Yeah, apart from what another person said about alternative apps… Events organized by local communities or businesses are often advertised in Facebook only. I know of a few local businesses in my area with Facebook being their only online presence.

Maybe it’s because they have to? Keeping in touch with older relatives, following local events, etc

Garmin. Works reasonably well without connection to the phone. Some models supported by Gadgetbridge

Edit: corrected app name

Well, they are saying they bring home $11k, not $17k a month, not sure where you got that number. With $11k of income, spending $5k on mortgage is less appealing. Especially if you consider a risk of layoff.

Still not Europe or Asia, innit?

Yeah… And the second source cited in article, VChK-OGPU “outlet” is an anonymous channel in Telegram, that published information from “an anonymous source”. Doesn’t sound trustworthy.

That’s what I love Lemmy for - a new perspective (and down votes, of course). Thanks for the link, it’s an interesting read. I also looked up details on their taxation system and it’s not that crazy, especially on business side. If someone wants it, here is the link to the article which compares Nordic countries tax system to US: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/scandinavian-social-programs-taxes-2023/

It seems that my opinion about lack of innovation was caused by me not knowing or hearing about big names of Nordic companies. No Scandinavian Apples or Googles around.

But as much as I enjoyed this conversation, I feel we have ventured way too far from Tim Walz…

I’m not saying you cannot have both. I’m saying that US and Nordic countries are like on opposing poles of economical systems spectrum. And in my opinion the better options are somewhere in the middle.

Yeah, CEO salaries are often outrageous. Wealth taxes should be implemented to curb that, and not just high bracket income taxes.

I stand corrected on this one.

Nah, Nordic model is not a good choice. It’s all fine to drill some oil, collect a lot of taxes and give that money away to people as welfare, while enjoying innovations produced by evil liberal capitalists.

I can’t think of anything advanced after Nokia that is built in Scandinavian countries. No cars (Saab is dead, Volvo is sold to Chinese), no microelectronics, no innovative drugs. To be fair, they have IKEA and LEGO, but this is not what makes humanity progress.

I feel there is a lot of options on the left spectrum that is less radical but still beneficial for broad population. Think France or Germany as an example.

Not sure if this applicable in Canada, but in US you can take a loan backed by home equity. It’s called HELOC and is independent from your mortgage - it will not change interest rates. The rates on HELOC are higher than current mortgage rates, but lower than credit card rates. The available amount depends on how much equity you have in your house.

Oh, sorry, I’ve assumed that you are in US since you posted an article about FTC.

I don’t know if there is a similar service in Europe. I think you could get a virtual card linked to a crypto wallet, but this obviously comes with downsides

There is Privacy.com that gives you virtual cards to use for purchases. Money go from your bank account to them. Destination is visible on payment description still, but it may fool bank’s algorithm. Or you can get paid plan from Privacy.com and mask destination completely.

Government: Only criminals use cash and crypto! Privacy advocates: Actually, this is not true… Government: makes cash and crypto illegal what do you say now, punks?

For a less than you pay for a cup of coffee, you can evaporate 10 or even 50 people!

Because we all know that a sergeant and soldiers can’t even hit a starship from 10 meters. Yes, Stormtroopers, I’m talking about you. What, this is what community again?

Raising the cost will reduce demand, and prompt producers to either reduce supply to avoid overproduction or find a way to keep costs down.

In first case, there will be less cow farts, and less meat and milk on the tables of poor people. There will be public health consequences, but emissions will be reduced.

In the second case, the government will get more taxes, emissions will be the same, and there will be possible public health issues due to lower meat/milk quality resulted from cost cuts.

In both cases, big manufacturers will likely keep their profits, small farmers will be impacted more and may go out of business, and public health will be at risk.

Where am I wrong? I have no economic expertise and no data, and the government should have both, at least in theory.

It’s an ad for a sex toys store with zero evidence

I guess there is a chance to see some of code, but I doubt about it being properly open sourced.

While we’re publishing the binary images of every production PCC build, to further aid research we will periodically also publish a subset of the security-critical PCC source code.

Source: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

Yeah, doesn’t seem that the proposed bill offers meaningful improvements. The article says

Under current New Hampshire law, voters are asked to provide proof of identity and age (usually a driver’s license), proof that they live where they want to vote, and proof of citizenship (either a birth certificate or a passport) in order to be able to register and vote.

It’s only if a person doesn’t have a proof of citizenship, they can sign a sworn affidavit to register or vote, which will be checked by attorney general office after elections.

This looks to me as a solid system already. One cannot vote by impersonating someone else, one cannot vote if you are not living in the district, one can only lie about citizenship with a significant risk of that lie to be exposed after elections with all legal consequences.

Unless you belive that damn liberals moving buses of illegals with forged IDs to steal the elections, there is nothing much to be worried about.