I don’t know how important this is to users of Vivaldi, and I don’t know how good Vivaldi can make their blocker by middle of next year, but this may force me to Firefox. Or maybe someone makes a local proxy like in the old days to do ad blocking Idk.
If youtu.be premium is actually ad free (and I can still run sponsor block) I can see paying for it. I get a lot of value out of it and can’t really justify doing a lot of work to avoid paying.
It’s fascinating how normies will figure out a VPN to use shitty social media but not figure out more open systems or alternative sites.
Windows post 7 was and remains annoying and getting worse all the time. So I wanted an OS without telemetry and one that I could control the updates on. I also work with Linux a lot at work. I use Alma 9 for a LTS release. Don’t have to mess with it much.
I have found that you usually have to go to a specialist forum or the like and spend a few months reading it and asking questions etc. Rarely has a community steered me wrong. However they also usually point to expensive or specialty products. Mass market is usually mediocre at best.
Sometimes though there are deals like Harbor Freight hand tools or their higher end power tools.
I am in NY upstate but travel around the east coast semi frequently, and was kinda thinking about online options too.
This seems like something the optimize charging tool could manage though. Starting the day at 90 percent or 80 percent or whatever is crazy to me - why am I going backwards to needing to babysit my phone when it’s charging, and why would anyone want to charge their phone when they want to be using it vs when they’re asleep?
That seems a strange definition to me - so if a boxer gets back up after losing the match, well his opponent didn’t beat him in that fight?
I hear this a lot, but what would beating the Taliban involve? While the US was there, the Taliban was at best in hiding, it was not holding territory. If you mean removing the very idea of the Taliban from the world? That is both hard to do and arguably also a genocide, at least a cultural one. The US has been good at that, but it’s also frowned on in the current world - see Gaza headlines.
This is also why I’d suggest it’s kind of impossible to both not be the worst of the colonialist systems and stop terrorism (and it’s kind of unclear that even the colonial cultural suppression / conversion / excesses / crimes actually would stop terrorism).
Gaming - too much hassle for me, and I just wasn’t even using my PS4 much. I don’t know if I’d call it outgrowing it exactly though… this one is borderline to me.
What I have outgrown is cable news like CNN etc. Or they went way to clickbait for me. Maybe both happened. Similar with the NYT, they keep getting things wrong that they just shouldn’t and then the more history I read the less I really trust their reporting. The more boring the news source, like AP, the more likely it is to be accurate from what I can tell.
Similar things happened with certain influencers / podcasters. As I learned more I just found they were continually making the same mistakes on things that they should have known better / learned better by now. Sam Harris was a big one, and I narrowly avoided the beginnings of Brett Weinsteins Dark Horse and now it’s completely off the rails.
Certain “nonfiction” authors followed the same path - as I got older I realized how made up the Ancient Aliens thing was, I think I bought in hard in my late teen years and then when I was 25 I had an epiphany that it just has to be crap or more people would believe it, and when I re looked at the “evidence” I was like - oh, well if you just go by the book, sure it sounds compelling - but if you search alternative explanations all of a sudden you’re like, oh yea, that is far more plausible.
Consumer Reports happened about a decade ago. The reason was I always was a little annoyed by their biases that they didn’t really make clear. What really killed it for me though was comparing laptops primarily on screen size. Looking back now, it’s a little less ridiculous than I initially thought, but to not have separate Mac and Windows categories let to the Mac winning over the windows competitor when the Mac was like 3x the price. This all seemed like a crazy result to anyone who knew anything about computers, especially like in 2014 when for something like 95% of the population, the Mac would not run 99% of the software they could possibly want to run, or know about. A great build quality, performance and size doesn’t matter if the computer doesn’t do the computation you need.
In the last 3 years non anime TV shows - mostly because of a mix of already been done better, no FOMO with streaming, and because of all the channels etc no water cooler talk about the 3 shows that were on last night / this week / whatever dragging me to be up to date. Now that there’s so many choices, I don’t have to take “mildly entertaining” as my bar for watching a show, it’s way way higher now. And as the individual shows get longer on streaming for many - it’s harder to set aside 55-90 minutes depending on show. Even 42 minutes is harder as more is going on now for me. I think the only reason I do more Anime is it’s ~20 minute chunks, and I have less experience with it (for half my life I didn’t know it existed, and for the next quarter it was kind of hard to come by) so I am just starting to get more picky about the shows and the “this was done better before”. Konosuba for instance is IMHO a worse version of Slayers series in a lot of ways.
