agrammatic @ agrammatic @feddit.de

Mein Deutsch ist nicht das Gelbe vom Ei, aber es geht.

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2 yr. ago

It's one of the most blatant self-made problems around migration that populists very disingenuously employ to paint their favourite picture of the "welfare queen" which has been a bold, racist lie since it was first used.

But I'm also a bit sceptical of how you can do this in a country without mandatory collective agreements in all sectors. Germany at least has a minimum wage, but that just means wage dumping can only go as low as 12 Euro per hour. Back in Cyprus, where the same question is constantly in the news, the most notorious anti-worker industry, the tourism sector, is begging for asylum seekers to be allowed in the jobs that they have most trouble filling with citizens, EU-residents, and work-permit holders. But they want to do so outside a collective agreement (one used to exist, but for various reasons is now dead-letter) and essentially without even the protection of a minimum wage (which Cyprus didn't have until this year, and now it has an idiotic version of it which defines a monthly minimum wage without a limit to hours worked).

I think that the introduction of asylum seekers in the workforce should happen, but it should happen in tandem with a massive pro-union legislation change that will make collective agreements mandatory across the board (similar to the Swedish and Finnish models, as far as I understand those). That might require re-aligning the way unionism is understood in Germany from per-workplace to be per-industry.

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/68004.html

Garrett's post makes a great point in only a handful of lines. Strongly recommended reading for anyone who organises a community of any kind.

I would agree. To the extend that OP's thesis is true (which I don't think is fully true, but also not fully wrong either), I also find that the readiness to compromise both at the EU level and in most member-state parliaments that eventually need to transpose the directives into national laws, is a difference that stands out.

A multi-party system helps too, because there can be situational alliances that do not divide the parties internally. E.g. in one topic the Social Democrats, the Moderate Right and the Liberals can be on the same side and pass something (probably a free-trade deal) and on another topic the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Left can pass something else (probably an environmental regulation). When there are only two parties in the legislature, such alliances break party lines, so it's a higher hurdle to overcome.

Thunderbird's Calendar supports local, off-line calendars and tasks.

It's the best FOSS calendar I have used, even if it has its rough edges.

That’s how American ISPs do it.

That's how the German Telekom does it too with other connection options. It's definitely not an insurmountable problem for ISPs.

Please note that the question is not whether delivery vans can be replaced by cargo bikes. In most situations, the answer is clearly yes, no doubt.

It's about whether cargo bike-based delivery can guarantee the same level of service that customers expect now from delivery vans, or that, indeed as the Dutch politician warns, people will have to accept that same-day delivery can no longer be promised.

I'm inclined to agree with you. For me personally, at-home delivery is a new thing completely, let alone same-day. Where I came from, that's still not the norm, we would just go to the post-office to pick up our items.

After some initial interest in at-home delivery when I moved to Europe, I realised that I now find it much more comfortable to redirect my parcels to a Packstation and pick them up on my own schedule.

At the face of it, it seems plausible to me that cargo bikes do not offer the capacity needed to guarantee same-day delivery to all of those who currently use such services.

That seems to capture the intuitive idea of discontinuity for me, thanks!

I would imagine using some sort of shapefile that I can run calculations in a scripted manner. So, in that case it will depend on the resolution of the shapefile.

Thanks for the proposal. That gets us somewhere already, although only for non-landlocked countries. Using the perimeter also opens us up to the coastline paradox.

I guess you’d have to decide if archipelago nations are measured as the geometry of the sea they own, or as discrete islands.

I think that it might serve us better to consider them as distinct islands, to keep the measures comparable with landlocked countries.

My intention was to suggest that you make those businesses unprofitable by intervening in the market with far-reaching regulations.

That's likely.

Perhaps intermittently so? I have obviously booked tickets in the last year with direct debit. hence why I expected it to work this time too.

I'm not sure if we are on the same side, and honestly in this case it doesn't matter, since you are right: a corporation only has to care about the externalities as much as they are forced to and not even an inkling more than that.

People who think that an enterprise in a free market will respond to any other force than economic force are wasting activism time that could be better used elsewhere.

If you want a corporation to stop performing a socially harmful business, you need to make that business unprofitable.

Es gibt Möglichkeiten im Privatsektor. Man muss nicht unbedingt Politiker:in sein, man kann einfach mit einem befreundet sein.

This is ultimately a minor story on a European level, but I am just astonished on how creating a price comparison tool has become the most hot-button topic in Cyprus right now.

Before I finally came across a piece that describes what the proposal is, I only saw the opposition statements which never clarified what they were against, just that those proposing it want to destroy their businesses. I was imagining then that this was attempt to set price caps. Nope, the huge scandal is a price comparison tool for groceries (something that Cyprus already has for fossil fuels)

„Mir steht es als Politikerin nicht zu, zu urteilen: Diese Autos stehen hier zu viel im Straßenraum herum“

Trotzdem bist du die Verkehrssenatorin. Wer keine Lust auf den Job hat, kann kündigen.

Something that I mentioned to a Ukrainian colleague who asked for my take as someone who is coming from Cyprus is also the effect of time on a conflict.

A politician can make passionate speeches about how faits accomplis will never be accepted and that justice cannot be anything other but the return to the previous condition and so on, but at the end of the day most Greek Cypriots understand that almost a century later, you cannot start kicking people out of the houses they lived for three generations without becoming the bad guy, even if the grandfather stole that house in the aftermath of an illegal war. You can't punish the grandchild for the sins of the grandfather, you need to find a way to work with them.

So, for Ukraine, the moral of the story is that if it becomes a frozen conflict, every next attempt to settle it will require more compromises on humanitarian grounds. And so far, I think they get it, since they do not consider a ceasefire. But if they end up having to agree to a ceasefire, they should be very suspicious of politicians who tell them at there's no need to rush to pursue a settlement because "in the future we can negotiate something better". With every passing decade, fewer and fewer aspects will be up for negotiation at all.

Let's not overstate Duolingo's effectiveness for language learning.

The technological challenge to adopting a self-taught language learning method into an app is rather small. You just need the content. Either you develop the course under a Free Culture license, or you purchase the rights for an existing method and you port it. Plus maybe some volunteers to handle user-interaction.

A good example is the VHS Lernportal which implements three levels of German class in a way that actually has some pedagogical merit. It's killer-feature is nothing technological, but that they have some teachers in the backoffice that will read your occasional text-production exercises and offer corrections (no, language tool wouldn't be able to replace humans in that case, because language tool doesn't know what you are trying to say and therefore gives you multiple guesses but no way to know which one you actually need).