US applicant: "How many sick days do I get?"
German HR department: "I'm sorry what do you mean?"
US applicant: "How many days may I call in sick per year?"
German HR department: "Er... that depends on how often you get sick?!"
US applicant: "Wat."

Global anti-trust efforts are simply not very strong and never have been. They make for boring political platforms and are constantly under attack by corporate actors.

Ideally no business should ever be allowed to grow to the point of being able to exert political influence at all let alone rival the power of small nations, but here we are.

Any rational enterprise will employ all and any anti-competitive practices that it can come up with - if it can get away with them. And the more influence the business exerts, the more it can get away with.

Help me out here, I'm having a senior moment. What on earth is the context? Holding what with their thighs? There's some kind of joke or backstory or implied scenario here that's going completely over my head.

A former colleague once complained to me that they could never find a parking spot for their humongous SUV in Berlin and that the city should be more accommodating in that regard. They weren't even a permanent resident or a commuter but a foreign diplomat.
To my discredit I wasn't assertive enough back then to calmly explain public transportation to them, I was just dumbfounded.

Jedes Jahr feilschen Bund und Länder über die Zukunft des Deutschlandtickets. Stattdessen sollten der Preis sowie die Zuschüsse der Politik mit der Inflation steigen. Das wäre einfach und fair.

Einfach und fair wäre, alle Bundesbürger einen jährlichen einkommensabhängigen ÖPNV-Beitrag zahlen zu lassen und dann sämtliche öffentlichen Verkehrsmittel als Mobilitäts-Grundversorgung allen Bundesbürgern kostenlos zur Verfügung zu stellen...

There is no "dilemma" here. There is no solution or compromise to be found here. Kernel level anti-cheat systems are simply not needed. While the games the tout them figure that out I'll simply play all the other ones that already have figured it out.

What’s that got to do with anything? What does account age have to do with anything or are you just unnecessarily flexing to make yourself feel special?

That’s like some 30 year old going up to a 13 year old and flexing because of where they are in life. It’s just…pointless.

Look at it this way: You just entered a clubhouse. Nobody there knows you. You have not yet put any time or work into maintaining the club or into establishing your credentials and social status among the members. After entering, you immediately make a controversial (and arguably badly-researched) statement.

Would you not expect to be much less likely to get away with a stunt like this than a long-established club member?

Driving a car and doing it regularly is the most dangerous task most anyone living in any number of western societies with service-based economies will ever undertake. There is nothing wrong with treating it accordingly - with awe, care and a healthy portion of respect and fear.
But whether the decision not to do it is a good one depends on your life circumstances. Do you live or plan on living in a big European city? Yeah, you don't need a car in your life, good riddance. Do you live in a North American suburb or rural area? Er... not using a car is probably not an option unless you relocate.

I had a pretty bad car accident due to failing to yield the right of way (I struggle with multitasking)

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something here. It should go without saying that when one is driving, one's attention should ideally be focused on nothing else and multitasking therefore shouldn't be a factor.

I used to have a (high-ranking and well-educated) foreign colleague who used to think that the "Main" indeed signified that this was the bigger and more significant of multiple Frankfurts.
I honestly can't blame him, it was a deceptivley plausible misconception.

when in doubt, assume it’s a sex thing. Seems to work with basically all of these “I LIED, instead of [x] we do [y]”.

Oh, I have no doubt in my mind that it's a sex thing, but I'm clearly lacking either the imagination, experience or cultural background to solve for [x]. It seems awfully specific, that's why I'm asking

I often reply under Japanese posts, and I always assume users will use a translator as I do, but maybe in the context of a Japanese this may look rude?

Can't speak for others (obviously, as this is about individual etiquette perceptions) but I would consider it to be polite to only enter conversations with unknown parties in languages that the parties have shown to be capable of speaking and understanding.
Using a new language entering a conversation would therefore signal either familiarity ("I know they understand me") or rudeness ("I don't care if they understand me") to me, I suppose.

This is such a better use of their time and dollars versus improving their service to make it more attractive to customers.

Making their service more attractive to customers is precicesly what they're trying to do.

It's just that an advertising agency's customers are not the folk who watch, read or hear the ads, it's the folk who pay for the ads.

sei “der sichere Weg in den Bürgerkrieg”

Nicht das Satzende, was ich erwartet hätte.

In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

Why even bother asking industry outlets about this? Clearly they will just keep on trying to paint the picture that they're people with rights and desires and not just replaceable entities serving at the behest of consumers, i.e. actual people.

Unfortunately, even if the Stop Killing Games movement eventually succeeds in creating some sort of policy changes, they will only apply in the EU (and potentially the UK, as well), so publishers and developers may still be able to permanently shut down games in other parts of the world.

Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. The whole world automatically benefits from regional legislation affecting global actors like international publishers. Just like the whole world benefitted from Europe enforcing GDPR compliance: Every reddit and Facebook user, not just Europeans, being able to download a data dump of their site activities isn't something that came about randomly.

Kind of offtopic: Can we call something offline if you need a server to run it?

Sure, you could run it on your own PC and that’s it, but I don’t think that method fit well with this community

Er... maybe I am misunderstanding your post but this community is literally built around hosting your own local infrastructure.

So, I’ve been having issues with voice chat on Discord and I’m looking for alternatives. In my search, I came across Mumble, here. Does anyone here have experience, or information regarding Mumble, or a better alternative to Discord with better latency? Is it relatively easy to set up? Is it safe? Any advice and help is greatly appreciated.

Been running a server for my friends for over a decade now. Can recommend. It's just one apt-get to set up, runs on a Pi Zero for a dozen people, has clients available for pretty much any platform and doesn't really require any maintenance. Latency will depend on the routing between you and your friends' ISPs, of course, but the whole purpose of the software itself was to provide a low-latency voicechat server for gaming.

But: That's it. You don't get anything else. It's a barebones voice chat server. You can set up rooms and have basic text-functionality, but you don't get any fancy user management, no full-fledged chatrooms, no persistence beyond the room setup and only limited backend options. Keep that in mind.

It seems like a bit of a stretch to frame two teenagers wishing to go island-hopping as part of their post-graduation world trip as "intending to work" 😜

Deportation appears to be about as appropriate here as sending the SWAT team after someone who dropped a candy wrapper.

I strongly disapprove of private trackers. I'm forced to take part in some only because the content isn't available anywhere else. And the private trackers generally forbid re-sharing their content on public trackers, which unnecessarily gatekeeps the content and perpetuates the problem.
If it doen't help to make everything accessible to everybody then it's not a valuable part of the sharing ecosystem.

10k? 100k? A million?
I am not talking about calculating with numbers, but rather the point where numbers stop being comprehensible, or “no longer mean anything”.
Try visualizing exactly 10000 apples in your mind.

You're quite optimistic. I recall from old Psych classes that visualization breaks down even before double digits, so the 5-9 range. Don't have any references at hand so I might be misremembering it, but now I'm curious too and will see if I can find anything in my notes.

Fedora: I have it on my PC and since I will be the first person to be asked, I thought it would be best if I know the distro well

I think that's the most important consideration here. It's your recommendation after all, so you have to be comfortable with it.