To the surprise of absolutely nobody. In all honesty, he should probably be stripped of German citizenship at this point, in my opinion. It’s not like he’s been a Russian asset for decades, so…

While true, there’s no way Scotland would get into the EU any time soon as an independent country. It would be a drawn out process and some member country would inevitably disagree for some reason or another.

Scotland voted to remain not too long ago. I believe they should give it a few more years before revisiting that question. Northern Ireland may indeed rejoin the Republic at some point in the future, if current trends continue. However, it will likely still take time for the apparent majority to emerge there. My personal guess is that I might see a united Ireland but my children will most likely see it within their lifetimes. Wales? Well, it’s Wales and therefore it’s full of English people to begin with, so…

Unfortunately about half of the US electorate either actively endorses this or doesn’t care.

Growing your own veggies, at least in most western countries, is seldom about saving money or food security.

Oh No! Anyway…

You can use a small Nextcloud in combination with collabora. As far as I know there’s still a free option for a small Nextcloud with up to 8 GB of cloud storage currently. To work on your various documents on the go I recommend collabora, which I use on my phone. On your desktop you can use any number of office applications that support the file standards you’re working with. I haven’t tried collabora on desktop, but it supposedly works there as well. I personally use Softmaker’s Free Office Suite on desktop with cloud storage on the Nextcloud. So far I’ve managed to keep this entire setup free and (apart from Softmaker’s Office) open source.

Once again, this is an opinion piece that (willfully?) misrepresents several arguments and mixes and matches them throughout. First of all, the problem of software you purchased being deactivated remotely didn’t exist in the first place. The problem was introduced with the (sometimes forced) reliance on online infrastructure. Second of all, service agreements for software are fine and very common for different sectors. These usually contain specifics about how long support will continue and even often include exit options for when the time comes to migrate. Putting video games on the same footing as most business software is also fine.

I find it difficult to accept that such a critical service is privately owned and operated. I find it completely unacceptable that it was supposed to be owned by Americans. This decision is definitely a positive one.

Too bad that “mood” really doesn’t seem to be relevant in totalitarian dictatorships.

I’m honestly surprised that the fat man cust conceded. I was convinced there would be some type of shenanigangs or at least an attempt at crying about foul play or “outside interference” by the evil EU/Ukraine/Soros…

If a large country such as France is serious about such a switch I’d be surprised if they didn’t use some sort of custom distro, perhaps built upon Ubuntu. This would allow for solid compatibility with the “parent”, but also allow for some tweaking to fit the specific needs of the French government and its many agencies. To my knowledge the German state of Schleswig Holstein, which decided to switch to open source as much as possible months ago, still hasn’t decided which distro would be the best fit for their project. Such a major decision really needs good planning and cannot be allowed to go wrong.

It must have been a terrible experience serving on one of these. The death rates were also very high.

I’m certainly not cheering for a regime like the current Iranian one. I deliberately put “good guys” in quotation marks and suggested they might be the more reasonable party, as in the party that is more likely to keep its word.

It’s really difficult to look like the “good guys” in a conflict, when you’re the Islamic Regime of Iran. Somehow the current United States are making the Iranians look more and more reasonable.

It would seem like different nations are trying to find a sort of modus operandi to somewhat use the shipping lane again. Let’s see how long it takes for the US Navy to be used to keep it closed for everyone.

This is good news. I’m honestly surprised at how positive the last few pieces of news from Moldova usually are. It’s obviously up to the people of Moldova and the people of Romania, but I would welcome Moldova into the EU via reunification with Romania at some point in the future.

As someone who was born outside of Germany but now lives here (with no immediate plans for going anywhere else) I regularly ask myself this question. Obviously many Germans seek economic opportunity in Switzerland, but the Swiss seem to really have about enough of all these immigrants. Then there might be other destinations that some people also bring up like Denmark, Sweden or Norway, but these fail to even break the top 20 destinations statistically.

In 2024 most emigrations seem to be in the context of people returning to their other European home countries. Out of the statistical top 20 only Spain/Italy (climate, retirement) Switzerland (economic opportunity) and the United States (again, economic opportunity, but recently with more people moving from the United States to Germany than the other way around) sound like plausible targets for German emigration at scale.

In all likelihood this could just be part of the general “mopiness” that seems to be prevalent in German culture.

I believe the specific law is from 1977, but I agree with your point in general, that service shouldn’t discriminate based on gender.

From my knowledge this rule was supposedly active for decades before Germany discontinued conscription and nobody really followed it then. Why there is a need to reactivate a law that will not be followed by the vast majority and that has no enforcement mechanisms associated with it really beats me. It’s probably a mix of incompetence and “we’ve always been doing things like this”.

It’s worth considering setting up payment for various commodities in other currencies as well. Obviously the buyer and the seller have to agree, but it’s not a far stretch from accepting payment in Renminbi to also having parts of the trades done in more reliable and importantly freely traded currencies like the Swiss Franc, to name just one example.