Same for UN.

Not really sure it would work. The security council legitimizes actual wars. In that case I’m okay with there being too much safeguards. The same goes for the EU. If we actually decide to invade a country, I’d prefer it that all 27 member states are unanimous. If everyone from Hungary to Ireland decides that a county needs bombing, then I believe it.

Apart from such things I do agree with you. For most policies (e.g. sanctions) we shouldn’t need unanimity. Though in some cases a bigger qualified majority (like 75% of population and states) might be better.

That’s also used in surveys in democratic countries. The example I heard in statistics class was the question “did you ever visit a prostitute”. It’s obvious that you need to anonymize that to get somewhat honest answers.

a totalitarian society

Afaik Russia isn’t totalitarian yet. They’re “only” authoritarian. In the latter there’s still a lot of private life left that isn’t dictated by the state and therefore a lot of room to wiggle in a survey. That obviously doesn’t mean you can get surveys with a western standard, but you can indeed gauge public opinion. Real authoritarian regimes are actually quite rare. I can’t think of any examples besides North Korea and Afghanistan that clearly fit at the moment.

Article 4 does indeed ban it.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruzifix-Beschluss https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/kruzifix-urteil-bayern-jubilaeum-1.4906155

Bavaria is indeed violating the constitution here. There’s merely not much done to enforce it here.

like banning lgbtq people from kissing outside cause it makes others uncomfortable.

We’re talking about bans in workplaces here. And I think that your example is fitting. If a workplace can ban people kissing (or wearing a pyjama then it should be allowed to ban religion affiliated clothing as well. That sad, I do be live that in most cases employers shouldn’t be allowed to ban these things. If you end up working with your boyfriend and occasionally share a short kiss, that’s not going to affect your work and if you’re able to do your job in your PJs, then you should be allowed to do so.

Get a picture and ask enough people to get a statistically significant result. The meaning of a symbols is defined by what people think it means and of course that can change with place and time. Hence in Europe the headscarf would be religious now but not back then.

as long as it is not too revealing

And how is banning “revealing” clothing any better than banning other other types of clothing that certain people might find offensive (e.g. headscarfs)? You won’t get hurt by seeing some nipples either.

If you find one, yes. As far as I know most pharmacies don’t do vaccinations. After all they need the facilities to do that. In a large city you’ll definitely find some, but depending where you are traveling time could mean that it’s easier to get vaccinated in a doctor’s office.

Well, if you pay yourself you fall under the rules of a “Privatpatient” (private patient, usually people who have private health insurance, not the social-security-related insurance).

Generally speaking that’s helpful because you’ll make the healthcare providers more money than a normal patient. I.e. you’ll have an easier time getting an appointment.

Also generally speaking the rule of getting a vaccine as a private patient is that you’ll have to do two things: buy the vaccine and then find someone to inject you with it. In case of Covid residents of Germany get the vaccine for free from the state (not from insurers, that is unusual), but I don’t think that would applies to you. Hence you’ll have to plan the logistics beforhand It’s possible to get the vaccine through a doctor who then vaccinates you and it’s also possible to get it from a pharmacist who then vaccinates you, but it’s quite likely that you’ll end up having to go to a doctor, get a prescription, go to a pharmacist, get the vaccine and then go back to the doctor to get vaccinated. I’ve done that and it doesn’t necessarily take more than an hour, but if you’re not in the country for long, you really want to plan beforehand. I.e. make sure the doctor has time and the pharmacist has the vaccine. How to plan does - just as @ebikefolder said - very much depend on the city you plan to visit. There’s no spoc for healthcare in Germany. You’ll have to find doctors and/or pharmacists via google (or specialized search engines like jameda.de).

Same publisher, same mindset, softer language.

Yeah, they’re conservative. But that doesn’t make them liars. I’m not saying “Welt” is great if you want a balanced viewpoint and they most certainly pick and chose in what they mention, but you can find that on the other side of the political spectrum as well. It’s Bild that doesn’t really have a counterpart.

I’m not talking about “Bild” here. They’re obviously not reliable. Welt however isn’t nearly as polemic. I disagree with a lot they write, but I don’t think they do “hate campaigns” either.

I agree with you on the fact that this inflation is a problem. I just think that we need to avoid inflation in terms of complaining about it as well. As it stands now anything that’s at least not contradicting the dictionary is tolerable in my opinion. Well, at least on social media. In academia your approach is obviously best.

Edit: OP shared a link to „Welt“

Welt has a right wing bias, but it’s fairly reliable with facts. So on direct reports on surveys you can use them as source (just like you can use TAZ for example, just with a left-wing bias).

