I meant, the priorities for the society as a whole. Our governments and laws are formed accordingly. On individual level it’s same here as well. We have people who reject (or abuse) the system, who hate the taxes etc. But our society is formed to provide certain things like free access to education, healthcare and collective social security for elderly and those who can’t support themselves.

Never heard of 996 but feels like these types of articles pop up every time there’s some kind of tech hype cycle going on. Silicon valley is full of IT heroes, ready to sacrifice it all - their families, health, environment - in order to make it big. Get rich or die trying. That’s the American Dream, right? Work hard, provide full value to shareholders and some precious honey might trickle down to you. The American “success culture” we Europeans apparently lack.

Meanwhile, here I am, I’m living in northern European social democratic utopia with free healthcare, education and annual, fully paid 6 week vacation while wondering why my 4-day work week is taking so long,.

Different priorities, I guess.

USA is not a serious country. What an absolute shit hole.

You’re saying Lemmy usage is turn on? I’m not judging, you do you, but that’s a weird fetish

And the absolute shittiest part (apart from loss of life) is that Trump is going find the words to make it all much worse

Aiming for next years FIFA Peace Prize, no doubt.

Ah, thanks I wasn’t aware of those instances. I guess it’s the same old, same old story as always - politicians (in general), even in EU are not really looking to do the “right thing”. They’re looking to do the most populistic thing.

If the EU has a system which does not rely on third parties for verification and allows the platform to verify directly with a government-run service

The EU has been driving union wide “Digital Identity Wallet” It’s documented here: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EUDIGITALIDENTITYWALLET/pages/694487738/EU+Digital+Identity+Wallet+Home

There’s actually a project that tracks EU MEP’s and their X activity https://leavex.eu/politicians/

It’s kinda sad.

The European Commission even has their own Mastodon instance (https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/), but it seems they can’t get any of the Commission employees or Parliament MPs to use it. It only has 10 accounts and from what I can see, only one “real” active user, Veronica Gaffey the Director-General, for Digital Services (DIGIT), who isn’t even posting on her real account but under the title @EC_DIGIT_director_general

As far as I know none of the EU member countries have their own Mastodon servers and most politicians at least here in Sweden seem to be using either X or (the technically minded “progressives”) Bluesky, while they complain about American Big Tech.

As always with politicians, actions don’t correspond to rhetoric.

Regarding this “W” social media launch though - There’s a post on the CEO’s LinkedIn about a “pre-launch” in Davos, and that links to an German article saying the same thing - but there’s no link to this launched site anywhere. ¯\(ツ)/¯

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensions_in_Germany

I think you want to have all three pillars going, normally you save in some kind of stock market pension fund.

I don’t live in Germany, but lot of countries in EU have similar system. Over here in Sweden, you can easily see an overview and your projected pension at retirement age by logging into one of government offered e-services, maybe Germany has something similar.

What number you need to reach - is completely up to you of course.

Just two short of full Nazgûl party.

I thought the promised plan of making things great again was returning to American isolationism. So seems to be going as planned.

Just keep working harder! It’ll trickle down!

Ok - so while I’m not ‘boycotting’ America, because I don’t really think that’s going to change anything, I’d much rather spend my energy focusing on my local community. But having said that, I don’t either understand or subscribe to certain U.S American cultural tropes such as:

• Driving oversized gas guzzling cars everywhere and believing it’s freedom.
• Nuclear family values.
• Rampant exceptionalism (granted, I live in Sweden and we have our own flavor of it - hate it here as well)
• Zealous Christianity. Religions should be abolished.
• Out of control late-stage capitalism backed by military. But I’m a anarco-syndicalist so pretty much every country sucks.
• The American Dream. Connected to the above. It’s not going to trickle down. Ever.
• Shitty polyarchical political system designed for the ‘elite’ and ‘weath of the nation’ (but again, I’m an anarchist, so everywhere sucks)
• Obesity and fast food culture.
• Everyday racism. The U.S is supposed to be the New World melting pot of cultures, showing us old world Europeans how it’s done. Seems that didn’t work.
• Enshittification of the Internet. Lack of anti-trust, lack of trade union power and lack of worker agency have all but destroyed the promise of early Internet. We have surveillance capitalism instead.

There’s not much I can do about them though. Except to act in my local community, and to tell my kids and anyone listening: There are better ways to live and better ideals to aim for.

And you’re right, of course. The original American culture is very much worth preserving.

Lemmy is the software. There are many servers with different moderation policies. There are some leftwing servers and there are some rightwing ones. Join a community that fits your personal preference

What is even “American culture” apart from mash-up of worlds immigrant cultures?

I fail to see organized attempts to challenge advertisements.

I think lot of that is embedded in the privacy communities/movement, so it gets easily overlooked as a separate part, even though most of the time it actually is the cause of the disease. Many times it’s just easier to treat the symptoms (“just install adblocker, bro”) because the real cure is to topple the entire system and challenge our late stage capitalism. That tends to be a bit too much for a “normie” who doesn’t necessarily even see the constant flow of ads as a problem and even if they do, installing a browser plugin tends to be “lol, too much work”

Evolution of Homo Sapiens was inevitable which means destruction of the entire habitat and all species in it is also unavoidable.