I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Epic’s main selling point was it’s lower storefront fee (15% vs 30%, if I recall). It didn’t offer any other benefits for consumers and I think Epic realised rather quickly that the people who are actually supposed to be paying money for all of this are the buyers and not the sellers, and thus they’ve resorted to strategies like making games “exclusive” or trying to bribe players with free games.

When you make up your own religion you can set the rules to be whatever you want, including refusing to eat pumpkin pie

Student loans are collected by contracted third-party loan servicing organisations, not the Government.

If you don’t pay, the servicer can initiate legal proceedings against you on their own regardless of what’s happening within the Education Department.

Can someone explain this one to me?

From a formal logic perspective, your statement is true. But in real life, the more important distinction is not between “true” and “false”, but between “purposefully deceptive and ungenuine disinformation” versus “outspoken dissenting viewpoint”. And that is one that people are really bad at telling the difference between, especially if the viewpoint in particular is one that they hold very strongly.

!asklemmy@lemmy.world has over 70 times as many subscribers as the other two asklemmy communities combined.

I thought the Oregon Trail was a pretty standard part of US history curriculum.

I never presented this as a dichotomy. You know, people prefer things in a certain order, right? I prefer Flatpaks and native packages over snaps and I prefer snaps to building from source.

Nothing useful for me. Given the choice I will usually pick the flatpak.

Unpopular opinion: snap is not so bad and genuinely useful for many things

I would rather have a snap than building from source or use some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script

Did any distro give concrete reasons for why they have actively chosen not to package it, or perhaps they just haven’t given it much thought yet?

This is not what I would consider a “political reason”. A political reason would be something like refusing to package it because of what political party Howard supports.

There is plenty of software you’ll find in these repositories that aren’t under the GPL. CMake uses BSD, the Apache web server uses the eponymous Apache license, LibreOffice and Firefox use MPL, Godot and Bitcoin Core use the MIT license, and I’m sure there are plenty of other software licenses that I haven’t thought of yet.

What is Hygge?

Yes, they’re similar, but from what I’ve heard, most UK building societies are basically the same as or worse than banks in terms of fees, rates, and service quality. In the US, most credit unions will absolutely spank the big banks on at least two of those, if not all three.

Oops, I didn’t see that. My bad. Guess I made a fool of myself here.

This isn’t a question about the US. I’m asking what your country does better than others.

I will start. I’m in the United States.

Credit unions! Nearly half of all Americans are credit union members. They don’t seem to be popular in Europe and Asia. A credit union is a not-for-profit co-operative financial institution that essentially provides all the same services as a bank, except it’s run as a democratic institution with directors elected by the customers instead of as a profit maximisation machine for shareholders.

It’s not really like they were evil about it though. Google attracted customers through its huge (at the time) 1 GB email storage space, which at the time, was unbelievably generous and also impressive in that it was offered for free. Outlook (Hotmail at the time) also drew in customers by offering the service for free, anywhere in the world, without needing to sign up for Internet service. Remember, at the time, e-mail was a service that was bundled with your Internet service provider.

Into the mid-2000s and 2010s, the way that Gmail and Outlook kept customers was through bundle deals for enterprise customers and improvements to their webmail offerings. Gmail had (and arguably, still has) one of the best webmail clients available anywhere. Outlook was not far behind, and it was also usually bundled with enterprise Microsoft Office subscriptions, so most companies just decided, “eh, why not”. The price (free) and simplicity is difficult to beat. It was at that point that Microsoft Outlook (the mail client, not the e-mail service) was the “gold standard” for desktop mail clients, at least according to middle-aged office workers who barely knew anything about e-mail to begin with. Today, the G-Suite, as it is called, is one of the most popular enterprise software suites, perhaps second only to Microsoft Office. Most people learned how to use e-mail and the Internet in the 2000s and 2010s through school or work.

You have to compare the offerings of Google and Microsoft with their competitors. AOL mail was popular but the Internet service provided by the same company was not. When people quit AOL Internet service, many switched e-mail providers as well, thinking that if they did not maintain their AOL subscription, they would lose access to their mailbox as well.

Google and Microsoft didn’t “kill” the decentralised e-mail of yesteryear. They beat it fair and square by offering a superior product. If you’re trying to pick an e-mail service today, Gmail and Outlook are still by far the best options in terms of ease of use, free storage, and the quality of their webmail clients. I would even go so far as to say that the Gmail web client was so good that it single-handedly killed the desktop mail client for casual users. I think that today, there are really only three legitimate players left if you’re a rational consumer who is self-interested in picking the best e-mail service for yourself: Proton Mail if you care a lot about privacy, and Gmail or Outlook if you don’t.

Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate. Dissolving it in water will increase its pH. I’m not sure if that works for killing bacteria.

Pretty sure humans are not the most co-operative animals alive.

Bees and ants exist, you know