That’s a pointless title. The truth is that 5.5 people claim they didn’t heat sufficiently. Whether it was objectively sufficient is a completely different question and going by the actual numbers for usage, households Germans barely reduced their heating. Almost all savings were done by the industry. The the average person in Germany still heats their living room above 20°C.

If you’re healthy then going with 17°C indoors isn’t actually a problem (I tested that myself last year). Having to wear a second sweater or using a blanket isn’t something you should get to complain about when the alternative literally kills people.

Yes, your point is that “hunger” should be interpreted very loosely, meaning in a sort of addiction-psychology way.

I’m saying that it simply isn’t well defined. There’s a reason we have terms like “malnurished” or “undernourished”. Your definition is only as narrow in certain contexts, e.g. “world hunger”. I personally wouldn’t use the word in the context of first-world issues either, but that’s because it’s ambiguous, not because it’s wrong.

I think that’s a sophisticated re-rendering, and that most ordinary folks do associate the word “hunger” with famine, with starving, with terrible deprivation.

I don’t think the definition is that narrow. There’s definitions like this:

a compelling need or desire for food. the painful sensation or state of weakness caused by the need of food: to collapse from hunger. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hunger

• a craving or urgent need for food or a specific nutrient
• an uneasy sensation occasioned by the lack of food weakened condition brought about by prolonged lack of food

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hunger

It’s indeed often used to describe more dire situations around a lack of food, but it’s not exclusively used for those situations. Hunger is also the corresponding noun to “feeling hungry”. Hungriness isn’t used that often.

It’s not a famine and fortunately no one is calling it that here. What it is, is “food insecurity”.

Eating healthy is already something that most humans don’t manage to do. Even those with money. After all humans are wired to love sugar and avoid work and cooking is work. If I had a penny for every time thought to myself “fuck being healthy” and then ate something, I could solve food insecurity. And I’m not even overweight, so probably mere average in that sort of irrationality.

Adding monetary constraints makes good food choices even less likely. And to make maters there’s also a bunch of other issues that arise people who have to worry about getting enough food. That type of stress is very much not healthy.

With your attitude, you could just go into a drug den and tell everyone there that all they have to do is “say no”. Sure, technically it’s correct, but reality doesn’t work that way.

Reality is that feeding people is fairly cheap option to curb social programs.

Downvoting just proves you have no answer to the question.

The answer is simple: Humans are neither omniscient nor perfectly rational.

Obviously, humans who always make the perfect choice to optimize their long term health won’t get obese just because empty calories are cheap. But if a typical human had such superhuman willpower and intellect, poverty wouldn’t exist anyway and humanity would be occupied with putting up a dyson sphere around Vega or whatever.

In reality however humans are flawed and practically all will make stupid choices if the right ones are harder. Hence we need to create systems that make it easier to chose wisely. Because as individuals that’s not something we’re capable of.

You’re not wrong, about the money printing, but it’s not a fair comparison since Bosch does its own manufacturing. I.e. they’re simply smaller but still have part of the supply chain google let companies like Samsung and Lenovo have. So you’d have to correct for that and see how much the “tech core” of Bosch brings in. It’s hardly 300k, but likely more than 5k. And they do pay fairly well by European standards.

Apparently some people are considered immigrants and that’s bad, while others are just expats looking for a new home.

I don’t think they’re considered expats if they plan to stay indefinitely. But yeah, there’s vastly different sentiments towards different types of immigrants. Usually the surveys ask for “European immigration”, but I guess a Canadian would fall into that as well, so they might just as well ask about Western immigration (the use European because of EU freedom of movement). In part sentiments obviously have a lot to do with racism and xenophobia, but it’s unfortunately not just that. The statistics for people who immigrated irregularly (i.e. without a visa) really don’t look good. E.g. here in Germany in 2022 foreign nationals made up some 16% of the population but 32% of crime suspects (excluding crimes around migration which Germans can’t commit). The percentages regarding people who actually get convicted are even worse and “Zugewanderte” (recent immigrants, mainly asylum seekers) used to have even worse numbers as well (before the refugees from Ukraine, largely women and children came).

Obviously there’s demographic and socioeconomic reasons for that discrepancy. The main issue is that there’s a lot of young men among immigrants and you men tend to commit most crimes, but that obviously doesn’t undo any of these crimes. Ukraine’s rather sexist border controls (they don’t allow men aged 18-60 to leave) really did their diaspora a solid here.