shikitohno

Damn, I was coming here to say this. All I can add is that maybe sleep on your stomach with one of these, otherwise it could wake her up vibrating the mattress, since she sounds like a light sleeper.

You’re probably selling yourself short on the tech front and over-estimating the difficulty of installing something new. If you wanted to install something like Linux Mint or Fedora, the most complicated step would likely involve making a bootable thumbdrive to load it from. You could check that all your hardware works as intended (ie, can you connect to wifi, does sound play properly, can you watch a video on youtube, etc) without actually modifying your base OS, and if it does, the installations mostly hold your hand and you can get a perfectly sane setup just sticking to the defaults for most things and clicking next. There are plenty of options out there where you don’t need to be a command-line wizard to have a perfectly usable system.

I would just say that not everything needs to be a BIFL product, but there can be a tendency to push towards recommending only buying the best of everything. Like, I cook a lot at home, so it made sense to buy a $200 chef’s knife that I’ll get tons of use from and decent sharpening stones to maintain the edge. I listen to a ton of music, so I’ve dropped probably around $1500 into a pretty good pair of headphones, a DAC and an amp. On the other hand, I solder like once every couple of years, so getting my cheapo $40 Amazon special made more sense than dropping $500 on a much better soldering iron that offers features I simply don’t need and won’t benefit from. Sometimes good enough is exactly that, but it can be a nuance lost in these discussions.

Heck, even though I use them several hours a day, my hearing just isn’t that good for me to justify spending a substantial amount upgrading my current audio gear. Even if there is an improvement to be had, I’m not sure it would be something I could even notice, so I’m not tempted to go down the rabbit-hole of upgrading my DAC, amp or headphones, as it would be chasing diminishing returns that I’m not even sure would be perceptible for me at a simple biological level.

I wouldn’t jump to compare Reddit to Amazon. Amazon may have operated at a loss for a few years, but it seems pretty clear that Bezos did have a roadmap to make it a profitable business and made decisions to make progress towards that relatively early. Reddit has never been a profitable business and has no real way to get there that doesn’t alienate increasing numbers of their users. It’s basically in a race to cut a deal that makes spez some money off the whole thing before the bottom falls out from under it and someone else is left holding the bag.

Even when Amazon expanded into categories and took losses on them, Bezos was able to do so knowing that it would damage other businesses that didn’t have the deep backing needed to outlast him, eventually leading to many competing retailers in that sector shuttering and Amazon being able to raise prices and rake in money once there wasn’t really another competitor in a given field. He might be a massive scumbag, but spez is a massive scumbag and an absolutely inept businessman. For all his assholery, the best case scenario for his legacy is driving reddit into the ground and managing to foist it off on someone else before they realize it’s no longer worth anything.

It moves the discussion further to the right and legitimizes Republican talking points for the majority of people who will only hear a brief soundbite about this, rather than diving deep into the matter.

Besides, the GOP isn’t about to run out of bogeymen to trot out just because they could get what they want on the border. They can take it as a compromise and try to push things further down the line. Or they can decide this is good enough for now, and start railing against something else. Union membership rising being a Chinese plot to infiltrate the US and install a Communist dictatorship, so we better write some new laws to enable even more union busting. Free school lunches for kids from poor families turning them gay AND communist by getting them hooked on the government teat early. Woke public libraries turning kids trans by letting them check out books that don’t universally demonize it, so better put some sort of draconian funding limits on them. They’ll find something else, don’t worry.

The way you’re framing it and Congressional Democrats approach these things only work if the Republicans aren’t completely shameless, above doing things that should completely destroy any remaining vestiges for their voters, but this has been disproven time and time again by the actions of the GOP. If they think they’ll have half a chance, they’ll wring out even more concessions on this front from the Democrats by pretending to offer something they immediately renege on, just to leave the Democrats going “Aw, shucks, fooled me again. I thought you said you weren’t going to do this again.”

See, this

I care within some limits. Using a phone I don’t like aesthetically is not in that limits.

and this

No no, I would prefer privacy.

are in direct opposition. They are irreconcilable positions. It’s your phone, it’s okay for you to decide you won’t compromise on aesthetics on your own devices, if that’s what’s important to you. Just own it and be prepared for pushback when you’re commenting on an article about a privacy-focused OS and using this as the basis of your criticism.

