Amen to that. Everyone has their own balance point, Calyx seems to hit that for many.

Calyx also comes with MicroG, right? So mitigates many problems with a bit more Google.

And Fairphone 4 here, partly for Divest (had it on Oneplus 6 before this and just used to it), partly because of a good deal for a barely used one.

There’s also the Lineage-based DivestOS that attempts to keep up with more security updates, and relocking the bootloader in phones that support it.

https://divestos.org/

This, so much. You majored in philosophy, you know more about absurdism than I do. You also know there’s no such thing as “being ahead” or “being behind” in life, just being closer or further to your own values.

You’ve got an approximate 30-40 years of good cognition and physical ability left, and soon after you’ll die and nothing will have mattered anyway. “Existed safely until s/he died” is one possible path to take, but it sounds like you want permission to stop being scared. Go for it, the world doesn’t care.

Two recent examples from Finland, just numbers, you decide if it’s a little or a lot.

When phase 1 of the “Länsimetro” subway extension from Helsinki city center to adjascent area and to the nearby suburbs was completed in 2018, it had cost 1188M€ for a 13.5 km route in challenging terrain, and 8 stations. To the best I could find, phase 2 completed in 2023 with 7.5km more route and 5 more stations, and cost 1070M€. This includes the infrastructure, not the vehicles.

The Tampere tram system (started from scratch) opened in 2021. Phase 1 route length was 15 km and 23 pairs of stops, as well as 10 new bridges and such, and cost 274M€+82M€ for the vehicles. Phase 2 is 95% done and 92% paid for, and currently the 7km, 9 stop(pairs) project is estimated to come to a total of 100M€+39M€ for the vehicles.

https://www.lansimetro.fi/kustannukset/ https://yle.fi/a/3-8727469 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Länsimetro https://www.tampereenratikka.fi/tampereen-ratikka/ratikan-kustannukset/

Anything to excuse our unhealthy diets, huh.

You’re aware of low-volume HIIT? Max 15 minutes per day, evidence-based for cardiovascular health same as “normal” exercise. Not for building muscle afaik, and finding your own among the many more-or-less tested ones can be a chore. The popular “Scientific 7-minute workout” and it new versions would probably be a good place to start, and are targeted more for building strength afaik.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37939367/ https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/the-scientific-7-minute-workout/

Edit: Oh, and to answer your question, I don’t. I do move about by bike and play BeatSaber because it’s fun, otherwise decomposing.

Yea, absolutely, hence the approximated 4-6% return on investment - some years more, some years negative.

There is this apartment that I’ve been eyeing for a while, and I’ve seriously considered becoming one of those loathed landlords myself. Feels like trying to do right by the apartment and by a tenant would be putting out more good to the world than a passive stock fund, you know? So been reading up on it quite a bit lately.

If you get an investment house you plan to keep for 20+ years, those in-demand areas change (here’s hoping the next areas to lose their lustre will be the car-dependent suburbia).

“Sold it for a much higher price without ever using or modifying it.” Proper upkeep over several years counts as “modifying it” in this context IMHO.

I think most of you are underestimating the cost of housing maintenance. We had some bad luck and a couple of structurally necessary renos were bigger than initially thought, or didn’t address the issue as well as we hoped, requiring new renos. In the last 20 years we’ve paid the cost of our townhouse apartment once over, easy. And now the bathroom, kitchen, and flooring could use an upgrade (25-50 years old), which is again expensive. In that time its value has risen maybe 50%, not quite keeping pace with local inflation.

Not complaining, we bought it for living in and it’s been great for that, and now that everything is at the end of its lifespan is a good time to really make it ours. But house prices aren’t rising insanely everywhere, house upkeep isn’t free (there are always “modifications”), and at least here the average ROI for being a landlord is abt 4-6%, same as stocks lately, and that’s assuming no major surprises.

OMG is the cat okay?

Hysterectomy is a big, risky and expensive surgery. Just snip the men at 35 (for average couple age difference), same panic effect but way less expensive.

/s just to make sure, super bad idea probably breaching multiple human rights agreements either way

Everything I know of Australian energy policies I learned from Honest Government Ads, so correctly accused.

I don’t know how the Play Store version does push notifications, but Molly, and I think the apk from their site, work just fine on degoogled phones without Google services.

I don’t remember what name it has, but missing it breaks push notifications on most “normal” apps. Many FLOSS ones are coded to have their own methods that don’t transmit data to Google, and it appears at least some versions of Signal do too.

My threat model doesn’t include state level actors taking an active interest in me, so for my purposes Signal would be secure enough, if only I got people to adopt even it.

We built our own civilization! With blackjack and hookers! And world class (or well above world class, since average world class tends to suck) cycling infrastructure!

Would have been great 20 years ago.

spaghetti monster

But does it fly?

It’s not even limited to the US. In Finland it’s called “pilluralli”, “pussy-rally”, and the general associations are of 18-19-year-olds of lower socioeconomical class.

Same has happened here. While I am proud of the younger, more skittish one, it’s also an indication of the old matriarch diminishing. I’ll never be ready to lose her.