Remember, it’s all or something, not all or nothing.

For me, I look at each major category of things in my life a few times a year and ask myself how I can improve the ethics of my participation.

So for food, I have been vegetarian for years now, which is good, but lately I have been trying to cut out most processed foods. I also have started shopping more and more local, getting as much of my food as I can from local co-ops, individual sellers, and small local grocery chains.

For software, I’m FOSS everything as much as I can be. 100% Linux on my computers and servers, and I have replaced almost all my programs with FOSS alternatives. Even my phone doesn’t run stock Android.

For work, try to find places to work that roughly align with good principles. For instance, try to get a job at a credit union vs a traditional bank, or try to find an employee-owned establishment vs a traditional top-down corporation.

If you have to work for a corpo, try to pick one that has a good reputation with unions and workers, like Costco, vs Starbucks or Walmart.

Capitalism is a machine that grinds us all down, so don’t feel guilty about not being perfect. But do the best you can to reject it, little steps at a time. Always be improving, bit by bit.

Looks pretty clean as is, I would need to see without picsto fully know, but looks good as is imo.

You’re totally right, and this is supported the data! The USA has the least restrictive gun laws of any major developed country but has similar rates of gun violence as all other developed…oh wait, never mind, the USA has by far the highest gun violence rates of any major developed nation.

Our per capita rate of gun violence is comparable to countries like Somalia, Iraq, and Haiti.

And also, car deaths is a huge issue too, and we should restrict car ownership and encourage mass transit and related infrastructure. Making more of our cities pedestrian-only locations protected by bollards, would also make people even safer from both accidental and intentional car deaths.

It’s also way better for the environment and thus, people’s long term health, leading to even higher life spans and better happiness.

This is the way.

Well over a decade now, married for about 10 years.

Read “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart, it’s free online.

He lays out a brutal critique of the modern mathematical curriculum in the Unites States but in summary:

We teach mathematics to children as a huge set of rules to memorize and use to get good scores on standardized tests so that they can “get into good colleges.”

We don’t treat mathematics with any reverence or care, like we do with the arts. Math is taught as a bunch of arbitrary brute facts that old wise men came up with centuries ago and we spend all of elementary and high school relentlessly drilling them into students heads no matter how much pain and suffering it causes.

There is no actual exploration of mathematical beauty, or mystery. There isn’t any discussion of the underlying philosophy of mathematics, or how any of the rich and fascinating history of its development as a field. It’s like if we taught music as just a way to write notes on a page in certain time signatures and keys, but never actually let students listen to a piece of music or discuss the great composers or cultural movements of music through the ages.

Of course that seems ridiculous to people, but for some reason when we do that exact same thing with mathematics, nobody bats an eye. In fact, people think it would be strange to do it any other way.

Happy to help!

Holy crap…you literally just unlocked that same memory for me. Idk what episode it was either, but I totally remember that part.

Edit: Found it! It’s the episode “Gary Takes a Bath” Season 2 Episode 13.

At one point, Spongebob attempts to hypnotize Gary into taking a bath, and one of the telepathic images is that weird hillbilly girl laughing.

The clip from that episode

Fair, however a balanced vegetarian diet is as cheap or cheaper than a cheap meat centric diet, and certainly healthier.

A can of beans is about a dollar, less depending on where you shop. Potatoes are a few dollars a bag, and for most people, a bag of large russets would last them several days if not a week. Same for leafy greens, frozen fruit and veggies, bags of rice, etc.

I agree that there can be other factors, but impoverished communities around the world for centuries have lived on staple foods like those.

I think some personal responsibility is necessary still. Sure the megacorps are the ones doing the most harm and push people to be more consumerist, but that doesn’t absolve people of all their personal autonomy, otherwise you justify all kinds of “just following orders” arguments.

We ought to still resist the corpos and try to live our lives in ways that are better for the world as a whole. Sure, me recycling cans and trying to buy local isn’t going to save the planet, but that doesn’t mean I should just throw litter around in the street and buy everything from Amazon and Walmart.

Large amounts of the population starving is not the morally correct option. Eating meat is many times more inefficient for resources used than eating plants. The infrastructure needed to sustainably mass farm vegetables for the whole world would be far less resource intensive than our current omnivorous factory farming system.

Your personal anecdote, assuming it’s true is completely included in my original critique. I specified factory farmed meat as the problem. I am fine with sustainable hunting if that’s your only option, because it requires genuine effort by the hunter, and it provides a generally less painful death for the animal vs what they would experience out in nature from any other predator. Also, there are some people who have medical situations where eating zero meat does cause them some issues. That being said, it’s a very small percentage of the population, and I suspect many folks (not necessarily you) are lying or mistaken that their health suffered when they gave up meat. Most of the time, it’s because they simply weren’t eating a balanced diet.

Eating less meat is better than eating more meat. Something is better than nothing, it’s good to cut down on meat consumption, even if you aren’t cutting it out completely.

