USA will aid Jamaica in the form of touristic corporations that will privatize their land (most of Jamaica’s beaches are already restricted to locals), massive cruise ships full of ignorant tourists, and all this will report net negative value to their citizens because its exploitative nature. But the GDP will go up

Israeli Merkava tanks use German made engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkava https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTU_Friedrichshafen

In my university, computers in the public rooms all ran Mint, and we had a working self-hosted mail platform. Here comes Microsoft and in a few months all computers are replaced by Windows machines and the email platform runs on Outlook. My previous university also had the same approach: all Microsoft products. I’d really love to know all the details of those deals. I know they offer scholarships and fund development programs (in exchange they make students dependent / educated only on MS products), but I still feel its a loss of freedom for all our institutions.

Yes! It’s a great thing! The next thing we should aim is to pass laws forcing Government instances (Germany and Netherlands already have) so politicians and institutions use those for their public/social media profiles and abandon X/Twitter/Threads and anything that isn’t decentralized. The mention of Mastodon/Lemmy/Pixelfed in the media (when eg. journalists quote a politician) would attract more users to these platforms. I believe this is truly necessary if we want to keep democracy healthy and have our socials out of the control of crazy billionaires.