RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
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User ID: 2051
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
2d ago
I've looked into the swedish response back during Covid and as far as I can see, they did mostly the same: They made a lot of recommendations to minimize social contact, they just didn't force you. And this worked: If you look, for example, into mobility data such as usage of trains and subways, it went down just the same as other large cities across the west.
The big problem with mandated legal lockdowns such as the UK and germany, both of which I'm more directly familiar with due to having lived in both and having family & friends in both, was their pointless tyranny and nonsense rules. I have a friend who got a massive fine in the UK. His crime? He took a walk with his flatmates through a forest - which was further than his allowed distance. He lived in central London of course, so he was allowed to take walks there. I, too, got told to move along and go home again in the UK. I was sitting on a park bench in a mostly-empty park reading a book.
Germany I at least didn't experience any problems going outside - but I was deliberately living in the countryside with my parents & girlfriend. My mom constantly reminded us, every time we technically were breaking the law, such as driving too far from home or staying outside too long or whatever. The situation in the cities was, of course, very different. Plenty of friends barely left their rooms and actually got stopped and controlled by police when they did, getting questioned to make sure they had legitimate reason to be outside.
Not to mention the insanities on the day care and school system and their still-lingering effects. Frequent & long closures threw back parents and children months to years in their career and education, respectively. Worse, the new culture of 1) always taking sick leave no matter how weak a cold is and b) always having to stay home two extra days after the cold passed "to be safe" is still on the books in many places and makes everything unworkable insofar as people actually follow the rules.
Again, my mom is a day care worker herself and she is extremely pissed about her younger coworkers constantly taking sick leave, always for a full week. She is staying even when seriously sick, because otherwise it would mean all the parents who depend on them couldn't work. This is still going on. Our own daycare also still has these rules on the book, and a few of the workers do seem to take advantage, but at least not as many. Several of our friends with older kids tell similar stories of schools with constant "teacher shortfalls" which are entirely due to teachers constantly taking sick leave by sticking to the letter of the current rules.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
3d ago
Yeah, Duggan is imo 100% wrong. This has nothing to do with ideology - today's social media is anything but cyberlibertarian anyway - and everything to do with what stupid and crazy people are like. They always existed, and always had these ideas. The only thing that has changed is that Duggan can now see them. Nothing got worse - if anything from my impression, the internet makes correct information easier to get than ever: Before, if you grew up in a crackpot community you might literally be unaware of the viability of alternative viewpoints well into your teens. Same deal for the relatively ubiquitous benign moderate religious communities. I've grown up in the latter, and we still had plenty of crackpots, too. Not to mention that Duggan seems like the kind of person who would like to just generally ban any speech to the right of Bernie Sanders.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
6d ago
Also, take Australia. Australia gets far more Asian grinders than the US ever did, indeed, it has some of the most elite immigration in the world measured by your system. And yet, it has stagnated against the US in the last decade in GDP terms and is facing heavy anti-immigrant backlash.
I feel like there might be a breadcrumbs effect that is under-explored. Basically, every ultra-competent (in the sense of being simultaneously highly intelligent and highly conscientious and highly agentic, and so on) person in the world, if they are interested in leaving their country and going to the west, will try to get into the US first and foremost, since it's the powerhouse #1. And since they are ultra-competent, they will find a way in. Every single other western country - no matter how hard they're working to have selective immigration - will only get the breadcrumbs from this, only people who either aren't quite competent enough to get into the US or who want to go to another country for idiosyncratic reasons, like already having family present there. And worse, this effect is cascading down: If not the US, then it's north-western europe, which also isn't even terribly hard to get into for a reasonably motivated individual.
To be sure as long as you're not screwing up the selection you're still getting reasonably competent, unproblematic individuals. But I wouldn't be surprised if Australia in particular gets the chaff of the grinders: Those that needed to grind extra-hard just to barely make it.
Since I know that you are german, I'd recommend to get a scalable capital account ASAP and put the 5000€ into the Tagesgeld there to start with. It gives 2.5% with no volatility, no fees, minimal risk and full access to take it out any time. That helps serve as a good basic protection against inflation. There's probably similar options with Trade Republic and the like, but I'm not familiar with those.
From there, you can start trying out any of the other investment schemes others recommend here. From my side, I'd just invest a percentage you're comfortable with into a world ETF through a fee-less monthly plan.
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