Fri Dec 27 06:47:05 CET 2024 To skimp is an english term to be greedy around money. This town where I'm living everything is weird, but what isn't weird is their mode of skimping on the poor. Since Corona time, everything became more expensive, but I'm not making the same amount of money on my welfare cheque (980 EUR a month in early 2025). With inflation over the last 3 years this amounts to the lowest amount ever having dived through the 900 EUR/mo barrier. My apartment rent and heating hovers around 700 EUR/mo alone. This town is a motor for slowing people. I'll give you an example: Metropolitan Toronto today has fares just as high (at 2.24 EUR/mo calculated in exchange). Once you're in the TTC system you can go anywhere to your destination. This covers an area of about 60km x 40km or 2400 square kilometers. So you can start on one end with the subway and drive the bus north 20 kilometers, in turn covering about 80 kilometers. This usually takes about 40-60 minutes. The grid is east-west, south-north. TTC is a corporation, this means they do this for-profit on behalf of the Metro Toronto region. In comparison in Schweinfurt you take about 15 minutes to drive from Deutschhof on the 52 Bus to Rossmarkt (the central Hub) then you wait up to 20 minutes to get the 22 Bus to Hainig, which takes another 20 minutes. It's a waste of time! Distance covered? 7 kilometers! So Torontonians are 7-11 times faster than Pig penners! On the same amount of fare! You can only tell me there is something wrong here! BTW the tarif zone 1 for pig penners is about 49 square kilometers vs. the 2400 square kilometers on the same fare in Toronto. Then again, thanks for the great outlook on Jobs in the region here! I'm turning 49 years old in March 2025. I'm too old to be employed simply as a "sysadmin", you've decayed my chances for the last twenty three years of making a decent income, and you've broken my income for the future. I'm now looking for something simple and affordable (affordable means minimum wage). These remaining days I'm raiding my piggy bank to pay off the last debt I owe to the health (hellth) insurance. This will be the last money I have and I don't know if this "Jobcenter" (a misnomer) will give me a raise in welfare when I once again request 200 EUR for clothing this year (which I haven't had a new pair of clothing since 2023). I'm going into 2025 with money worries and bleak outlook that anything will come along. My Tarot deck in some card says "Wealth is your birth right", in translation to german this is "Reichtum ist dein Erb-recht". But I'm seeing little of that am I? Wealth is "other" people not I! To blame is complete mismanagement of the SPD, CDU, CSU, Die Gruene, FDP parties and their plans to do anything productive for the citizens of this nation/state. Guess what? I'm not voting anymore, I'm done. And I'm done fighting for you as well, let Putin take it all! Guess what? You'd only be smart enough to fight for something that you want to defend, I have nothing to defend, and perhaps Putin has a plan to get us all back to work? Can't be worse than this crap! Poor, broken, silenced, I'm going out with a bit of a noise! -pjp Update Tue Dec 31 03:03:13 CET 2024 Yesterday I was trying to make use of my "sozial ausweis" which is a discount for welfare recipients. It is a contribution from the city where I live to the poor and explicitly states that you get 50% off a months pass which lists for 50 EUR. When I got there I was told that I'm supposed to take this Ausweis with me everytime I go on the bus and get a childs fare instead. This is unbelieveable. Not only are they once again skimping on money, now they are also actively shaming me for being poor and I have to present the filthy sheet everytime I'm going downtown. I'm going to write a letter of protest to my Buergergeld office and beyond. I was intending to use this discount for the transit pass in order to do what I call "rotate", which means to get busy physically in the city. After two months of doing so I believe I'd be in a better position to find a non-IT job (which there exists next to none in this place). I've been sitting for 30 years in a chair I'm not able to do certain tasks, in a partial day. I predict though that it would get better if I get active.