If you assume the primary goal is self enrichment and the rest is just side effects and distractions, things immediately start making more sense.

Yes, but then we have the blanket tarriffs. Which it seems even the most diehard are coming around to say was really, really stupid. Who's genuinely making a profit off this decision?

That definitely tells me there's ego at play here more than anything else. Even money.

That's the unheard of part of this year. Even the most blatantly corrupt politicians know not to actively throw money into a furnace.

They shorted the market and trump told people before he announced it. He even bragged about it: this guy made millions the last few days

That may also just be Firefox's way of telling you it has updated and needs to be restarted.

From what I've read it was the company's own board that asked for the ceo (Wing) to be removed.

Ah, so we will fight child porn by detecting family pics of children in the shower (or w/e) and sending them off to a "trusted" 3rd party who will no doubt leak them at some point. Also, if I were a pedophile I know where I'd send my resume...

Tfa mentions immigrant deportation as a reason exactly zero times.

I used ublock origin remove it from the page.

The least corrupt countries per the corruption perceptions index also (mostly) have strong unions.

Danmark and Finland topping the list have 70% membership.

US-Finland expat here, and yes, I quite like my union. But I especially like my unemployment fund: 100 euros a year gets me 50% of my pre-tax salary for a year if I lose or leave my job.

Unemployment insurance plans seem underrated in general by FTEs, both in the US and elsewhere. Without it, your ability to exercise both halves of "voice or exit" in the corporate world are severely curtailed. Like life insurance, it's relatively hard to game as a policy - it's usually pretty clear when you lose your salaried job, just like it's usually pretty clear when you die. I see few downsides, especially if you live cheap enough to pay all of your bills on that X% of your income anyway.

$100 euros a year does not get you 50% of your pre-tax salary for a year. That 100 might be what you paid, but that is not anywhere close to what that costs. Do not confuse the cost of something with the price you pay. At 100 per year they should just make it free. I'm not sure what the real cost of unemployment is per year (there are people who's job it is to figure this out - they have more data than me), but it is thousands per year.

Not totally sure what argument you're making here. Say you're a professional making $100k per year, with a 1% chance per year of losing your job. A 50% unemployment insurance policy like I described in a private market should cost you a little over $500/yr. That still seems like a good deal to me, and probably to most people.

Your chance of losing your job is a lot more than 1%.

And life insurance is more expensive when you're 85 compared to 25. Do you understand how insurance works?

Considering having children is beneficial to society and the economy (e.g. it's advantageous for employers since they still want to be able to hire people in n years and surely they'd like there to still be customers) one could argue that the programmer with five kids should get some "compensation" for this service, and as we know some countries do either directly or via employers.

The Dutch debit cards are Maestro (Mastercard) or V Pay (Visa) cards which are a pretty standard systems. There is no point in embossing because transactions need to be authorized immediately by the issuing bank for obvious reasons.

They are pretty standard but not accepted where credit cards normally are. In particular Maestro, I'm not sure about V Pay as I've never had it.

But when I lived in the Netherlands I had to get a credit card to do stuff like book flights or order on foreign sites.

They are pretty non-standard as they don't display a number that can be used where credit card numbers are normally accepted (they do have such a number internally to work with the Maestro/V-Pay system).

I recall vesa was only used for graphics cards. There was ISA and extended ISA for the rest (like modems and sound cards).

VESA Local Bus supplemented ISA. It did mostly see use as a graphics card expansion slot, but you could get various I/O cards. I saw a couple of boards in my lifetime that had those slots, thankfully didn't need to support them.