Denmark, Sweden, and Finland have economies that are nowhere near as concentrated as the two other Nordic nations. Norway is analogous to a Middle Eastern petrostate with over 60% of their economy being derived from oil. Iceland is also heavily reliant on aluminum mining and fishing with those two sectors making up over 70% of their economy.
My current daily driver is a Thinkpad X230 running Mint which honestly does everything I need it to. The processor holds up pretty well and the storage and RAM are easily upgradable. The screen is my only real gripe and even that is merely fine. I've heard others upgrade them with different IPS panels too though I haven't looked much into that.
However, if you want something with the horsepower of the M2 MacBooks I have colleagues that run the Dell XPS 13.
One company that always interested me in the Linux specific laptop space is Star Labs out of the UK. They seem to have a competitive offering in the Starbook line when compared to manufacturers like Purism and System 76. They also have a very small netbook style laptop but the processor seems pretty weak on it.
Already addressed in the FAQ and numerous comments by dang over the years:
> Are paywalls ok?
>> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
>> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.
My understanding is that it is not entirely open source, in particularly the code through which they deliver ads. How innocuous is that? Can I disable it? Does it do tracking? I can do the research, but if you or anyone knows the answers, please share!
I mean surely the art collective behind wacky shoes and WD-40 cologne will make sure my SSN and other personal information is safe once I put it into the game? Surely.
Furthermore, they've actually got a more direct and much more persistent motivation to exploit your personal information for all its worth.
In general the conventional narratives on personal security are completely backwards. If some drive by attacker gets your credit card or social security number and uses them to defraud someone else, your rights are well represented by the system and you have plenty of recourse. Whereas if some commercial surveillance advanced persistent threat gets your personal data accompanied by a boolean field in their database saying that you agreed to "terms" saying they can abuse it however they want, there is literally nothing you can do to stop them in the US. Furthermore the underground lists of CC/SSN your semi-private information made it into will eventually be considered stale and forgotten about, while corporate surveillance databases are forever.
That's a straw man. And financial surveillance companies certainly do aim to use your personal information to extract as much value from you as possible - selling you crap you don't need today, higher insurance rates tomorrow, and so on.
Sure, I guess technically there are some narrowly-scoped abuses you do have the means to stop, so my "abuse it however they want" bites off too much (like for example they can't legally use your address to show up at your house and murder you either). But for the most part no, you have very little say in what is done with your personal information once other parties have a copy of it.
I don’t know that the artists actually want people to file their taxes in the game, but for the critique to land you do actually need to be able to use it to file. That means asking for an SSN.
The developer comment on the itch.io page indicates that it can be played offline. You can also input a falsified SSN to the game and change it on the resulting paperwork if you desire.
It’s possible that this game is just filling out numbers in the PDF for you and you can fill out your personal info manually, sign it, and mail it in. If it’s trying to do E-file for you, then yeah I would be scared.
Becoming an "Authorized IRS e-file Provider" is a significant hurdle that is not necessary to producing a real, mailable, tax return.
It's certainly a convenience, and most serious software would try to include it, but I don't think MSCHF are going for convenience. The Yahoo headline and article uses the word "file" but the video doesn't.
