European here. Germans just think their beer is the best in the world and if you're not doing it like them, you're not doing it right.

Don't get me wrong, the standards Germans apply to their beer production means that it's rare to get a terrible beer there, but IMO it's also not that innovative and the range of styles is fairly limited. There is a ton of choice in the US both in terms of breweries and styles. The variation means you get more duds but also more excellent beers.

Shouldn’t that be a “oh well, sucks. but a sale is a sale” problem?

"A sale is a sale" works fine when both sides to the transaction are well-informed and acting for themselves. When you are selling assets for someone else's benefit, you generally have extra obligations to them, because otherwise you don't really have an incentive to achieve a good price. So courts do generally have some oversight over sale of the assets of a bankrupt estate, to ensure that the trustee is not short-changing creditors just to get the job done quickly.

A complicating factor here is that the Sandy Hook families (who as far as I know are the large majority of the creditors) also supported the sale.

Anyone know how well the Fairphone 5 compares against the Samsung Galaxy S10? I know the specs are pretty public but I don't follow this stuff that closely so find it difficult to draw comparisons between different chips etc.

My S10 is on its last legs so I think a bit about what I will buy to replace it. I really like the idea of the Fairphone but of course you pay a lot (relatively speaking) for the ethics. One of the worries is that the phone will become unusable in a few years anyway, either because parts are unavailable or because software has become too heavy. The other option I am leaving towards is a second hand Pixel.

I use a lot of free and open source software, and some of the stuff I use a lot I support with donations. Python, Mozilla, FairEmail are examples of software I have donated to. Wikipedia also.

This is the publicly owned and funded NHS, not a business.

Coffee, particularly espresso.

It helps if you can treat it as a hobby. My partner's hobby is music, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do in one's spare time. I always feel a bit weird when people ask me what I do in my own spare time and my answer is basically fixing my shit, then pushing it just hard enough that it breaks again.

To your question, the unfortunate reality is that those of us who care about privacy and software freedom are a small minority. Why overhaul your business model to suit us when they can continue to milk every other consumer out there who frankly doesn't give a shit?

Phones are, of course, the worst of all for this. People do great work developing FOSS solutions but it is an uphill struggle and I worry that the hill is getting steeper.

They have since announced that it will be capped at 0.1% of a bank's assets: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/09/business/italy-bank-windfall-tax-change/index.html

I don't think a week is that long to wait for an open source project like this. I suspect as soon as they released 115 they got a deluge of bug reports that are probably keeping them occupied.

Granted, I'm not personally affected because I use Arch btw. But on a serious note, it makes sense to me that "bleeding edge" distros where users expect the latest versions quickly would package Thunderbird for their repos, whereas those on more stability-focused distros would wait the couple of weeks for the Flatpak.

One limitation that games like Civ suffer from is that diplomacy is ultimately pretty shallow because there can only be one winner, so even when you're building alliances or trading relationships it is generally to gain some temporary benefit until you are in a position to defeat your partner later on (whether militarily, scientifically, etc).

What I would love to see is a multiplayer game like Civ but where each player has independent win conditions (so that a game could have multiple winners, or no winners). The condition could even just be to attain a certain level of happiness or wealth. And if you achieve that then you win even if other nations are bigger or stronger, and conversely if you don't achieve it you lose even if you are the last nation standing. So decisions to go to war, or focus on technological development, or build alliances or trading relationships, etc, are driven by the wants and needs of your own people and not just a need to dominate others.

Not to be That Guy, but Discord is another corporate proprietary walled garden just like Twitter and Reddit and given recent experiences I think it should be avoided by the Fediverse community. See also this blog post (I am not affiliated with its author, I just think it expresses the point well).

There are several alternatives. If you want real-time chat, Matrix or IRC would work. If you just want to make announcements, an RSS feed or mailing list would do the trick.

Just my two cents. Thanks for your work in setting up and maintaining this instance!

Edit: Bonus see also

The United States abandoned the gold standard. I am guessing the point of this website is to suggest that was a bad thing. There is a lot of debate around the gold standard and most "mainstream" economists have no love for it, so I'm not saying the website is right or wrong, just that that's what it's about.