arbitrary

So your definition of neocolonialism boils down to 'has trade and diplomatic relations with the US and France'?

And isn't that quite offensive against the African states? You imply that they could not have created an intranational community without centering it around Western powers, no?

How, in your opinion, is ECOWAS a tool for neocolonialism?

Even if you don't get a job immediately, with a 25h week you should have a lot of time to upskill and get yourself employable.

There are a lot of free resources for anything from programming, MS Office (seriously, Excel will get you a job), languages, and even science (though probably more as a setup for any kind of degree).

You are not reading my comments. The closures did not reduce deaths/infections by enough to justify having them, that is the argument.

I feel like you only read half my comment each time.

You will always reach a point of diminishing marginal returns with measures taken, and you have to evaluate the impact of the measure against it's effectiveness.

The argument is that school closures likely did not contribute sufficiently to justify their extent of implementation, meaning you probably would have wanted a few more people dying to avoid the shortfalls in children's education and socialisation that you have now. The ends, in retrospective, arguably did not justify the means.

I mean, comparing countries with it's peers is what you should do. I could also have taken Argentina, Bulgaria, or Russia, but at the end you'll see that Germany did fairly well.

I think the question is somewhere how much death we accept against the impact of avoiding it. In this case, as I said before, there seems increasingly the opinion that school closures as a measure did not have the impact that justified its extent of use.

Question is, what business model would you support?

Ads are the thing that pay for a lot of services most people use in daily lives. Imagine you needed a paid subscription for your email, your search engine, browser, social media account(s)...

Lemmy is fun and all, but eventually it will need to expand and pay for server costs and so on. Yes, perhaps it will be carried by enthusiastic community members, but that's just a higher paid subscription for a few rather than many.

I agree fully with you that the level of commercialisation is beyond crazy by now, and many developments do not have the user in mind. But that's not on the business model itself, but the companies' decisions.

They don't say that. They said the extent of closures was inappropriate for the severity of the pandemic and the role of schools.

And Germany did quite well during COVID, per capita deaths are far lower than, for example, in the US, UK, Italy, or France.

Not sure about other countries, but at least in Europe we had quite a few comments, including by health officials, that the school closures should not have been done and upheld to the extent that they were.

And I agree, the impact on learning and children's mental health was not justified by the real or potential dangers of the pandemic imho

Edit: One comment from the German Health Minister here, describing prolonged school closures as a mistake

You are right, the spot exchange rate at a given point in time is random and tells you nothing (nothing!) about the strength of a currency (or economy). Japan is a great example.

What, however, does indicate a weakening or economic downturn is the uncontrolled depreciation of a currency, which errodes savings, threatens foreign debt paybacks, and makes imports more expensive

The Yen is relatively stable for decades at its spot. The Rubel is sliding against monetary and fiscal efforts, which indicates deeper macroeconomic issues.

In all fairness, FPTP did create one of the oldest, most successful democracies that ever existed on the planet. Now, I'm not saying it shouldn't be reformed (it should be), but calling it a straight up terrible no good isn't right either