100% create a separate instance, and allow anyone to add subreddits to your import list. I think this would be hugely helpful!

OP, you’ll probably want to block NSFW content, though.

The Daily Brief - I have been subscribed to their daily email newsletters for about 2 years. It’s been a helpful way for me to stay vaguely aware of the most major global news events. I appreciate that each news story is condensed to a single factual paragraph without speculation or an imposed narrative:

TRUMP INVESTIGATIONS | Multiple media outlets reported yesterday that the U.S. Department of Justice has issued a target letter to attorneys for former President Donald Trump informing them that Trump is the subject of a criminal investigation related to the retention of classified documents at his home in Florida. Such target letters typically indicate that prosecutors feel they have substantial evidence linking someone to a crime. [more]

This is from one of their news briefs that came out yesterday Thursday, June 8, 2023. Notice that what is stated is purely factual and does not impose a narrative. The Daily Brief is a useful tool for getting a quick idea of what happened in the world yesterday, then you can read more about specific news events from other sources.

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Wednesday is my favorite day off on a normal week - Only working for 2 days in a row for any stretch feels so much more manageable than 5 days in a row.

When I’m taking paid time off I’d like to stack all three days off together, though. Gotta save those precious PTO hours!

Absolutely. Most non-fiction books I’ve read averaged about 9 hours for me to complete. 9 hours listening to an expert is such a trivial investment compared to a lifetime of half-baked speculation on a topic one doesn’t really understand. In 9 hours an expert can provide proper context, break down complex topics, and they have the space to fully explain their perspective and the stories that brought them to it.

The only content as informative and concise as a good book is a good lecture.

*Citation needed

Veganism can be inexpensive, accessible, and perfectly healthy with a little planning. Here’s a short list of major nutrients that are usually a concern and some inexpensive vegan sources:

• B12 - Nutritional yeast.
• Calcium - Antacids like Tums.
• Iodine - Iodized salt.
• Complete Protein - Beans, lentils, tofu, etc.
• Omega-3s - Flax seeds, Chia seeds, nuts and vegetable oils.*

*Omega-3s are the hardest to get enough of because converting ALA to DHA and EPA is an inefficient process. Chia and flax seeds are an easy way to get enough ALA, but you will need to eat them, or another ALA-rich food, with every meal. I use a non-vegan Omega-3 supplement, but I don’t claim to be a vegan. A 95-99% reduction in the animal products I consume makes me happy.

As others have stated - a strict vegan diet is not necessary for everyone, but the individuals who choose to go strictly vegan increase demand for alternatives and popularize recipes and techniques that help the general public to consume fewer animal products. Whether someone adheres to a strict vegan diet, or not, a drastic reduction in the amount of animal products we consume is essential. In the United States it is normal and expected to eat meat & dairy as part of every meal and every snack. The adverse health effects of red / processed meats and dairy are well documented, and the resulting environmental devastation is undeniable.

Everyone doesn’t need to go vegan, but eating meat and dairy 3-5 times per week instead of 3-5 times per day would be a big step in the right direction.

Direct link to the study : https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.15.22277693v1

The analytic sample included 8,620 respondents… 6,768 [(78.5%) considered political violence to be at least sometimes justified]

[67.2% of respondents] perceived ″a serious threat to our democracy"

more than 40% agreed that ″having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy″ and that ″in America, native-born white people are being replaced by immigrants.″

Half (50.1%) agreed that ″in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States.″

these findings suggest a continuing alienation from and mistrust of American democratic society and its institutions. Substantial minorities of the population endorse violence, including lethal violence, to obtain political objectives. Efforts to prevent that violence, which a large majority of Americans already reject, should proceed rapidly based on the best evidence available.

Whether or not you believe that a civil war / terrorism is likely, a lot of the steps you should take to prepare are the same steps that you should take to prepare for any disaster. The Red Cross’ official recommendations are a good guide.

GET INVOLVED, LOCALLY. - By participating with local organizations you can help resolve issues within your community and prevent conflicts from escalating to violence in the first place. Organizations that you can be a part of may help maintain order and save lives in the event of a disaster. The people you connect with today may save your life tomorrow.

