Earning more than I spent. It’s really not a complex science. In fact this whole question reminds me of the weight-loss debate.

For context, I’ve been working for a couple of decades, never been highly paid, rarely even worked full time, and it’s been at least 15 years since I had the slightest money issue.

The critical variable is self-discipline. I know this is not a popular opinion. I also understand that there are societal factors that feed into all this, and that questions of virtue and vice are basically irrelevant. But it’s true nonetheless. We do not live in a society of material scarcity. If you have an income, basically any income, and you can find a way to control your needs, then you will quickly escape survival mode.

Just don’t be that American who says “Gee everything’s so cheap!” and pays over the odds and causes inflation for the rest of us. Thanks.

Admittedly the definition is hard to pin down but clearly the thing exists or the word wouldn’t have taken off so quickly.

Roughly, it refers to the worldview in which group power dynamics are all-determining, where race is destiny, where the individual takes a back seat, and where the only possibly solution is some form of reverse discrimination - but even that will never work, really, because injustice is destiny.

It exists, quite few people believe these things, far far more of them hate it, and that’s why the peak woke moment seems to have passed. Mercifully.

Terrible, no-good, cynical, nihilist take. If everybody took your advice, the world would be a worse place in short order. Sorry to be so blunt.

This should really be more widely known. It’s a case study of mission creep and bureaucratization. The cost of keeping the servers running, and even dev work, is at this point a smallish fraction of what they’re pulling in. The is rest going to various forms of outreach and activism. That’s fine, and the money is probably well spent. But they really should be more honest about why they’re asking for it.

A token amount, a few euro a month.

BUT. One day it will all be donated. Every last cent of it.

Money is security. It’s peace of mind. So I will keep hold of mine for now, thank you very much.

Your individualism. Of course I’m aware of the huge downsides, but my understanding is that personal freedom has been a vanishing rare thing in human history. As I see it, some very odd circumstances (puritans and the frontier) generated the USA, which morphed into something even weirder still: a libertarian superpower. Which then, in extremis, saved the rest of us from authoritarianism of both right and left. Probably temporarily. I predict that after it all collapses, and with better hindsight, we’ll appreciate the USA more than we do today.

Ugh! That word again.

Guessing you’re American. Over here in soft Europe, even to ask that question would get you ostracized as a psychopath.

Of course, most of us are complete hypocrites given our diets.

The counter-argument is that communes are populated by an unusual variety of human being, hence their rarity, and that most people are motivated by less disciplined human goals such as status and material accumulation.

Almost thought you’d done one yourself there with this “even then”! But I was thinking of even still (from even so). Which BTW is probably in my top 3 most hated malaphors or catachreses or whatever they are.

catachresis

Ha! Here you are answering the actual question but nobody cares!

Amazing. I had never seen this word before.

Current pet peeve: “to step foot on”. Facepalm! Just coz somebody misheard “set” doesn’t make “step foot” grammatical. And yet here we are.

That’s why I emphasized the word “server”

E2EE with a server web interface is a technical impossibility. The ends are the clients. By definition the server is only there to pass encrypted data from client to client. Presumably you can make this work with a web client using the browser’s local storage, but at that point you’re not actually looking at a web site and you might as well just use the official app. This is one reason why Telegram doesn’t do encryption by default: group chats are particularly hard to do with EE2E.

The music of SILENCE. And I never listen to music at any other time either.

I’m beginning to think this makes me extremely unusual.

Interesting, will do. I do know of the host’s dark take on such matters.

In terms of more mainstream pundits it just really bothers me how many so many of them are obviously intelligent and well-meaning yet incapable of breaking out of the mental straitjacket of orthodox economics, despite all the evidence that its usefulness has run its course.

Possibly unsolvable given its distributed nature. Seems like there will be at least some small cost to pay for that benefit.

Decent counter-example. In turn I’d say that’s an edge case where we could still survive just fine without knowing the relevant fact for sure. And certainly not worth the cost in privacy terms of recording and storing everything.

What are we going do if (and when) it turns out that economic growth is not compatible with environmental protection and yet a prerequisite for political freedom?

Sorry for the bummer of a question but to me the conundrum looks more obvious every day, I really want to know the answer, and yet (almost) nobody is talking about it.