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.

Edit: Yes. I do understand that neither men nor women are minorities. But there’s still enough differences to allow pushing a divisive narrative, which I suspect is enough reason for certain motivated people.

And to the “could just be a shitty set of incentives” argument. Fair enough. It could be. It’s highly suspicious, but it could be.

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)

I grew to love Linux because I was hating Windows, I don’t hate Windows because I love Linux. And I don’t want to hate Windows, I wish they were slowly becoming anti-user, but they keep adding (forcing) features that are so unfriendly to the user.

Yes. If Windows was still like Windows XP, I don’t know if I would have ever switched. It used to be fun, not soul sucking.

There’s lots of other reasons I’m glad I switched, of course.

I find the windows update and Linux graphical updater processes identical. They only diverge at the end when the Windows one fails with a mysterious error message and offers to retry or open a troubleshooter that won’t work.

Windows arguably is, indeed, two or three different systems stapled together. There’s the C code kernal bits, the .Net runtime higher level bits, and the Electron “this didn’t need to be fast anyway and we only knew how to write JavaScript” bits.

until it came time to install new software.

That is the big giveaway. I used the term “It’s free” too many times when setting up software for them. “I used to have to pay for all of that.”

I always hard code IPv4 addresses. Load balancing and DNS resolution are an admission of weakness.

(This is sarcasm. WTF Steam?)

If I recall correctly, it has been released for moile on and off as experimental builds. Last time I grabbed an APK, it wasn’t ready.

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.

Sure, but it’s not quite the compelling argument it used to be.

Today, I’m not sitting here pining for old Linux software that stopped working. And the small amount of old windows software that did finally stop working actually works now only works on Linux with Wine.

That’s another of the decision points that finally switched to fully favoring Linux, for me, in the last decade.

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.

“Does this salary offer from Google look fair to you?”

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.

That looks like exactly what I’m looking for in my next phone. Thanks.

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.