The Mastodon software seems to be in a kind of anti-sweetspot for this kind of hosting service. It kinda sucks that other better options have so much less name recognition that marketing becomes hard.

Europe is already spending 430 billion Euros annually on defense (compared to about 150 or PPP adjusted 300 for Russia).

This is not about pacifism, this is about not being manipulated into spending even more, when you could rather look into what you are already spending and use that more efficiently. There is a lot of potential to massively improve spending efficiency and also strengthen the defense capabilities.

Defense is not the only problem Europe has, and also just ramping up defense spending elsewhere does not help the Ukrainians defend themselves against Russia.

People really need to learn how to read here. It is astonishing 😱

I wasn’t only talking about Rheinmetall, and while the Rheinmetall founder died in 1923, the company went on to be a major part in the Nazi war production.

On an US American investment fund? How exactly do you think the German government is going to “smack down” on that?

It’s coming from another company that owner owns. We are talking about huge multinational investment fonds here.

Well, you need to be a bit smarter about it, otherwise the bidders will know about your plan to buy only local and ripp you off anyways. It’s very hard as a state to keep such ideas secret.

Says the person that literally just held a sermon on the core believes of capitalism that have very little to do with the real world 🙄

The German constitution allows this kind of nationalization in times of crisis.

My suggestion would be to refund these speculators the (inflation adjusted) pre-war value of the stock. That’s currently less than a tenth of the current stock price, to give you an idea how much they have already profitted.

And it is a bit funny to argue state owned companies are less efficient and the same time fear-monger about the Russian war economy that is now fully state controlled. But yes, in times of peace when companies can freely chose what to produce, non-state owned companies tend to be more efficient.

Sure for individual companies, but what about their owners?

No, I am saying if people truely believed that we are in a situation of existential risk, then the German government would be talking about nationalizing existing companies like Rheinmetall.

That they are not talking about that at all, tells us a lot about their true motivations.

Ah, because Nazis in Germany magically appeared with Hitlers birth and all magically disappeared when he committed suicide? 🙄

As I already said elsewhere, Rheinmetall itself might not sell, but the profits go to people that can invest them into other businesses that can sell and/or otherwise support fascists regimes around the world.

How is the ownership structure of an already existing company relevant to it’s capability to produce the outputs necessary? If anything they will be more able to produce the needed things if a large part of the money isn’t siphoned off to US American investment fonds.

Some of these companies are still family owned, but yes I consider the other point to be more important. There are loads of war profiteers, and while Rheinmetall itself is unlikely to sell weapons to Russia or the US, I assume their owners have little reason not to and also own other companies that will.

Yeah keep sticking your fingers in your ears and pretend everything is fine 🙄

I said nothing about socialist command economy 🙄

Try reading up about “capitalist realism” and you might realize that there are a lot of other options than capitalism or socialist dictatorship. Anyone who argues in binaries like that is either extremely naive or has a capitalist agenda.

And no. The benefit to Ukraine is indirect at best. Notice how the pundits like to always say “but Ukraine” and how there is a suspicious absense of concrete plans on how this increased defense spending is directly benefitting Ukraine?

If people were as serious about it as they pretend to be, we would be talking about nationalizing those defense industries.

You know who the biggest shareholders of Rheinmetall are? US American investment fonds linked to fascists. And the original founders of all these German companies? Yeah, litteral Nazis.

They are of course happy to sell to both sides. They always do.

And look where this kind of thinking got us: Ecological collapse and the climate catastrophe. Have fun eating money I guess 🙄

What a butchered headline.

Ok so this skeleton is about 12,000 years younger than the time the Neanderthals started disapeaering from the geological record.

There is no genetic evidence that this child was indeed a hybrid, only some circumstancial evidence based on bone shapes.

So I guess the most logical conclusion is that it was not a (significant) hybrid after all, but just a human sapiens with birth defects.

Nice dellusional capitalist thinking you got there 😅