RandomPancake
About 3 months ago I was banned for saying “People have the right to use like force to defend themselves against an attacker, including using deadly force. It’s not a happy outcome. But neither is being a victim.” It was a comment on an article about a homeowner who killed a burglar, so context is king. /r/news banned me and reported me for “threatening violence”. Then I got an account warning (whatever that means) by Reddit.
When I contacted the admin team, I got a ban for abusive reporting.
%reddit%.com is now blocked in my DNS. Fuck those fucks, they don’t even deserve my ad revenue from searches.
Microsoft: “Windows 12 is free but all our great built-in apps like Candy Crush, Linkedin, and MegaStomp are unavailable without a subscription.”
Me: “Yup.”
Microsoft: “But if you don’t subscribe, you’ll miss out on hot celebrity gossip and the latest fashion news! And you won’t be able to use Bing AI to find great deals on amazing products from our trusted corporate partners!”
Me: “Sounds good, thanks.”
Honestly OneDrive is actually very good as far as cloud storage platforms go. It just works. I paid for a subscription for a few years.
But starting around the 1000th time Microsoft tried to install even more bloatware I started looking for alternatives. For the low low price of “spend a few minutes learning about Tailscale” and buying a few extra hard drives, I’ve got 24TB of storage. My most important stuff gets encrypted locally and backed up to B2. I use Immich to manage my photos, so now I dropped my Google Drive subscription as well. Still on the fence about Nextcloud’s office suites but LibreOffice works great.
The only reason I still use Win11 is because gaming on Linux still has some issues with the games I play.
I miss the day when you could search YouTube for something like “JFK skyclub” and actually get video of the Skyclub at JFK. Today you’ll get 15-minute videos that are 90% a guy talking about his thoughts on JFK, or Skyclub, or airlines, or whatever. If you’re really lucky, some of them may feature a few seconds of actual footage of Skyclub.
It’s not just Skyclub or travel videos. If I search for “repair mr coffee” I want to see a howto, not someone’s SEO-optimized long winded lecture about whatever coffeemakers they’re selling.
In SHTF, eventually everything is going to run out. I don’t care weather you have one year of coffee or ten. Unfortunately too many people see preparedness as an all or nothing game. You’re either ready to ride out WW3 in your 3500 square food bunker 50 feet underground, or you’re not prepared at all.
That mentality is detrimental towards prepping for the things that are actually far more likely to occur: job loss, financial ruin, illness, house fire, supply chain disruption, nearby chemical leak, utility loss, traveling cross country to take care of a critical family member at 3 AM, things like that.
Having that much instant coffee on hand means I have more than enough to weather any short-term disruption, and plenty of time to break any caffeine addiction.
ETA: I love that someone disagrees with me that job loss or illness are more likely than WW3.
Great! There’s no reason not to clearly disclose those fees up-front other than deception.
AirBnB is the worst at this. A vacation rental is $200 a night, so you’d assume five nights would be $1000 plus tax. But then add the cleaning fee, the service fee, the booking fee, the hosting surcharge, the surcharge fee, and a half dozen other junk fees, and suddenly it’s $375 a night. Plus tax.
