I have a lot of problems with our current government but you make it sound as if our current government was working towards a dictatorship. That would be a wild take…
Dissent is not outlawed, as long as you voice your opinion in a sane manner, e.g. don’t chant for the death of other people.
Your first sentence is my whole problem with that framing: Germany is not anti free-speech. It just does not subscribe to the US/UK view that you are allowed to say anything. Maybe voice your opinion without threatening or inciting violence? Maybe the US would be better off if some prosecutor could actually charge Musk after showing the Nazi salute?
I disagree with most of your remaining text but this is too far away from the original topic, I will not comment on that.
German here: Due to our own history, for specific cases, speech is much more restricted here compared to the UK (or the US until recently). These are things like inciting violence or “gruppenbezogene Menschenfeindlichkeit” (hostility towards / discrimination of a group of people).
So if someone chants “Death, death to the IDF” they could be charged. It will not necessarily end in a conviction if it is considered an acceptable protest.
So if you are expected to do something that might be a crime in Germany, it does not seem unreasonable to deny entry. However, the decision should be transparent to the impacted people and they should have the option to fight against that decision. This is the actual infuriating part of this story.
But framing this as a “Free Speech Crackdown” is a very British/US take on our laws.
If you want something to really complain about: The German government still considers Israel an ally and still supports them. We learnt a lot from our own history but somehow “Genocide is bad regardless of who is doing it” did not make the list.
According to reverse image search your friend is the 45 year old Rina Satō https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rina_Satō
That is an amazing little speech. I think except for the first sentence and the “Thank you” at the end every sentence contained misinformation on renewables. I wonder how long it took them to come up with this density of lies.
The title of the post is a little misleading. The model presented here does not require many parts of a capitalist system. If you can own stuff and have a free market this model predicts extreme wealth inequality. This happens by pure chance.
The model is not a good argument against capitalism. It can be used as an argument for taxing rich folks and against the “trickle down” idea.
I think there is some confusion as to what this model represents. The linked article is not bad at explaining it but some things could be clearer.
First of all, the “money” in the model is not the cash you have at hand. It is the total value of all the things you own. This model does not need money and it also works if you exchange cigarettes for candy (as long as you can assign some worth to the objects).
It is also not about gambling. It assumes that every time you exchange goods with someone else, you can become richer or poorer (I like the example from the article: if you pay $200 for a watch that is worth $150, you lose $50, someone else gains $50).
It makes the extremely optimistic assumption that the chance to gain or lose money in a trade is equal. This is often obviously not the case in the real world. If you buy something from a supermarket, the owner wants to earn money, needs to pay their employees, needs to pay rent, … so you know you pay more than the value of the goods you get.
Now this simplified and very optimistic model predicts that there is an exponential distribution of wealth and it predicts that repeated exchanges between a rich and a poor person will most likely result in the rich person getting richer and the poor person getting poorer.
What can we learn from that?
1.) even under these very optimistic conditions money trickles up. The real world is stacked much more against you, making a trickle down effect unlikely (though not impossible, this model is a simplification).
2.) rich people (in the model but imo it applies to the real world as well) are not smarter or otherwise better than the average person. They were lucky.
3.) Even if we remove a lot of the advantages rich people have in the world and construct a system that is seemingly “fair” (as in every one has the same chance) you still end up with super rich people. The only way to combat this is by redistributing money - tax the rich. Note that you still get an exponential distribution in the model but it becomes flatter.
What this model says nothing about is how the real world is stacked in favor of rich people. It tries to eliminate all these factors. So using this model to argue that inequality is built into the system (as the headline suggests) is somewhat strange. The model rather suggests that the inequality always arises from simple chance - One could maybe argue from it that we need to actively combat it (depends on the personal sense of justice if earnings due to luck should be redistributed).
I agree with you on the value creation. This model treats the economy as a zero-sum game. But the real economy is typically growing and this is ignored here.
Looks like Dr who: https://youtu.be/Bb3bXgUEMk4
That is a really interesting question. The exact acceleration depends on the density profile of the earth. But you are correct there is no gravitational pull in the center of the earth, it cancels out.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preliminary_reference_Earth_model
This is actually true for every spherically symmetric shell - gravity cancels out everywhere inside the shell. Something probably every physics undergrad had to prove as homework. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem for more information.
So when calculating gravity you only have to take into account the part of the earth below you, everything above you cancels out (yes the earth is not a perfect sphere but this is a pretty good approximation).
The end result for a large hole through the earth is oscillating around the center and slowing down until you are stuck in the middle. Oh and you would also be melting, it’s still ~6000° C down there.
That would apply to a lot of entries of this list, which is a really interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions
About 9/11 or actually any other major event: you typically get a lot of contradictory witness statements with so many people. The real picture only emerges when you have analyzed a lot of statements and looked at evidence. Thus early reporting often relies on a few statements that are found to be wrong later - perfect fuel for a conspiracy theory.
While I agree that the current official stance on Israel is insane, it is not the majority opinion in Germany.
Do we still have a problem with Antisemitism? Sadly yes, especially now since some people project the behaviour of Israel on German Jews which is absolutely crazy. But I would argue that the overwhelming majority has a positive or neutral view on Judaism.
You sound like you have met too many crazy people from my country. But the loudest people are often not the majority. There are regular surveys on issues like these and I would classify your interpretation of German society as a fringe theory.