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.

Ehh. That’s like accident billboards. I maintain that most people don’t know they can block ads, and a large part of the masses who have heard of it think it’s complicated or too hard for them.

With ad blocking I have a small tension that if I know a sort of thing exists, I presumably will find it when I search for it. So I don’t want another vacuum ad.

If I don’t know something exists then I have to stumble on it somehow.

The bigger problem would be if they didn’t block their own ads. I honestly didn’t even know they did ads so my blocking, of which they’re a part, apparently is working.

Usenet is hurt a lot by takedown notices unfortunately. So lots of older popular stuff doesn’t work. That said, things like Anime or something that isn’t given a takedown seem to be on there about forever. The server speed is a benefit for sure.

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.

Idk, I think Frieren isn’t about the action, and all the stuff about elves and maturing, and what is really important etc is a breath of fresh air to me. And has just been interesting and different to me.

I think maybe Lina Inverse from Slayers. But picking a favorite is hard.

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.

Try Vivaldi, the spiritual successor of the original Opera team.

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?

I looked at both, and went with fastmail because at the time it had a shared calendar you could use, which I do with my family to track events and do scheduling. Fastmail is standard commercial privacy though. Good enough for me, but no where near Proton Mail from what I understand.

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).

I don’t think I understand your questions to be honest. I’d strongly prefer to keep democracy, and to reverse the course of our system so it’s getting more democratic. I’d prefer not trying to make the point being cruel to outgroups or anyone.

Specifically I would never make the case that we’d lose democracy from trying to do any of the things you listed as “or”. The “Might lose democracy” is about Trump’s actual statements about wanting to be a dictator, and the republican party that seems to be all for that.

The first 3 questions are to congress or maybe the supreme court - Biden tried to do loan forgiveness, it wouldn’t pass congress, and the supreme court struck down his ability to do it in an executive order. This is not something that Biden can change, it’s something that needs more people to vote in democratic congressional representatives. So these questions seem completely irrelevant to me in terms of the presidential election. I’m in NY, we vote in democratic senators and a lot of democratic representatives. I’m not sure what else you’re asking me to do.

The last 3 questions are more salient to Biden, and I personally would not have done any of that. I don’t know how the government can actually block a strike if the people were really serious they could all quit and let the companies deal with that.

If I was president knowing only what I currently know now - I’d have told the companies to fricken pay up, not say the strike can’t happen. I’d channel that FDR meme where he hauled the one company away from the person not coming to an agreement so stuff kept running.

I would tout federal workers working remotely as both something good for labor, and good for the environment with less car pollution, and potential for a broader recruiting base. If I was feeling snarky I might also try and throw in it might let the government recruit more people from low cost of living areas and save money.

On the Israel issue I’d probably throw it to congress at this point. I just don’t really know what the stance to take is because I don’t know enough about our alliance terms, the strategic goals, etc.

I have to point out - theres presumably a lot the President / Government knows that I do not about each issue. There may be things that if I knew it, I’d change my position. One thing I think Biden needs to do is get on TV or whatever and explain to people why he’s sending arms to Israel at this point, and why he’s not strongly pressuring Israel to get out of Gaza and stop this war.

Given the above - I’m not really sure what compromise you’re talking about that I’m “not willing to make”? I didn’t choose Biden - no one else was running in the primaries that I’m aware of. It’s not that people didn’t hear that no one was excited about Biden running again, it’s that whoever makes the political decisions didn’t choose anyone else even hearing that. And TBH, politically, other than maybe John Stewart (as I’ve said elsewhere, and who they obviously didn’t get), I don’t know anyone who’s even as well known as Biden on the Democratic side that also would have any chance in a general election. The swing voters who decide elections seem to be very resistant to anyone who’s not an old white man. I wish we didn’t have the electoral college that even makes swing states TBH, but it’s what we have to go by. Pretending that it’s not is not engaging with reality.

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.

Biden isn’t the one saying he wants to be dictator, that seems to be Trump. As far as I am aware, we needed to run a different candidate in the primary, that’s where you push people to come more to the left. Going hard right because Biden wasn’t left enough for you is kind of insane to me. That’s all.

Do I love what the Biden admin does 100%? No.

But you seem to be saying you’re rather have Trump than Biden, which is a position someone can take, but a very strange one for someone who’s left of Biden. To me it’s like saying It’s 70 degrees in here and I’m cold. One person says I will set the thermostat to 72 degrees, the other says I’ll set it to 60 degrees, and you would like it to be 75 degrees. Because the 72 degrees isn’t hot enough, you’d prefer the 60 degrees. Weird way to express your preferences to me.

The thing I don’t understand here is just - do you expect Trump to go pass BBB, forgive student loans etc? In the primaries, sure, go out and vote for more progressive candidates. But if I’m asked if I want a tooth filling or a root canal, I don’t bitch about the filling material and hope to go get a root canal.

Like, practically, what do you expect to get better if Biden loses?

I mean, I suppose there’s always potential. It’s just that there were 2 seasons already, so not only does season 1 have to do good enough to warrant a sequel, we need season 2 to also do well enough, and then we get something “new”.