I’m never sure how to answer this because the concept of universal healthcare being a debate is strange to me, often it seems to coincide with “free” healthcare debates but the two seem quite different to me. Isn’t healthcare universal in countries like the US too? The problem being rather that it will bankrupt your family for 3 generations if you have to actually use it unless your employer values you staying alive instead of using the threat of death and disease as leverage to make you work harder for less pay. But that’s more a problem of universal insurance rather than universal healthcare itself, right? Anyone could still get treated if they accept the financial consequences. The system sucks, but still seems universal to me (again, universal insurance is the problem).

It’s not free over here, but everyone needs to have health insurance, and you get some subsidies to pay for it if you have a very low income. After a few decades of neoliberalism the subsidies are not sufficient, there’s an amount each year that you have to pay yourself, and hospitals are permanently nearly overwhelmed. But the financial amounts are much smaller compared to what someone in the US would be faced with (150-200 euros/month insurance, max 450 euros/year you have to pay yourself). There are waiting lists but despite memes I’ve seen of “yeah it’s more affordable in Europe but they never get treatment due to waiting lists”, I’ve never had to wait for actually urgent care, stuff I could do any time had some wait time but nothing crazy (few weeks, rarely 1-2 months for very in-demand optional stuff), and I believe overworked hospitals with crazy waiting lists are still much worse in (some) American hospitals compared to here. But I’m basing that off tv shows and movies where people have to wait for hours in the emergency department, not sure how realistic that is. By the way visits to the GP are free and I’ve never had to wait more than a day for an appointment. When I had something more serious I could stop by the GP instantly regardless of the appointment schedule.

Basically if you compare it to the situation a few decades before it’s worse, and some other European countries have better systems IMO. Compared to the US, which is the only country I know of where universal VS non-universal health care is a topic of debate, i can’t think of a single dimension in which it is not an upgrade, perhaps with the exception of shareholder profits (but even then a full economic argument wouldn’t work based on that, because sick or dead citizens don’t work very well).

Netherlands

I miss being able to make embarrassing mistakes without the risk of it being recorded and shared with the world. It’s not even that I make a lot of them, or that anyone would care, I just hate the principle that anything could potentially be used against you. It’s more that the threat itself takes the enjoyment out of being outside, like everyone has to be so guarded and fake all the time.

The first time I saw this was in the early days of YouTube and smart phones, some kids had found a video of a teacher who was peer pressured by some people into very shyly singing a popular song, which they put on YouTube. After that nobody took him seriously anymore.

Note: this is for actual small silly things only, the kind that can happen to anyone. I absolutely do not support people who try to excuse their crimes, harassment or bigotry as “it was just an embarrassing mistake when I was young haha”, that sort of thing absolutely should be used against them later.

That was my first reaction too. I usually try to stop myself from falling into conspiracy thinking, but in this case it’s hard to do when a few days prior the Internet has been full with an alleged memo with plans to stage something dramatic for the press at this specific event.

Can’t rule out a real attack but at this point I wouldn’t exactly say it’s the option with the highest probability for this government filled with tv personalities at record low popularity…

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The American government and their supporters hate modern day Europe, and yet they’re so obsessed with gaudy replication of old European stuff. You see it also with all the kitchy Roman-like pillars and replicas of the statue of David randomly plonked in some room. It’s just so… weird. I guess they like the idea of “old” Europe, the good old days when they still spent half their time killing each other, and the other half killing people in far-away places. They probably see it as their own origin story, so they resent that the modern versions of these countries, after all the devastating wars, have evolved into modern, peaceful countries. Maybe they see themselves as defenders against modern debauchery like freedom, peace and happiness?

From my perspective it just seems kind of hollow and desperate, can’t think of your own stuff to do so you decide to copy the megalomania of dysfunctional old empires that got crushed by their own ego and inability to peacefully coexist in prosperity. There’s a reason they’re not around anymore, and copying them, aside from being vaguely pitiful, just means you’re headed to the same end. Let’s hope it won’t take two world wars for America to catch on.

Kind of niche but Guitar Pro. Not sure what the newer versions are like but the one I have is great for composing and arrangement.

I like HERE WeGo lately, haven’t really noticed differences for public transportation with Google Maps. I only have experience using it in my country, though.

Your interactions will generally be stored and used for further training, so using their services gives them an advantage compared to European companies. I would suspect, although I have not read about this in detail, that the plan for eventual monetisation, once they have a monopoly and people are dependent and unable to switch back, will be to generate a profile and use this for targeted advertising/influencing, similar to how social network services operate. IMO it’s much better not to use their services, they want the data more than they care about electricity bills.

It depends on what your goal is. I used to share your opinion, but find myself increasingly of the opinion that these ideals must be kept separate. Much as I like the idea of open source, not all open source applications or crowd-sourced data can keep up with companies with hundreds or thousands of people actually responsible for it. Similarly, when it comes to innovation, large resources and private investments are needed. If we focus too much on requiring every single thing related to software being open source, we risk the entire effort failing before taking off.

Open source is great, and if you care especially much about this topic that’s also great, but it’s still quite niche (the general public won’t care), while geopolitical sovereignty is a big topic many are rapidly coming to appreciate. Let’s start with this part where there’s already substantial agreement within the population instead of necessarily packaging them together. Switching over from sending our money to the US for the privilege of dependence to investing our money into our own companies seems a relatively easy and well supported first step, over European and open source and non-addictive and no obnoxious ads and low energy consumption and and and. All all worthwhile causes, but insisting on all at once is doomed to fail. IMO it’s better to move in steps, and start with the low-hanging fruit.

Is this feedback for devs?

My 144hz monitor randomly runs at 60hz with no way of changing it apart from restarting several times.

I have a TV connected in addition to my monitor (for lazy gaming or watching series), but this causes various small but annoying problems. I can’t unlock my PC without moving the mouse over to my monitor, which invariably spawns on the TV, and I have to guess how to move it over (left/right alignment is also inconsistent). It also turns the mouse pointer massive on the monitor, presumably because the TV has a higher resolution. Despite marking the monitor as the main display, more than half of my applications launch on the TV. Except the ones I actually want there, of course. If my tv is off before booting is complete, and I turn it on later, my background disappears, and sound is routed to the terrible built-in monitor speakers instead of either the tv audio I use while it’s on, or the actually good headphones I use when it’s not.

At some point my kernel randomly broke because the driver of my WiFi adapter was somehow incompatible. It was a massive pain to figure out the problem and fix it.

As a causal user these are definitely points that came out worse than the competition functionality-wise, and since most of the general public will not opt for a lesser experience for the sake of idealism, this type of issue probably prevents other people who just want to use their PCs from switching.

Edit: it was also a massive pain to set up a Korean keyboard layout, in Windows you just select it and you’re done. In Ubuntu, you do the same and nothing changes. I don’t even remember what it was that actually fixed it, but I tried a lot of guides that didn’t work.