Your rent payments now, may be quite different in a few months.
If you rent an apartment in a desirable location, which is
far easier than owning a house in a desirable location, then
rent payments are huge.
And comparable or worse than owning a house in farther out.
Your luck with landlords can wary a lot, and your rent payments
may increase substantially with little notice.
The landlord may also sell the building with either different
management or repurpose it for something else and you
will have to find a different apartment.
You may also suddenly have unpleasant neighbors.
That is true with a house as well, but the distance
between you and them is closer in an apartment.
As a dog lover, If you wish to have a big dog your may not be allowed to.
If you want a yard to kids to play, you cant.
If you want chickens you cant. (I know many in Denver who do)
If you wish to install extra cooling /AC/heatpump you probably cant.
None of that negates your arguments fully, but the case is far
from as black and white as you make it.
The question I why did you edit photos?
What was goal?
Why were you doing it in the first place?
I guess the thing you have discovered shooting
analog is that each click is a finite resource
so you spend more time composing and being
aware of the scene before you take the photo.
Saving £20 is nice.
Having your 36 snapshots developed at a decent lab
will cost you more.
In you are paying them additionally for edits
as well you are on longer saving money.
You just pay someone else.
Or are you giving it to a company that runs it
through an automated usually digital these days
sometimes analog machine that develops them
automatically? Those machines usually do edits
as well. But highly automated ones.
(I am not sure they make them anymore)
Having my medium format film developed is
far from cheap.
Lightroom is far from the only editor out there
and it is not a great editor to start with.
Lightroom is a Frankenstein combination of
of a DAM and an editor.
You probably will want some form of DAM
to organize your photos regardless.
I have been awake too long so I am probably stupid.
Please have mercy.
I don't understand.
NASA says they goal of landing on the moon in 2028 is not realistic.
They are adding a launch in 2027 to do more testing.
Great.
It will be followed by one possibly two lunar landings in 2028.
Are the now 2028 landings primarily testing SpaceX integration?
The Artemis rockets are huge, and extremely expensive.
And the build time is considerable.
Now they are planning 3 rockets in two years,
each of which is not reusable?
Then they have to build those in parallel, which makes sense
but incorporating wha you learn in 2027, into rockets you have already
nearly finished seems an odd approach
iOS is one problem, but it goes for every other
device/server/desktop/appliance that you use.
You can take a lot of precautions, and mitigate
some risk, and ensure that operations can continue
even if something bad happens¹,
but you cant ever "be safe".
¹
""
There are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns;
that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know
""
(Often attributed to Donald Rumsfeld, though he did not originate the concept.)
The different between taxes (you -must- pay (unless X loopholes applies to you))
whereas tariffs are voluntary and even more so then sales tax.
You may chose not to buy any products or goods that requires you
to pay tariffs.
Which is the primarily goal to begin with.
Influence consumer behaviour.
I realize that for some products and goods there may not be a
an alternative choice of products or goods that do have tariffs.
In theory, over time, these will be increasingly replaced by
products and services that have the competitive advantage of
not having to tariffs applied to them.
Once tariffs are in place for a year or two it is possible
that, domestic producers have expand capacity, have created jobs
have caused supply chains shift and new production is based on
the tariff based price structure
This however takes time.
And to what extent it happens is not easy to predict.
Some may think that the next president will remove all tariffs
the moment he or she takes office, so it is a short term problem.
The problem with removing them all, is if the above has happened,
and removing them will destroy American jobs.
Those are exactly the groups that are meant to pay for the tariffs.
A factor in this that is not mentioned is that companies selling
goods to the US may have made an effort to lower prices,
altering production to lessen tariffs or in other way tried to
offset the extra amount US consumers have to pay.
The big problem EUs continuous big talk on digital sovereignty,
which is a good and vital concept, is that funding is ridiculously
lacking.
Terms used like;
“European hyperscale cloud”
“Sovereign infrastructure”
“Strategic autonomy”
“European data centers for critical workloads”
Which ended up in various efforts and projects
Digital Europe Programme,
Recovery and Resilience Facility,
IPCE
(I am not deeply familiar with EU projects)
I believe funding was around low hundreds
of millions (€) total
To build one hyperscaler region might cost around €10 billion.
The second problem is that systems that were suggested
out of it still relied on US software stack, US computers,
etc.
It is not like the EU member states could not fund it,
some estimates say aggregated EU and member states have
spent €350 billion in Ukraine.
That is not to say they should not do that,
nor to suggest you have to chose one or the other
but it is demonstration
that EU+Member states can fund massive efforts,
If deemed important enough.
and EU+Memberstates so far have not felt an urgency or will
to really invest in digital sovereignty.
> Syria was an absolute hell under Assad for dissidents,
And now its an absolute hell for everyone.
Is that really progress?
Humanitarian Crisis:
Over 60% of the population faces food insecurity.
Millions are internally displaced, often living in
overcrowded, inadequate, and unsafe, temporary shelters.
Economic Situation:
The economy is devastated, with skyrocketing
prices for basic goods, high unemployment,
and a massive depletion of household resources.
Infrastructure and Health:
Roughly half of all hospitals are non-functional.
Access to electricity, clean water,
and sanitation is severely limited.
Education and Safety:
Roughly 1 in 4 schools are damaged or destroyed,
affecting education access.
The security situation remains volatile,
with an elevated risk of violence and
armed conflict in various parts of the country.
As of late 2025, the situation remains dire, with
continued, significant, and long-term deterioration
in the daily lives of civilians.
I fully agree that this is disconcerting form a privacy standpoint,
and the danger it poses when Microsoft gets hacked.
As for it being user hostile.
I am pretty certain that thousands of users a year are delighted when something has gone wrong and they can recover their keys and data from the MS Cloud.
There should perhaps be a screen in a wizard,
Do you want your data encrypted?
y,n
If (yes)
Do you want to be able to recover your data if something bad happens?
(else it will be gone for ever, you can never ever access it again)
y/n
The west have had various forms for this since before the internet,
and certainly have huge efforts similar to what you list above,
but have in general been far more productive than bots from
the other side.
> First do it, then do it right, then do it better. Get the ugly prototype in front of users.
Great, give users something that messy, horrible and not fully functional.
Customer who spend big for production environments are exploited to "be
the outsourced QA"
And comparable or worse than owning a house in farther out.
Your luck with landlords can wary a lot, and your rent payments may increase substantially with little notice. The landlord may also sell the building with either different management or repurpose it for something else and you will have to find a different apartment.
You may also suddenly have unpleasant neighbors. That is true with a house as well, but the distance between you and them is closer in an apartment.
As a dog lover, If you wish to have a big dog your may not be allowed to. If you want a yard to kids to play, you cant. If you want chickens you cant. (I know many in Denver who do) If you wish to install extra cooling /AC/heatpump you probably cant.
None of that negates your arguments fully, but the case is far from as black and white as you make it.