brot

I like to bike deep into nature. It's really great to go up into the woods around here. Nobody around, a hard climb, spring, everything blooming, nice views, birds singing, it's awesome. There are also some castle ruins around, which make great destinations.

Let's be honest: I, as a customer, want to make informed buying decisions. I want to buy food that is tasty and maybe is healthy, but not based on some image that some marketing guys want to push. I want to choose the car which is best (and cheapest) for my purposes, and don't want to be hearded into buying something else. I want to choose the best insurance for me and not be mislead by some emotional ad showing me a happy family.

And I really do not want to be manipulated in an emotional vulnerable moment so that I buy something. That's shady as fuck

I really fear that they will get a not so nice letter from Microsofts lawyers.

Back in the day I played a browser game called "Inselkampf". That was way before anybody did the whole monetization and one of the earlier browser games. Totally free, no micropayments. It was awesome: You had a level playground. People formed alliances on their own without the game having such a feature. We hang out in IRC channels. We plotted wars, starting in the middle of the night in order to surprise the other alliances. We had diplomats talking to other alliances. People started alt accounts and snuck into the enemy alliances in order to spy on them. Some rose to top ranks, leading to epic betrayals and epic wars.

Everything from that is gone. The game is long offline. The players dispersed, the IRC channels abandoned, everything never to be repeated

I remember those screenshots in the mags back in the day. Yes, I want to play that version, too - and the tank and heli looked so cool back then!

Yes, that is the plan. My private IT has been Microsoft-free for a while. There is an old PC with Windows standing around, but everything else runs on linux. Works great :)

(work is, of course, something else as I don't have anything to decide about the software there)

Yeah, Microsoft fucking sucks. German has ~95 million speakers and is one of the most spoken languages of the world. And Microsoft, one of the most profitable companies in the world can't be bothered to even do some minor translation work. I don't even expect them to translate every help document on their page, but menu items in the main ribbon? And Edge is showing totally garbled weather infos on every new page. To millions of people. Because they don't want to hire one or two guys to proofread their texts.

A decentralized service like Mastodon will have the same issues when governments are knocking on the door. The turkish government totally can force all those small turkish instance admins to defederate instances who are not reacting to legal threats. And all those small admins don't have the resources to fight a lengthy legal battle against their own government

Kids don't buy $500 consoles with $90 games. Parents do.

All those Americans that were stockpiling weapons & munition to fight against tyranny are awfully quit right now.

You can do a lot against tax evasions - if you want. Yes, they will find loopholes. But you can close them. Quickly - if you want. They have literal armies of lawyers? Well, hire armies of clerks, they will pay for themselves and make laws without loopholes.

If the american supply ceases, european producers won't be able to handle demand. Expect higher prices - good whiskey takes several years to produce and nobody has prepared for a stupid situation like this