I make as much of my own food as possible. So I mostly buy basic ingredients.

Mayo, ketchup, BBQ sauce, ramen broth, grow my own yeast, bake breads all types, pizza dough for home made pizza, kimchi, grow some herbs and other plants when possible. You eat healthier, and tastes way, way better. Some planning required since you make things in bulk but since there are no preservatives, food will not last months, unless you also make your own preserves, but it gets easier with practice. Pickled stuff is delicious.

Also, will buy meat with bone in, use the bones to make broth and sauces for better for flavour.

It may, if enough people did it. I stopped too.

This is what I been using for years. Works great. But not everyone has, knows or wants to deploy a server with Nextcloud.

Firefox Sync looks fine.

I use Island. Same concept, and does the same, including contact isolation. Which was added a while back.

Depends of where you live and what your definition of what your standards are.

If you compare to the rest of the world, you would be very wealthy in most of the world. In most of Asia or Latin America or Africa you would be laughing.

In some Wester countries you would be well off assuming you are smart with your money. Depending where you live.

In some cities like New York, San Fran or Vancouver you will get by alright. Depends on expectations. I known people who plow through cash because that’s their lifestyle. I do not relate.

It sort of depends, since many people get into the mindset of spending more, the more they earn, sometimes irresponsibly. Personally, I go out of my way to spend well beneath my means, do not throw money on fads and got the party lifestyle out of system a long time ago, so 200k would be plenty which would allow for savings for larger purchases like property or investments. Especially if your partner contributes to the treasury.

No.

I am on the Left, and if I am objective, a lot of very extreme lefty people seem to really like censorship when convinient. X does not censor the way they like, so clearly it is a National Socialist website now. You will notice they will claim anyone who does not think like them is a National Socialist or a Nationalist Socialist sympathizer. Disagreeing with people is not “hate” and people not agreeing with me or saying things I do not like is not hate. Free speech includes dissenting opinions and none of us should pretend to be the morality police since I too see calls of violence from the Left but for some reason that is fine when we do it. Do not like hypocrisy, does not matter what side it comes and all sides are guilty of it at some point. That just reality.

Elon, despite the silly claim that he is one, is not a National Socialist. National socialism is a full on political framework like socialism. Who here, aside a stupid hand gesture can point out the exact National Socialist policies that Elon follows? Endless ad hominems do not make a person a national socialist, at least not among adults and for the record, I do not like Elon.

But it makes sense why hate get brought up a lot since “hate speech” laws were introduced by Stalin.

Objectively speaking it is far more open today than it was before. If anyone actually bothered to read the Twitter files, which I assume most people here have not out of ideological bias they would see how much it censored as per the Biden admin requests.

If people do not like people’s opinions then do not follow them or look them up. This has worked for me for decades or just do not pay attention to them.

No, Apple is just doing the governments’ bidding due to laws.

The real goal down the line is this, to be put in place circa 2030. The goal really is control… with a healthy side of profit for all involved:

To have a Digital IDs that surveillances and montiors everything you are and do, that proxy control you. For your protection and for the children, of course.

The age restriction BS is just the up ramp towards this. Think about, why is it that like 15 countries are pushing this all of the sudden, within the smae window. From the UK, USA, Sweden, Australia, Spain, Brazil, etc. Then, CBDCs and then the scam of UBIs which will be used as means to control too, or did people really think that UBIs actually meant that kind governments are really going to give you some stipend cash for free and for nothing in return? Come on.

Politicians and technocrats are delusional utopian ideologues who think they know better than us on how to live our own lives.

But at least we have the choice. Cows don’t.

Albeit true, not to the extent of cows.

Grass is nutritionally poor. The reason we are smart in many ways is due to our varied diet. Even if we had evolutionary gone in that direction we would be dumber. Eating grass is a specialisation.

Also, we would not look like we do. If you look at the digestive track of a horse or a cow, you will see that they are longer. Carnivores have the shortest and we as omnivores are in between. Being an omnivote is a good thing and in the end, we can get more nutrition by hunting and gathering than by grassing.

Worth noting, while individual cows’ behaviour and preferences vary greatly, the time spent feeding and ruminating usually adds up to 4-7 hours a day. Our society would be were we are today if we spent 7 hours as a species eating grass in order to make ir worthwhile.

Evolution can only evolve so much within an existing animal especies in order to specialise or fit in a survival niche. Hence you do not see sea crabs that can fly or flies that live in the bottom of the sea.

Cows only have 1 stomach. That is devided in 4 compartments.

Hey, IPAC did help, too.

SimpleX is starting to delve into Crypto. Some may care, some may not but it is a newer development in the project.

CoMaps is the fork of Organic Maps as it was found that Organic Maps Devs were using the app in ways not intended. Mostly due to privacy, transparency and for profit issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoMaps

Or, if one wants to go the minimalist, smallest threat footprint way, one can go in the other direction and use F-Droid Classic. Think a debloated F-Droid, made by the F-Droid folks.

This is a bit of a misnomer. No one PC can be fully anonymized or fully private, even if the PC provided fake data points, they will still be technically fingerprinted. Having said that, having a browser that tries to spoof stuff like LibreWolf, Tor or IronFox is decent.

The gains in using a VPN, among other best practices is that helps --assuming people do not log on to something like Google-- is to minimize the fingerprint of the PC to you, as a user. Assuming one trust their VPN provider, helps.

Tor leverages the point of having all users look and be fingerprinted mostly as the same, so you get lost in the shuffle and crowd.

Quite true, but that should not be a reason to use Gmail, anyway.

More so if you have friends who are not on Gmail.

That is why I disable auto-update.

Been using uBlock for what feels like 15 years now. I find it weird and off putting when using other people’s PCs without it. So many ads and so much garbage everywhere. Same when I watch network TV.

From experience, if the drive starts making clicking noises, often, and it never did before, I agree, it could be a sign that the drive is starting to die.

Best practice at that point is to make a backup of vital files. No one wants to wake up one day to a dead drive without a backup.

Even now, on one my machines one of the drives is starting to switch to READ only, which usually means something is failing and the PC tries to minimize damage by switching to that. I van fix it with a chsk on terminal but I assume its days are numbered.

OP needs to backup. Just in case.