The practical experience of having your own domain for your email is that you delegate your domain to Google / Fastmail / Proton / whatever, and it takes care of everything else. Some webmail providers will also let you buy a domain on their own website as a part of registration flow.
It really is not hard. Harder than not having a domain of your own, but not as hard as you make it sound.
Okay, do you think if we just picked some random person they would have any idea what we're talking about?
It's just not something normal people do, but I don't like the snarkiness of implying that's an indicator of intelligence. Otherwise we go down the no true Scotsman rabbit hole, what do you mean you're using Proton. You didn't set up your own mail server ?
What do you mean you're using AWS, your not using a solar powered raspberry pi?
It's not an indicator of intelligence, but mail providers (including Google) could offer this if they want to, with a simple "Choose a personalized email address, like john@smith.com, for $9.99 per year" radio button on signup. They don't do this because:
1. Most people will choose the free option, so it wouldn't be much of a useful revenue stream.
2. People having @gmail.com email addresses is a little bit of zero-cost marketing for them.
Even following all the directions is not trivial, nor is it easy to troubleshoot when something mysteriously goes wrong with what is usually a pretty vital connecting piece for most of your digital life.
Plus all the good places to host your personal domain cost money, so now people who have gotten email for 'free' for 20+ years now have to start paying a monthly email hosting bill and annual domain registration fee because some 'nerd' told them they "should"? And if they ever forget to pay either one, suddenly their email is down and their email 'identity' is at risk of being resold.
This advice is exactly like changing your own oil: Anyone with enough interest in cars and dedication to learn the steps certainly can easily do it, yet nobody should try to convince their grandparents who aren't already highly self-motivated to start doing it.
If you don't trust Gmail, then you have to use Proton to host it, don't trust them then your on AWS, don't trust them you still need you ISP to play nice with a home server.
Unless you want to raise your own carrier pigeons...
Have tried giving detailed directions to people? Nobody follows them, and the few who try don't do it effectively. There are many steps to setting up a domain - and with an email host!
Currently it's too hard for normal users, but it would be possible for e.g. Proton to add a feature where you can either import your domain name, or create a new one.
> Copy and paste them into the Jira ticket so the junior employee who makes half your salary can run them next time.
Or, more likely: so that you yourself can remember what you did the next time the problem arises. Or your colleague, who is senior, but does not know this part of the codebase or infra well. Heck, you can even write a shell script, automate things and have your productivity increased!
These things will be just as true and useful in some communist FOSS context as they are in a capitalist system.
You can do chargebacks, it's just that you are not likely to have business with that merchant again. No big deal, given that that merchant is proven to be not very reliable with your money, right?
The issue arises when there is no other merchant, in other words - when there is a monopoly, or something close to it.
Which is exactly the case with Meta. That's the issue. If you are in U.S., please ask your representatives to take some anti-trust action and split this company once and for all.
This was the first thing I did when I landed in the South.
Answer: very easy. You know the shape from the flags and logos, you can't miss it. Magellanic clouds are harder to see, and require a place with little or no light pollution, but they're there too.
Fun fact: in Chile they sell tours to look at the sky - in Atacama desert, where light pollution is very low. A bus brings you to the desert and you look up. They also provide a tour guide who knows the sky and has a laser pointer (yes, strong laser pointers can be used to point to objects in sky). Sounds ridiculous, but is 100% worth the money. The view of Milky Way in its full unpolluted southern glory is breathtaking.
A go-to joke of the tour guides. Question: "So, you are in Chile and there's no polar star. How do you tell where's north?". Answer, after some ideas from tourists: "See the mountains over there? That's east. Like I said, you're in Chile."
> Given the very limited space available in Paris centre, I don't really see an easy way unfortunately...
Bicycles take less space than cars, both on road and when parked, don't they? A four-lane bicycle highway is as wide as one-lane car road. If anything, people switching from cars to bicycles should produce more free space for the city, not less.
Many streets have been transformed to one way or made cycle-only so some critical arteries are getting congested a lot. I feel the violence and anger too, you don't even need to go to Paris, the suburbs are becoming a mess of seething drivers. I get a lot more of very dangerous behaviour, insults from drivers on shared infrastructure as I did 5 years ago, even though I have my kids in a cargo and I cycle around the max assisted (25km/h) speed or higher if my legs work, most of the time.
I see shouting matches at least once a week, angry drivers honking on streets they can't even pass a bicycle... And isolated infrastructure is not always possible...
I feel this has become another part of some culture war, where I just don't have a license and drive my kids around in a bicycle (I don't want to drive a car) so I'm some angry green extremist out to annoy every driver out there...
In Paris, most people who are now biking are people who would have taken public transportation before, so the amount of cars on the roads is roughly the same as before.
I don't live there anymore but I grew up in Paris -
I knew absolutely nobody living in Paris driving to another location in Paris. It's always been metro first, bicycle sometime. Almost all of the passenger car you see in Paris are people driving from the suburb.
Many cars in Paris are driven by people commuting to Paris from outside. There is a real fracture between suburbans (who don't vote for those changes happening in Paris) and city residents who votwd for them.
Funny that you chose Amsterdam to give an example: this is one of the places in Europe where there actually are IT startups - some "home-grown", some moved from elsewhere. "Nobody" is plainly not true.
I specifically chose Amsterdam for that reason actually, it is probably the best place in Europe to start and run a business and it still sucks compared to the US.
Americans can actually move to the Netherlands easily because of special arrangements for starting businesses, but you won’t be surprised to find out most aren’t taking them up on that offer.
> I don't understand why he went back to Russia --- on principle, maybe?
He was a Russian politician and was intending to stay one. In the eyes of Russian public opinion, a politician who fled abroad - opposition or not - is not a politician anymore, but some foreign guy living in comforts of some Germany or England, either on money stolen from Russians or on the payroll of CIA, not worth listening to. Interests of polit-emigrants and interests of Russians in Russia do not align, and the general public knows that.
This is why Navalny returned and Yashin never left.
I confirm the previous poster: in the eyes of even oppositional public those who fled loose credibility -- at least that they can't call people to the streets under SWAT batons; and also living abroad they lose sense of what matters and events are important.
It could be an argument, but no politician inside Russia call people to the streets either. Navalny abroad had more influence than all other opposition personas in sum.
The practical experience of having your own domain for your email is that you delegate your domain to Google / Fastmail / Proton / whatever, and it takes care of everything else. Some webmail providers will also let you buy a domain on their own website as a part of registration flow.
It really is not hard. Harder than not having a domain of your own, but not as hard as you make it sound.