AFAIK At least one user of the other instance has to be subscribed to the community in order for the community to be “synced” with the other instance (for lack of a better word).

God, that seems horrible.

I don’t get taxes on index funds themselves - you don’t “own” anything - it’s basically a savings account that (in general) actually gives you something other than bajillions of a cent.

And there’s no sense in taxing you on what you already own (what you paid in). Especially on pension funds. Selling stock directly is a different matter, but that is done by the fund. They shouldn’t be passing this down onto you, nor should the government double-tax. Why don’t casinos charge capital gains when you cash out? Or stores charge you for gift cards?

And then there is the whole banking apparatus: I can use stocks as security against cheap loans, use the loaned money for consumption and then lower my capital gains tax by calculating those loans against my gains. Remove that loophole and suddenly a pensioner can’t pay for their running costs anymore

I lost you here. How would taxing capital gains affect pensions? Surely a carveout can be made. There’s a difference between (in most countries) mandatory pension plans, index funds and $200k in stocks in the hands of one individual. It’s not as if these are indistinguishable.

Personal note and speculation: often I read people taking about a system that is designed against group X.

A system doesn’t need to be purpusefully designed against a group for it to cause carm against the group. And the system can be mended and modeled to lower the discrimination caused (or to create positive discrimination).

All of that lead down a rabbit hole of “but can’t we just” for me

You do have a point. But, the current system isn’t here from “time immemorial”. Things change, and they do so fast. Some change is inevitable. And the key to making sure “can we just” doesn’t happen is active participation in the discourse.

Wait… Are you meaning to say UN is run by Hamas all along?

I wonder how Reagan’s is doing

Oh. Thanks, then I had it the wrong way. I still remeber it from school and going to the doctor as a kid. Must’ve swapped them.

I always thought while both serve both functions, paracetamol was more on the antipiretic side (i.e. lowers body temperature) while ibuprofen was more of an analgetic (pain reliever).

Also, you can take both at once although then you shouldn’t take them as long. And always take the minimum effective dose (or preferably none if you can manage), but that applies to OTC non-prescribed medicine, not just to these two.

Civil disobedience is a good thing and it should have no “consequences” to think about. At least in a democratic society, which Academia isn’t on multiple levels.

Additionally, a well-meaning and functioning state would make those making these threats think about consequences of punishing free speech exercised in a civil manner.

So that was the catch

I know there’s drama between the various lemmy instances and ml is supposed to be commies bad, but I find this place quite welcoming.

Speaking of MBFC… Did the bot finally disappear since it didn’t invite itself into this thread?

was Israel not attacked?

If you’re attacked, you don’t have the right to escalate the situation however you please, especially if it’s against international law.

I genuinely have issues trying to discern the propaganda from the facts.

Sure, it’s hard. It isn’t easy sometimes for me either. You just have to take in information and draw your own conclusions. Of course, depending on the information you get your view will ve skewed. In my opinion it’s impossible to be biased, but you have to at least try to siniff out the propaganda and lies, which I commend you for doing.

from what I gathered, I believed that Israel just took some land on which other people were living ~70 years ago, displacing these people.

That’s true, sort of. Israel was given part of the land after WWII by the UN as a result of wellmeaning intentions. However, a conflict arose, culminating in the First Arab-Israeli war. Next was the Six-day war some 20 years later, followed by other conflicts. Then 5 years later, the Yom Kippur war. Other than that there have been other conflicts with the Palestinians, notably in 2007, 2012, 2014 and 2021. Finally there’s the current conflict which started last year.

Of course, some of this was justifiable by Israel, but the problem is the way Israel treats Palestinians. There’s a good chance that if they weren’t treated as 2nd class citizens none of the later conflicts would’ve happened.

Most notably, Palestinians were rsther explicitly forced out of Israel during the Nakba, itself a breach of International law. Nowadays, Palestinians are living under an apartheid regime: they are scrutinised much more closely during security checks, thir homes are appropriated by Israeli settlers, mkre often than not under the protection of the Israeli government. They don’t have the same civil rights as Palestinians are tried in miliary and Israeli citizens in civil courts. Military courts generally don’t offer the same legal or human rights protections, punishments are mlre severe, there’s limited legal representation of the defendant and no confidential communication with lawyers, and Israel isn’t an exception to this.

Regarding escalation: the Palestinians are rutinely, and often violently opressed in a systemic manner.

They can’t get building permits. They get kicked off their land by settlers. They get retaliated against indiscriminately.

