Honestly, most modern books on Stoicism read like that; I tend to avoid them altogether. Although I will say that Donald Robertson has done a great job with the two books I've read of his (Stoicism and the Art of Happiness, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor).
The best modern book, in my opinion, is Pierre Hadot's The Inner Citadel. It's primarily about Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, but does a really good deep-dive into Stoicism (and frequently mentions other Stoics).
Don't all cars in the Netherlands have at least a small checkup before inspection?
I once had a Fiat Panda from 1984, 20 years old by then. It had a small checkup and maintenance, then went for the inspection. It passed, but was highlighted for inspection from the controlling organizing. The mechanic, owner of the shop, started getting really nervous about losing his license, asking, is the car allright, is it really allright? And it passed inspection again.
And within those countries in only a handful of banks. We've been here before, but as of right now, I'd give it a better chance than I'd have given just four months ago.
I am unfamiliar with Wero. Can you explain why it is an engineering fiasco?
Side note: Looking at their job listings I don't see any engineering positions (with the exception of a security engineer which is a grey area in a bank IMO), only managers and business roles.
what ever "money extraction business" means - wero is a real thing people (me included) are already using and developed jointly by many european banks.
Old Dutch banks and their Belgian suckers, mostly. You can see a list on their website.
I am not deep into this, but I heard multiple times that the choice of the pan-european payment system was largely political and technnically suboptimal. Old Europe pushed for the aging iDEAL against a much more advanced Blink, so Eastern European banks led by Poland left the consortium.
In the end, iDEAL rebranded as Wero was dead on arrival because a successful system needs to be supported by everyone.
I have no idea what you are talking about. I have been using Wero for a while in France and it works just fine and is completely free.
It's basically instant bank transfer without any fee or limitation on how many you can do.
The big European countries adopt it, so if Poland will adopt it or not won't matter in the short term, in the long term merchants will accept it as they do it with Alipay and other more obscure stuff
Wero is a land grab by the banks who fumbled building a PayPal alternative for 20 years, now desperately trying to stop the digital Euro.
Sure I'd rather use Wero than PayPal -if it was decent- and building it on top of SEPA instant transactions is neat. But the lack of buyers protection is a deal breaker for me!
And quite frankly I'd rather use a digital Euro governed by the ECB than some rent seeking hobby project by a bunch of private banks. Especially because they will inevitably enshittify it with ads and hostile BNPL like PayPal.
Where the date is the last day of the month that I need to make (the next day there is income, for me it's 19th, not 31th). Saldo is my bank account that day. Savings are, well, savings in a separate account. delta is the sum of special income and outcome. row 5 is all special income and expenses. Groceries are not listed, I need them every month anyway.
There is the Gemini PDA from 2018 which has a physical keyboard. I heard it was mostly a disappointment.
There was another phone with keyboard around the same time, but I forgot the name. That was claimed to be very much in the spirit of the N950 and its cancelled follow-up, the Nokia Lauta.
All with Sailfish, the spiritual successor of Meamo/Meego from Nokia.
Mostly a disappointment? The keyboard is fantastic. I can tell because I have a Cosmo Communicator (successor with 4G) and Astro Slide (successor with slide mechanic and 5G). The keyboard of these is great, but... they got barely no support, and the company who build these is like AWOL. Either way, like the GPD Pocket series, the keyboard is larger compared to the Nokia N900 (3G) and Nokia N810 (WLAN only)
> There was another phone with keyboard around the same time, but I forgot the name. That was claimed to be very much in the spirit of the N950 and its cancelled follow-up, the Nokia Lauta.
Probably F(x)tec and their successors. Those have a similar small keyboard as Nokia N900 and Nokia N810
There's also the Hackberry. This device uses a real Blackberry keyboard, with custom firmware. It works together with a 3D printed case, and a RPi CM5. This keyboard, while small, is very ergonomic.
It was mainly the investors that didn't want to move. Many things were stagnant that needed moving. Now that the investors are gone there is a chance to move things, and slowly things are moving into open sourcing their software.
The Camera app, Gallery app, Nexcloud accounts and other accounts components are open sourced and on github. There is now talk about Silica, the Wayland compositor. It hasn't been updated well in recent years and there is talk about moving it to Weston or Wlroots, while also supporting xdg-shell for GTK applications.
This is really nice to finally see this happen! It has been super awkward that often small bugs and messing features persisted for years for the sole reason of the given app being closed source, so the permanently busy Jolla engineers just could not get to fixing it & the community couldn't help withou source & license enabling them to contribute.
It never made sense not opening everything up from the start - did they really thing someone would just clone it and made bank if they themselves usually struggled to make the whole thing work financially.
In my opinion it was most likely the combination of the combination of three things:
1) The race to release the Jolla 1 ASAP back in 2013, resulting in a messy codebase and systems not setup for community to contribute.
2) Then clueless investors got involved, especially when they needed emergency funding after the Jolla Tablet debacle in IIRC ~2015, blocking Jolla from opening the full source.
3) Constant firefighting preventing engineers on actually opening things up and setting things up for people to contribute & actually review the contributions in timely manner.
In 2013 they released the Jolla 1, a phone with custom hardware and Linux software. In 2015 they tried again with a tablet, but it failed on the side of hardware production and the company became insolvent.
In 2017 there came investors, among others ROS Telecom, a Russion telecom provider. They pivoted to only providing software, mainly on Sony phones. That is still ongoing.
Since the Russia - Ukraine war the Russion investors went MIA. The Finnish people from Jolla started a new company and had all assets moved to that company. They are now trying to rebuild the company and apparently extend into hardware again, even though the PCB design is off the shelf.
I have been a user since 2014 and am quite happy with their offering. It offers ssh root access if you want. Optionally manually installing software. Very much a GNU/Linux experience. Privacy focused and user oriented. And now slowly but surely there are parts of the software being opensourced.
In classic times there was no general concept of good or evil. The question was about if something is fitting in its context. With the rise of Christianity came the general concept of good or bad.
This was one of the many disagreements between Catholics and Protestants during the 16th-17th century, for instance, with some of the most powerful Catholic currents (e.g. Jesuits) being very much in favor of rethinking morality to take into account context, while the most powerful Protestant currents pushed for taking morality back to [their interpretation of] the manichean early Christian dogmas.
Come on. A quick search suggests that Zoroastrianism already had this a good six-hundred years before christianity. And ancient Greek philosophers were trying to define good, evil, and "God" for generations before christianity (source: I've been reading about early christianity for two years). Certainly, Judaism had it and that's what inspired early christianity (with the exception of Paul, the early leaders were devout Jews).
The same reason this happens/happened on Windows laptops. The hardware provider gets money to pre-install this software. They can then offer the phone at a lower price with a higher margin.
An interesting book which is more complete but still readable is Stoic Notes written by Rymke Wiersma, translated in English here: https://modernstoicism.com/a-free-book-stoic-notes-by-rymke-...
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