How is a diverse opinion a threat to democracy?

If the opinion is that there should not be a democracy, then that is a threat to democracy.

Excluding a portion of the population from the polls

They are not excluded. They are free to vote for a party that is in line with the constitution.

its almost exclusively a phenomena specific to the left…

I don’t even know what to say. In which world are the far-right, fascists and nazis known to value opposing views? Are you serious?

Big chunk of the funding is from the Saudis though - and they have a very vested interest in trashing twitter.

This does not address any of the points above though. The Saudis could have just bought it for half the money and closed the doors.

It’s also entirely possible the truth is somewhere in between - people who knew he couldn’t manage his way out a paper bag working ego boy into buying twitter and ketting the inevitable happen. He’s not exactly hard to manipulate.

Manipulate into doing what? Buying twitter? I think it is very likely that he just attempted market manipulation and failed. Now he is trying to make the best out of the situation and transform Twitter into the company he actually wants. Except he is absolutely incompetent. I don’t see where anybody manipulated him into doing anything. Everything that happened seems very much like him.

Just today there was a great comment by @Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works on why this does not make any sense.

1. When you factor in the incredible damage done to the Tesla share price by the amount of stock he had to liquidate to finance the deal, and the almost billion a year in interest and operating costs the company is pulling out of him, the deal has, altogether, cost Musk about half of his net worth. No amount of petty childishness is worth that.

2. He literally went to court to try to get out of the deal. What was his play here? To sue with the intention of failing? For what possible reason?
3. If his plan was to kill Twitter, why would he attach his beloved X name to it? Musk has spent his entire life trying to make X happen. It is dearer to him than his own children. Why would he attach that brand to a company he’s intentionally sabotaging?
4. If his goal is to kill Twitter, why is it still here? He owns the company outright. He took it private. There’s no board. There’s no shareholders. He doesn’t have a fiduciary responsibility. If he wanted Twitter dead, all he had to do was shut the doors, turn off the lights, and send everyone home.

Anyone who buys into this “He’s trying to kill Twitter” nonsense, please, I am begging you, try to get your head around the fact that Elon Musk is not a smart man. This isn’t some incredible 4D chess play. Twitter isn’t failing because of intentional sabotage; it’s failing because Musk is genuinely trying his best, and his best absolutely sucks. He’s a bad businessman who lucked into a fortune he never deserved.

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/4855307

Not everywhere are cats a problem.

They are literally native to Africa and parts of Asia. In most of Europe they have been held for thousands of years and are not a threat to the ecosystems.

Taking Countries with invasive species as a global role model makes no sense.

The original contract with the company RWE was made in the 1990s and included destroying whole towns for the coal mine, which was planned to be in use until 2038.

What we see now is a compromise between RWE, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the federal government to save the remaining towns and close the mine earlier (in 2030). The wind turbines are from 2001 and are nearing the end of their lifecycle.

I was exclusively talking about the EU ban, not about some random US cities’ bans (This is a thread about Germany after all). None of your points really apply to the EU ban.

It does not ban the distribution (you can still legally buy leftover stock - my local cinema seems to have a century’s worth of supply), just the first-time sale of newly produced non-medical single-use plastic straws.

The “medical exemption” is not on an individual basis, but an exemption for a production line of straws. Everybody can buy the straws afterwards. The EU ban is not cutting a “lifeline” for disabled people.

The links you provided talk about bans by local city councils in the USA, which have their own (apparantly stupid) rules.

No? Nobody thinks that?

My comment was just a response to the following:

Replace your car with an electric one! (even though it still works fine and will end up in landfill, never mind the environmental cost of producing the new one, or the source of the electricity it uses)

…which for some reason suggests that the introduction of electric cars leads to premature scrapping of existing cars - which is bullshit.

While I partly agree with your argument at the end of your comment, I think your examples are really unfitting.

Only single-use plastic straws are banned. There is also an exemption for straws that are necessary for medical reasons. The needs of disabled people are included in the exemption. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2021-003536-ASW_EN.html

If people buy a new car, the old one (if still functional) typically enters the second-hand market, not the landfill. There is no reason why this would be different if the new car is an electric vehicle.

The carbon footprint is a perfectly fine concept on its own, the problem is just that some people shit on it with their private jets, which are a legitimate concern. Some people also argue that “most of the pollution is done by corporations, not individuals”, completely ignoring the fact that these corporations only do it while producing goods for the people. That does not mean that we can just blame the people for it, but everybody has the responsibility to vote for policies that keep the corporations in check.

Recycling is really bad in some countries, but works pretty well in others. For example in Germany 56% of plastic waste is recycled, 44% burned. 90% of paper is recycled. https://www.quarks.de/umwelt/muell/das-solltest-du-ueber-recycling-wissen/#lösung4

I don’t think the article is trying to claim that labor exploitation is new.

This part directly admits that it is a very old phenomenon:

It’s been noted, and correctly so, that entertainment industry labor disputes often erupt when there’s a change in technology — from theaters screening projected films to the cathode ray tube of the home television, say, or the rise of YouTube and other online content in the 2000s — and that happens for a reason. Historically, executives and management use a disorienting new technology to try to justify lowering wages of their workers, and they have done so since the days of the Industrial Revolution.

As I understood it, the article just wants to explain why this is happening now, because historically it seems to happen in waves.