In my university, computers in the public rooms all ran Mint, and we had a working self-hosted mail platform. Here comes Microsoft and in a few months all computers are replaced by Windows machines and the email platform runs on Outlook. My previous university also had the same approach: all Microsoft products. I’d really love to know all the details of those deals. I know they offer scholarships and fund development programs (in exchange they make students dependent / educated only on MS products), but I still feel its a loss of freedom for all our institutions.

This, set up calibre to automatically convert and sync the files to your mom’s kindle.

Yes! It’s a great thing! The next thing we should aim is to pass laws forcing Government instances (Germany and Netherlands already have) so politicians and institutions use those for their public/social media profiles and abandon X/Twitter/Threads and anything that isn’t decentralized. The mention of Mastodon/Lemmy/Pixelfed in the media (when eg. journalists quote a politician) would attract more users to these platforms. I believe this is truly necessary if we want to keep democracy healthy and have our socials out of the control of crazy billionaires.

He’s already doing this. We worry too much about “oh how bad would the backlash be?” but we are already heading for X,com-powered fascism, what’s to lose?

As an European, I think the obscene amount of lobbying we allow to happen around EU institutions is something that makes “European democracy is just as bad” sound reasonable.

This. So many Europeans act with superiority because “at least we don’t shoot kill them” when looking at US police brutality, but e.g. we ignore how those cops in US mostly use Glocks made in Austria, making us part of the problem (and making a profit out of it). Or if we look at the deaths numbers, we ignore the many deaths the “protection” of our borders cause.

“They would prefer instead an increase in the basic salary of restaurant employees.” Crazy how indoctrinated the Swiss are

100% ! Similar to all those youtube celebrities promoting Ocean Clean Up projects but avoiding the fact that the only real solution is just stop producing unnecessary plastic trash. Also that instead of looking for donations, these projects should be paid by the companies that produced these plastics.