I’ve had bad experiences with all of them, it’s just the most consistent with FedEx. Out of the major services, I prefer USPS and DHL, by far, but even they still fumble things from time to time. FedEx has just been a consistent pain to deal with, across 3 addresses at this point. Plus, I happen to get off work and get home right around when FedEx comes through my neighborhood, so I’ve had the pleasure of seeing the lady that handles this area literally hurl every package small enough for her to be physically capable of doing so the 8 feet from the sidewalk to peoples’ front porches. I buy a lot of small, delicate things. Do other couriers toss stuff around? Probably at some point. But I know it’s a 100% guarantee it’ll happen with this lady, so I’ll take the “probably, at some point,” over a sure thing.

If they don’t deliver something to me and determine I need to go pick it up, their delivery hubs are also the least convenient to reach. One is across my county, the other halfway across the neighboring county, Both are at least 90 minute trips each way on public transportation, with a healthy walk between the last stop and their location. At least UPS drops things off a 15 minute walk away, and the post office is probably a 10 minute walk.

This is still kind of reading like “Look, I know ‘pretty phones over privacy’ is a bad take, so no, but really, yeah.”

Basically all the positives you’ve mentioned have been aesthetic, with one you even admit is worse to actually use, but which you prefer the look of.

Why on earth would I want to shop somewhere that I can guarantee will ship with FedEx? I’ll actively avoid places that only offer FedEx shipping as it is.

Yep, Gypsy-Rose Blanchard. She’s gotten parole and been released now.

So does Qbittorrent, if you’re unaware.

That avoiding systemd is even a choise is nuts

I really want to know what the crossover is on people who know what systemd is, much less have any actual reason to decide they wish to actively avoid it, and those who would find this the best way of determining their next distro. That has to be a vanishingly small group of people.

If you assume they’re all 13" wide laptops and stacked them on their side to get maximum height per unit, you’d still fall 305,752 km short of the average lunar distance. You normally only see this level of hyperbole in the estimated street value cops give for drugs they seize, pretty impressive.

Maybe users wouldn’t have felt the need for adblockers if ad agencies hadn’t made them increasingly obnoxious, intrusive and pernicious. They just couldn’t leave a fraction of a penny on the table and made sites more and more unusable without adblockers, so screw 'em. They can reap what they’ve sown.

I haven’t really tested the limits on it, but so far at least one therapy session a week. Haven’t needed any inpatient care or anything beyond this, thus far, so I can’t comment on that.

Mental health care is also often just excluded from coverage. My current job is the first time in my life I’ve had insurance that would cover therapy rather than be like “Look, we gave you one 60 minute session with our free crisis line, what more do you want? If you really need it, it’s only $450 a session if it’s that important.”

My hard drive on my laptop died in college and I needed to get a paper written in a few days. I didn’t money to get a new Windows license and Fedora was free and had a live disc I could burn to install off of in the school’s computer lab without getting in trouble. I distro hopped a bit since then, but never went back to Windows. Things worked and it wasn’t as hard as people made it sound.

No evangelizing, I just use my computer.

Could be for the sort of awful filters so frequently employed by schools that just block content based on matching a list of banned words exactly, like I used to have in high school years ago. We couldn’t visit a page on breast cancer without an admin override while learning about cancer in the school library as part of an assignment, all because their awful content filter flagged the page as porn for having the word breast in the page.

They are the biggest group, but it’s a pretty diverse group with a wide range of beliefs. It covers the whole gamut from Evangelicals who declare anything that has ever made someone smile to be of the devil and the King James Bible to be the literal word of god to the hippy dippy churches that are cool with gay marriage and will say the whole bible is just metaphorical, so come play guitar with them at coffee hour before the church goes on a nature hike to do yoga and meditate on top of a local mountain. If you consider the denominations individually, Roman Catholicism is a larger denomination than the biggest Protestant denomination, at least according to Wikipedia.

Also worth considering how many people in all camps don’t really practice their professed faith and just keep saying they identify as follower of whatever creed anyway.