Inheritance is clearly societal ill, and even on a personal level, depending on inheritance might cause family troubles

Bike

That’s a good point to illustrate the importance of banning cars for personal transportation; all of the traffic is making your partner’s job slower and more stressful

It’s common to call products dumb when they have the marketing strategy of tricking gullible people into thinking they need it.

I see, my favorite podcast (“A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs”)[https://500songs.com/] has no ads. I’d strongly recommend if your interested in that kind of music

I don’t understand what you mean. I just skip the ads with my skip 30 seconds button.

If you’re doing it over an app, without the chance for the person you’re dumping to respond, I see no risk of things turning nasty

In the US you sometimes hear that phones in class are necessary to see if your kids are OK in a school shooting scenario.

I think this isn’t a good argument, since school shootings are rare, and it’s unclear if each student having a phone would do more harm than good in that kind of situation.

I don’t see the connection between neurodivergence and phones

Short haul flights should probably be high speed train rides anyway

I guess I didn’t notice when I opted in, and couldn’t find a way to opt out when I realized it was broken

If I want to have security, I would use a different communication protocol. I find it unacceptable for an SMS app to change quietly change to a different protocol, particularly if it causes messages to fail to send.

I found Google messages to be unreliable: refusing to send a SMS if the Internet connection is bad. The signal that the message failed to send is a single hollow checkmark.

I switched to fossify messages, which just sends SMSs or MMSs and doesn’t create its own flawed messaging protocol

I think OP believes every town in the US has twice as many homeless people as churches, it doesnt need to be exactly 1 church and 2 homeless people.

But either way, that’s probably not true. Since homeless people tend to be in larger cities.

But then again, lots of people become homless in the suburbs and then move to the city to get the social services. If churches in the suburbs housed a few people as they become homeless, it would probably help. It’s better to keep people in their communities so they have a better chance of returning to housefullness.

But probably not that much, since homelessness rates are strongly correlated with housing prices, so expensive cities create more homelessness than cheap suburbs.

Linux is often used to refer to a family of operating systems including Ubuntu, Debian, fedora, red hat, ect., which all use the Linux kernel.

However, GNU/Linux may be a better name for this family of operating systems, since they all use GNU components and (to varying extents) embrace the philosophy of the free software foundation.

Android uses the Linux kernel, but not GNU components, and do not embrace the philosophy of the Free software foundation.

Stalman, the man who founded GNU and the free software foundation published his thoughts on this:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/android-and-users-freedom.en.html

I just donate to GiveWell. They treat charity as an optimization problem for minimize dollars spent per human life saved.

Recently, this effective altruism philosophy has gotten a bad reputation because of the support techbro grifters, and wacky long-termism. But GiveWell seems to be distributing the money to reasonable causes: mosquito nets, maleria medication, vitamin a, cash for vaccines

it still doesn’t work with a whole load of software even with Wine.

I don’t think being able to run programs designed and compiled for windows is a requirement to be considered a usable os. For example, you can not run safari on windows. Does this mean windows doesn’t count as a usable os?

I think the definition of useable should be that software exists that can do the kind of things you want to do on your computer. In that sense, Linux is perfecty useable on the desktop, at least for people who have similar computing requirements to me.