Posteo was the winner when I last looked over the alternatives, although I haven’t switched yet. Tuta, mailbox.org and Runbox were runners up.

Various reasons (mostly price, provider getting blocked too much, and being in the USA) led to a hard “no” for CounterMail, Soverin, Mailfence, StartMail, Fastmail, Proton, RiseUp, Hushmail, Skiff and Mail.com.

It’s likely you don’t need a VPN. You’re putting a lot of trust in that company; make sure it’s well founded. I just use my ISP for normal stuff, then when I want to surf under the radar for one reason or another I open up Tor.

I don’t remember how many hours I sank into that game on my Amiga. Loved it.

how does housing come into being?

Well one “simple” way is for all the builders to be rolled up into the civil service: the government pays them to do their job, i.e. build houses, which the government then owns and allows people to live in. This must necessarily be rent-free, otherwise the government becomes one massive landlord therefore not solving the problem, and also takes the bottom out of the mortgage market because why would anyone buy when they can just move into government-provided housing without a 25-year millstone tied round their necks. It also creates a ton of job security because it means you can just walk away from a shitty employer without fear of becoming homeless.

It also drops anyone with a mortgage into the worst possible negative equity problem, which will be a massive problem for a massive number of people, therefore has zero chance of ever being voted in. So for this to work there has to be a solution to the mortgage problem, e.g. the government buys all that housing stock for the current outstanding mortgage amount, but that’s a massive investment into something that now necessarily has zero value, which would likely crash the economy. IANAE so it’d be interesting to get a real economist’s view on how this might all work in practice.

I was surprised to find out that ******* gets censored everywhere.

You’ll love the way we do tyres then. Two of the dimensions are metric and the third is imperial.

What flag is that?

It looks similar to an inverted Union flag but one of the red stripes is in the wrong place.

Twit is a light hearted jibe, much like calling someone a muppet or a dingbat. It’s not a word you would use if you really wanted to insult them.

Another friend once thought twat was a synonym of twit. First time she called someone a twat in my presence I was gobsmacked but thought I must have misheard; there was definitely nothing twattish going on.

The next time it happened I made a note to raise it privately with her later. “You do know what twat means don’t you?” “Yeah, it’s another word for twit.” “Er, no.”

Easily. Step 1: become a billionaire, as in the image. Step 2: create 999 millionaires. Congratulations, you’re now a millionaire!