It poses a fascinating question whether unbridled growth of the economy is valid to support unbridled growth of population. Not saying that people facing malaria shouldn’t be helped, but if it depends on an ever growing economy we might have a problem.

Are nfts actually still a thing? I mean are there still people selling/trading them?

Well that might actually not be the worst thing to happen

I wonder if he realizes how he will be remembered by the world after his death, and how different that is that if he would have died, say ten years ago, or right before that moment when he wanted to rescue those kids stuck in that cave and went off on anyone that criticized him. For me, that’s the moment it all went to shit for him.

Great, another 26 year old that stumbled into wealth and thinks that makes him an authority.

Like those 20 something “executive coaches” fresh out of school I always seem to stumble upon on LinkedIn. They think they are incredible, but in reality they are only incredible in the literal sense.

Just the other day there was a writer that explains a phenomenon in her new book (can’t remember her name off the bat).

She describes the fact that people always say “it starts with you”, promoting individual action. Like, “if you want to stop climate change, why don’t you become a vegetarian.” But few people actually do.

She argued that it’s not that people don’t want to, however what’s never taken into account is that the cards are stacked against the individual by corporations and (in many cases) government.

There are laws, marketing machines, price points and supply chains that set the virtual boundaries within which people can maneuver.

People still have enough individual freedom to keep a sense of free will, but under the hood, this free will is heavily influenced by what’s affordable, normalized or in supply.

It’s a pretty bleak view, and only solved by a change in politics where politicians actually want to work for the people and for democracy rather than for corporations.

The people can provide them with votes, corporations with money. This can lead to a government that benefits from lying to their voters while profiting from corporations.

The nineties were good. Less racism, less pandemics, no social media to make the world collectively dumber. Just silly clothes and hair we had to deal with.

If he doesn’t die of old age in his second term, he will die in prison after. Along with a good part of his cronies.

Of course they want to politicize this. And the EU is being far too careful here, these amounts are only 1.5% of the maximum penalty. They got off easy

I got a Sonos speaker for Christmas a couple years ago.

As soon as I realized I needed an account for it to simply play music, I went to return it. The guy in the store told me that there were no speaker brands that did not require an account these days, and that I shouldn’t be so petty. He said “but you also have a Google account, right?”, “Why is a Sonos account such a problem?”.

I told him indeed, I already need a Google account for my phone to work, a Spotify account for listening to my music, and now a Sonos account for my speaker that plays that music , and I thought that was ridiculous.

My previous speaker was a Sony, and while that did have an app to configure it, it didn’t require setting up an account with any personal data, which I think is fucked up for a device whose main purpose is just to produce sound. I left the speaker in the store and got my money back.

I did some research and found Teufel devices, speakers from Germany that work fine with an app that doesn’t require an account. Now all my speakers and soundbars around the house are Teufel, and I’m very happy with them. I think also Yamaha has (or at least had) accountless speakers. So win/win - buying European and keeping my privacy a little more in check.

I did the same for my smart scale. I don’t want my weight in the cloud somewhere, or on the servers of some Chinese or U.S. company somewhere. An app on my phone can store daily weight and other health data just fine.

So when I wanted a smart scale, I also did some research. It turns out there’s an open source app called openscale that does exactly that: just store the data locally on my phone, and it supports a bunch of devices.

I got myself a Beurer scale (coincidentally also a German brand) because I read you can skip the whole account setup. Then used openscale to register my weigh ins. It works, I’m sure the cloud apps of larger brands have a nicer user interface, but they come at the cost of my privacy, which I simply refuse to sell out for a piece of hardware whose main purpose is to show me what I weigh.

I think people should be more conscious about their data. I don’t use apple pay or Google wallet, my bank already knows most of what I pay, where and when. Why would I want to share that with these big corporations? I will gladly trade in a little convenience for a lot of privacy.