Spyke

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Judge Rejects Sale of Infowars to The Onion

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Shouldn’t that be a “oh well, sucks. but a sale is a sale” problem?

"A sale is a sale" works fine when both sides to the transaction are well-informed and acting for themselves. When you are selling assets for someone else's benefit, you generally have extra obligations to them, because otherwise you don't really have an incentive to achieve a good price. So courts do generally have some oversight over sale of the assets of a bankrupt estate, to ensure that the trustee is not short-changing creditors just to get the job done quickly.

A complicating factor here is that the Sandy Hook families (who as far as I know are the large majority of the creditors) also supported the sale.

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Europeans of Lemmy, is American beer really that bad?

European here. Germans just think their beer is the best in the world and if you're not doing it like them, you're not doing it right.

Don't get me wrong, the standards Germans apply to their beer production means that it's rare to get a terrible beer there, but IMO it's also not that innovative and the range of styles is fairly limited. There is a ton of choice in the US both in terms of breweries and styles. The variation means you get more duds but also more excellent beers.

linux

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Thunderbird 115 - odd lack of packaged options beginning to raise eyebrows?

I don't think a week is that long to wait for an open source project like this. I suspect as soon as they released 115 they got a deluge of bug reports that are probably keeping them occupied.

Granted, I'm not personally affected because I use Arch btw. But on a serious note, it makes sense to me that "bleeding edge" distros where users expect the latest versions quickly would package Thunderbird for their repos, whereas those on more stability-focused distros would wait the couple of weeks for the Flatpak.

android

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Fairphone 5 review

Anyone know how well the Fairphone 5 compares against the Samsung Galaxy S10? I know the specs are pretty public but I don't follow this stuff that closely so find it difficult to draw comparisons between different chips etc.

My S10 is on its last legs so I think a bit about what I will buy to replace it. I really like the idea of the Fairphone but of course you pay a lot (relatively speaking) for the ethics. One of the worries is that the phone will become unusable in a few years anyway, either because parts are unavailable or because software has become too heavy. The other option I am leaving towards is a second hand Pixel.

meta

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lemm.ee Discord & new admins!

Not to be That Guy, but Discord is another corporate proprietary walled garden just like Twitter and Reddit and given recent experiences I think it should be avoided by the Fediverse community. See also this blog post (I am not affiliated with its author, I just think it expresses the point well).

There are several alternatives. If you want real-time chat, Matrix or IRC would work. If you just want to make announcements, an RSS feed or mailing list would do the trick.

Just my two cents. Thanks for your work in setting up and maintaining this instance!

Edit: Bonus see also

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What's their secret?

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It's possible there's a regional or generational gap there. If you're pushing 110 you probably haven't worked in 40 years. You could even argue that the ones literally working themselves to death are the very ones paying for the older generation's happy carefree lifestyle.

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What content do you miss on Lemmy?

A lot of country- or city-specific subreddits either aren't on here or are quite inactive. To be honest they were mostly cesspits on Reddit so maybe it's no bad thing but you occasionally found useful information there.

Other than that, there were a few subreddits that were good for recipe ideas, like /r/EatCheapAndHealthy. /r/ZeroWaste was good too, on occasion.

In general, non-tech related communities don't seem to have migrated over as much. Most of the subreddits I followed were related to technology in some way and now have pretty active communities on Lemmy.

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What's a good alternative to Gmail?

Proton and Tutanota are the most privacy-focused ones, offering zero-access encryption. The flipside is that they are a bit more expensive and less easy to use with third party email clients.

There are a number of alternatives like mailbox.org, Posteo and Fastmail which are cheaper, and less private than the above two but arguably still better for privacy than Gmail (in that their whole business model isn't built off capturing and monetising your data).

Personally I use mailbox.org and have no complaints. I use it with third party clients like Thunderbird for desktop and FairEmail for Android so can't speak to how good their web UI is.

I also strongly recommend getting your own domain name to use with your email. It means if you ever want to switch providers in future you won't need to change your email address.

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Why do most US lawsuits settle instead of going to trial?

Other people have covered the main reasons, which are time and expense. I will just add:

  • Lawsuits are public, and a lot of dirty laundry can get aired. They have the potential to be embarrassing for both sides.

  • They are also stressful, particularly if you are cross-examined which must be an awful experience.

  • Finally, they are risky: even if you think you have a very solid case, there is always a significant chance that the judge will rule against you on the day.

Basically litigation is a bad experience, whether you are plaintiff or defendant, corporate or individual, right or wrong. So both parties have a strong incentive to settle.

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The one thing missing from the fediverse (or why Facebook is not going anywhere anytime soon).

I suspect the large majority of people who use the Fediverse don't want to be publicly trackable in this way. It would be fine for me if the people who did stayed on Facebook. To me, it's not a goal that 100% (or any %) of Facebook users move to the Fediverse. What is important is just that the Fediverse has a critical mass of activity that it doesn't completely die.

Also, maybe it's just me (I'd be interested to hear what others think) but I think trying to track down old school or college friends is really something people only want to do for a few years. By the time I hit my mid 20s I didn't really care anymore. There are people from school I sometimes think about and wonder where they are now, but ultimately, if I never tracked them down and they never tracked me down in the years since, the connection was clearly not that important.