Climate legislation is only dead when supporters give up. So what if Manchin won’t support climate action? He’s the quintessential example of a conservative Democrat. Vote him out if you can, protest if you can, and speak out against him so that YOU get to write the first draft of his disgraceful legacy.

Don’t despair when you read claims like “Climate legislation is dead”, get mad. There is no force more powerful than an angry public. Use your frustration to contribute to progressive organizations in any capacity that you are able, because the future you want to see must be built by you.

When your friends or relatives mention gas prices redirect those conversations into how the opportunity to decarbonize painlessly was squandered decades ago. When the US didn’t take sufficient climate action 20 years ago the pain we’re feeling today became inevitable.

When you hear inflation being talked about redirect that conversation to a discussion about how car/truck dependent our cities and supply chains are. Trains, bicycles, and feet don’t give a fuck about the price of gas. When gas prices go up ALL prices increase because most of our transportation and industry is designed to use fossil fuel.

Everyone outside the US can have these conversations too. Get involved in your community because more lives than your own may eventually depend on the relationships and organizational foundations you build today.

Don’t focus on fighting the past, focus on building a future.

Summary of the bill from Congress.gov -

This bill prohibits certain large online platforms from engaging in specified acts, including giving preference to their own products on the platform, unfairly limiting the availability on the platform of competing products from another business, or discriminating in the application or enforcement of the platform’s terms of service among similarly situated users.

Further, a platform may not materially restrict or impede the capacity of a competing business user to access or interoperate with the same platform, operating system, or hardware or software features. The bill also restricts the platform’s use of nonpublic data obtained from or generated on the platform and prohibits the platform from restricting access to platform data generated by the activity of a competing business user. The bill also provides additional restrictions related to installing or uninstalling software, search or ranking functionality, and retaliation for contact with law enforcement regarding actual or potential violations of law.

The bill establishes affirmative defenses for the prohibited conduct.

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice must designate whether an entity is a platform covered by the bill, and both must carry out enforcement activities.

The bill also provides for civil penalties, injunctions, and the forfeit of profits for repeat offenders.

Hearing a song I liked and missing the opportunity to listen to it again later is not a serious issue, just another piece of straw on the camels back.

My point is that a lot of little inconveniences add up to a significant life-style change, especially when the end-user is supposed to choose that life-style change.

Just a few weeks ago I used a dumbphone for 2 days in the US.

During that time

• I was called for work while out and the caller expected me to review their email and respond while on the phone with them. This would have been easy with a smartphone, but instead I had to go home, review their email, then call them back the next day. They were annoyed by the inconvenience and delay.
• I was called to schedule a doctors appointment while out, I needed to call the office back when I got home because I could not check my calendar without a smartphone.
• I was working on a project and wanted to take a photos for memories / share when explaining why the project was taking so long. I needed to leave the project site, go home, grab my camera, return to the site, take the photos, upload them to my computer, then email them.
• I wanted to log in to an account while away home, but I was unable to access my password manager or email without my smart phone.
• My family went out to eat and I needed to borrow one of their smartphones because I could not scan the QR code for the menu and the restaurant did not have paper menus available.
• I needed to deposit a check, so I would have driven nearly 20 miles round trip if I had not used remote deposit on my smartphone instead.
• I wanted to listen to an audiobook from the library, but I need to use the overdrive / libby app in order to do this.
• I heard a song on the radio and I could not use Shazam to identify it.
• I needed to display a ticket for an event, so I had a friend save my ticket on their smartphone and they used their phone for both of us.
• I needed to read a smart home monitor, but the only interface available was a smartphone app.
• Discord kept crashing on my desktop, so I used my smartphone instead.

I gave up using a dumbphone after only 2 days because smartphones are integrated so deeply into modern society that it felt prohibitively difficult to function without one where I live in the United States. Everywhere a person goes it is assumed they have a smartphone on them, so anyone without a smartphone needs to find workarounds for simple tasks and is forced to navigate dozens of inconveniences every day.

