This is a bizarre article.

In the UK, average life expectancy at birth was 81 years, according to 2021 data from the World Bank - the same as in Slovenia, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Austria.

To frame that as “the UK has one of the lowest life expectancies among rich countries” is… misleading, to say the least. Why does Germany have one of the lowest life expectancies among rich countries? Why does Denmark?

Completely agree, and anyone with any foresight would insist on something more robust. But very often the courts have to deal with situations where the parties did not have that foresight and instead proceeded to do business with one another on the basis of informal or very flimsily documented arrangements. And it falls to the court to look at what little evidence there is and determine (to the extent they can) whether there was an agreement and, if so, what the agreement entailed.

You would actually be surprised just how much business is conducted like this.

I don’t think this is particularly surprising. Handshakes can form legal contracts, and contracts can be formed orally. There’s no reason why an image couldn’t indicate acceptance of a contract, generally speaking (certain specific types of contract may require additional formalities).

When I was young, I spent a lot of time playing Extreme Paintbrawl. I only learned years later that it had achieved notoriety as one of the worst video games of all time. Looking back it’s not hard to see why. But back when it was one of the very few games we had for PC, I got a lot of enjoyment out of it.

I was planning to sign up at BeeHaw because it seems pretty active and with high quality discussions. When I heard that it had defederated from Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world I decided not to sign up to any of those three as I would rather have access to all of them (though I can understand why BeeHaw defederated). So I just went with VLemmy.net as it was one of the recommended ones (on join-lemmy.org and the Awesome-Lemmy-Instances GitHub) and seems to be very broadly federated.

I don’t think it matters too much, though I think if you were signed up on the same instances as all your favourite communities it would be a bit more convenient.

Also using Hetzner, can’t complain and the pricing is good.