PonyOfWar

An electronics repair kit, e.g. the ifixit toolkit.

Go hiking! It's many Germans' favorite pastime and we have well-signposted hiking trails everywhere. In Grünwald you're quite close to the Bavarian alps and lakes, really beautiful areas.

Germans have quite a different way of communicating compared to Americans. Small talk with strangers is not as common. Don't take it as rudeness if the supermarket cashier doesn't really smile or ask about your day. People are quite direct. If you ask someone how they are, be prepared for an honest reply.

Germans have many dialects and Bavaria is known for having quite a heavy one. If you know some German, you might still have some problems understanding people in Bavaria.

Public transport is good, but not Japan- or Switzerland-good. When going on a trip, take possible delays into account. Don't rely on a 5 minute connection in Mannheim HBf.

That argument only works on the specific belief that souls constantly exist on earth though. In various mythologies and religions, there are various other realms where countless numbers of souls exist without inhabiting a human body on earth.

There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1, but none of them are 2.

That is by definition though. 2 is impossible to appear between 0 and 1. I know already that it's possible for my consciousness to exist and I don't see a reason to assume it's impossible to exist in the future. So, it becomes more like the Infinite Monkey Theorem. Technically, it's possible for my consciousness to not appear again, but almost surely it will.

I see it (or at least some form of it) as a realistic possibility. Let's say that consciousness is a completely physical thing, a certain set of chemicals, cells and molecules in my brain that define what is "me". That would mean that given infinite time, something that possesses "my" consciousness would eventually appear again.

I explicitly said “we should disincentivize (via fees or increased property tax) those who don’t properly renovate their buildings”, so… such people would just have to pay fees or more taxes (realistically and depending on fee/tax amount, they would take a loan instead or do the exact same thing they would have to do if renovations were needed for whatever other external reason such as aging of the building, fire, flood, etc.).

The problem is that a large portion of those people you talk about aren't renovating because they can't. Renovation already makes financial sense in many cases, but it requires a huge initial investment. You think for example an older retiree can just take out a loan? Haha, no. Fires, floods etc leave many people destitute unless they have a good insurance, which wouldn't apply to this situation.

You keep arguing against the proposal of incentives, which is fair enough. I can understand the argument that you don't want to finance people's private property. But what I take issue with is your idea of increasing the financial burden on those people with increased taxes and fines. I don't think you've presented a good argument as to how this would improve the situation in any way.

Does it say somwhere the tax cuts are for low income oeners only?

Not that I know of, but that is beside the point as it's not what you originally suggested. Restricting the tax cuts to low-income people would be a much more reasonable idea.

If you can’t afford to own a house (or car, or anything else) you’ll have to sell it.

From what you suggested, you want to actively price people out of their houses. So non-rich people in rural areas etc won't be able to keep their homes anymore and have to rent. Their houses will either get bought by rich people or real estate companies who can afford to do the renovations or they'll be left abandoned. People who are already rich can afford the renovations and won't be affected by the penalties. Is that really a desirable outcome to you?

To give a concrete example, a policy like you suggested might make my mom homeless. She's not rich, my parents were both social workers and paying off the house took decades. The house is from the 1920s, so it needs a lot of renovations to be up to modern standards. Currently, she can slowly save up some money and do them one at a time. You'd place an additional financial burden on her, which would make her unable to save money for the renovations and possibly cause her to lose her house.

So making people pay who currently can't afford a renovation? That way you'll get even fewer renovations and raise inequality in the process.

I mean, they totally do. Very recent example.

Plenty of stuff like this or this or this

Again, those are all pushes for legislation. None of which are implemented at this point. The EU is, for better and for worse, a bureaucratic monster. Anything it does has to go through a long process involving multiple oversight comittees, the commission, the parliament etc. It really doesn't have the option for much secrecy. National governments are quite a different story.

The app is just a map to see the hotspots, you don't need it to connect to them.

But those are all publicly available pieces of legislation. It's quite a leap to go from that to just assuming they'll secretly and illegally spy on you through public wifi networks, without any law allowing them to do so. Besides, if they have no problem doing that, why would internet through your European ISP be any safer?