Man, some days i just feel second-hand embarrassment for Germany. Get it together guys, goddamn. Germany has been in a pretty sad state of affairs for so long lately.

I still fondly remember my first perma ban. It was 3 months after signing up, commenting on stories on offmychest. The user was talking about her own infidelity and i told her cheating was wrong and she should just break up to prevent causing unnecessary suffering.

Mods banned me for not being supportive enough. Muted me when i asked about it. Looking back i should have stopped using the website then and there, because it only went downhill from there. At one point i was permabanned off a dozen subreddits i wasn’t a part of because i was discussing with anti covid vaxxers about their misinformation and other subreddits said i was participating in subreddits responsible for misinformation and thus, was permabanned from their subreddits now too. The anti vaxxing subreddit didn’t ban me, even though i was against everything they stood for, but they were banned by admins later on.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when i was in a news subreddit and a user posted a story with a clickbaity title. I said the title was clickbaity and i spoiled the bait by answering the clickbait on the title. The mods permabanned me and i mod mailed them and said it was ridiculous to ban me for such a frivolous thing. Mods reported me for harassment and admin gave me a 3 day ban. I deleted my account and just stuck to Lemmy ever since, where i haven’t been banned even once in a year.

That folks is the 4 year long, 10k karma reddit experience nowadays.

From the point of view of efficiency, solar heaters beat pv. With pv you need to convert the sun’s energy into electrical energy, with losses, then convert electrical energy into heat by extracting it from the outside with the heat pump. If you store it in batteries to heat up water later, there’s even more losses. Depending on the outside temperature, there’s a limit to what the heat pump can do, which an internal electric heater inside the water tank takes over to reach usable shower temperature.

With solar heating the sun heats water, that’s it. Not only you can yield energy from the sun more efficiently, this doesn’t need complex electronics or semiconductors, so it’s also better from an environmental impact point of view.

And it doesn’t have to be either/or. In my country, solar heating usually comes as a package deal with pv heating. Some companies are making hybrid pvs. Solar panels become less efficient as they heat up, so a hybrid pv would use coolant to keep them within their most efficient working temperature and extract that heat to be used for space heating, using radiators or floor heating or forced air systems, and/or water heating. Having both just makes sense, since it makes your pv needs (and your upfront investment) smaller and the maintenance on solar heaters is much simpler.

This specic post October attack Israeli incursion, genocide and massive land grab will be Joe Biden’s legacy. Nothing he did or will do will shine a candle light on this.

Cuba - sponsor of terrorism, hasn’t done a single act of terror in generations.

Israel - not a sponsor of terrorism, used pagers and walkie talkies to kill several hundreds of people, some of which literal children.

Yeah, ok US.

And thrown a flashbang into a nearby stroller with a sleeping baby inside.

Quit complaining, cause the aliens are coming in next, probes blazing.

I honestly can’t understand that. Discussion boards are where opposing views come to clash. That’s what creates meaningful dialogue. I am politically centrist and i find myself sometimes agreeing and disagreeing with the left and the right. What these people mean about “right wing hives” is forums where conservative opinions exist.

If we’re just creating spaces that share only one political ideology, where we ban everyone disagreeing, how can we ever learn from each other ? What value is there in spaces where opinions are homogeneous and we only see people shouting opinions over the wall to the other group ? It’s just a circlejerk at that point, and i have nothing against circlejerk per se, it’s just that politics is very ill fitting for such types of forums.

Since the times of Greek democracies and republics, disagreement and factionalism has been a part of growth for political discourse. I believe we shouldn’t shy away from that at all.

Yeah. Popular subs always had this issue but some subs were ok before all the mods left and only the ill tempered ones remained after the apk changes. The infamous “power mods” that fit the quintessential reddit mod stereotype.

I am happy with lemmy for now though. You’re free to say something unpopular and it’s fine. You get downvoted sometimes, but at least you’re not silenced because your opinion goes against the grain.

Reddit isn’t really a place for discussion. It’s a place you go to have a specific opinion or get banned. You choose the “room” with your opinions and express only those in the instructed method on the sidebar. Any dissonant opinions, facts or arguments and you’re banned. So really, more like a place for agreement if anything (or disagreement of the opposite view, but only that and no other disagreement).

Mods absolutely made reddit unusable for me. I mainly lurk in the news subreddits and they’re all the same. I got perma banned and instantly muted on some news subreddit i don’t really recall for saying an article’s title was clickbait. I got perma banned on worldnews and news for different instances of criticizing Israel.

I even tried using the platform to do other non politics things, like commenting on those am i wrong type of subreddits and got perma banned for not being supportive. Got banned in about half a dozen, despite never being there, for commenting on other subreddits.

I honestly cannot understand how people use the site without being permabanned nearly everywhere. You don’t even need to be combative. They use permaban for literally any minor infringement or disagreement that turns up and then mute you if you try to discuss it. It’s so frustrating. Thank goodness for Lemmy. There’s a lot of weird propaganda here, but at least you’re not permabanned.

Everywhere little by little is becoming like this. Youtube keyword snipes your comment and never tells you anything about it. It’s hard to find places to discuss the hard subjects now. Everything is for the advertisers.

Okay i understand your point. Thank you for explaining it in a different way.

So the point is not wealth but spite ? You don’t have to act in good faith to cooperate with others. Like i said, in trade, a prosperous peer is worth more and generates more wealth than an ailing one.

This is not an argument on good faith, it’s self interest and selfishness. It’s right there on game theory and pretty much the entire course of biological history and evolution. One might profit from destroying and seizing the resources of a peer, but in most cases that profit is inferior to quid pro quo cooperation.

To me this is just acting deranged and nonsensical. Just being belligerent for the sake of cruelty and destruction. It’s more believable to me that its motivations are about projection of power and hegemony like other commenters have pointed out.

But that’s a failure in and of itself. A prosperous country produces more, therefore has more goods and services to trade, therefore presents itself as a source for wealth for everyone involved than an ailing country.

This is mere short sightedness. A country that’s destabilized like this requires foreign help, is often sanctioned, its people will eventually seek asilum elsewhere and it produces very little. If the point is to generate wealth, this is the opposite of what should be done.

So it’s 2020 and the US is still using special forces to carry out coups and arming rebel militias around the world, often to mediocre results and incredibly hard consequences, such as runaway rebel militias and an absolute mistrust of the US as a partner.

Yeah good job US. It would be worrying if the CIA & co were not so famously demonstratedly laughably incompetent. Stop orchestrating coups and arming militias. It will never work out the way you expect. It’s so ridiculous. One would think that after some 50 years of failure in the middle east and south america a country would learn what not to do, but here we are. I guess some countries take a little while more to learn.