Unless there's a revolution in this pricing mechanism the only way for Germany to lower its electricity prices is through renewables build out to push away the more expensive sources.

I'm not one of those, I just commented somewhere else in this thread that I spent 10 years of my life engaged in political activities, from 18-28 (right before I moved out) I participated in organisations that tried to have some impact with nothing to show for it. It's not my passion to do that, I got tired, and there was nothing tethering me to that society after feeling like a fish out of water since I was a teenager.

In that case it's much better for my life to simply give up, I had my run while youth energy existed, nearing my 30s (which was more than a decade ago) I simply didn't want to waste more of my life swimming against the current.

I don't think many people understand how disheartening it is to run a civics education project for 2 years to try to educate people to vote better just to see they go to "church"* and vote on whomever their "pastor"* told them to.

* (Evangelicalism is not church for me, it's a money-grab scam to exploit poor desperate people)

I simply did not want to waste more of time by feeling powerless, I spent 10 years in civics organisations from 18-28 which didn't effect any change whatsoever even though we organised protests, education outreach for people to understand how government systems worked at each level for more conscious voting, one of my closest friends is a constitutional lawyer and helped to write motions to the state assembly.

Nothing of that ever helped anything, I wasted 10 years participating in civics for absolutely no gain. Much the contrary, I've been beaten by police, tear gas'ed, had a rubber bullet shot on my thigh (with a visible mark still there, 15 years later).

At some point you run out of steam, you are more than welcome to pick up the fight I gave up though.

After suffering a massive defeat, losing millions of lives, and being occupied for decades.

Otherwise culture changes slowly, I won't waste my lifetime to see 5-10% improvements, you are totally free to move to Brazil and fix it for us since it seems to be an easy task for you.

> If talking corruption, my own country has progressively became far less corrupt over my lifetime

In mine it only got worse, religious nuts like Evangelicals only accumulated more power over my life there, in my almost 30 years living there progress outside of economical terms got stuck.

Corruption is only one issue, violence is another major one, macho-culture and sexism is yet another, religiousness in the form of Evangelicalism with tele-pastors only grew to become >50% of the population.

It's an absolute fantasy that me staying there for my next 30-50 years of life would've made any difference. I only have one life, I won't waste it at a place where I always felt like a fish out of water with no power to change it. My life won't be dedicated to politics and power plays to the point where I could have any meaningful impact, I'm just a normal person trying to live a decent life, not an agent of change, lol.

You are completely invited to move there and change it though.

How do you imagine that me staying in Brazil would have helped fixing major issues with corruption and violence? It's my life, I won't waste it living in a fantasy that as an individual I will have any meaningful impact on lowering corruption, homicides, robberies, so on and so forth.

I'm just a person trying to live a good life, my home country didn't provide it while I tried to live with my values, I decided to move on and had the privilege to be able to do so, of course I will take it.

Because it's neigh impossible for an individual to meaningfully change parts of the culture they dislike which are ingrained for hundreds of years.

How am I supposed to change one of the major issues plaguing my home country: corruption? It's ingrained at all levels, from politicians to the police, and people participate in it because it's simply the way it is. By rejecting corruption I just made my life harder at all levels, it took me months longer to fix tax issues because I didn't want to pay someone who knew someone and could have it fixed in a matter of days; registering my car at the time took a whole week of visiting different offices, paying government fees in-person at banks so I could get receipts officially stamped, ordering a plate was a 2-day endeavour, I could have paid a person who would have fixed everything in a day but that involves being part of corruption so I rejected it.

I cannot change that, it's part of the culture, it annoyed me to no end, and my individual actions didn't matter at all while making my life harder.

It was much better for my life to emigrate, and live at a place where society is fundamentally more aligned to my values and ways of living.

Don't understand why you think 78 years is a long time, even less why you think it's equivalent to 1300 years.

A historical event from 1300 years ago is a bit irrelevant to contemporary issues.

The only case I personally know of someone doing that during their PhD didn't end well.

My friend couldn't replicate the results from a known professor in the field, asked for the data + model to re-run because he assumed his own work was wrong and wanted to benchmark against the known study. Got stonewalled for more than a year, brought it up with supervisors because he started getting the feeling the results were tampered and the professor didn't want to be found out. He pushed it but got ridiculed by the professor's university ethics committee.

After a couple of years he could show that the research was at least sketchy and he depended on that model/results for his own work, he lost 2 years of research and completely left academia after finishing the PhD (delayed by almost 2 years).

So Zionism for Israelis might just mean "we support and advocate for a Jewish state in the land of Israel" which also includes two-state solutions but it can mean "we are a colonial and ethno-religious racist state" to the ones being displaced by the movement (like Palestinians).

Sweden and Norway have very cheap electricity while mostly being renewables.

It's a whole concerted effort by many figures in the US political landscape (in this I include moneyed elites) to tear down democratic pillars of European countries.

The USA already had massive issues with corporate power in politics, the Trump admin just made the merge of state and corporate interests even deeper and more overt. The pressure has only been building up the past 10 years, the Biden years were a short respite of a movement ongoing for longer.

Unfortunately we will only see how this ship continues to sail after the US's midterms, it will be the defining moment to see if American society can find ways to right the ship or if it's going to be cement the plunge into the abyss...

People have different notification management than we do, I disable any work-related app notification outside of 9-5, others don't so maybe it's better to cater to them and send delayed messages if you aren't expecting them to read right away.

Readership issues in countries like the USA started way before mass adoption of AI, so also it's not related to AI effects.

I need to nitpick on this: MSG is not harmful to babies, if it were then breast milk wouldn't contain MSG.

I didn't think the anti-MSG hysteria was still alive and kicking in 2026.

Ragebait = fanning flames through misinformation or disinformation. Why do you immediately jump to the conclusion that anything inciting rage is true? I constantly get fed content on Instagram and YouTube with outright lies about my country (verifiable lies, not something I judged as lies) which are intended to cause rage and engagement. That's ragebait.

Other kinds of ragebait: creating a whole profile dedicated only to take the most extreme view on issues (on both sides), only to make people angry so they comment or like/interact with the content.

> Some of their practices are good, some are bad. People addicted to TV have existed for decades. It's been a trope forever, the old lady spending her day glued to the TV. Hundreds of millions of people live like this even currently. And just like most people today are a little bit addicted to social media, everybody was a little bit addicted to TV. The evening news broadcast was a very important part of their day.

When it gets to a device that you are carrying with you 100% of the time it's a whole other level and degree of an issue. You verge into the false equivalency territory, something before was addictive so now that we have something even more addictive it's ok just from precedence? Different levels and degrees demand different solutions.

> So yes, I think the reason why the people in power are more interested in throttling social media than traditional media - even though they both share the same addiction problem - is because the people in power have much less control over it than they did with traditional media.

That's absolutely cynical and a thought-terminating cliché since it's impossible to contradict you. I understand it's your opinion but it verges into conspiratorial thinking which I don't think anyone can de-escalate you from except for yourself.

> As for ulterior motives, this is Hacker News, so I fully expect you to believe that I'm secretly a Russian spy, Iranian drone operator, AI bot, Mark Zuckerberg, neo-nazi, scientologist, jew, Elon Musk and bio-lab operator.

Not really but you constantly rehash similar arguments in topics surrounding the EU so I'm trying to figure out what exactly is behind that. Ulterior motives don't need to be that drastic, it can simply be "I don't support the EU as a project" since you never state that but consistently take that side of the argument.