Leather isn't a free byproduct, in many cases less CO2 is emitted by not using the hide and just producing an alternative instead

It's not, cotton seats are also a thing. And even the polycarbons are usually recycled anyway

I'm not convinced raising a whole living being that eats plants, and harvesting its skin is that much more energy efficient than just using a plant fibre

It absolutely is, it's naive to think these puritans will just decide to stop here

Oh 100%, I'm a republican (lowercase R, in the British sense). I just find it ironic that the US portrays itself as having removed monarchy, when it was just replaced with dictator that has a term limit

You're conflating colourism with racism, I'm guessing you're in the US and your primary exposure to racism is via colourism?

This is patently false and just a rehash of the same old attitude we've seen so frequently before.

If you're going to be a bigot at least try and be original

Ironically, our king has incredibly limited power that is enforced by a strong belief that religion should be separate from politics and an independent judiciary. Your king doesn't seem to have the same hurdles

Hetzner VMs generally, there are a couple of issues I've needed to workaround like private IP assignment with terraform, but other than that, if you're comfortable deploying a k8s cluster yourself, just throw things on the cluster. The VMs aren't the fastest but they give the biggest bang for your buck.

I'm currently experimenting with scaleway, but the cost is pretty high, so I'll probably just migrate over to dedicated machines in hetzner and add more machines as the cluster grows

Not as far as I know, but the self-hosting community is generally moving over to VM runners and off the vendored solutions, any cloud provider can give you those.

Scaleway gives the most was style of services like managed kubernetes, FAAS, managed gateway etc. you pay for the convenience though.

Whilst WhatsApp is still owned by meta and I'm sure the US military would have a lot use for the metadata they collect, let's be honest, I'm sure Putin would prefer if Russians switched to a platform they can spy on themselves

This is why I'm migrating all the servers I own to EU data centres owned by EU companies. It's insanely hard to get enterprises off the big 3 cloud providers, but for the smaller clients I support they don't know why difference and in the long run it ends up saving then money