Hearing a song I liked and missing the opportunity to listen to it again later is not a serious issue, just another piece of straw on the camels back.

My point is that a lot of little inconveniences add up to a significant life-style change, especially when the end-user is supposed to choose that life-style change.

Just a few weeks ago I used a dumbphone for 2 days in the US.

During that time

• I was called for work while out and the caller expected me to review their email and respond while on the phone with them. This would have been easy with a smartphone, but instead I had to go home, review their email, then call them back the next day. They were annoyed by the inconvenience and delay.
• I was called to schedule a doctors appointment while out, I needed to call the office back when I got home because I could not check my calendar without a smartphone.
• I was working on a project and wanted to take a photos for memories / share when explaining why the project was taking so long. I needed to leave the project site, go home, grab my camera, return to the site, take the photos, upload them to my computer, then email them.
• I wanted to log in to an account while away home, but I was unable to access my password manager or email without my smart phone.
• My family went out to eat and I needed to borrow one of their smartphones because I could not scan the QR code for the menu and the restaurant did not have paper menus available.
• I needed to deposit a check, so I would have driven nearly 20 miles round trip if I had not used remote deposit on my smartphone instead.
• I wanted to listen to an audiobook from the library, but I need to use the overdrive / libby app in order to do this.
• I heard a song on the radio and I could not use Shazam to identify it.
• I needed to display a ticket for an event, so I had a friend save my ticket on their smartphone and they used their phone for both of us.
• I needed to read a smart home monitor, but the only interface available was a smartphone app.
• Discord kept crashing on my desktop, so I used my smartphone instead.

I gave up using a dumbphone after only 2 days because smartphones are integrated so deeply into modern society that it felt prohibitively difficult to function without one where I live in the United States. Everywhere a person goes it is assumed they have a smartphone on them, so anyone without a smartphone needs to find workarounds for simple tasks and is forced to navigate dozens of inconveniences every day.

I am spoiled and addicted to the convenience that smartphones provide, but my experience persuaded me that systemic changes, instead of individual choices, are necessary to ultimately solve these problems. Evidently, it can not be expected that a significant portion of the public will choose to abstain from the convenience smartphones offer even when they are educated about the harms caused by smartphones. Therefore, the only solution I can imagine is regulation to mitigate those harms, and humane technology design that solves the problems of profit-maximizing technology design.

Good luck, smartphones are integrated so deeply into modern society that it can feel impossible to get by without one.

A better solution is government regulation of the advertising industry, and free software alternatives that are designed using humane technology principles.

The reason for the opioid epidemic is not because the medical system has clamped down on prescriptions.

Pharmaceutical companies lied to doctors and patients about how addictive opioids are. Then, a series of studies concluded that many people are living with untreated chronic pain; so prescribing opioids more frequently was advised by medical associations and public health authorities.

It was only a matter of time until the truth about opioids’ addictiveness became obvious and undeniable. Only THEN did the “whole” medical system start clamping down on opioids.

The Sackler Family (owners of Perdue Pharma) directly caused the deaths of millions of innocent people by misleading doctors, patients, and health authorities. The Sackler Family is spending millions of dollars to launder their reputation and prevent the public from associating them with the opioid epidemic and the millions of lives they ruined for profit.

Look into Nextcloud calendar, you can use the default calendar application on your phone / desktop while offline and it will automatically sync with your Nextcloud when connected to the internet. Hetzner Storage Share is an inexpensive Nextcloud host with calendar enabled by default.

SSHFS is by far the easiest and most secure-by-default way I’ve found to mount a remote storage share. I have donated a little bit to this project before; I really hope a stable maintainer can take over because this is a critically useful piece of software!

Companies have brands, people have personalities.

I have read too many books evangelizing hustle culture, and I have listened to too many MBAs preaching “selling yourself” by “promoting your personal brand”. It’s bullshit, I’m a human being - I don’t want to sell myself, or spend countless hours crafting a narcissistic professional persona.

All I want is meaningful work, a modest livelihood, and a stable community. None of which requires fame, and it doesn’t require tracking my every keystroke. Exploitative tech companies are so desperate to chase infinite growth that they will sacrifice and erode everything that makes life worth living in pursuit of profit.

Is it really any wonder that people just want to use the internet without being data-mined, judged, and manipulated?

