is tainted by the US perspective. And neither do they have a spectrum (with just two parties), nor multiple axis (again, two parties can’t represent nuanced opinion on different topics). In fact they don’t even have left and right, just right-wing and more far-right.

No, bots aren’t a thing alhough a lot of people pretend them to be. Trolls are still either human or very obviously fake.

The crimes of the Soviet Union while claiming to be communist are well documented.

FTFY

And not everything left of Eastern European nationalism is communism. In fact 90% of the political spectrum lies between these two extremes.

You mean “pre-installed with most DEs”…

Yes, that’s how habits work. They are mostly automatic.

No, that’s not how brushing your teeth, flossing, taking the time to exercise or drinking water works as those are not habits at all.

PS: Drinking water might be the exception. You might be able to create a habit out of it… by taking the concious choice to always make some water readily available…

Close this tab right now and promise yourself never come back to see if someone gave you an easy answer…

Or maybe you would realize that a lot of people think the same but are also convinced to be alone and unable to change anything… Just like it happened for me back then the moment the first few made the effort to change. We will never know.

I live in Germany

Same here… and most of my contact list (and I) dropped WhatsApp when Meta bought them or a year later when the eavesdropping and phoning home to Meta was publically discussed in the media. The remaining minority is able to use another alternative on top of WhatsApp (that’s one of the reason I like to remond them that they provide Meta with data from the people opting out…). That was also nearly a decade ago (2014/2015), so pretending that you need to use WhatsApp in 2023 is indeed a choice.

I use WhatsApp as well for the people I keep in touch with

And everyone in your address book not using WhatsApp should come by once in a while and slap you for selling their numbers for your convenience… You are right… keeping a basically inactive Facebook profile is harmless in comparison.

And on the other side of the coin military training areas in Germany are studied as potential nature reserves because just some limited amount of sane oversight goes a long way…

“The Baumholder military training area is therefore of special importance for nature conservation and landscape management. 722 ferns and flowering plants have been identified so far. Of these, 27 species are on the Red List of the Federal Republic of Germany and 34 species are on the Red List of Rhineland-Palatinate. In the animal kingdom, the abundance of insects and amphibians is striking. For bird life, the open and semi-open cultivated landscapes are particularly important, as can be seen, for example, in the occurrence of red-backed shrikes and Great Grey Shrikes. The larger animals such as the lynx, wildcat or black stork, which have found a retreat here, are of public interest.”

You didn’t know because that’s mostly a bullshit pretense. Do you want to know actually happened between Munich going OpenSource and then reverting back to MS? Munich was bribed with a shiny new European Headquarter and the promise of additional taxes.

but will it even be the same now that you know how little control you actually have?

Some communities weren’t even the same anymore after those 48h protests. And you can basically feel which parts of the community instantly left the moment they realized all that talk about protesting was bullshit and it was purely symbolic.