sweden is well known for bowing to US requests. just look at the history of the unlawful attacks on the piratebay and the sham court they were passed through to get sentenced on no broken laws.
not to mention Sweden's constant bullshit in other data related sectors pushing american (hollywood) agendas into EU (and thankfully failing). the pay to take action against the will of the people IN A DEMOCRACY must be the recipe for immortality or some such because i don't see why they would otherwise be able to legally betray their countrymen.
not at all. mint offers a bunch of features 'exclusive' to mint as an integration with their system. of course it's all open source and you could install it on any other system. but the key important factor with mint is that everything 'just works' with a fresh install, no customization necessary - which is something that can't be said about any other distro, including Ubuntu. it is the only distro i recommend for non-pc users as there is no chance they will brick it.
regardless, KDE is just a DE. you won't get the same mint experience of course, since it isn't officially supported (and indeed, only cinnamon offers the complete mint experience), but installing KDE on mint is easy enough if you insist on using it.
frankly, the US is STILL fighting in the middle east after 9/11. the chinese has shown more restraint and milder treatment towards their local terrorist group. so i'd say they've handled it better than the west ever could.
honestly, mistborn isn't very good and there is no reason you can't just immediately jump on stormlight. yes, there are tons of references and characters which does make stormlight awesome because you'll go "omg no way! it's HIM!", but it isn't strictly necessary because stormlight doesn't actually assume you've read the previous cosmere books (few exceptions where brandon just teases too much it takes away from the plot, i.e. the mysterious scarf wearing woman. yes, we get it, it's the princess from warbreaker, and she's looking for one of the gods from warbreaker, that we're also familiar with, and the god in turn is looking for his weapon). but ultimately these characters have their own story arcs and most of them aren't immediately important to the plot and more like easter eggs.
now, i should point out that ... i really don't care for mistborn. and for now, it doesn't matter. but after the next stormlight book, there will be an in-world timeskip, and then another 3-6 mistborn books, and then both the mistborn series and the stormlight series become one joint series.
but there is really no reason to read stormlight before mistborn in its current state because the only real way you'll know for sure one of the hidden characters in stormlight is a particularly well loved character from mistborn is if you read the wiki. there is also a guest appearance of another character in i think the first book but it doesn't make sense in the timeline and it's inconsequential to the plot in every way.
Linux Mint is hands down the most stable linux distro out there and has been for years. zero tinkering needed. everything just runs no questions asked.
My only grief with Mint is the most recent update where they changed the software centee and now it's slowed to a crawl. Why they would do this is anyones guess.
I'm recommending MX until such time that Mint sort their crap out - unfortunately I doubt they will, seeing as this change of software center was to resolve some other issues they (but not is end users) though they had.
MX is basically debian but with a lot of improvements. Sure it might have a bit of a learning curve for those primarily used to Ubuntu based systems, but it beats running any of the other Ubuntu distros by miles since they all struggle with the crap Ubuntu puts on top of Debian.
Manjaro is another great option if you don't want to deal with debian based stuff, and KDE is the default DE with most stuff under reasonable control. You can also use all the Arch resources if you ever run into trouble so it's a lot less of a headache than what I've experienced running OpenSUSE (i want to love OpenSUSE but I just can't).
i've been pushing mint for years because it truly is just that good. everything just works. easy to learn. lots of easy customization available by default for even beginner tinkering. there is no headache or issues with drivers, patches, or software, ever.
but unfortunately (most recent versions) have become more prone to heavy slow downs and the new store in the latest update is utter trash.
tying up in assets such as property, land, etc. has real value though. you can sell a huge amount of land without the land losing value because of the sale, but you can't sell a huge amount of stock without the value collapsing while selling it off.
any exposure is good exposure. investors don't normally run away just because you earn yourself notoriety, they usually do the opposite - because the market is entirely made of make belief and fairy dust.
he doesn't actually have his wealth. it's estimated stock value; which would cascade to nothing the minute he tries to extract it. all he can do is borrow with stock as leverage; which would net him a lot of money sure; but there is no way they would approve billions in a loan unless he is very very specific on the investment goal.
our taxes goes to fund resources and development. and a large part of those taxes goes directly to microsoft so our governments can maintain windows and office installs instead of developing a public solution; its a problem because we aren't actually getting anything from the taxes that goes to microsoft; which, unless you live in the US, is practically illegal unless specifically hiring a domestic corporation to supply the product (good ol' privatization).
oh sure. big bad china gonna get us. meanwhile, the US keep fucking with us over here in europe and breaking our laws in the name of american private enterprises.
but yes, europe should really stop relying on foreign corporations for vital infrastructure, and yet here we are, laws being broken, national security thrown out the window, and no one cares.
nonsense, it's not like microsoft, google or apple is logging every input you do and scanning your shit at every turn!
it still amazes me that the whole globe is paying R&D taxes to microsoft, a private foreign entity, instead of, you know, what R&D taxes are actually supposed to be spent on. is it even legal?
they should, especially as a smaller business, as data leaks could run into GDPR problems. my ex-employer, for example, handled all customer data in plaintext and never delete data for people who were no longer customers. he also insisted on using non-secured channels for business related information/secrets. and zero backup systems. malware ripe for the taking lol. had one system crash and he went mental but refused to accept a backup solution. absolutely no understanding of IT and deaf to any recommendations because of fear that he'd be unable to replace me with a cheaper employee once i was done setting everything up.
three years later, three employees later, and the cheaper replacements were unable to do anything anyway and it's all broken now. but i'm sure in his mind it's all my fault.
so yes, they don't, either due to incompetence or to cut corners. but they definitely should.
there is no evidence that jesus existed and the first writing about jesus appears 100 years after he supposedly died. his original story was eventually replaced with a plagiarized version from mithraism; so jesus = mithra. not that there is any evidence that mithra existed either.
sweden is well known for bowing to US requests. just look at the history of the unlawful attacks on the piratebay and the sham court they were passed through to get sentenced on no broken laws.
not to mention Sweden's constant bullshit in other data related sectors pushing american (hollywood) agendas into EU (and thankfully failing). the pay to take action against the will of the people IN A DEMOCRACY must be the recipe for immortality or some such because i don't see why they would otherwise be able to legally betray their countrymen.