Honestly I thought the entire point of a union was to demonstrate that you are in fact a union. Not a bunch of employees running around in their union "cliques" cosplaying as a union pretending to have power

There's some truth to that, but often it is just not possible to start off with one already big union. Or even get a union at all. And one small union, as well as a couple of small unions, is still better than no union. And as we see here, consolidating several small unions into one big union can and does happen...

Maybe not that much at all. More contented employees usually have a tendency to also be more productive employees. Something far too many employers still don't understand.

Not as such, not necessarily – like if it would be fueled by photovoltaics instead of coal. There's hardly any other appliance besides the AC for which solar energy were a similarly perfect fit. (There still are possible severe effects through refrigerant leaks, at least with those refrigerants in conventional ACs until lately, but that would be avoidable; and the waste heat that's dumped outside has some potential to worsen local urban climate, but the global warming effect is negligible as far as I understand this.)

I'm pretty happy with my soon-25-year-old "compact" sedan, thank you, except that it is already slightly bigger and heavier than I would have liked. But its computing ingredients are minimal, nothing annoys, nothing diverts my attention from where it needs to be: on the road, and anti-lock brakes and traction control (I also got by excellently without the latter for most of my driving career) are all I require in terms of technical features.

If I wouldn't want an electric car at some point, I wouldn't even care, as long as no one would force my to buy a car that's significantly newer than mine. At the same time, European law makes cars around here even more expensive through the sheer amount of overblown safety requirement, soon to include a camera that permanently monitors the driver, while I'm pretty sure that certain manufacturers will like this a lot and somehow overlook that other requirement that says that monitoring data including imagery has to stay in the car and to be deleted soon after it was recorded.

As of now, only VW, of all the manufacturers, even if just lately, seems to be the one manufacturer to have understood that many people still just want functionality and ergonomics, and that that is best achieved by classic buttons and levers and switches and displays reduced to what's relevant...

One shouldn't have to turn off yet another new, useless and unwanted setting or feature every couple of weeks.

It's acceptable, even if only just, with Vivaldi, where I also do get new features every couple of weeks – which, though, in 99% of cases are at least potentially useful and not just completely browser-unrelated gimmicks or even malware.

Well-known fact since Edgar the Bug.

And funny that this coincides with my starting to move my servers from Ubuntu Server to Debian. I don't want to trust a company that, on May 22, announces the shutdown of a service on May 31 that was supposed to store data for up to one year (guaranteed or not)...

Like, bread?

I call BS if that's actually what someone or something says. It's a fighting term of modern-day esoterics who make a religion out of what they eat, thereby to attack (the evil of) modern civilization (which of course is a living hell for a growing number of participants, but for other, sensible reasons), including science, or whatever.

Right. Not even 35 years old, the 3C509. I remember it like it were yesterday how we wrapped coax cable around that three-storey house with rented flats to get us four people connected. Probably need to go back to OS/2 if Linux drops support!

In the moment the Nextcloud people forked it, the fork has become European software.

What? Taxonomy is science, not religion. Religion has nothing to do with this. Homo sapiens is a species in just the same way as cat and dog are species.

Except that LMDE and Debian, compared to LM and Ubuntu, lock out a massive pool of application sources many people rely on, namely PPAs and other non-Debian-compatible apt repositories.

And that would be bad why?

Because any Mint user used to getting significant amounts of stuff from PPAs and other non-Debian-compatible apt repositories will be effed as soon as they're forced to move to LMDE.

It's not so easy. If major Linux Mint versions will now come eight months later even than their underlying Ubuntu LTS which already is slow, then that will become a problem for quite some users and thereby for Mint itself. And they wouldn't be doing that if their resources weren't too limited for keeping up the previous cadence which at least was acceptable. It isn't that far-fetched at all to use the word 'trouble' in this context.

The Mint distribution based on Debian (LMDE) is not made for productive use (despite being good enough) and the Mint team does not recommend it for that. It has been created to explore the possibility of a Debian-based Mint replacing Ubuntu-based Mint in the eventuality of Ubuntu stopping to be a viable base.