Tuukka R

Assuming the fine isn’t progressive, of course.

Over here in Finland fines for any but the minor offences are defined in percents of income, not in fixed sums of money. There have been cases of traffic fines of several hundreds of thousands for going 30 km/h over the speed limit. That makes them a punishment for very richest people as well, not only for the lower class.

At least the Siku cars I checked just a few weeks ago in a shop were all made in China 😢

The Majorette cars I’ve bought to my children are all made in Thailand.

So, the war in Ukraine is a proxy war between North Korea and USA?

Breaking anti-bribery laws of a country is illegal, no matter whether they are enforced in some other country or not. Of course Microsoft can break the law and then keep paying large fines until they decide to no longer break the law.

On working days before 16 o’clock bank transfers inside EU are instantaneous. After that, next working day. If the shop has the same bank as the customer, it’s always instantaneous.

But, the shop receives immediate confirmation that the money has been successfully taken from the customer’s account and will arrive soon.

…which is actually how it works with card payments as well. With card payments, the shop receives the money about a week later, but gets an immediate confirmation that the money is on the way.

Handling cash costs money as well.

I’d like to know who got the idea to name the system with a word meaning “tax” in Finnish, one of the official languages of EU… Both are related to money, so there is a possibility for confusion.

(We used to always use w, and had a reform some ~century ago to allow using v instead. Therefore, w is considered another form of v in Finnish, and thereby wero equals vero)

Online you pay by bank transfer. Instead of “credit card”, I choose “online bank”, click my bank’s name, enter my online banking login and password, give one of the single-use codes and press “transfer”. A bank transfer from my account to the bank account number defined by the shop is made, no money goes to USA.

VoIP means any online call, including Zoom-to-Zoom or Skype-to-Skype or Discord-to-Discord.

Most VoIP programs don’t support calling regular telephone numbers.

Nope. The goal is to call regular telephone numbers from your computer.

Uh, a bank transfer maybe? We’ve got excellent infrastructure for that. PayPal is needed because in USA you can’t do bank transfers just like that.

The problem is, the person saying “these guys are nazis” could be simply lying.

A good example is Putin funding nazis everywhere in ex-USSR since around 2005, then managing to get Europeans to think the Ukrainian freedom movement was somehow a nazi movement even though the prevalence of right-wing extremism was growing until 2014 just like in the Russia and started decreasing in 2014, while it kept rising in the Russia and Russia-controlled areas such as Crimea.

If the Russia was to gain control over Ukraine, the prevalence of right wing extremist attacks would start growing again like it did until 2014. And yet, a lot of Europeans, especially in Germany, are opposing Ukraine because of the "these guys are nazis, nazis=bad mindset. Nazis are bad. It’s just important to understand that someone accusing someone of being a nazi doesn’t mean that the someone actually is a nazi.

The mindset has caused large parts of Ukraine to fall under circumstances that cause there to be more fascism. Anti-fascism has ended up promoting fascism in this case.

I have not read about what Proton’s owners have said and will delve into that now. But my experience, having lived in Ukraine in 2015 and 2016 and in Germany between 2008 and 2010 (and still having good friends there), is that many are eager to jump on a bandwagon of lynching an accused nazi, even if the accuser himself is a nazi and the accused is not.

It is ugly seeing precisely those who would be needed for fighting fascism work as errand boys for fascists.

Half Life 4: Episode 3.

You can also buy technology second hand. That’s a way to avoid giving money outside your country.

And clothes! I buy my socks and underwear new, usually from Ukraine, and all of my other clothes in the past 20 years have always been second hand. Has worked very well.

Yeah, and ResQ works in a bunch of other countries. Just wondering if there is a third bunch of countries served by a third app. I wouldn’t mind having them all installed on my phone when travelling 🙂

That’s the one this post was about, though.

Yup, I’ve only ever seen that in Germany. In Finland we also need to queue if we want to pay by cash. I don’t know why they want to pay for all those extra cashiers.

Just install Steam or GoG and play the games through those. Then all the configuration work is done by the Steam/GoG crew. You just buy the game, install it and play, out of the box. About a quarter of Steam’s games work on Linux. The only thing I miss is something akin to Skyrim or Witcher. Factorio works and Stellaris works, so I’m happy :)

EDIT: Ok, Steam’s American. But GoG is Polish.

Linux Mint is the most Windows-like regarding its user interface, so that one probably requires the least learning. Ubuntu is trying to work a bit like Mac OS X, and I actually like that.

And then there are distros that don’t try to be super easy but actively try to help you learn how to do the difficult things. Arch Linux is famous for that.

Ubuntu (and Linux Mint, which is actually just Ubuntu with a more Windows-like user interface) have the best app support, so that might be a factor.