I think you can find a bunch of clothes on the online retailer Zalando. They also have a good return policy and sometimes bigger sizes on female clothes (if you need that). You can give that a try if you wish to try them in the comfort of your home.

Though, I’m not sure if they have good coverage outside central and western Europe.

On PC: Linux, LibreOffice, LibreWolf, BetterBird, Lemmy, Invidious, Le Chat + Ollama (w/ Open WebUI), Proton stack, moved to Helix for development rather than VS Code.

On phone: EMUI (yes, I’m changing my phone soon 😂), F-Droid + Aurora, IronFox, SimpleX + Signal, Loops, Pixelix, Organic Maps and HERE WeGo (for local transport), pipepipe, DeepL.

Planning on getting the upcoming Fairphone 6, if the rumours are right, and it comes out in the summer. I’m also considering the Shiftphone 8.1, but I haven’t heard much about it before this year. I previously wanted to get a Pixel and put GrapheneOS on it, but I’d rather not have my money go to Google. Although, I currently rely on Google Wallet to pay without a card, but I might just go back to carrying my wallet with me rather than send more data to Google about my purchases.

Oh, I don’t know how I forgot about this. I have already signed it last year haha. Thanks for reminding me!

Well, what I’m thinking about is not too far from education. I am suggesting that we have independent fact-checkers, or at least tools that show all the angles of a certain issue (e.g., something like Ground News, but not owned by a for-profit organisation), paid by tax money. This should be incorporated in something like an API that Fediverse instances could tap into. Again, not governments deciding who is right or who is wrong, but citizen-backed initiatives that work for the people. There should be open source plugins that could be used by fedi instances to relay the fact-checking or other relevant information.

I am categorizing this as governmental regulation because the tax money is allocated by the government specifically for content “moderation”. However, this doesn’t mean that content should be removed from social media just because it talks about a topic (unless it is illegal), but people should at least have additional information available for free that they could research further. And no, I don’t think the community notes employed by Meta and Twitter are enough, as we’ve seen how that went for the Americans in the last election.

Mate, I am not advocating here for the EU to break E2EE, nor support linking of your social media profile to a citizen number that can be used against you. Similarly, I do not wish for the EU to start generating its own propaganda machine to replace the US one.

I am merely stating that we should invest more in EU open source, promote more fact checking and open algorithms (or even banning them) for social media. What is happening with Twitter, Facebook and TikTok is not ok. We do not need social media to profile us and push content that a state or rich person deems necessary for their benefit. Aren’t you on Lemmy specifically because of that?

Thank you for the information. I’ll keep that in mind for the future! To be honest, I intended to find a petition on this topic and share that to incentivize some mobilization, but I could not find anything. This was the most recent article I could find on the topic, given my limited time to research. If you have a suggestion on an article, I would love to change it to that!

It’s a bit short-sighted to say that Trump is the one calling in shots here, specifically to weaken the US. It is pretty clear that he is following the plan put forward by the Heritage Foundation word by word. If I understood correctly, the idea is to make the American economy more resilient at the expense of all of its (poor) citizens. Once that is done, they can then leverage their safe zone to further influence policies in other countries. For example, get the EU to lower regulations, so American companies can extract more wealth.

Here is a quote from the actual “Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership” PDF:

Needed reforms

[…]

Increase allied conventional defense burden-sharing. U.S. allies must take far greater responsibility for their conventional defense. U.S. allies must play their part not only in dealing with China, but also in dealing with threats from Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

1. Make burden-sharing a central part of U.S. defense strategy with the United States not just helping allies to step up, but strongly encouraging them to do so.
2. Support greater spending and collaboration by Taiwan and allies in the Asia–Pacific like Japan and Australia to create a collective defense model.
3. Transform NATO so that U.S. allies are capable of fielding the great majority of the conventional forces required to deter Russia while relying on the United States primarily for our nuclear deterrent, and select other capabilities while reducing the U.S. force posture in Europe.
4. Sustain support for Israel even as America empowers Gulf partners to take responsibility for their own coastal, air, and missile defenses both individually and working collectively.
5. Enable South Korea to take the lead in its conventional defense against North Korea.

[…]

They are engineering most of these situations that we’ve seen in the media specifically to make the ideas more digestible to the average population. See the Zelenskyy case: “This is going to be great television” - the guy is not even hiding it.

On one hand, Taiwan is right to say that the US won’t abandon them. The US does not produce enough chips locally to just let them get gobbled up by China. However, this sort of “theatrics” is not over, and they will come up with a reason to scare Taiwan into investing a lot more in defence, specifically to prepare them for a fight to destabilize China.

It’s truly sad that this administration is now in power to push these ideas. The average American is going to become much poorer and hateful due to all protections previously put in place being dismantled. Hopefully people wake up and kick them out of office, but the damage done to foreign relationships is already done.