You know how you can only withdraw a certain amount of money from an ATM even if you have more in your account and need it in cash?
That’s because of laws against money laundering and terror financing. The gist of it is that criminals and terrorists will finance/get cash out of their activities through using a bunch of middle men/fronts, cash and other ways to obfuscate the origin/destination of the money.
It’s a time honored tradition to treat foreign legions as disposable, even if Russia takes that to another level with the country’s general lack of regard for human life.
Rutte is Trump’s most loyal ally and friend.
It’s probably right that Trump is overstating his win, but frankly any form of yielding to Trump is infuriating. If there is a deal that covers “the entire Arctic region” the details will be important. Countries in that region include Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. One should not assume it’s a win for the Nato countries with more Trump regime forces in the region after the US has threatened invasion or annexation of two of them.
An average day in 2024, 54 people in the EU died in road accidents, per Eurostat.
Edit:
Somewhere around 40 people a day die in road accidents in the EU. (Eurostat seems to only have numbers with the actual number of dead for 2023 so far and that year I think it was something like 47 per day on average, but other sources show road deaths decreased somewhat in 2024.
He wants to own Greenland, but moreso he wants to “own the libs”.
But to be clear, that’s still just your “normal” bad day that hits the markets with some regularity (e.g. Jensen Huang has a bad hair day).
Consider that Russia has been failing to take over a neighboring country for several years now, for incomprehensible reasons, displaying immense incompetence on every level along the way. It is inherently very unlikely that Russia simultaneously has masterminded the entire fabric of the US and effectively taken over the country through sheer genius.
No doubt that Trump is playing right into Putin’s hands, but Putin is also an idiot: not omnipotent.
I think it’s more worth considering that the MAGA doomsday cult has a lot of interests that align with Russia, e.g. shifting U.S focus to the Western Hemisphere for resource dominance, as suggested by Aslı Bâli in the latest episode of The Dig (https://thedigradio.com/podcast/maga-empire-w-asli-bali-and-greg-grandin/).
Thanks, corrected!
If you’re like me, a long time Mac user with a lot of time spent in Windows for work, I think it’s really pain free to switch.
I chose Debian – the distro for boring people. Supposedly, it’s the best for stability and compatibility, not the best for cutting edge applications and perhaps slow to get some drivers and what not. Often people suggest alternatives like Mint as user friendly. However, I haven’t had a single problem with Debian in terms of compatibility or usability.
For the “Desktop Environment” (DE) – that which impacts the most whether the system feels more or less like MacOS – I use the bundled KDE Plasma without modifications. Like on Windows, the most used keyboard shortcuts, by default use Ctrl instead of CMD. If you’re at all used to Windows it will take you no time to adjust – otherwise it may take some rewiring of the brain or rebinding keys. The stock file manager in KDE is nowhere as nice as Finder, but also trivial to adapt to. Overall, KDE Plasma does not really mimic the feel of MacOS at all, but I consider that a pro – it means that I don’t end up frustrated assuming something will working the same way when it doesn’t.
I have never been big on using the official App Store on MacOS, but if you are, that’s going to be an adjustment. Each system comes with something similar to the App Store, but they generally don’t come with the same range of apps (e.g. Debian/KDE has an app called Discover which has a really narrow range of apps). However, as you’re stated goal is to break free from big tech, getting to know the different ways of installing apps will be a rewarding experience (and rather straight forward, most of the time).
Speaking about apps, I think one of the pains you should prepare yourself for if you decide to stick mostly with apps that are “Free Open-Source Software” (FOSS), the degree of polish – particularly in terms of investment in GUI/UX – will generally be considerably lower than many paid apps you might be used to, particularly premium Apple apps (e.g. Final Cut).
As for hardware, I don’t really have any valuable pointers. I think losing out on the great synergies between Apple’s excellently built hardware and very optimized software is a big trade off. But depending on what you’re gunning for, you will have a lot more options and potentially at a better price/performance point.
Yes and no, it moves the goal post and makes it harder for some criminals/terrorists to launder money. But organized crime is one of the largest business sectors in the world, so many have large incentives to get around the rules.
It’s helpful to think of crime as a (or many separate) business sector(s) in this context, because at large scale criminals can benefit from much of the economic infrastructure that is required for legitimate international businesses, particularly modern businesses that sell things that don’t cost much/anything to produce (doesn’t have a fixed profit margin), such as subscriptions, streaming or intellectual property (e.g. music or games downloads).
Not long ago the circulation of this dirty money was a staple of many parts of the established financial system (see the Wachovia cartel scandal as an example). Today’s rules and crackdowns after the 2008 financial crisis has changed that somewhat.