Cute pic, but what is going on with those cat biscuits in the background? At first I thought that cat must be spoilt if the monks are shelling out for those fancy cat-bix. But they look like supermarket shelves - did the monks meditate in a supermarket? I even did a reverse image search hoping to find the original image, but just found lots of the exact same, with that same background.

The police even have the audacity to try and moralise about this: “As a result of her selfish actions that day, she is now behind bars and her four children will now be without their mother for a considerable period of time.”

No, it’s a result of our useless coppers choosing to waste taxpayer money harassing adults for entertaining themselves in ways that cause no harm to anyone else. Selfish actions my arse. You guys are the ones who have kept those kids from seeing their mum, nobody else. How about the police do something more worthwhile with their time, like investigating burglary and other anti-social criminality.

You’re probably right but there’s pretty stiff competition from all the other moronic stuff they’re doing in foreign affairs, like tariffs and threatening to invade allies.

They really are speed-running the death of the American Empire.

Your downvotes make me wonder if I misunderstood your post, but you seem to be saying that Spain’s Airbnb regulations make it harder for people to buy flats with the intention of using them as short-term holiday lets, while not really stopping people who just want to rent a room in their own house for short periods. Which does sound good to me, given that those empty rooms in grandma’s house wouldn’t otherwise be on the market.

So is your point that this is “anti-tourist” in the sense that it does make things more difficult for tourists, but that should be expected given that tourists are generally indifferent to the long term negative effects of tourism on a city?

You must be able to see that giving your daughter your mother’s name as a middle name is not at all the same as giving your son your own name?

Vanity isn’t it? Pathetic male vanity. Never hear women doing it do you.

Three. Hundred. Million. Pounds.

Government IT spending is absolutely insane. That’s 100 people on £100k a year for 30 years. How does this get through oversight? And then they deliver a shitty system and there’s no comeback?

While true, why are you linking this comment in almost all the other comments?

I’ve been stuck repeatedly asking myself this question ever since reading your comment 😩 Please be careful about throwing infinite while true loops around! Now I need someone to Ctrl-C me.

That’s interesting. I’ve always thought the name a little weak, so you prompted me to find its origins. According to wiki:

Taler is short for the “Taxable Anonymous Libre Economic Reserves”[7][8] and alludes to the Taler coins in Germany during the Early Modern period.

That definitely looks like a backronym! Anyway, the wiki for the Taler coins says this:

The word is shortened from Joachimsthaler, the original thaler coin minted in Joachimsthal, Bohemia, from 1520.

So the original root appears to be Thal or Tal i.e. valley (just like Neanderthal/Neandertal). The Taler wiki page goes on:

[The Holy Roman Empire’s] longest-lived coin was the Reichsthaler, which contained 1⁄9 Cologne Mark of fine silver (or 25.984 g), and which was issued in various versions from 1566 to 1875.

Was Denmark part of the Holy Roman Empire? Either way, your ancestors would’ve presumably often traded with Germans using these early Thaler/Taler coins.

But… but… the children in the meme mines will go hungry tonight, you monster

Looks interesting - and ambitious. Who are you targeting this for? Non-tech people who do everything on their phones? What would attract such people to make the switch?

Anyway good luck. Do you allow people to use their own (or a third party’s) email domain? A lot of people would not want to give up their established email address.

(And a small thing - it’s spelt leisure not leasure! Otherwise it looks good and professional)

I vote that all Germans should from now on refer to distances in terms of Saarland - but rather than use kilo- mega- etc, you just add extra "A"s. Actually, better idea, you should change the name of Germany itself to Saaaaaarland.

if this is part of an effort to get beef recognised as a type of fish by the Catholic church, keep it up, this’ll probably work.

I’m probably misunderstanding as I rarely use word processing software, so I apologise if you talking about something more than the system’s own handling of touchpad scrolling! here’s the settings applet for XFCE, I think every DE will have similar options (it does even offer circular scrolling, but I know you aren’t looking for that):

Gesture scrolling? You mean like making clockwise or anticlockwise circles to scroll up or down? I’d have thought that kind of functionality would be handled by the touchpad driver, not individual programs.

The usual stuff here - Wero instead of PayPal for person-to-person payments (but only if your bank supports it), use Girocard in shops rather than Visa or Mastercard, threema as a chat app, make use of your library’s e-book services, try to switch to a European email provider. They give two German-based examples for email - both of whom charge €1 per month for the lowest tier.

In my view, it was the US tech companies willingness to offer their services without charge that led to their current dominance.

Apparently threema asks for a one-time payment of €6, which reminded me that WhatsApp at first was an independent app that charged a one-off 50p if you wanted to use it after the first year.

That was low enough that many people did pay, making the developers a lot of money. Not superyacht money but still a tidy income. They made the superyacht money when Facebook bought them. Facebook then got rid of the one-off 50p charge of course, because they were going for world domination.

So the question is, how much are the general public willing to pay for privacy and some kind of corporate accountability?

Trees do actually improve air quality, by absorbing harmful gases like sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide through their leaves. Additionally they can reduce particulate pollution by up to 70% - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200504-which-trees-reduce-air-pollution-best

You live in a fantasy world if you think “Don’t go” is a feasible alternative. If I don’t go, someone else will, and all I’ve done is deprive myself of something that I want to make a point

Come on mate, you could say this about any kind of protest or boycott.

all I’ve done is deprive myself of something that I want to make a point

Yes that is exactly how boycotts work. You make a personal sacrifice as a protest against something that’s unfair or immoral.

If you’re not prepared to make a sacrifice, that’s OK, but at least have the honesty to admit you just don’t care enough about this particular issue.

Such a cop-out. Every boycott is a personal sacrifice, and every individual participating in a boycott knows that their one purchase isn’t by itself going to make a difference.

you mean you always plead not guilty, don’t you?