Mass Effect and Dragon Age makes Cyberpunks story telling feel ancient as well in my very firm opinion.

The first part there is a big reason behind why 4chan was started and the big block relates because a lot of the far rights coordination online stems from 4chan and 4chan initiated movements. I'd argue pepe and all the memes around Trump was instrumental in getting him elected 2016 and that started on 4chan. Also the whole qanon thing had a lot to do with 4chan and that was a big part of why Jan 6th went down.

Sure, the Stockholm Region had 38 murders last year. Laredo, Texas, reportedly a rather safe, small, US town of 250,000 had 13 murders. But Region Stockholm is around 10 times that size. So 130 vs 38.

If we instead compare to Malmö which is the second worst region but much smaller than Stockholm, roughly like Laredo it's 13 for Laredo and 5 for Malmö.

Because in our society we very much need money and gambling sells itself by making you believe you'll get money. Cosmetics in games has no such issues.

EDIT: as long as you can't sell them for money a la CSGO.

Yeah exactly it's a very concerning trend

While the trend is horrible for my beloved country with crime increasing year over year which is very fucked we need to keep perspective. Sweden has a population of almost 11 million. NY 9 or so. Sweden a given month 2-11 homicides, NY around 30. And there are far worse cities out there.

We need to get crime down for sure however, we can't let this become the new normal.

The real case meat isn't default search though, it's the fact that they have 95%+ of the US online search market. That is stifling innovation and is part of the reason for their ad dominance as well. And they're abusing it as well by making changes which mean they funnel you into ad results, display the content you're after without entering the page in question thus "stealing" traffic and eyeballs and the whole amp bullshit.

Just like AT&T previously completely dominating telecom was a dampener on innovation which became super obvious once the monopoly was ended I think it will be the opening of Internet and search innovation flood gates if this monopoly is broken.

Traditional snail mail has died. For bills and other important documents there are better, digital, solutions out there. Mail has too many security issues to be the answer for that. What do you get by email today that couldn't be chat message, an entry in a RSS feed, part of a social media feed or a to do item of some sort? 95% of my mail box is newsletters and ads. The rest is order confirmations from various sites. But none of that needs to be emails imo.

The only real, proper use case, these days is work related communication. But even there chat is often the better tool and email lacks because it's fundamentally insecure and to make it secure you run into the problem of having to set it up between domains, and if you're already doing that kind of work why not decide on a more secure by design communications channel?

I think in the future communication solutions like Matrix that can talk to (virtually) all other solutions will enable us to move away from email, but it won't happen until we get Matrix like solutions for task management such that I can send someone a task without having to care about which solution they use at X company, and it will still land in that system. Once we have something like that mail won't have anything going for it. That really is the final use case.

Eh, I guess it's a Ship of Theseus kind of thing. So much in the core is roten that if we change it you could argue it will be something different.

No, just in a very short time frame. You probably don't chug two gallons straight up, but if you'd did it'd be super dangerous. Even one gallon could be dangerous if chugged.

You're completely missing the point to a level that feels dishonest. You've already gotten a great reply around why you're wrong on Microsoft so I'll keep to Google.

Google started out providing the superior service and didn't do anything overtly shady. Then the shady shit started, cloud storage was one thing as mentioned, others include doing the Microsoft thing of not following web standards properly, in Googles case with the argument that their way is faster/better etc effectively forcing everyone to code towards their browser (chromium, not just chrome) since it has insane market domination.

Another, and maybe the most egregious because they haven't been slapped for the other stuff, is the privacy bullshit they're doing now around cookies which basically kills off the last remnants of competition around ads online.

Google as the default search is just the tip of the shitberg of monopolistic bullshit imo.

I use iRedMail but would I call it simple? No. Mail is such old tech that simple really isn't the word for it. Archaic, ancient and dying fits better. But it will take decades more to actually die. iRedMail is available as a single container, which isn't correct from a container perspective but makes everything a lot easier in my opinion. Of the various solutions I've tried it's the one closest to the goal of "It just works". The biggest downside is the manual steps often needed to upgrade version. Not to time consuming but far from "It just works".