I used to travel to the U.S. once per year. Friends were working there and thinking about moving permanently. That is a thing of the past already since George W. Bush and the DHS.

Donnie put this to completely new level, but one could read the signs two decades ago.

One just does no longer feel welcome ...

The U.S. will still get those who only care about money. Please keep them there.

Most recipes (90+%) on the internet illustrate only two things: the author can neither cook nor write recipes.

Don't get me wrong: there are excellent recipes to be found. But it takes quite some effort to find them before being bludgeoned to death by ads.

We are hitting more and more negative feedback loops. It will not stop at 2.6C.

Story is not sexy enough to be noticed :-(

My last active Windows Installation is my Gaming PC. Once Windows 10 goes, I will switch to SteamOS. I took one look at the roadkill that the cat dragged in (aka Win 11) and decided, I will never use that. Microsoft has made so many customer hostile decisions. Worst is that they try to ram AI down everyones throat.

This is just anecdotal evidence:

I am working in sales, so my metrics are very clear: how many Euros do I pull in.

When I went to a 4-day-week three years ago, all my numbers went up and stayed there since.

I took a 20% hit on my base salary, but the higher commission compensated it.

I am suffering from osteoarthritis. I would rather need an appliance that enables me to walk more than a mile without pain. 5000$ would be small change compared to what I would pay for that.

My last Windows is my Gaming PC. Wanted to try Gaming on Linux anyway, so this is the necessary motivation.

8 * 8 TB HD
4 * 2 TB SSD
64GB RAM

The EU didn't demand that Microsoft grants 3rd Party Software Kernel privileges.

What the EU demanded, that all solutions must have the same access to work with the system as Microsoft does.

So the reason for 3rd party SW having kernel access is because Microsoft is using a shitty security architecture for it's own software.

Apple recognised this problem and went through years of pain and complaints to get security software to use an API and do things in userland territory.

Just checked:

Our first web server came up in 1994 using Cern HTTPD.

We developed that year a concept of mirrored web sites to keep non-local traffic low: the Bundesdatenautobahn. It was the first attempt of a CDN that didn't take of.

We also built a web shop that sold books online in 1994. Strangely we are no billionaires today.

What do I remember?

Client was Mosaic Browser running on Solaris 2 on a Sparc Station. The Mosaic Browser showed the web to be vastly superior to Gopher.

I also remember that running a web server was really complicated in the time before the Apache HTTP server was born.

We started as an ISP in 1992. I am unsure when exactly our own web server came up. But it must have been in 1994 or shortly after.

As mentioned, during Covid-19 there were a lot of regulations in place that allowed companies to continue existing even if they would have had to file for bankruptcy under the usual rules.

That way we built up a backlog of zombie companies. Most of the uptick results from cleaning up the backlog.

If you look for overall payment discipline, that is at an OK level (same as pre-pandemic or better). So this is not worrying.

Between the approaching climate disaster (which will hit us most likely very hard) and the rise of the right wing parties (which want to slaughter the EU goose that lays the golden economic eggs), I don't have CPU cycles to spare for that worry.
 

It has been at a similar level in 2018. The lowest price was in mid 2020 at height of the first Covid wave....

The irony is that today the gas prises have reached it's lowest level since summer 2021. It is down more than 90% from the peak in 2022.