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.

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”

I tend to agree. We won’t have any “content creators” because it’s so hard to monetize fedi - and that’s a good thing! Instead we have people who post stuff they like and are interested in. It’s far better system. No ads, no “influencing”.

However, it would be great if we could create a better model for sharing hosting costs somehow - bandwidth and servers are not cheap when serving video. Donations work to an extent, but it’s always a shaky system based on kindness of select few.

I know. I meant it as a potential model for income (a platform owned by creators collective), it was just an example

Surely the ability to pay for things exists already in many forms/platforms.

But one thing that’s missing is central financing from the platform itself. The “big tech” is running wild with advertising money and this is what fuels the rapid growth.

Things like Nebula seem to work (creator owned business that offers paid subscriptions), but I’m not sure how many Nebula-exclusive creators there are, I have a feeling most of them publish stuff on YouTube as well.

Mastodon and Lemmy communities work on donations, but most of them just trundle along barely covering hosting costs.

I guess, in theory, it would be possible to create a PeerTube/Loops server that monetizes everything with ads, but I’m a bit skeptical of that unless you have very deep start-up VC money behind you to get you off the ground.

We’ve had micropayment/-donation sites like Flattr, but it never took off for real.

I think the core problem is trying to make people to pay for the content/service/membership. Most don’t. I don’t think that would change even if the option was integrated into platforms.

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

It’s not a question of belief

What I prefer is not getting sick and dying. I prefer following science. I prefer following government guidelines for keeping distance, washing my hands and wearing a mask when required.

I’d recommend you to contact psychiatric healthcare services (they are free here, don’t worry Mr. President) because we don’t have a president.

I agree that idealy no one would have to donate to the poor, but we don’t live in a society like that

I do live in a society which has social security programs based on a shared taxes instead of relying on donations from rich. Same with offering base human needs like free healthcare and free education.

Well have fun with the lottery!

How about building a society where you have a freedom to do meaningful things without having to amass wealth?

How about building a society where the poor don’t have to rely on donations from the rich?

Why would I want to get rich?

Yeah bud, very topical

Tell me, what data does Beehaw sell to the brokers?