Because retailers are middle-men by definition. Large online resellers just have much less overhead, so the cut they take for being a middleman is much smaller. They often also have the bargaining power to reduce their cost price with the supplier. You should look for things that are produced in large quantities locally, and find ways to purchase direct from supplier, if you want to save money buying locally rather than spending more to support local business. Buying from independent local retailers is for indirect social and economic benefit. We should all endeavour to do it as much as we can but it’s also very hard to justify when cost differences are large.

Make them in a portable language. Something like Java for example. Or you can write in rust and compile for each target.

It’s calling them prostitutes that is incorrect. The kids are not sex workers.

Even though I hate car centric infrastructure, watching a new highway or bypass spring up out of nothing is an incredible testament to our ability to work together to achieve great things

I did a comparative study on 10 things I hate about you and taming of the shrew for a term in school. In fact, a lot of our Shakespeare was dressed up as comparative studies which did make it interesting.

I’m pretty sure usernames, like community names, are on a per-instance basis. So mantissa@lemmy.ml or mantissa@sh.itju.st.works or whatever it’s called might be available