If you systematically opress someone like this, of course the desperate people will fight back in their desperation. What is unnecessary escalation is the disproportionate response of mass murder via starvation and bombing, as well as the systematic opression during the 70 years you mentioned.

None of this would’ve happened if Israel just came to some land, holy or otherwise, planted a flag and fairly enforced their laws according to basic principles of human rights

British Ambassador to Japan Julia Longbottom explained that her decision was because the city did not invite Israel to attend. Longbottom told reporters that unlike Russia, which invaded Ukraine, and Belarus, which cooperated in the invasion, Israel is exercising its right to self-defense. So, treating Israel in the same manner would be misleading, she said

U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel will also skip the Nagasaki peace ceremony. According to the U.S. Embassy, Emanuel does not want to politicize the Nagasaki event.

the envoys of Group of Seven nations, except for Japan, and the European Union said that if Israel was excluded from the invited countries, it would be difficult to send high-ranking officials to attend the ceremony.

Totally not politicized. I guess supporting Israel is a better look than opposing nuclear warfare.

British Ambassador to Japan Julia Longbottom explained that her decision was because the city did not invite Israel to attend. Longbottom told reporters that unlike Russia, which invaded Ukraine, and Belarus, which cooperated in the invasion, Israel is exercising its right to self-defense. So, treating Israel in the same manner would be misleading, she said

U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel will also skip the Nagasaki peace ceremony. According to the U.S. Embassy, Emanuel does not want to politicize the Nagasaki event.

the envoys of Group of Seven nations, except for Japan, and the European Union said that if Israel was excluded from the invited countries, it would be difficult to send high-ranking officials to attend the ceremony.

Totally not politicized. I guess supporting Israel is a better look than opposing nuclear warfare.

I’ve also made the switch from win10. There are a lot of “small” things that add up. The constant nag messages. Updates. Start menu ads. That was mist of it on Win10. I’ve had some experience in win11 at work, and I can say the new UI is abysmal (honestly I couldn’t care less about the UI as far as look/textures go, but one thing I can’t stand is slow animations for every little thing. If I open the start menu, I want it open as soon as I press the keyboard button, not 0.5s later. When I snap a window, I don’t need 0.5s of my life wasted on watching the “beautiful” animation. I just want it on half the screen instantly. Whenewer I close a window, I don’t want to have it fade out and distract me, I want it either gone or a popup asking me wether to save, discard or cancel show as soon as I tried to close the window. I want the Control panel back. I knew how to use it, and navigating menus wasn’t animated to consume 0.5s for every screen change. The animations were what pushed me away the most. I assume you can turn the off, but I never bothered since I changed computers often and would just rather put up with it rather than spend time tweaking each and every computer I wanted to use. The UI is why I don’t like win11, and the MS requirement is why I won’t let it touch my computer.

I have to say, switching to Linux was very frustrating as I had to google every little thing and most sites are filled with ad garbage even with uBlock on Firefox turned in with most of the lists, so that was frustrating. But now, after just under 2 years of Linux use, I can say the switch has paid great dividends. I can do a lot of menial tasks much faster (highlights are fike conversion with ffmpeg, combining PDFs with pdfunite, navigating folders using cd and tab completion (I’m the type to have a lot of folders in one parent directory to whkch I know the names, so typing the name is faster than looking for it manuakly and clicking on it), not to mention all the programs I used that are on Linux open 3-5 times faster.

Another big quality of life improvement are updates - updating apt packages with one command and Flatpaks with another, not having to reboot while doing it and not having programs prompt for updates individually is all something I never knew was possible before switching over. Linux has really impressed me with how well it works and how much of a laid back attitude it resembles, as opposed to the whiny Windows forcing its will upon you with its updates, ads and bloat.

As most others said, pretty much any distro is fine. You have a powerhouse of a laptop, so running a Windows VM inside of KVM would pose no problem, but if you can, I’d advise to try avoiding a VM.

Teams is basically just a web app masquerading as a classic application using Electron, so you can just use Teams inside of your browser of choice with minimal features missing (the only one I noticed was green-screen, but I didn’t care that much about it).

Even if you use a lot of Office, you’d be surprised at how similar LibreOffice is to MS Office. The UI is a lot worse IMO, but 99% of the features are there. Tables in Word/Writer seem to behave quite a bit differently for one which can get annoying, along with the usual problems of switching from one UI to another. As for formats, LibreOffice supports MS Office extensions. There are some differences in rendering because of what I see as MS bullshit, but it’s limited to padding, font size, etc. (and missing fonts), but if your teachers are open to it you can easily send them the original as well as a PDF reference just in case.

