We all are the only and best witness to our individual experiences. I don’t think that’s taught enough. I’m not saying that all truth is relative all the time, but I think it’s very reasonable to be in a nation with a de facto two-party duopoly on the entire political system and come to a conclusion as an individual that there are many things and experiences, including your own, that aren’t accurately represented or advocated for by either party’s narratives. IMO, that’s common sense. Just like America has one of the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world, it’s also unique in that it (and all of the five eyes nations except for NZ and kind of Australia) is a western democracy that only has two parties with the vast control of natl. govt. instead of a coalition of many more. Competition almost always yields better results for customers in a market and in politics.

We’re in a system in which voters feel locked into a system of only two choices and then will turn around and berate other voters for not being 1000% committed to ‘the revolution’ after toppling the n*zis. Instead of providing a inclusive environment for old republicans turning away from and standing against obvious fascism, some of the left does a whole old timey Christian preacher “scare the hell out of you,” narcissism-of-small-differences routine with zero prompting to try and push for a huge cultural and political upheaval before removing the awfulness that’s currently in power. It’s the Aesop’s Fables lion giving up the rabbit (small win) to chase the antelope (ambitious win) and losing both. It’s Anakin telling Obi Wan to join him with the Sith or die, his head so far up his own butt with his own issues that he thinks that’s an actual choice for Obi Wan but it’s not. It’s shortsighted and self-centered and it’s stupid. And for the sake of just getting through elections in the next 4 years I wish it would stop.

Anyway. “Nothing is ever as good or bad as people say it is. It’s always better or worse and you have to figure out how.” Some of that is adjusting your own expectations and reactions, some of it is adjusting for the biases of others.

Same. When I was at a point where I was skipping a meal a day to save for rent, it was the boots problem. If I could get the nicer, more durable thing, it was always worth it in the long run but not usually affordable up front. But sometimes there are easy wins. I found my first and only cast iron skillet I’ve had in the last 15 years covered in grease & surface level rust next to a dumpster on the way home. Some oven cleaner and flaxseed oil and it has been good to me ever since.

It started then by saying no to eating out bc it’s unaffordable, now it’s saying no to eating out at a lot of places bc they have awful food, service, and management treats their workers like crap. Starbucks wasn’t worth it to me for a long time before the anti union stuff, now I have two reasons (actually more) never to go there again.

I always think of this post whenever I hear someone dead-set on nothing less than massive, systemic change.

Conscious consumption! I like it. It’s a big part of what they advocate on the Frugal Friends podcast. Just need to figure out the “we have McDonalds at home” of fossil fuels. Hybrids & bikes can be a good first start.

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. If you wait until you feel great and have all the time in the world to ever go to the gym you might work out 1-2 days a year. If you wake up late and are tired but commit to at least going out and walking down the street and back at lunch and you do the latter more often then you’ll be way ahead of the former situation. Maybe different strokes for different folks. Perfectionism ruins a lot of dreams and ambitions of people that would accomplish a whole lot more if they just stopped overthinking about it and learned to leave well enough alone. Just ask any former ‘gifted and talented’ student.

TBF, google throws up captchas & ‘suspicious activity detected’ at the drop of a hat these days. One of our clients is a SMB that runs off Google SaaS, and recently implemented a 3rd party, device based SSO that is supposed to sync with Google auth. We’ve has nothing but issues, VPN or no, adblockers or no, and stupid captcha pages all the time. Youtube as a google product sucks now bc embedded videos randomly flag across all browsers and make you sign in to watch an embedded video on someone else’s webpage. I understand (though disagree) with google flagging something like known mullvad vpn IPs or something but a corporate vpn? A company approved ad blocking extension allow-listed in GOOGLE ADMIN? GTFO. Just a mess.

I think franchisees have a lot of leeway as to how things are run, down to some of the suppliers. It makes sense to me that it varies by location. The downside is that if I’m used to it being bad (which I am) then it taints every other location for me. I don’t know whether McDs or Sonic is going to be ok versus awful and I pay the same either way so if I have literally any other choice I’m not going to gamble on it.

I really want to enjoy Mastodon, I truly do. But my experience has been that it is a living doom spiral by 95% of posting users on there. I learn a lot, but it also drags me towards a highly negative thought pattern and mini-existential crises. I still occasionally review it for the information, but it’s like watching an episode of “This is Us” knowing that I’m going to cry multiple times by opening this pandora’s box. Lemmy has been a lot more varied. Still deeply disturbing news, some weirdness from the .ml crowd, but overall I’m much happier here even if it’s bc my feeds sandwich disturbing news with memes for the dumb caveman brain that’s using this site.

I recently traveled and I brought my old iphone 6 and made sure my physical SIM was compatible with both and checked with my carrier as well. One issue I keep running into is that the digital boarding pass and email communications for updates from the airline just make issues like flight delays, reroutes, lost baggage, or missed flights so much faster to deal with, especially if there are minute by minute updates and a time crunch in an airport I’m not familiar with. I guess the best answer there is to have a dedicated email address for airline comms and make that the only connected account for your backup smartphone.

Because there’s no native sync for feeds between NetNewsWire and FreshRSS. iOS and Windows developers don’t develop useful apps for both platforms for free.

Qwant off of Orion on iOS. Don’t bother with Kagi. There are better options if they switch to graphene.

EDIT: SearXNG is perfect in every way except for consistently returning useful search results.

ASUS will charge you an arm an a leg for a ‘premium’ consumer router but will not handle VLAN traffic appropriately. And if you are betting on Open-WRT to save your bacon it’s not a great bet.