Ads. Specifically, a popup served by the OS about chrome and switching to bing or edge or something like that. I didn’t even use chrome, just having it installed was enough for them. Any ads baked into the OS is unacceptable, but that’s just so far over the line that I find it insane anyone still uses Windows at all.
I contacted support to complain and their “solution” was to reinstall the OS, so I installed a better one instead.
I’m not really sure what you’re asking since your post is a but unfocused, but if your problem is that you have too many addresses with different providers you could simply redirect mail from alternate addresses to whichever one you actually check. When I switched to proton I didn’t delete my old gmail account, I simply imported my old emails and set up email forwarding (see here for Proton’s migration instructions from Gmail). If you want to completely de-Google you don’t need to do it all at once, just migrate accounts to your new addresses as needed.
If you want a separate account for your PC then this does of course require a separate account. There isn’t really a solution there since your problem is also your requirement. You could set up separate folders or aliases for your PC and phone but that might not have the same level of separation you want.
I’d recommend switching away from Chrome-based browsers entirely anyway due to Google forcing through questionable standards by throwing their near-monopoly around, but using one Google service doesn’t mean it’s pointless to switch away from others. You don’t need to do everything at once.
Your security is only as good as the weakest link, which is usually people. If your password policy encourages users to stick a note to their screen then your weakest link is anyone in the office deciding to take a selfie or joining a call with their camera on. Best practices balance security with what users are actually willing to do.
Good luck remembering them all, also change them all every 30 days, so here are my secrets.
Password expiry hasn’t been considered best practice for a long time (must be at least a decade now?) largely because of the other points you mentioned; it leads to weak easily memorable passwords written somewhere easily accessible. Even when it was considered good 30 days would have been an unusually short time.
Current advice is to change passwords whenever there’s a chance it’s been compromised, not on a schedule.
If someone said they were concerned about their sugar intake would you tell them to just stop eating entirely? It’s possible to take steps towards privacy-friendly services without cutting yourself off from the modern world in the same way as you can cut back on sugar and still eat food.
You absolutely do not need to “burn all your devices” to improve your privacy, suggesting so is unhelpful at best.
There’s definitely some issues that jump out to me on first read.
1. I’m not sure about “indivisible”. An area should be able to self-govern if desired. More detail needed.
2. Awful. Removing people’s voting rights in general is bad, and something as nebulous as “a criminal offence” is incredibly easy to abuse. Are people no longer citizens if they steal a loaf of bread? Also, voting age here is 16/18.
4. No. Guns are incredibly rare where I am. I’d rather not have one, and I’d prefer not to risk getting shot every time some asshole on the street gets mad.
7. Limiting land to a single use is generally not a great idea. What if for instance you have too much agricultural land and not enough housing?
10. A central state-owned bank isn’t a bad idea, but abolishing all non-state banks is iffy. Should the government really have so much direct control over everyone’s finances?
12. Your salary should not be based on the amount of unprotected sex you have. That’s just silly. Other support should be available for those who need it.
I’m not sure that’s a completely accurate analogy either. When you’re using a VPN people can still see that you are sending traffic through your tunnel, they just can’t tell what it is that you’re sending. It’s like looking through frosted glass; there’s definitely something moving in there but you can’t tell what.
I suppose the best way to describe it is you send a locked box to a trusted friend; everyone handling it can see the box but can’t tell what’s inside. Inside the box is a letter, your friend posts it so it looks like it came from them. Your friend then gets a reply, puts it in a locked box, and send it back to you. Nobody between you and your friend can snoop on your mail but anyone between your friend and the final destination can.
Being limited to only three options doesn’t sound very democratic but I suppose it’s better than a two party system. Instead of adding a self-destruct button, have you considered switching to a system which better represents the people?
Where I am most people are happy to drink the tap water, and we’re all oddly proud of it. Which is fair, it’s great water. Very soft too, I remember seeing ads on TV for products to remove limescale but that doesn’t really happen here much. I find it a little odd that some places’ tap water is so full of impurities that it leaves mineral deposits on their appliances.
Come to Scotland, try our tap water!
That reminds me of an issue I had when I was installing Mint. I tried out a live boot first and everything seemed to work except there was no internet connection. Turns out my WiFi card needs a proprietary driver, but no big deal it installed easily enough just from the boot disk. Internet’s working, all looks good, so I go ahead and install Mint proper, remove the live boot usb, start the system, and savour that new Minty smell. But hang on, there’s no WiFi, I forgot to install the driver! Should be an easy enough fix though, it wasn’t hard last time.
So I go to install the driver and the first thing it says is that it needs the boot disk to get the driver. That makes total sense, can’t install something you don’t have! I plug in the usb again and now it should all be plain sailing, after all it’s just installing a driver that worked 20 minutes ago, right? Sadly no, that would be too easy; for some reason now it’s missing dependencies! Or something along those lines anyway, I forget exactly. But can’t it just install those from the boot disk? Well apparently not, it instead tries to connect to the internet to download them. This obviously fails since I don’t have a WiFi connection, which is why I’m installing the driver in the first place. All I get is a popup saying it can’t install some stuff because there’s no internet connection, fix that to get your internet connection. This is the point where face meets palm. I’m sure there’s some fiddly “proper” way to work around that but the thing is I’m incredibly lazy so I’ll just take the quick option instead. I plug in my phone and use a tethered connection. I run the install again and it finally goes through, at last the system is ready to use! It’s been mostly smooth sailing since then (though I did get annoyed enough at NTFS a couple of months ago that I just reformatted a data drive and wiped a ton of data I probably didn’t need).
Tl;dr: I had to tether to my phone for a minute. Traumatising!
Personally I don’t see that as a good thing. Reddit had a thriving community of active art sharing subrrddits, Lemmy only has a few barely active art coms and instead floods All with ai-generated images.
The article you linked is about brutal mistreatment and forced “disinfection” of people crossing a border. As horible as that is, do you truly believe that is the same scale of evil as systematic genocide?
I’m not American and that article doesn’t mention liberalism, so I’d appreciate it if you highlight the connection there too.
Just to clarify, you believe “American Liberal” is more extreme than Nazis?
This argument has never made sense simply because of the fact that singular they/them has been in use for literally centuries. It’s even reasonable to say it’s always been in use considering singular they/them was in use in the 14th century and modern English formed around 14-17th. I can guarantee you have never batted an eye when you heard something like “someone called but they didn’t leave a message”.
There are only two differences with recent usage: people are less likely to assume genders so use they/them more freely; and people identifying specifically as they/them. The words themselves haven’t really changed, they’re just more common now. Opposition to singular they/them is almost entirely political.
I’m not sure I follow that analogy, if you get a ride to a hospital you don’t expect it to lock off all other destinations. What happens in the hospital is irrelevant.
From reading the article, this is more like if you walk into a hotel and they burn down your house so you have no choice but to stay. I suppose in theory you could argue in very bad faith that this is a problem with the house since it’s the house that burned, but in reality the problem is the fact they’re the ones who started the fire.