how is Belgium to live in and what would it look like to live there right now?

It’s literally between France, Germany and the Netherlands, I mean geographically yes but roughly culturally too. Arguably Brussels is a mix of all that and other cities again match where they are.

So… it’s a Western European country with good quality of life despite having one of the very highest taxes rate. You don’t have to be a socialist to be here but if you want to become a rich entrepreneur it’s going to be challenging.

Source : immigrated there from France ~10 years ago.

That’s fine, you’re missing the point as I clearly don’t manage to explain it clearly enough for you so please document yourself anywhere else you want. I gave you few sources but feel free to search elsewhere. Take care.

“Forbes magazine ranked him as the world’s wealthiest person for 18 out of 24 years between 1995 and 2017, including 13 years consecutively from 1995 to 2007. He became the first centibillionaire in 1999, when his net worth briefly surpassed $100 billion. According to Forbes, as of May 2025, his net worth stood at US$113 billion, making him the thirteenth-richest individual in the world.”

Wake up. Not Robin Hood.

Isn’t it supposed to be Tux?

In your analogy that’d still be Robin Hood coming from a very rich family, accumulating more wealth that anybody he knows around him, fighting with his best friends to keep more, getting indicted by the most powerful government on Earth because he abused his power… then giving only a very small fraction of his wealth to some starving children while still sitting in his mansions, accumulating still more money without working.

That’s not the Robin Hood of my childhood to say the least. To me that’s clearly not a net positive.

I do recommend listening to the episode of Behind the Bastards to get a clearer view of the entire process, not “just” imagining a “net positive” outcome regardless of the path that lead to it.

Edit : sorry but while re-reading what I wrote, somehow confabulating the richest man on Earth for years to Robin Hood shows how excellent his PR work was. Like… what the fuck?!

Edit2: oh yeah and Robin Hood would fight for Big Pharma during a worldwide pandemic, … no, absolutely NOT Robin Hood.

The fuck did I just watch…

Well, thanks I guess, made me chuckle. Enough random Internet videos for me today! (he says confidently yet we all know he’ll be back here 5min after closing his tab)

Cory Doctorow’s Craphound

Oh, I didn’t know he had a podcast! Added, thanks

Bonus : as others also highlighted Gates isn’t sadly just about software, he’s also, unfortunately, about intellectual property more broadly (because that is how he made his fortune) in health business (not health care) cf e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bill-gates-vaccine-colonialism/

I’m not a doctor but my understanding of the topic is that it’s pretty clear : any soda is bad.

Sure, a Coke a week, in a cocktail or otherwise, does not matter much but AFAIK people who buy entire packs (as in the photo) drink sodas at every meal and that’s unhealthy over long term, no matter what brand or type of soda it is.

So assuming that’s a well known medical fact and people still do it, then one can say they do NOT care for their health, no?

Yes, yes sir, I’ve found the terrorist, right there! /s

up there with the humane pin.

Funny, or sad, how quickly we collective manage to forget bad grifts.

How about giving up

Just imagine a World where ALL governments, ALL schools of all countries did not have to pay a fee to the then world richest man.

Imagine if a fraction of those governments invested instead on infrastructure, both physical (imagine literal bridges going to schools) and software (as some are doing now) or better paid teachers. Imagine that some of that money would be invested in Linux, gcompris, etc.

That’s the genuine cost of Gates wealth.

Think I’m a “communist” for thinking that? Well I guess then the American DoJ is on that boat too because the 2001 antitrust law case was a landmark, not a matter of my opinion.

So… yes, he’s a billionaire who did donate a lot of money, but how did he get that money in the first place? It wasn’t his to donate to.

At least you are an adult so you have the tools, cognitive and cultural, helping you see the problem. Imagine a very young kid, say 5 years old, watching exciting video content. They do not yet possess such ways to protect themselves from for-profit manipulation.

Just few days ago I finished the IMHO excellent “Buy The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence” by Henry A Giroux and Grace Pollock so you can already understand where I’m going with this.

Yes, advertisers are terrible, they make money by manipulating our thoughts, probing our deepest desire, toying with our emotions in order to sell us whatever is made by whomever pay them the most. But… you and I are fully formed human beings in the sense that we are adults. We spend years navigating through the world, getting scamming, learning how to spot lies and marketing pitches. The problem is, as showcased by Disney in that example (a very important example!), the process is not random. It is a very thoughtful and strategical one, namely how to transform a human being to a consumer from the youngest age.

Anyway I won’t dig into the obvious but the book ends with a couple of practical links e.g. commercial free childhood (what a name, how can how even imagine that would be needed?) which since then became https://fairplayforkids.org/

If you prefer a video on the topic the 2001 yes still relevant 2001 documentary (52 min) “Mickey Mouse Monopoly - Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power” https://films.mediaed.org/Film/Mickey_Mouse_Monopoly/f56fd530-8724-460b-b2bc-6eba9868f0e7

I personally pulled that thread also thanks to the more recent 2016 article “Teaching Disney Critically in the Age of Perpetual Consumption” https://www.jstor.org/stable/45157190 but, again, the point is that it’s systemic.

Congrats, you missed the whole point about Amazon.

As others already replied, the business model of Amazon (and any marketplace that sells its own products within it while being part of an oligopoly) is precisely to prevent unbiased comparison. Amazon gets data on all the products being sold on its website, its warehouses occupancy … then make Amazon Basics and replace them. They did that before also with diapers among many other examples e.g. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/emails-detail-amazons-plan-to-crush-a-startup-rival-with-price-cuts/ but they also do the same with software products, e.g. AWS.

So no, clearly Amazon is not about having fair comparisons and a shopping cart. Amazon is about being the ONLY shopping cart one can have fill it with Amazon products.

PS: to clarify also something very obvious but just in case it’s not so, Amazon by the simple fact of controlling the order of search results control what customers can, or can not, see and thus compare and in fine buy. Even if it did not sell it’s own products (which again, it does) it would still be able to manipulate what customers buy. That is, again, the opposite of an unbiased product comparison service.

Coke zero is worse for your health.

nobody who drinks Coke care for their health.

Same vibe https://lemmy.world/post/29256164/16922503 and https://lemmy.world/post/29256164/16922130

Not convinced the number matter as much if settings are indexed and thus searchable, which they probably are now otherwise the “AI” wouldn’t be able to access them. So… just more convolutions for the end user?

unaffected by EMP were everywhere.

They called them books.

Out of curiosity what the range and/or power for an EMP pulse to brick my microSD with Zim files on it?

Wondering what’s the actual risk of such a thing happening, what kind of scenarii would this require?

Still using X11 as I’m on Debian stable but https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Wayland might help.