I am spoiled and addicted to the convenience that smartphones provide, but my experience persuaded me that systemic changes, instead of individual choices, are necessary to ultimately solve these problems. Evidently, it can not be expected that a significant portion of the public will choose to abstain from the convenience smartphones offer even when they are educated about the harms caused by smartphones. Therefore, the only solution I can imagine is regulation to mitigate those harms, and humane technology design that solves the problems of profit-maximizing technology design.

Good luck, smartphones are integrated so deeply into modern society that it can feel impossible to get by without one.

A better solution is government regulation of the advertising industry, and free software alternatives that are designed using humane technology principles.

The reason for the opioid epidemic is not because the medical system has clamped down on prescriptions.

Pharmaceutical companies lied to doctors and patients about how addictive opioids are. Then, a series of studies concluded that many people are living with untreated chronic pain; so prescribing opioids more frequently was advised by medical associations and public health authorities.

It was only a matter of time until the truth about opioids’ addictiveness became obvious and undeniable. Only THEN did the “whole” medical system start clamping down on opioids.

The Sackler Family (owners of Perdue Pharma) directly caused the deaths of millions of innocent people by misleading doctors, patients, and health authorities. The Sackler Family is spending millions of dollars to launder their reputation and prevent the public from associating them with the opioid epidemic and the millions of lives they ruined for profit.

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Look into Nextcloud calendar, you can use the default calendar application on your phone / desktop while offline and it will automatically sync with your Nextcloud when connected to the internet. Hetzner Storage Share is an inexpensive Nextcloud host with calendar enabled by default.

I believe the greatest factor is community. In my experience wealthier people, and wealthier areas, tend to have less community and weaker interpersonal bonds because they do not depend on one another to the same extent that poorer people do.

When your neighbor needs to borrow a tool, you need to sleep at a friend’s place, or you give a friend a ride to work you’re building relationships. The web of relationships between all the neighbors in a community forms a culture.

When people become wealthier they don’t need to borrow tools because they can buy their own, they don’t need to crash at a friend’s place when they can stay in a hotel, and they don’t need a ride to work if they have their own transportation.

In my experience some of the isolating effects of wealth accumulation can be mitigated with infrastructure that increases the inter-dependence, trust, and fraternity between neighbors. A few examples are walkable cities, cooperative organizations, social clubs, public parks, etc…

SSHFS is by far the easiest and most secure-by-default way I’ve found to mount a remote storage share. I have donated a little bit to this project before; I really hope a stable maintainer can take over because this is a critically useful piece of software!

Companies have brands, people have personalities.

I have read too many books evangelizing hustle culture, and I have listened to too many MBAs preaching “selling yourself” by “promoting your personal brand”. It’s bullshit, I’m a human being - I don’t want to sell myself, or spend countless hours crafting a narcissistic professional persona.

All I want is meaningful work, a modest livelihood, and a stable community. None of which requires fame, and it doesn’t require tracking my every keystroke. Exploitative tech companies are so desperate to chase infinite growth that they will sacrifice and erode everything that makes life worth living in pursuit of profit.

Is it really any wonder that people just want to use the internet without being data-mined, judged, and manipulated?

Unfortunately, this is old news and not as exciting as it sounds. Doing a search on Youtube yields videos from almost 10 years ago with ordinary people filming time lapses of mealworms / superworms digesting styrofoam.

One problem is that it takes a large number of the worms to digest a small amount of plastic, they take a long time to do it, and they do not fully digest or absorb the plastic on a single pass through their digestive system. The worms must eat their own poop multiple times before the microplastics are sufficiently broken down enough to be released into a natural environment.

A diet of styrofoam is also (probably) unhealthy for the worms, and it is unclear if there is a safe and effecient way to dispose of the dead worms.

The researchers are interested in isolating and synthesizing the enzyme that allows the worms to break down styrofoam, I think this is a great start and definitely deserves grant money, but even in a hypothetical scenario where commercial styrofoam composting is viable today it would not be enough to solve the problem of styrofoam pollution. Reducing (and ultimately eliminating) the use of disposable plastics is the only viable way to address pollution.

I’m not sure if this is exactly the sort of solution you need, but check out Loomio. It is open source and self-hostable.