Still, why should be Telegram paying for this, when they offer the service for free?

Exactly. I know of many public grants that you can’t get if you aren’t doing everything in the EU, and so many companies in the EU would cease to exist without these handouts.

It’s not something that the business owners want to do, but they are being forced to from above.

If they were in the same tribe they wouldn’t be excluded. Unless you move the goalposts of what the tribe is.

The more we solve economic inequality the less children people have since they have more interesting things to do with their lives.

Used them both for years.

Outlook eats Gmail for breakfast. The way shared accounts, lists, and work assignments are done in Outlook require their backend (share point inheritance), and google drive is pretty good even for some small files, but when all is considered O365 wins.

Then if you are in Europe, you should not use any of those and other very good solutions are currently growing super fast.

Practically all the ills we suffer currently are depressing manifestations of an aging society.

That, and the lack of real issues to solve.

Without thinking too hard I can name a few?

The rise of authoritarianism? Inequality? Revival of geopolitical "realism"? Decrease in empathy and holistic thinking? Increasing willingness of the general population to engage in political adventurism? Accelerating resource consumption (and decelerating resource stocks).

And if you consider none of those "real" problems, I know some people seem to have forgotten about it, but what about climate change? Given the half-life of CO2 and methane, that's a problem as "real" as they get.

There's also a worrying trend of education getting less effective across the first world.

If only we were all privileged enough to believe that the problems in the world today weren't real.

There are real problems and they are huge but the solutions to them are very unpopular. So that's why political parties resort to this kind of distraction politics. Blaming immigrants, LGBT people etc. Or simply causing other problems by bombing random countries for no reason.

Because nobody wants to limit the big corporations polluting the world and exploiting the population, tackle climate change with more than some hollow measures. Because people will be annoyed when it affects them and that means political suicide.

So they manufacture other problems, ones they can control and point the blame to groups that have little voting power.

I was talking about the first world. And yes, I think most if not all of the problems in the first world are gratuitously self-inflicted.

Even if that were true (it isn't) you would want to consider the systemic issues that background self-sabotage.

Where is the cushy insulated bubble you're living? Can I join?

I predict in the future many will blame the poor overall quality of software and the poor uptime of services on AI, as if things weren’t terrible before AI.

That's already happening in the gaming world. Gamers blame any bug, glitch or upstream issue on AI. In WoW, the most recent patch 12.0.5 had a ton of bugs and users on the forums and other fan sites relentlessly blame Blizzard and "microslop" for using AI to "do their jobs" now.

(And maybe AI was to blame in WoW's case, but the speculation is baseless.)

He didn’t mention race anywhere in his comment. Unless you think Californians or Sicilians are a different race, which is an, uh… interesting theory.

I mean, after having spent some time in both LA and Sicily, I can see some merits on the idea /s.

Unfortunately no, outside of the clubbing and the winemaking scene there are way too many differences. Trying to sell a coffee in Palermo for $5 would be cause for public commotion, for a start.

I doubt Canonical cares much about the desktop segment, at least the segment that doesn't pay. They seem to be focusing on servers. Or at least that's what it seems to me.