German Hanwag. Their ”wide” models are the only shoe models I have never had to break in. Their terrain soles wear quickly on asphalt or concrete, but they have a selection of flatter urban soles.

Support your local small businesses so they don’t go bankrupt. Purchasing anything from Europe will have you pay tariffs to support the orange guy’s administration. Oh yeah - vote so the current admin gets weaker.

Other than that - I have limited sympathy for the country that voted in the current chaos willingly making the world unsafe and trying to throw the victim of military aggression (Ukraine) under the bus. And that is coming from someone who is half American with relatives living in the US.

I haven’t seen a retraction. In 2024 there were articles where the CEO basically doubled down on the decision to remain, making Ritter Sport a hard no for me.

Except that the video was done by NRK - Norwegian national TV. All the Nordic countries can be brutal at heckling each other - all in good fun.

This is definitely an aspect of social media in general. An argument can be made to register your profile and let it lie dormant just to avoid it being hijacked. Hijacking has been an issue in BlueSky during the Twitter migration bursts. Sure - the companies can use the registration for statistics, and the decision to register is somewhere between performance and personal integrity.

Switzerland is contradictory in many ways. At the same time as they go for on-prem or sovereign cloud (laudable), they are passing laws that chase away privacy first companies such as Proton (less than optimal).