There are plenty of asset classes which are quite safe and return >5%. Saving money in a "savings" account was never a good idea (outside of an emergency fund).
This nicely encapsulates why our society sucks. Helping people you can't see doesn't provide the self-congratulation dopamine hit, thus people don't do it.
A lot of that changed with my peer group either due to caring about managing from a phone or caring about power/noise. The latter are especially not things real enterprise gear tends to optimize for.
You can absolutely manage ubiquiti local. Even with a ridiculously named local appliance called a cloud key. Their cameras are unfortunately another story.
What about your experience on the Internet leads you to believe a company would value ads at $0?
Can you point to another Amazon produced product where they achieve segmentation by making the same product and then disable features on the cheap one?
"If you are located in the European Economic Area (“EEA”) or Switzerland, with respect to transfers to the U.S. of certain personal information collected in connection with your use of Samsung Smart TVs, Samsung Electronics America, Inc. and its subsidiary Samsung Research America, Inc. are certified under the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield frameworks developed by the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the European Commission and Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, respectively, regarding the transfer of certain personal information from the EEA and Switzerland to the U.S."
When I read that I assumed that they want to observe the effect this guarantee has on pricing by changing people's booking behavior. Doing a time-limited study seems like a good way to do that.
It's unclear to me what that has to do with my point; the existence of high quality patreon-backed podcasts doesn't mean anything about the supply of quality advertising-supported podcasts. You should look into it, there are a lot of them.
You need a computer to run LibreOffice. So no, in many cases, they can't afford it.
Vimeo requires the person creating the content to pay, yes? So if I want to do a series of videos on Kibana, or Active Directory, or astrophysics, I need to pay Vimeo in addition to the effort of creating my content.
Basically no one outside a philosophy lecture has ever suggested that the current state of anything is the only possible one, that's a meaningless strawman. Please avoid the condescending suggestion that others can't imagine things being different, it's as patronizing as it is pointless.
I think that the democratizing effect of services that make money through advertising is vastly underestimated. There are a lot of people on the internet who can't afford to pay for Microsoft Office, or a set of encyclopedias, or courses like those which can be found on YouTube or blogs.
It's all well and good to say that you hate ads because you can afford to pay to remove them. Many can't, and we should think very carefully before we remove services they need.
I guess it's a good thing mosques aren't minarets. I see this as a good compromise between "we want to allow others to practice their religion" and "we want to preserve our own cultural heritage". Not knowing the back story of why that line is in the Constitution, I hope it's there as this type of concrete example; practice your religion, build your mosque, but meet Switzerland halfway architecturally speaking.
Also, your metaphor is incorrect; this is banning bell towers not banning churches.
Could it be that those people think that more social programs would only be in their self-interest in the short term, and are taking a longer view (as appears to have just happened in Switzerland)?
Why is anyone who votes against short-term self-interest automatically uninformed?
Rent/buy is not a simple analysis, there is no one right answer. If you ever (for medium-large values of "ever") find yourself in a situation where there's one obvious right answer for all cases, you probably did something wrong.
Fortunately, at least for homes it's also a solved problem. Take your data to the below calculator, and get on with your life.