"Billionaires in the US only invest there because they pay next to no income tax. The consequence of that is that the middle class gradually disappears"
Yes, billionaires pay little to no income tax (or more accurately: capital gains tax or tax on dividend). Yes, the middle class is gradually disappearing. But no, one is not a consequence of the other. Taxing billionaires on realized gains is not going to bring in enough revenue to save the middle class. The middle class is not being squeezed out by taxes, but by corporations / private equity increasing prices on basic necessities. It's an odd application of the old communist tenet "from each according to their ability". If you are in the income group that can afford to pay €2 for a €1 item, they'll try and charge you €2 if they can get away with it. And if they can corner the market on a scarce item (or create that scarcity), they'll charge you even more.

"a country previously famous for it's scientists and mathematician"
A good many of them coming from Ukraine. They were a technology and engineering powerhouse even back in Soviet times.

Western media hardly report on any individual strike. What we can find about the strike on May 22nd: Russia claims the dormitory was used as a dormitory. Ukraine claims the place was used as an HQ for Rubicon (the Russian elite drone unit). No one has been able to confirm or debunk either claim.

So: 1) Russia is lying about what went on in that building, 2) Ukraine acted on incorrect intel, 3) Ukraine accidentally hit the wrong building, or 4) Ukraine deliberately targeted a student dorm.
1 and 2 are plausible. 3 not so much: their strikes are generally precise, and Russia allegedly had no jammers or air defense assets in the area that could have caused drones to go off-course (as does sometimes happen in other strikes elsewhere). 4 is implausible; Ukraine has not much of a history of deliberately targeting civilian homes.

I bought a Roland S-1 Tweak Synth this week. Absolutely lovely bit of kit, one of the best things Roland have done for a while. It's relevance to this conversation though is that it has a built-in, non-user replaceable battery and is charged by USB C.

I've kept my Roland synth from 1989, and there are people with synths much older than that. While never massively user-serviceable as a genre, this is the first time I can think of that there's a definite life span on these things. Just like a phone, eventually this battery is going to wear out and have severely reduced capacity. I have to imagine that, as with vintage synths or older phones, someone will probably start a service for replacing the battery but wouldn't it be nice if they didn't have to and the design had been thought of in advance?

Yep, was more thinking of the "people using wired don't care about the DAC" part than the actual machines we're talking about.

Quite the opposite. A strong use-case for a jack is low-latency audio, and tht's the kind of thing used by people who use their machines for audio and music production. I'm a heavy user of Logic, and would absolutely not let wireless headphones anywhere near it.

For "people who don't care the DAC sucks", there's wireless. For people who do care about the DAC but only for listening to music or conversation etc., then wireless also exists. For those who care about both quality and latency, and that's really only for specific use cases these days, then wired is the way.

You can use it as a living room gaming box; my wife uses it like that often. She uses it as a handheld when playing old arcade games on an emulator, but for more serious games she hooks up a big screen, keyboard and mouse in the living room.

Why do you think the Dutch authorities are now blocking the acquisition of Solvinity by some US based firm? Solvinity manages the servers for the national identity provider scheme (DigiD).
Personally I don't think the government should be using 3rd party clouds for anything remotely critical. They have the scale to make running their own infrastructure worthwhile financially, and the know-how to run it effectively.

Pragmatic? The decision was made at the very last minute despite the grave risks having been pointed out months ago. No action was taken. Now they unnecessarily blocked the takeover instead of taking actual pragmatic action. Such as: offering Solvinity to let the acquisition go through, if they are willing to end the contract for this service early, and sell the servers that are already living in a Dutch government-owned data center to a new partner willing to operate them.

"Competing with things in even higher orbits" is exactly what they are doing in this scenario. Round trip to a Starlink satellite with on-board AI compute is less than 100ms. Round trip with older satcom systems like BGAN to a base station is 700-1500ms. This in an environment where regular radio transmissions are highly unreliable, and putting the processor on board is not viable. As I said, it's a niche application, but a real one, and there may be others.

Low latency AI edge computing. There's several military applications, such as directing drone swarms or even providing AI to individual drones.

I'd be more than happy to invest in SpaceX, the space company. Sadly the company has been poisoned with X and xAI. Looking at the market valuations of each of those individual companies, that doesn't seem to be like a big deal at first glance. But in the IPO filing, the company points out that their addressable market opportunity isn't space, it is almost all AI. Around 3/4ths of their spending in Q1 has been on AI. If you buy into the SpaceX IPO, you're buying into an AI company. Maybe they want us to believe that they will be a vertically integrated AI provider with data centers in space. I am highly doubtful about the latter; there certainly are business cases for having AI datacenters in space, but they are edge cases.

Maybe few people will by enthusiastic to buy into that; even with investing into indices or EFTs, chances are that you're already overexposed to AI. The worrying thing is that SpaceX will be included into the Nasdaq 100 index shortly after their IPO. Doesn't that mean that anyone running EFTs or trackers on that index will have to buy SpaceX stock to cover their position?

Agreed - I'm also a light user of KDE and exactly the same as I said about the Mac applies to KDE. The Mac improved a lot, although it's still more flexible to use 3rd party stuff. I'm not aware of any extra window management available in KDE although as stated I'm only a light user of it really (my gaming box is a Bazzite install with KDE).

People switched to Google because it had a nice clean white page with a single search box, while AltaVista was going the 90s fad portal route. Clean interface and simplicity was thee key,

There's lots of talk about how Google's search algos were better than AltaVista but honestly, at first, they weren't. They were close and they improved, but the loading speed and simplicity advantage that Google had over AltaVista is what bought them time to improve. Remember too that one reason AltaVista was better was that people optimised to be found by it, and not for Google. As time went on, more people learned what Page Rank was (long since gone) and started to optimise for that instead, thus speeding up the switch.

Lesson: Don't go complex. Don't go shoving extra stuff at people that they haven't asked for. Give them the simplest thing possible, and they will use it.

How do you know they exist in the first place? Start menu is a copy of the Apple menu as enhanced by an ancient shareware utility called "Hierarchical Menus". That add-on does exactly what the start menu does, allowing shortcuts to be grouped in folders etc. and for nesting of folders. It predates the Start menu by a few years.

One of the points was to be able to organise by category. I might not know what the thing-to-set-up-a-disk-partition is called, but it's probably in a menu hierarchy called "Utilities" and I can go look. It's discoverable, and it should be there.

Pinned things? Probably a set of defaults that are easily removable would be my preferred answer (which is what they do), but I could also settle for none until you put it there. But I very much disagree that nothing at all should be in the Start menu except your own choices.