On the other hand, seeing this symbol more and more on other random videos outside that bubble does give a very nice sense of “I am not alone”. It does more for users to find eachother than it does damage to big corpos.

But choice of the symbol itself is questionable… Why use a big tech symbol to protest big tech? -__- And not just any big tech, but super evil 90s monopolistic giant Microsoft

There’s a nice cartoon in this thread we’re clippy is if he could have, he would have harvest all your data.

Good news: Firefox on Android supports extensions, including uBlockOrigin

Though Im in the same camp, much prefer desktop over mobile for big purchases, banking, or anything that feels important

No and kinda yes. Duckduckgo has its own webcrawler, but also adds in results from other sources including Bing, Yahoo and others.

Not Op, but I was in a very similar situation (decent pay, old house, old car, not many fancy purchases). While many people here will borrow a lot and pay the minimum on their mortgage, I paid down my mortgage completely. (and otherwise spent money on travel).

Ironically, this is bad financial advice. The last 15-20 years interest have been very low, and house prices have soared. It would make much more financial sense to borrow more and buy a nicer house. But I value the freedom I get from not having a mortgage. And I never borrowed to buy a car, as cars depreciate like rocks

Checks out. But also Military Industrial Complex.

There is one potential (small) hurdle you should be aware off: Secure Boot.

Basically some laptops came with Secure Boot locked to only allow booting Windows. These days Linux distros should still be able to boot even if the laptop was windows-only back then (thanks to the so-called shim bootloader). If you get an error about secure boot, just go in to BIOS/UEFI menu and disable secure boot for now (after installing Linux you can google the steps to enroll a key to re-enable Secure Boot).

Beyond that, just flash a USB stick with Linux Mint, boot the laptop, smash the keyboard to find the button for BIOS menu or Boot Device selection, then follow the installer. Installing Linux should take less than an hour. Way less if your computer is fast.

… Surreal numbers?!?

Sudden culture shock from a Norwegian:

Still open is the transition of heat and cars to electricity…

Almost all electricity used by Norwegian homes goes towards heating (including cooking and hot water), and charging cars. So counting heating separate from electricity suddenly makes the electric transition sound less impressive. (And the transition away from nuclear more baffling). It’s still impressive to see Germany really follow through on renewables though. 60% renewable electricity is still a lot

Is there a plan to transition away from burning fossil fuels for heating?