German government procurement is horrendously inefficient, but it’s because of incredible levels of transparency to try to prevent corruption.

It means that even the most minute purchases come with lots of beurocracy attached.

You can look at it almost as its own kind of corruption, that syphons money into the beurocracy, but it does mean that things aren’t happing without people knowing, and that, for an extreme example, when you decide to invade another country isn’t the moment when you discover that you discover that most of your equipment had been sold for vodka money a decade ago!

Can someone fill me in on wtf is going on with drag in the US?

I’m from the UK, drag is like our longest running joke, and families go to pantomimes all the time. Recently theres been a more direct association with the LGBT community in the popular understanding of it. I’d say that most people’s view on drag here is:

• not necessarily an LGBT thing, though it very often is
• kinda traditional
• can be funny, or just a fun performance
• pretty lighthearted
• not expected to be overtly sexual by default, depends on context

Some of the stuff I see out of the US is bizzare. I realise that the weirder stuff is always going to be amplified in the news, and people are not necessarily trying to show the full context in photos. But I’ve seen shit like

• rightoids getting so worked up that the pickets outside resemble the Gaza Strip or, as I’m reliabily told, the average us abortion clinic
• performances in weird places like libraries
• people watching a clearly sexual show in dive bars with their kids in tow that look like they’re starting at a painting in a gallery pondering the meaning of nothingness and looking way out of place

Like, wtf? Drag isn’t the problem, it’s the weird-ass way that people seem to be responding to it. Go to a show if you think you might enjoy it, read up on the performance or use context ques to understand what kind of drag performance it’s going to be. Certainly don’t go for political reasons and ruin the fun for performers who are just trying to have a good time. But equally, don’t plan shows that are meant to provoke a reaction for political reasons, for the same reason.

And why the right wingers care so much if fucking beyond me. Imagine having enough free time to consider that important enough to spend your precious free time protesting it rather than doing literally anything else.

Just chill, it’s a fucking stage show. It’s like the whole toilet thing again, just hysterics over something inconcequential. I’m trans and fabulous as fuck and don’t seem to consider these issues nearly as important than a middle-aged cishet blue collar dude from Texas who may never have met a single trans person or encountered anything like this outside of the Internet.

Is only fun show, why you heff to be mad?

Public transport is great in cities, but as soon as things get more sparsely populated, you get diminishing returns. Everything takes longer, runs infrequently, and still barely gets you close.

But then if they run more frequently, they’d be empty.

Yet, where I live, they keep introducing hostile rules, new houses can only have one parking space, at a time where kids are having to live with their parents for longer, so their mobility, job opportunities, etc are really hampered. It would be one thing if there was decent public transport infrastructure, but there’s literally nothing, just people becoming ‘stuck’ because those who make the rules often don’t think about areas as a whole.

Oi, I’m moderate af and am only techy to people who don’t know the difference between a laptop and… the larger one!

I do like a community that values a free, open and decentralised Internet, Reddit used to, but seems to have lost that.

Not always, but it is when you go public. I work a lot at small businesses, lots of them have shareholders who are mostly hands-off, or would prefer a more conservative approach to protect their investment.

People who invest in non-public businesses are usually in for the long haul, and come with much greater risk.

But when you go public, your business just comes a commodity, nothing but a vehicle for a fund manager to use to try and get a higher return for their clients so they get more business and commission.

In theory, it’s a really democratic system, but the reality is that we’ve lost track of what an investment is meant to be, and the number of private individuals actually holding shares in a company directly is very low, it’s mostly fund managers who literally just want to pump their numbers for a few years, because long term, they never really beat the market.