Unfortunately, this is old news and not as exciting as it sounds. Doing a search on Youtube yields videos from almost 10 years ago with ordinary people filming time lapses of mealworms / superworms digesting styrofoam.

One problem is that it takes a large number of the worms to digest a small amount of plastic, they take a long time to do it, and they do not fully digest or absorb the plastic on a single pass through their digestive system. The worms must eat their own poop multiple times before the microplastics are sufficiently broken down enough to be released into a natural environment.

A diet of styrofoam is also (probably) unhealthy for the worms, and it is unclear if there is a safe and effecient way to dispose of the dead worms.

The researchers are interested in isolating and synthesizing the enzyme that allows the worms to break down styrofoam, I think this is a great start and definitely deserves grant money, but even in a hypothetical scenario where commercial styrofoam composting is viable today it would not be enough to solve the problem of styrofoam pollution. Reducing (and ultimately eliminating) the use of disposable plastics is the only viable way to address pollution.

I’m not sure if this is exactly the sort of solution you need, but check out Loomio. It is open source and self-hostable.

Rclone is the best program I have used for any cloud storage needs, you should be able to mount your google drive using rclone. It is a CLI program, but it is very easy and intuitive to use. As an added bonus you can skip cryptomator and use rclone’s built in encryption.

A great book on the topic is Brotopia by Emily Chang.

This is exactly the type of info I was hoping to find, thank you!

I found only one Low-Income Designated CDFI in my area. I think there’s a real void here. I need to find a volunteer opportunity or another way to connect with financial leaders in my area to learn more about my local credit unions and maybe help direct more funds towards serving the community.

It’s kind of disappointing that there aren’t better options in my area, but it is also reassuring to know I’m not just cynical! Thank you!

Check out https://frame.work/ it’s a pretty high-end and completely modular laptop.

I am not aware of any crypto consensus algorithm that is not regressive. This is an argument against all cryptocurrencies and blockchains, not just Proof of Stake.

What has proven far more equitable than any decentralized consensus algorithm is a fiat currency issued and controlled by an institution accountable to a democratic constituency.

Proof of stake is fundamentally regressive. Literally, whomever has the most tokens also has the most governance weight. It is basically “1 dollar, 1 vote” rather than “1 person, 1 vote”.

There’s https://www.mercuryos.com/

Mercury OS is a speculative vision designed to question the paradigms governing human-computer interaction today.

If you’re wanting to self-host a cloud service, then Nextcloud is second to none. You can use NextCloud together with Cryptomator for easy client-side encryption, but If you need automatic syncing look into rclone instead.

If you are planning to use this for backups, check out borg backup and vorta(easy to use GUI for borg).

Unfortunately, despite forced interoperability being a recommendation by the FTC and a senate committee, the judge in this case has already limited the scope of the case to exclude anything regarding interoperability.

Currently I’m using VS Code because VS Codium does not have a native M1 Mac build, and electron apps running through Rosetta 2 saps my laptop battery at least twice as fast as native apps. I could build VS Codium myself following this page, but I would rather continue using Homebrew to manage as many packages as possible.

I’ve been considering learning Vim, is it more productive and worth it to learn in 2022?

At least in my circles and where I live it’s pretty normal to shit on mainstream apps. Most people still use them, but if my opinion of those platforms comes up I never feel judged. In fact, since the social dilemma came out and after Facebook’s most recent controversies and name change I’ve heard more and more people speaking poorly of social-media, smart phones, and algorithms in general.

In my experience it’s almost as if using social-media is perceived the same as smoking was in the 80s-90s: everyone knows it’s terrible for you, but it’s normal. Now, in conversation there’s almost a prestige in saying “I don’t use Facebook” that causes people who do use Facebook to immediately justify using it by saying things like “Yeah, I only use it to keep in touch with family”, or “I don’t check it very often”.

Many of my friends and family half-joke about their addiction to their phones and apps, it seems pretty widely recognized now.

I don’t believe alternative apps, services, and platforms are necessarily better, so if I bring up the fediverse it’s usually in the context of me advocating for government forcing interoperability between social media sites to weaken the tech-giant oligopoly. Most people’s response is basically “huh, I didn’t even know that was possible”.

For using Linux I used to catch flak from my friends when trying to play games with them, but we don’t play games nearly as often anymore and anything we do play generally works on Linux now, so I don’t get teased anymore. Amongst every single non-techie friend I have they could not possible care less that I use Linux.