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TLDR: Maintaining things suck magnificently, but it might suck less if you make conscious decisions. At some point I no longer remembered in my childhood, when I first learned about the concept of “renting”, it sounded like the dumbest thing in the universe. When you buy something you only pay a finite cost once, whereas if you rent it you’ll have to pay infinitely - an infinite total cost! There are many issues with that statement. Obviously my kindergarten self is not going to know about interest rates and present value discounts, not to mention market volatility and risk. However, when I brought this up to my parents, their response wasn’t these but - “purchased things cost money too”. ...

Internet Browsing Note that anonymity and censorship circumvention are different goals. Tor Browser: Trusted standard for anonymous browsing, standard safety levels should be enough for normal use but disable Javascript for special cases. Some sites block Tor nodes from connecting, but occasionally there are unblocked nodes if you keep switching. Snowflake: Browser plugin that helps people living in censored countries access TOR. Project X: State-of-the-Art censorship circumvention proxy protocol. Requires self-hosting so your identity and connection will be visible to your service provider. Oracle Cloud provides free servers you can host this on. There’s also an official Setup Script. Online Privacy You should use Tor for anonimity purposes. This is focused on things like stopping ad trackers in day-to-day browsing. ...

Prologue. Dreaming of an era where I belong The great thing about humans is that they’ll never stop being miserable. Even in our dreams we still manage to have nightmares. That’s how some stranger “keppy” ended our argument in an online chatroom yesterday, spouting the idea that being miserable is somehow an inherent part of human condition. It’s honestly defeatist nonsense. Even if every society is bound to have sacrifices, I will not sit contently and watch as that sacrifice chooses me. ...

“The Personal is Political” is a stupid statement. The personal “is” political, yet it “need not always be” political. This much-echoed catchphrase is a prime example of how linguistic ambiguities dull our brains and allow for logically uninspired statements. To say that “The Personal is Political” can be one of two meanings: 1: That personal matters always have a significance or influence to other matters people colloquially treat as “political”. ...