Magazines - I just got tired of both trying to keep up, the rising costs, and then the increase in ads so there was so little there there, along with what to do when I was done with the weeks / months issue? I get a lot of that kind of content now from online anyway.
Physical books - similar. Unless I want to get a collectors edition for the object, the content is much better as an e-book IMO, cheaper, less paper waste, less piles of stuff taking up space etc. I’ve really come back around on the novel contents though - lots of bang for you buck in time vs dollar spent, way more variety in stories than ever get made into TV shows, can be stored locally easily on the device so you’re not burning data like with streaming… Easy to keep place with a decent app, easy to read for 3 minutes or 3 hours.
This is so hard to specify because it really depends on a lot of factors. It’s usually more like there are specific models that are really worth getting, or pricepoints or brands depending.
Like, I don’t think cordless drill/drivers that are sub $100 are really worth it if you’re ever going to do more than screw into pre drilled or pre made screw holes. But a Bosch (blue), Dewalt, Milwaukee, Makita, etc are all pretty good. They’re just usually over $100.
You’re right about blenders - I never had a use for Oster blenders, but a BlendTec in 2008 changed my life (well, not really, but did do things that I have uses for at least).
Ohh, pressure cookers - I don’t want to risk it exploding, so I avoid the $70 and under crowd. Actually, I went Kunh Rikon which is pretty expensive, but also really hard to screw up (like 6 layers of safeties), and easy to get refurb parts for seals and such.
Lots of safety equipment - there’s all sorts of … “fake” in that it won’t actually work stuff at super cheap prices. I’m thinking like laser safety glasses or chain saw safety pants. Mid range is def worth it there.
Dishwashers IMHO. I’ve used cheap ones before and they clean poorly and are extremely loud. Depending on your house, you won’t want to be in the next room to them. OTOH, Bosch higher end ones, like the 800 series, cost a pretty penny, but are darn near silent and actually live up to the washing claims - shit just comes clean in them. I’m usually surprised in a good way. Oh, and that third tray for silverware - I’m never going back to the basket (though lots of brands have that now).
Stand Mixers - especially if you want to get into bread or attachments for grinding things. I strongly recommend the Bosch Universal Plus. That thing is like a power tool for the kitchen. We’ve abused it for over 10 years and it’s not slowing down. I know many people online who have had them for 30 years.
Vacuums - look into Sebo.
I mean, to the extent politically we supported the Afganistan and Iraq war, this isn’t much different as far as I can tell. Much of the US is pretty pro war for some reason.
I only compliment people if they’ve done something impressive in some way. Rarely do I interact with strangers in any situation for that to occur. The limited situations like someone’s appearance or clothing beings stylish or something just seems like it would come off creepy to say so I won’t do that.
With people I know I tend to be pretty brutally honest so it’s rare I compliment them, but when I do they know it means something.
Probably many others I just don’t recall
I’ve seen some sketchy motels in my time, which is why I stopped staying in them. Hotels, especially major chains tend to be decent to great quality, and are usually cost competitive with AirBnB according to several news stories and lemmy threads over the last 10 months or so. And they have less weird requirements about you doing bed stripping / cleaning before you leave.
Well, it’s harder now. Back in the day I migrated people to text secure then over to signal. So it was just an upgrade to their texting. Now that Signal dropped texting it’s harder for regular people to use it. There was a large debate and the people wanting to bring in more new people lost.
Today I “sell signal” for people who want to share pictures (SMS never works with AT&T resellers and cheap phones), people who want to get my pictures when I’m out of the country, and people who want my “technical support” for media.
But there are some people who won’t get on Signal and they just miss out on my trip pics they want to see. That’s on them.
The question here is just is a self organized posse better than the state police? I guess there’s a reason that kind of went away in the west as it became less “wild”. And we see what self protection or self enforcement leads to in many reports in the US. It’s differently crappy / violent but not obviously better.
The biggest issue I see is self serving fuckwads don’t go away. They’ll import themselves a la Putin if they think they can get away with it. They’ll create their own institutions a la the Mafia if there’s nothing else.
The second problem is there are large groups of people who want to be under some Authority to the extent they get populist / fascist stuff going or invent ones like in Religion.
I just don’t think people “freed from institutional authority” are inherently going to not just recreate it, probably worse…
The problem I have always seen is how do you deal with bad actors in general? It always eventually comes down to force.
No police or military just means that eventually some one will come in and take over.
Idk the Republicans seem to really want fascism.