joyj2nd

"through a coerced opium trade,"

You forgot to mention WHY the opium trade happened. China was exporting tea, silk and porcelain like there is no tomorrow and at the same time had accumulated the majority of the world silver reserves since they did not want to buy anything, therefore chocking the world economy. Then the British said, wait, we have something that you want to buy!

As a private consumer, likely the law of your place of residency applies and they may be obligated to honour all kinds of cancellations, e.g. in California. https://www.cnet.com/news/companies-must-let-customers-cance...

Depending on the law if your jurisdiction, an email may be enough. Then cancel any future charges on your CC.

IANAL. IANYL.

Well, most people, including me I must admit, are using excel when they actually should use a database.

I worked in clinical research with the FDA and complex word documents. I am not a programmer, but lordy lord, how often did I wish we would use something like git.

Maybe the kiddies here in their parents basements were to stupid to realize that Stackit ist run by:

STACKIT is the Schwarz Group's digital umbrella brand for IT services. Behind STACKIT stands the Schwarz IT KG as the group's central IT service provider, including the retail divisions Lidl and Kaufland. In addition to 20,000 servers with more than 22.5 PB storage, we operate 1.4 million network ports and one of the world's largest SAP retail systems. Benefit of our capacity and speed and realize the opportunities of your digital future!

Schwarz Group is the Owner of Lidl.

Lessons learned:

1. The Lidl AWS service won't run under the Lidl brand

2. The average Ycombinator user is probably more stupid than you would expect.

nothing beats recoll

1. Xournal to annotate PDFs (aka sign contracts without printing them and scanning them back).

Will check it out. For PDFs I mostly use Master PDF Editor

2. LibreOffice of course for most document related work

For me LibreOffice is a bad nightmare. I use the commercial Softmaker.

6. pdfsandwich and Tesseract OCR for OCR/turning PDFs into searchable files

Good luck with that. My results with Tesseract were always abysmal. I use ABBYY Finereader with wine. I would pay for a native Linux version. They have a Linux command line tool that has a biblical price tag.

12. Inkscape for messing around with vector graphics

Inkscape is good. I wish they would still develop Xara XL

What I am missing in your List:

Recoll. Find Stuff on your computer. One of my most important tools.

Here you see an animation of a falling whale... https://giphy.com/gifs/fat-anS1ZNfpzXSjm

Blogs are not dead, neither is RSS.

You find interesting blogs by chance or via blogroll of blogs you like.

What really has changed are stock related news. Recently I went back into stock trading and was shocked. Basically 90% of the stock related news on google seems to be AI/ML created bullshit with zero value.

Link or it didn't happen

This may work and may be much cheaper than the overpriced Amazon AWS, since Germany does not pay her people well. Most salaries are are a fraction of US salaries. This is the main reason for the exorbitant and quite bad trade surplus of Germany, who exports both, goods AND capital.

Lidl has not quite a big reputation for IT: https://www.consultancy.uk/news/18243/lidl-cancels-sap-intro...

My experience with Ryanair ist pretty good. If (big if) you know what to expect. I had terrible experiences with Wizz and United and avoid them like the plague.

Ryanair is cheap. Tickets can be 9.99, 12.99 Euros. (One Way). I have often speculatively bought these tickets for a trip that might or might not occur and then let them expire. Obviously this is part of their business strategy.

But Ryanair is great.

By the way, Kiwi.com also searches flights with Ryanair connecting flights (AKA Flight hacks). They once offered me a 50 Euros trip from Duesseldorf to Malta with 5 tickets, including going to Bucharest, Berlin etc. I would have been on the road/in the air for two days.

Well, what else to do with your money?

It is called asset price inflation. Most assets will devalue at some point but, in the broader range, won't go to zero.

This is not clear for FIAT money.

Has a Nash Equilibrium for the first n-1 iterations if I remember correctly.

"Thought exists without language, does it not?" This is a very interesting question.

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.” Wittgenstein

"How can dogs dream of sticks and walks and chasing squirrels?" Do Androids dream of electric sheep? :-) You may want to read the books mentioned here. I found it so impressive, I bought a first issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

"Only the one who gives himself up is lost" Hans-Ulrich Rudel

"Fun" fact: This guy was a convinced Nazi who basically destroyed two Russian tank divisions alone. I told this quote to an African American friend when he was struggling badly and had to go abroad for a job and it has inspired him ever since. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Ulrich_Rudel

Beowulf has a similar quote: "fate often enough will spare a man if his courage holds"

Yeah, rent caps worked out in Lisbon extremely well. Not.

Try to buy

Can you elaborate? What and why did the guest destroy something?

AirBnB is a great business. I actually met the founders when they were just starting, handling out Obama 'O's as marketing gifts. Maybe should have asked them to join their company.

This being said. Their business and bypassing of local laws has made many housing markets in touristic city insanely expensive. I know, some win, some lose but still, it is a major concern.

Sorry to break the news for you, but German salaries are 50% of US salaries (US salaries may vary by location). My first offer on the cost as my first job was 160k USD. In Germany they were backing out in Munich if I asked for 60k EUR.

"Cost of living in Munich (one of Germany's most expensive cities) vs. SF.[1] And then Berlin (one of Germany's cheapest cities) vs. SF.[2]" I think these numbers are outdated. Especially Berlins rental and real estate costs are catching up quickly.

Because of some reasons I use evolution and thunderbird. The search function in Evolution is abysmal.

May try out InScribe

"Thanks for that anecdote. I was planning on using the lockdown home office situation to finally buy some domain and set up my own email server."

Don't do this. Buy an email with a domain that offers email. e.g. gandi.net or infomaniak.com They do have phone numbers if things go wrong. Hosting your email is easy. Having you emails delivered and not blocked is an art.

"With thousands of brainless bodies kept alive on life support," It is questionable, if you can do this without a brain.

Have you seen Elysium? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)

I don't understand the anger.

1. Booking has the best hotel prices. Much better then, lets say google

2. They always honoured their free cancellation policy when I used it.

3. With Corona they also accepted a cancellation beyond cancellation date

Which site is better than Booking?

Why the downvote? Have you used this airline? Aeroflot, Turkish and Ethiopian are in an excellent geostrategic position for the future.

I hold SU and TK gold elite, both just emailed me: Due to the crisis the both extend my gold elite status for 12 months/6 months without any need to accumulate miles to reach status.

Well, a country with a decent population size and a decent economy has to rely on air transport. Just now many countries flew out their citizens for example.

As far as I know, Lufthansa, like some other airlines, have a government owned golden share. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_share

In fact, if I remember right, an EU based airline is not even allowed to be owned by more than 50% of non EU share holders.

It may make more sense, to bey an apartment, rent it out and live in another place that your rent.

Many major national carriers have national importance. So, no, they won't go bankrupt. Be it Lufthansa, Air France, Air China, or whatever.

Airlines like Ryanair and Wizz air might be different.

Nah. Aeroflot, Turkish, Ethiopian and Delta have pretty good customer service.