Nothing we do is perfect, even the most hardcore vegan has slapped a mosquito or patronized a business that uses fossil fuels, etc. But it’s about trying to be better. Trying to equate the harms of the meat industry to harms that vegetarians/vegans cause is like trying to equate Ted Bundy with a kid who cheated on their math homework. Sure both did something bad, but one of those bad things is far more severe.

And as my personal anecdote: I am not vegan, I’m vegetarian. I get attacked by more hardcore vegans for eating honey and eggs. I have cut down my consumption of both, I drink almost exclusively non-dairy milk, and I bike and use public transport when I am able. But I’m not perfect, not possible to be.

If you eat factory meat, you’re doing something morally wrong that can’t be justified.

And the vast majority of people who get defensive about that, deep down know what they are doing is morally dubious at best, but they can’t/won’t admit it, so they lash out at vegans/vegetarians instead.

Not really a young child, but in my late teens my parents told me I had no curfew.

Their only rule was, lock the front door when you get back, and let one of them know I was home, even really late.

I would leave at 8pm in my truck, drive to pick up my friends, then hit various late night stops like Dairy Queen, Subway, Denny’s, etc. My friends and I would spend like an hour or two at each place, chilling, playing cards, eating snacks, chatting, and then go hit the next place.

Often we would all find some random parking lot and just chill there chatting and listening to music. I would frequently get back at 2-3am.

Many gen-Z kids don’t even drive. My spouse’s youngest sister is 20 and doesn’t have a drivers license. She hardly hangs out with her friends in person at all, same with most of them. They all just game together on Discord. I was a pretty mild mannered kid when I was that age, but they make me seem like a wild west bandit lol.

Also sleepovers apparently aren’t a thing any more?? A ton of parents are totally against them. I guess I kind of get it. Idk, I used to have sleepovers all the time with my friends. Pretty much everybody’s birthday party was a sleepover from age 13-17. I remember staying up super late, playing GameCube/XBox, playing truth or dare, and stuffing ourselves with candy and soda, super fun memories.

Yahoo! Lol

Man, I wish the Windows-only shop I support as a sysadmin “just worked.” I spend the majority of my time troubleshooting random Windows issues.

Driver issues, firmware issues, Teams breaking, Outlook breaking, SharePoint and OneDrive sync issues, Edge freezing/crashing, UI scaling issues, routine updates failing, random connectivity issues, random audio issues, printer issues…

I won’t lie, my Linux computers have random issues too, but way less often than the Windows machines I have to support every day. And when I encounter the Linux issues, I actually can fix them in a way that is permanent almost always.

Windows on the other hand, I typically fix and then the same problem starts happening again a few months later after an update, or the only “fix” that works is restarting the computer several times in a row.

To be fair to the Windows defenders, Windows 11 has easily been the worst for this in my experience. Windows 10 was more stable, and Windows 7 was even better. XP had lots of random issues, but back then you could still get under the hood pretty easily and make Windows do what you wanted.

Every personal device I have runs Linux and has for several years. I removed Windows completely from my life thank God, and I can’t imagine going back. I honestly would be more likely to stop using computers altogether before I went back to the horror show that is Windows/Microsoft.

An unorganized pile or collection of unrelated items.

“The top drawer of the desk was a shlarmle of buttons, marbles, pens, and rubber bands.”

Oh wow, didn’t even know that was a feature.

Yeah, and it’s free for a basic account + up to 100 devices, so plenty for most home lab needs.

Have you looked into Tailscale or an equivalent solution like Netbird?

You could set up a tailnet, create unique tags for each machine, add both machines to the tailnet, and then set up each machine’s network interface to only go through the tailnet.

Then you just use Tailscale’s ACLs with the tags to isolate those machines, making sure they can only talk to whatever central device(s) or services you want them to, but also stopping them from talking to or even seeing each other.

The traffic data, at least in my area of the US, is pretty good.

Road closures are a rough point for sure. Generally, Magic Earth does have them marked, but not always. And the map data is only updated once a month. So even if a new closure does show up on Magic Earth, it takes several weeks to a month.

This isn’t a terrible issue for me in my area, because I know the major roads and highways decently well, but when in other states or cities, it can be a problem.

That being said, it’s still about 80% accurate on the whole. And on rare occasion, it has actually had a closure marked correctly that Google Maps didn’t.

The #1 Google service/app that I used in the past was Google Maps. I’ve replaced it with Magic Earth for the last few years and it’s been great. It uses Open Street Map for its navigation data, handles addresses very well, has live crowd-sourced traffic and hazard data, and can record rolling footage if you want it to act like a dashcam.

It works on Android and iOS, and supports Apple watch and Android car play if you use those.

For email I use Protonmail, for Google drove I use Proton Drive and my own self hosted NAS. For browsing I use several different Firefox forks like Zen, Floorp, LibreWolf, etc. UnGoogled Chromium for the rare times that a website “needs” Chrome to run.

My phone runs GrapheneOS which works great.