I didn’t use Office web apps for a few years now, but when I did they were missing a lot of features (more than 80% i’d say), but others say the situation has improved, so you can try that in your browser of choice like Teams.

If you need the desktop Office apps, you maybe could use Wine or something to run them on Linux, but I don’t have any experience with that so I don’t know how well they behave or how the setup is.

You could easily run a VM with KVM with the specs you listed. Personally I find the installation of KVM and Windows VM creation a bit convoluted, but there are great tutorials availiable online and it’s a one-time ordeal of maybe 15-45 minutes (including VM creation, depending on how fast you want to go/how familiar with the Linux command line you are), so not that bad. Utilizing virt-manager limits command line use to just the first setup of KVM. Installing the VM can be done graphically using virt-manager.

I don’t know how drawing tablet passthrough compatibility in KVM is (probably great though). RedHat drivers enable shared clipboard and dragging files over between the host and VM, so even that should be quite painless if you choose to go the VM route.

Gommorrhea

I don’t know why a journaling app needs full system access and access to system settings, and the permission Flatseal requests is a dangerous one if you pay attention to these things. Looks like they’re doing their job to me.

Xournal seems pretty trustworthy to me, so I assume it’s for code simplicity (or age) or not being made with Flatpak in mind - just ‘open any file/full filesystem access’’ (for basic functions like opening files) and ‘change system settings’ for probably only a few features that change system settings.

I agree the permissions are dangerous and I commend Flatpak for incentivizing developers to use granular permissions.

As others (and you yourself have said), Flatseal’s entire purpose is to edit Flatpak lermissions, so that one shouldn’t be alarming.

As most others already said, the best solution is immersion, ideally by talking with someone. If you can’t find someone to speak with that would make it quite a bit harder to improve, but not impossible.

For your situation (being able to understand but unable to express yourself in English) I’d reccommend the stereotypical “think in english”. I’d recommend talking with someone (ideally a native speaker, but even a fellow learner is incredibly efficient, followed by writing a diary abd participating in online forums (like you currently already are!).

It’s best to have input from someone else who can correct you if you make a grammatical mistake, give general advice on what sounds ‘more natural’ or ‘better’ in the language and answer any questions you might have, as well as help you if you’re “missing one word” (from personal experience when learning a language it’s rarely a ‘it’s at the tip of my tongue’ situation. It’s more like I just don’t know this one word and I need someone to give it to me).

Another thing I can say about your problem is I also suffer a bit from it. Whenever I try to talk in German I need a few hours to ‘warm up’ - to just get my brain to switch to German and having a speaker on the other side really helps. I can hear the language to jog my memory and the other side can (and often does) give me input on what they think I might be trying to say. (I’m a B1-level speaker so not even close to fluent but more than enough for doing basic interations within an environment open to helping with language issues).

What I liked to do when I was actively learning German was trying to come up with different ways of saying ‘the same thing’, seing how they differ in their meaning, potential usecases, complexity, grammar, etc. It helps with vocabulary as well as the “thinking in German” part, as languages differ greatly in the ways they package the same message and taking a comparative approach helps greatly with being able to (casually) converse later. Having a fellow learner or a fluent speaker give you multiple variations of the same thing and analyze the differences for/with you would be a godsend for this approach.

Get your head out of your ass, it’s in your laws.

My head just might be in my ass, but none of that is in my laws, as I’m not a US citizen.

From what I’ve read online more than a few months ago, there were criminal charges in certain places for having abortions in certain other places where they weren’t illegal. Maybe it wasn’t for the people having abortions themselves per se (I don’t remeber anymore), but there definately was a doctor sending aborion pills/information that was sued as well as some police sharing data and peoole getting in trouble shenanigans. Or just straight up people looking stuff up on the internet and being investigated for it. Chilling stuff, really, whichever way you look at it.

Also, with the way the US seems increasingly unstable (what with the Supreme Court doing whatever they please, more or less, as well as a potential 2nd Trump presidency), there’s a high chance that the current status quo changes for the worse, i.e. some of the ammendments/clauses you’ve listed get selectively overruled for abortions, as well as more states getting abortion bans (perhaps even as a simple “No More Abortions, Anywhere” Supreme Court ruling).

As if crossing state lines to deal with that isn’t illegal in some places