Unfortunately many of us have been taught that being a good person and a good citizen equals being productive and accumulating resources. Things that are quantifiable and external to the actual person and their relationships.

Being productive and accumulating some resources can be good activities to spend time on, but they are practical necessities and not defining characteristics of existence.

Layers of protection. It’s worth it when we’re talking about life and death safety.

I’m not sure if I saw it in the same place, but I saw the same recommendation long ago and have stuck with it ever since.

I don’t rely on it for changing lanes though. It absolutely helps situational awareness, but I always turn and look.

As an American, this line short circuited my brain:

Police there still carry guns on the regular

I live in a quiet but growing suburban town that’s closer to rural areas than the nearest city. When I walk my kid to elementary school (how European of us, lol) the police officer working as a crossing guard for the kids still has their gun, taser, bulletproof vest, and all their other gear on.

And it’s not a school-specific thing. You just never see cops without their weapons here. Armed and armored is just part of the uniform, essentially.

Yeah, honestly it’s worked fine without any fiddling around. If it makes a difference, I tend to do things like let mint use non-free components if necessary, and I know I do have the “play drm stuff” option turned on I’m Firefox, even though the privacy and security stuff is all strict.

It’s just a Dell laptop with a discrete nvidia gpu in addition to the embedded Intel one. I think it works fine though with either the open drivers or the closed nvidia ones, but I don’t know if it touches that gpu.

I get to dual boot at work (I run mint btw) and the only reason I ever boot into windows every week or three is to make sure it doesn’t get so out of date that it gets booted from the network.

I guess it’s time to stop that shit! Having windows available is not worth the risk of messing up my work machine. Hell I’m tempted to nuke that windows partition and double the size of my /home partition!

Though I will give Microsoft credit that m365 stuff, including video calls in Teams, work great using the web versions in Firefox. That’s even with the security and privacy stuff cranked up. I only white listed those sites for cookies and local storage for convenience.

GSUS

As opposed to G.E.C.K. OS.

A ton can change just based on your mindset. There’s a lot of that subject in stoic and (secular) Buddhist philosophy. It’s not sticking your head in the sand, but rather practicing being more in control of your mental state while processing the things you need to process.

For instance in Buddhism one of the three poisons is attachment, or sometimes called greed. Having high expectations of other people and relying on their actions to inform your mental state is just setting yourself up for failure.

Add on top of this “maybe you don’t need to worry about criticizing others in the first place” and you’re well on your way to a happier existence.

Disclaimer: of course thinking critically is important, and there are areas where you’d be irresponsible not to be critical of others. I’m talking about the IV drip of negativity of constantly getting annoyed at things that don’t affect you.

I like to use Oregon Trail generation too. It’s the perfect label for those of us who essentially had computers inserted into our childhoods at some point.

Computers pre-date us by a lot, obviously, but it’s more about the mass market computers (and home video game systems) that normal people could access.

Definitely. The context just seemed to be people who know what OSs are.

I get the sense that both of those two things are somewhat true here. They’re getting rid of 10, and people want to avoid 11.

Along similar lines, I think one of mine has become resisting our cultural expectation of constant growth in all areas possible.

Carter is an obvious one. I like my job and it makes my day more pleasant than past jobs have. The pay is good. I don’t need to painstakingly plan a path to be the manger then the director then the VP, just to spend more of my life working.

I have big plans for the future of the koi pond in my back yard though. The more of my life I spend working on that thing, the better my life seems to get.

(The things that matter or don’t matter are inherently personal - I’m not trying to insult anybody who gets genuine thrill and fulfillment from kicking ass at work constantly. )