I hate investing

Mutual Funds / Index funds are your best bet. (Look for descriptive words like “broad”, “mix” or “full market” in the description).

If you can, pick out one named “target retirement YYYY” with YYYY being within a few years of whatever year you will turn 67.

It will automatically follow investing best practices based on your current age - agrressive earlier, and very cautious later.

I’m not familiar with all the details of how it works

Perfect recipe to get ripped off. (Most people I know say that insurance/investment combined products suck. I’ve heard some disagreement whether they’re just a bad deal, or such a bad deal they ought to be a crime.)

I can’t prove anything, but:

• There’s evidence that billionaires are taking much more than they earn, and that we (everyone else) would be dramatically better off without them (whether we tax them away or… Come to some other compromise.)
• Billionaires own most media outlets and social media sites, even those these don’t actually make much money compared to everything else the billionaires own. This makes some people ask why they bother…
• There’s a noticable tendency in billionaire owned media to focus daily on divisive topics. The specific topic changes, but the divisiveness continues.
• There is history of powerful authoritarians investing heavily in divisive propaganda, primarily to break apart and distract groups of people who could overthrow them.

What I have laid out is not proof that today’s billionaires are directing their staff to verbally attack minorites at any opportunity.

But it certainly is something to think about next time a vicious rumor about a minority group comes along.

Would you accept “under-regulated capitalism” or “capitalism treated as an ideal rather than a tool” as a more specific root cause?

the need to constantly change jobs to move ahead financially also keeps people on unsteady ground with relationships.

That’s a great point.

A college class introduced me to “The Birth of a Nation” aka The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan

Did you enjoy it?

Fuck no. It is a deeply messed up racist pile of shit.

It certainly opened my eyes to it’s place in history.

Since the film itself is best left to the trash heap of forgotten awfulness, here’s two points from Wikipedia that feel worth remembering:

• “the most reprehensibly racist film in Hollywood history”
• was the first motion picture to be screened inside the White House (for President Woodrow Wilson)

Put any person who has zero computer experience in front of a windows computer or Linux computer and I doubt they would say the windows computer just works and the Linux one doesn’t.

I did this experiment on my own kids. They find Linux more usable, and find it hard to believe people tolerate Windows.

There’s also some indoctrination involved.

But they have access to both, and they prefer Linux. I think that the “Windows is genuinely easier” argument doesn’t hold any water anymore.

There is such a law, but many of us feel that Microsoft has proven malice a few times, when it comes to open standards.

Can I find a broken window and start sanding it with sandpaper, as an extreme example?

Yes, provided you have a way to polish it back to transparent again, after changing the shape.

Linux Mint is so nice.

I would turn off “Secure Boot” in BIOS before doing the upgrade.

It officially works, but can throw in unnecessary challenges - and Mom probably isn’t traveling with national secrets next week anyway.

That’s a pretty good description of what GrapheneOS does with the sandboxed Google services.

I have found that the only apps that don’t work well with Samdboxed Google services are ones that work hard to invasively probe their runtime environment.

Thwy usually fall into these three categories:

• Bank apps that do it “for my safety”. Nevermind that a website version exists for attackers to target without the same (dubious, invasive) “protections”.
• Streaming apps that do it “because this paid subscriber might be some kind of dark web pirate and we need to protect our content from being uploaded to the dark web one more time.”
• Apps whose developers are shitty at writing code for memory management. But GrapheneOS has good options to allow these to run, anyway.

Do you have access to credit unions?

The GrapheneOs team is quite particular about hardware.

I would gladly purchase a phone that came preloaded with LineageOS.

“Better than we have now.” often wins over waiting for perfection.

CoMaps is quite nice.

There are also still companies selling navigation devices that mount in a car windshield, assuming the car doesn’t already have one built in.

Pro tip - those navigation devices also often have an accident camera that records if it feels an impact - which is a good idea anyway.

GMS apps work fine. The only ones that don’t work are ones that act invasively enough to notice they are sandboxed and disable themselves.

Mostly bank apps. Which is irritating, since they all have mobile friendly websites that work fine without needing to know my location and everything else about my phone.

Google has made it extremely hard to degoogle.

Just remember that there are no nice reasons why they are working this hard to keep your phone captive.

We can argue about how bad it will get, but there’s only worse things coming from this effort.

We can take action. We can grab the die that Joel McHale has tossed into the air.

I text my friends. I assume that everyone else just thinks I died.

The move between seeing “your brother in law took the kids to the zoo” to “your brother in law liked this trash article” was such a jarring transition.

It was awful.

“Oh, look. He’s a little bit racist. Now I get to know that. Thanks Facebook.”

Exactly! If I’m not clutching the mute button for dear life, an I really having a relaxing movie night?

Yes. It’s been a few years since I countered a video game that didn’t have separate volume sliders for dialog, for music, and for all others sounds.