Always eat your greens!
So true! Also, productive screentime has been nice. Instead of doomscrolling or mindlessly zoning out to video essays, I’ve been programming, doing some 3D modeling for 3D printing, working on some simple games, and reading long form articles from my own curated news feed.
Ublock Origin, NewPipe, and Grayjay, haven’t seen a YouTube ad in over a decade. 😌
Wish they handled it better, but I knew about this a while ago, and the price is more than reasonable.
A decade without a price hike is extremely generous, especially at how cheap their plan was.
They are a FOSS company that makes a fantastic product I’ve been happy with for years, I’ll gladly pay less than $2 a month to support them. Their server code is licensed with the AGPL, the strongest copyleft license there is, which gives me a lot of confidence.
Worse case scenario, they enshitify down the road, we are protected via the open source implementations. We’ve seen this many times in the past, Red Hat > Alma & Rocky Linux, Citrix Xen Server > XCP-ng, Terraform > Open Tofu.
Pay for your open source software, folks 💖
Ah yes, I forgot it’s impossible to ride public transport with kids…
Call them in, parking patrol will be giddy writing all those tickets in a row.
Door dashers and Uber eats are the worst in my experience.
Total disregard for any traffic rules, they just straight up park their cars in the middle of a lane outside of the restaurant and leave their cars sitting there while they go inside.
Food delivery gig services are an absolute blight and should be completely illegal imo.
I am constantly impressed with the level of general idiocy of end users when it comes to stuff like this…
Call it in. I got a truck just like this towed within an hour and a half for illegally parking, partially blocking an alley street.
Expensive and very inconvenient for the owner, which is just what we want 😌
I’m constantly shocked how poorly Windows 11 runs on brand new high end hardware.
My current job has expensive enterprise class HP laptops, brand new, Nvme drives, the newest CPUs, 32GB RAM, blah blah.
Nearly every day, my corporate VPN app just shits the bed. The tray window that pops up to connect just goes black and never shows anything. I have to open task manager, end the process, wait 30 seconds for it to autostart to then authenticate.
My WSL instance constantly fails to start and I have to run a Powershell command to fix it. Programs won’t maximize won’t open when I try to switch to them until I do it 4-5 times.
Everything is slow and clunky even when I have almost nothing running.
Meanwhile my 8 year old low end Thinkpad with 8 GB of slow DDR4 RAM and a 2.5inch cheapo SSD runs fine with Linux Mint thrown on it and I frequently go 4-6 months between updates.
Everything you described falls under the umbrella of Capitalism.
Capitalism will always result in this sort of devolution, because it rewards this sort of behavior.
Constant GDP growth fuels capitalist enterprises because valuations go up and Capital is expanded. That incentivizes governments to make access to Capital easier and regulations on growth looser, which the firms themselves favor in terms of lower taxes, cheaper loans, larger capital markets, etc.
How many business leaders lobby, vote, and push for higher general taxes, stronger labor rights, stricter regulations, and more expensive loans?
The only time you’ll see them doing any of those things, is when it directly hurts one of their major competitors.
This makes perfect sense within a Capitalist framework, because private ownership of the means of production and increasing profitability are literally the core of Capitalism. So of course Capitalists will always tend towards what makes the most money.
All the worst traits of modern Capitalism, (Everything is a subscription, planned obsolescence, shrinkflation, extreme litigiousness over patents and copyrights, ads in everything, predatory pricing & monetization) are the logical result of a Capitalist system.
Of course they are, same with undersea data centers (for different reasons).
But it doesn’t matter. In the late-stage capitalism we find ourselves in, you don’t need a real product, nor a promising prototype. You don’t even need a good idea, you just need the promise that you’ll come up with a good idea soon. That’s enough to get the investors drooling, the shareholders hyped, and the gullible idiots engaged.
And you only have to maintain that long enough to pay yourself and your insiders some fat checks. Then when inevitably, reality barges in and people start to realize it was all bullshit and pipe dreams, you’ve already cashed out. If your PR team is good, the media and your sycophantic fans will praise you as a visionary who was simply, “ahead of their time.” And you can go on to rip off more people.
It’s basically Patreon scams but with billions of dollars.
Breaking News! Multiple forks discovered in kitchen, exclusive coverage tonight at 11:00!
Call it in. All cities have a number you can call to report illegal parking. I had a guy park his stupid huge pickup truck and trailer in the alleyway by my house, blocked me into my own driveway. Totally illegal to park there.
I called the parking violation report hotline I found online for my city. Within about 30 minutes a cop showed up, got out and looked at the truck, made a call on his radio, and 20 minutes later a tow truck got there and towed the whole thing away.
Didn’t cost me a dime, and the loser who parked it there not only had an absolutely shit day when he found out his truck and trailer got towed, but also had to pay out the nose to get it back from the impound lot. Win win!
All we want is a really good FOSS browser and email client…
“A great commander secures his victory before entering into battle. A poor commander first rushes into battle, then searches for victory.”
~Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Lol, the poor suckers who ever paid for premium in the first place.