Someone has to stock and clean and maintain all that space and pay for the electricity it takes to illuminate and air condition such a huge area. Good luck convincing people to increase their taxes in exchange for indoor tennis courts and lounging areas. I love the idea of having more free community spaces, but the last city I lived in had the downtown library basement essentially become a homeless encampment until they closed off that entire floor of the library and then the city sold the entire library to developers who plan to demolish it and build something else there. With people struggling financially and spending most of their time staring at screens, there isn’t much demand for government spending on new public spaces.

Paper tea bags usually contain polypropylene or another plastic so they can be heat sealed shut. They aren’t fully compostable.

What makes you think this isn’t how I code? Offices love me, this is way cheaper than a bunch of ergonomic equipment.

Ok now I am curious where you live that you have to provide ID to shop. Here in the US we scan the items and then swipe our payment card, the ID is only used to check your age for tobacco and alcohol purchases which can’t be sold to minors. An employee has to come look at the ID to make sure a minor hasn’t borrowed someone else’s, so it doesn’t even get scanned. Employees just swipe their work badge and confirm that they checked your age.

As for the pain, a lot of self checkout systems have very limited space and can be awkward to run all your items through. Manned stations have the conveyor so you can unload multiple items from your cart at a time to be scanned. They also have more end space so you can have room to bag everything if you are doing a big shopping trip.

I don’t check Reddit much, but I have been using Dystopia lately if I need to check a niche community. I have a different VPN so no idea if browsing Reddit through that app works with Mullvad, but it does let me browse without an account.

I used RiF as well so I didn’t see the ads first hand, but I definitely came across multiple posts complaining about the Jesus ads. They were apparently pretty bizarre and it was a large ad campaign partly funded by the founder of Hobby Lobby. Even NPR (US National Public Radio) did a story on them: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/06/1154880673/jesus-commercial-super-bowl-billboard-he-gets-us-hobby-lobby-evangelical-billion

I do check one niche subreddit for a TV show about once every week when a new episode drops, but I hadn’t used reddit at all until this season came out. I will go right back to not using it pretty soon here. I used to read reddit during the majority of my down time, but the attitude Spez had was so awful that I have no desire to return to regular use. I spend a lot of my time on discord, some on Firefish, and a little bit on Lemmy. I do more things offline now. I thought it would be difficult to replace reddit, but it hasn’t been.

The Brave browser was full of ads for crypto currencies last time I looked into it. It hardly seems like a good option for someone who is trying to avoid ads.

Firefish is another fediverse microblogging platform and it has search and quote tweets, but you can’t follow hashtags in your regular timeline (you can set up a separate timeline called an antenna that regularly pulls in posts according to a list of words or hashtags you specify). It also has a tweet deck style layout you can setup and you can easily follow and be followed by mastodon users from a firefish account.

There are other alternatives as well, but this is the one I am most familiar with.