I definitely commiserate with this. This is almost certainly the biggest moral quandary in my life. I think in my lifetime there will be a tipping point where vegetarianism will be a large enough minority to make it personally viable for me, but for the moment I reduce consumption where I can. Breakfast sausage will be the hardest thing to give up for me - but I continuously try meat alternatives in hopes of finding something I like.

Erm, not arguing that this lady is middle class, but dog insurance cost is not remotely relevant to that lol. I pay that for my dog and make less than 6 figures. My dog is just really important to me, and our last dog cost us thousands and thousands of dollars on vet bills. I’m not going to be blindsided dropping $5k in a day on vet bills again. Our dog has insurance because it seems like the financially responsible thing to do, especially when your dog is extremely active and engaging in sports that it may be injured doing.

My neighbor used a leaf blower to dry his car after washing it at 7am on a Saturday. I don’t know that I will ever be able to like that man after this.

I’m not fully de-Googling, however I have been migrating things that Google does badly over to other services. Kagi for search was the latest, and admittedly hardest mentally for me to do. Not because the search engine itself isn’t fantastic (it is), but I’ve been using Google since its inception when I stopped asking Jeeves or Hotbot. Just feels weird to jump ship, but I’m so tired of how bad and enshitified their search has become that I just can’t do it anymore.

I actually have a Proton acct already but only use the VPN. Sounds like it’s time to look further into the other offerings.

Absolutely this. There IS a scenario in which I would love a “smart” or “AI” fridge, but it’s gotta be damn impressive to even be worth my time.

It needs to know everything in my fridge, how long it’s been there and it’s expiration date, and I want it to build grocery lists for me based on what is low, and let me know ahead of time that I should use something up that’s going bad soon. Bonus points if it recommends some options for how to do that based on my tastes. And I want to do this without having to manually input or remove everything.

But we’re still SO far from being able to do this reliably, let alone at any kind of acceptable price point, and yet fridge makers keep shoving out dumb fridges with a screen on them and calling them “smart”. I hate it.

Not really. I haven’t looked into why it caused the issue it did. Presumably it is not actually intentional by MS, and there is some conflict going on that’s causing it. I’ll eventually get around to trying to let it install that update again, but life has been busy :)

I recently had to roll back a windows 10 update because as soon as I installed it all of my startup programs stopped starting up at launch. As soon as I removed it, the problem went away.

No Microsoft, you cannot ruin my Win 10 experience to coerce me into migrating. It’s gonna be a long annoying fight.

Who knows, by then Broadcom may drive VMware into the ground too, making the whole thing moot!

My company is based in CA, and employs me remotely from the Midwest. They pay me above average for my area, but less than they would have to if I lived in the Bay area where they are based. I feel like this works out for both of us! They even go so far as looking at the zip code of every employee when considering raises, and thus far (3 years) I have received an annual raise which is higher than the cost of living increase for my area.

In my situation at least, me working remotely benefits both myself and my company. I just can’t understand why so many larger companies are so adamant about return to office, especially ones in larger coastal cities.

Many of the libraries in my area have all kinds of rental things you can check out! Books, audiobooks, music, video games and movies of course. But they also have a whole tools and homegoods section. Need a weirdly shaped pan for a 1-time birthday cake? Check it out and return it when you’re done. Need a drill to hang shelves in your new apartment? Same thing. It’s pretty awesome. For me personally I love to bake, but I simply do not have room for every type of pan. I only make angelfood cake once a year or so, and those pans are huge. I just use the library one and then I don’t have to store the thing all year!

If you haven’t been to your local library in years, you should make a trip there. You might be surprised what they have these days!

I refuse to be part of that group. I’m a democrat living in KS and I vote in every single election I can. My candidate may not win, but damnit they will count my vote and know that I dissent.

Ohhh that’s good to know! We already live in the US though. I’ll have to look at the new legislation. Thanks for the info!

At one point my German husband was looking into becoming a US citizen, but just never got around to it. I stopped encouraging it years ago, because Germany has weird laws about dual citizenship and he would likely have to give his up to become a US citizen. As a result, we have a European exit plan. While I’d really like the US to get it’s shit together, knowing we have options is nice.