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.

Ich bin mir da nicht wirklich sicher: Wir hatten unseren “Juhu, die normalen USA sind zurück”-Moment mit Biden und jetzt die Katerstimmung. Trump zerstört gerade deutlich mehr und schneller als in der ersten Präsidentschaft und da kommst du dann nicht mehr so schnell raus - die Institutionen haben ja die erste Präsidentschaft lädiert überstanden, aber jetzt werden sie aktiv zerstört. USAID etwa wird auch unter einem demokratischen Präsidenten erstmal nicht mehr da sein und auch hier wird keiner nach erfolgreichem Aufbau von Alternativen in 4 oder 8 oder 16 Jahren wieder freudig auf eine US-CVE-Datenbank rennen.

I do not agree with your arguments. Georg von Holtzbrinck has been dead for 42 years. And that the editor in chief has written two (!) articles for the Jüdische Allgemeine is also not really something that disqualifies the whole newspaper. So please stop demonizing newspapers which are not 100% supporting your own view.

And in this case: There is a picture in the article and you really can’t argue with that. You can see the banner with “intifada until victory” with the Hamas symbol. That is nothing where the past of the long dead founder of the newspaper has a role.

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!

No, that is not correct:

Asylum cases will still have to be examined individually, ensuring that existing safeguards remain in place and asylum-seekers are not rejected outright, the commission added.

Applications of asylum seekers from safe countries of origin shall be considered as manifestly unfounded, unless the applicant presents facts or evidence which justify the conclusion that they might be persecuted in spite of the general situation in the country of origin.Since March 2016, accelerated procedures can be carried out for applicants from safe countries of origin.

https://asylumineurope.org/reports/country/germany/asylum-procedure/the-safe-country-concepts/safe-country-origin/

So basically if you’re coming from a “safe” country, you have to give proof that you’re being persecuted unfairly. So if you’re a german going to the netherlands and are claiming asylum, the dutch will hear you, but assume that the german state and courts are not unfairly persecuting people. So basically you will get kicked out faster, unless you have really good evidence

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

Wir sollten trotzdem nicht so tun als ob solche Verwerfungen an der Börse nicht doch etwas mit allen hier zu tun hätten. Die Wirtschaftskrise ist real, beeinflusst eure Jobaussichten, eure Bewerbungen, euer Gehalt und die Aktienkurse sind ein Teil davon

Sue? The contracts are often with their own companies in the west and they, of course, have the full protection of the law. Break a contract, pay whatever the contract says about breaking it. And now the commission is trying to get laws in place that allow judges to rule that breaking such a contract is ok.

Dieses Zerstörungswerk ist schon gruselig - es macht ja überhaupt keinen Sinn, dass man für eine “Ersparnis” von ein paar Millionen dann ein zentrales IT-Sicherheitstool killt und das dann noch so kurzfristig ohne irgendeine Chance auf Refinanzierung durch andere Partner. Das macht absolut keinen Sinn

And that is exactly what I mean with “toxic relationship”. You seem obsessed with Israeli crimes, but are totally ignoring every atrocity coming from the Palestinian and Arab side. This won’t solve this conflict at all. And demanding stuff that nobody could even accept on a road to peace (like your travel ban for all active and former IDF soldiers, which are due to mandatory military service for men and women all Israelis). Try to spread peace, don’t be a online keyboard warrior.

[citation needed]

I’m not sure if your analogies are correct - but if you want to compare this to a domestic situation, you have to admit that this is not one-sided domestic violence, but a toxic relationship where both sides are involved in really bad behavior. In those situation the only way out would be to separate those two spouses, end the relationship and let them recover and encourage them to go on their own ways without each others. That is kind of difficult when you’re neighbors.

Doing some kind of international peacekeeping mission is the only way to keep both sides separated. Stop palestinian rocket attacks. Stop israeli retaliation strikes. But even an international mission will have big problems fighting against a deeply entrenched terror organization like Hamas. And we know how the UN peacekeeping in Lebanon doesn’t work, how UNRWA was infiltrated by terrorists and that all major powers who would be able to do something like that are currently unable to do so or really unwilling.

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

It makes sense to recognize Palestine in order to calm the problem and give peace a chance. But I really do not see a how palestinian statehood will play out with a good ending and how they might find a way forward to peace and prosperity. They are being used as a pawn by arab states. Every palestinian state will have the problem of militant religious extremist fighting for power as we saw with Hamas vs. Fatah in Gaza. So the scenarios look like in neighboring states to me: A brutal dictatorship that crushes disstent with a vast secret police like Egypt. A weak and disfunctional state where powerful militias are building a state inside the state like in Lebanon. Or civil war like in Syria. Those scenarios also will play out when militant Palestinians have their way and push Israel to the sea and deport or kill every jew in Israel and go back to 1948 borders.

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.