Their HQ seems to be in San Francisco though and they have a US stock symbol. So I guess they pay the majority of taxes in the US, no?

True. And it’s also not like that’s some kind of secret. That’s an official branch of the Ukrainian military organization.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Legion_(Ukraine)

You can check this thread for other alternatives.

https://sopuli.xyz/post/23555632

If you don’t have a problem with second hand, I’d recommend to check out Vinted. If you live in Germany you can also check Kleinanzeigen.

I got several pairs of barefoot shoes in good condition there for relatively cheap.

I had shoes from Leguano, Wildling, Merrell (US) and vivobarefoot.

Does anyone know if the Eutelsat service is technically comparable to Starlink? So far, I was under the impression that there’s no real alternative to it in terms of bandwidth and response time.

Second, Eutelsat has been criticized a lot for (still today!) spreading Russian propaganda via their TV satellites. There’s even a dedicated section on that in their Wikipedia article. Not sure if it’s adequate to frame them now as the good guys.

Is there a list with brands that are actually manufactured in Europe? IMHO that’d be way more interesting for me.

In general I would advise everyone to have a look at second hand clothing. Especially Vinted makes it very comfortable and easy to search, filter and buy used products in your style, size, budget and condition you are looking for. It’s not only money but also lots of ressources.

Then at least start to eliminate them where it is possible: single use cups, pizza boxes, oven paper, pans, rain jackets, dental floss, skiing wax etc.

And for the other areas tax all PFAS products with an increasing rate year-by-year. If the alternative is ‘just keep going’ I have doubts that the industry is trying hard enough to find substitutes.

Maybe try to add a bit more valuable content to your post. I saw Tuta being mentioned a lot lately and so far never recognized people being banned for that.

I use the regular KeePass 2 and love it. It looks a bit oldfashioned but is a very powerful tool once you get used to it a bit. As there are plenty of addons you can also easily extend the standard feature set with further options.

What makes you think that all these CO2 cartridges sold and used in Europe are manufactured by a single company in the US? I couldn’t find a source on who actually builds them, but found the confirmation that the fitting is a EU-wide norm across all brands selling these 425g CO2 cartridges. The norm is ISO 10297. I don’t see why there would be only one company producing these things. And if so, I’d rather expect it in some low cost country rather then the US?

Edit: I found these on AliExpress: https://german.alibaba.com/product-detail/0-6L-Sodastream-CO2-Cylinder-Refillable-1600975277101.html

Shanghai Eternal Faith Industry Co., Ltd.

So at least there seems to be not just one manufacturer for these.

Do you mean the glass bottles or the CO2 cartridges? I think the latter are more or used by all brands of these sparkling water machines in Germany. Seems to be like an industry standard to me.

Sodapop is German. It belongs to Krüger Group, a company with around 5000 employees, so also not a megacorp. :)

https://www.sodapop.com/

What is going on in this thread!? If you work in IT, you should know better than what you claim here. It’s completely fine to dislike SAP. It definitely has its flaws but your statement is so blatantly wrong that it almost feels like some kind of orchestrated propaganda.

All the data in SAP is stored in a database system. It can be Oracle, IBM etc. or their propietary HANA database. All data is freely accessible directly in the tables from the application itself (e.g. via transactions like SE16, SQVI, ST04 etc.), you can use Eclipse and other external tools the SAP layer and of course you can also directly access the underlying database completely bypassing the SAP frontend.

Performance- and feature-wise the SAP and HANA database or Oracle in-memory database aren’t any different. If it takes your colleagues hours to extract some data, then it’s either a lot of data, very complex queries or they’re doing something wrong.

SAP works like it was built in the 90s.

That’s because most of its core is.

It’s slow as fuck

Highly depends on what you’re doing and how much data you’re processing but in general this is incorrect. SAP uses in-memory computing for quite some time and looking at the vast amounts of data that is often processed, it’s pretty impressive from my perspective if you keep in mind that everything must be traceable and consistent at every point in time. I worked with SAP a lot and also with many newer competitors and can guarantee you, that the more recently developed solutions, aren’t any better.

doesn’t have good export capability

You have Excel/CSV exports almost everywhere and where you don’t have it, you can still always access all the data you need from the database tables via SQL, data extractors etc. Maybe not perfect but Oracle, Navision, Workday etc. aren’t better IMO.

the worst user interface I’ve ever worked with

The old ‘dynpro’ UIs are pretty ugly compared to today’s standard. SAP is aware of that and offers a new UI technology (‘Fiori’) for more than a decade. It’s still not perfect but they’re working on it.

is the least flexible ERP system I’ve ever encountered

Excuse me the harsh wording, but this is complete bullshit. SAP ERP is literally open source software (not FOSS!). Even if you are in the rare situation that your requirement cannot be fulfilled with one of the official enhancement mechanisms (Business Add-In, user exit, BRF+, enhancement points, database appends, etc.) you can literally just look at all the source code and adapt it to your needs. How much more flexibility can you have?

I’d rather work with a custom built ERP

If you are in a rather small company, I can get that sentiment. But in big corporations, building and maintaining everything yourself is just not an option in a world where legal and market requirements are constantly changing.

I can understand when people don’t love SAP. It’s not perfect by any means. But I also don’t understand why it’s sometimes hated like here. I’ve been in several evaluations for ERP systems where it won against plenty of competitors. It definitely is a pretty flexible and powerful solution for big companies.

Isn’t that same applicable for most mega corps? I mean there’s also no equally convenient one-stop-shop for Amazon Shopping, for PayPal, for Social Media. There are alternatives for everything but I guess they always involve some grade of compromise.

That’s also a valid perspective. Still, I don’t like the idea of shipping numerous items separately. From my perspective, it wouldn’t necessarily need to be a megacorp. There could be like a big warehouse that is provided by company A. Within that building there could be shelves or departments owned by different suppliers. Then there could be yet another company that picks the goods from all the different suppliers, puts them in a box and ships them with a - once again - independent shipping company.

It’s somehow like the concept of a huge shopping mall, just without access for end customers but only for mail order. For end customers it would be similar to the ‘Amazon Prime’ experience, maybe not as fast and maybe more expensive but IMO it doesn’t need to be a single legal entity to provide such a service to consumers.

For bigger purchases I found it pretty easy to get rid of Amazon. Clothes and electronics I mostly buy second hand on Vinted or Kleinanzeigen (German Craigslist). If I need something new, there are usually plenty of alternative shops for everything. It’s the small stuff that bothers me. If I buy a ~5€ article online from a specialized shop, the shipping costs double the price and if you have a separate (often oversized) box to dispose afterwards.

The items above reside on my shopping list for ~2 months and I’ve been to EDEKA, Kaufland, Rewe, Globus, Decathlon, Hornbach, DM, Rossmann and Reno in the meantime. :-D I guess it also depends on the specific store, the season and some luck to get what you’re looking for. My local EDEKA e.g. did have these flavor drops in the past and DM typically sells sun sticks in summer. But if I couldn’t pick specific items after some time, I usually go online to get them out of my mind.

Will check out bol.com, thank you! :)

Thanks. Galaxus.ch (the Swiss version) seems to be pretty close. They indeed have vanilla drops (even from multiple brands), shoe laces in 140 cm (even though unfortunately not green or yellow) and sun screen sticks.

Their German version of the shop unfortunately seems to sell mainly electronics.

Which ProShop are you referring to? Proshop.de seems to be also mainly electronics.