Yeah, agreed. If I needed a filter for allergens I wouldn’t trust noname brand too

Air filters. For car, HVAC, etc. Branded or OEM stuff is usually overpriced.

Yeah, apart from what another person said about alternative apps… Events organized by local communities or businesses are often advertised in Facebook only. I know of a few local businesses in my area with Facebook being their only online presence.

Maybe it’s because they have to? Keeping in touch with older relatives, following local events, etc

Garmin. Works reasonably well without connection to the phone. Some models supported by Gadgetbridge

Edit: corrected app name

Oh, sorry, I’ve assumed that you are in US since you posted an article about FTC.

I don’t know if there is a similar service in Europe. I think you could get a virtual card linked to a crypto wallet, but this obviously comes with downsides

There is Privacy.com that gives you virtual cards to use for purchases. Money go from your bank account to them. Destination is visible on payment description still, but it may fool bank’s algorithm. Or you can get paid plan from Privacy.com and mask destination completely.

Lots of good advice here, but many might be too extreme. I find such all-or-nothing approach intimidating for people who just started to think about improving their privacy situation.

Let’s see… you are angry about bloatware. It can come from two sources - mobile service carrier and phone manufacturer. How to get rid of it?

1. Buy only “unlocked” phones. Then the carrier will not be able to push anything to your phone. You will also be free to change the carrier as you wish.
2. Buy phones from manufacturers that don’t install too much bloatware. Google Pixel has only Google apps, Motorola also is almost vanilla Google. Fairphone is more exotic, but an interesting option. iPhone is OK too if you want Apple ecosystem, but customization is not a thing there.

Now, we are in a privacy focused community and I saw your later comments about Google being an opposite of privacy. I would argue that vanilla Pixel is much better than bloated and locked Samsung already. I see you get recommendations to replace the OS that your new phone might run, and these are valid, but come with significant downsides. There are other ways to improve your privacy stance by changing the way how you use your phone without changing what phone or what OS you run on it.

I use SimpleLogin for email alias, and username usually has to be associated with email address. So I just use whatever SimpleLogin generates for me

It just gets… dumber? It’s pretty subjective though.

Not a dumb part, but the main characters, being separated for a long time, don’t get their own interesting storylines. It seems like authors got bored with characters and didn’t know what to do with them. New characters are usually boring. Duarte’s daughter, Kamal’s son - they are just background… The only strong character in focus is Tanaka.

I’m using pi-hole + uBlock origin.

Adblock DNS, Pi-Hole, hBlock - these three do essentially same thing but at different layers - blocking DNS requests based on blacklists. I’m not familiar with hBlock, but I assume blacklists on each of these 3 are very similar. Using all three doesn’t slow down your internet connection much, unless your pihole server is underpowered. You can drop pi-hole from the mix if you are not using it’s other features (statistics, local DNS, etc). hBlock looks nice, and should add zero latency, but works only for local machine. So you still need network-wide blocker. Make sure you set your DNS on router, so all devices would get protection.

uBlock Origin is smarter than simple DNS blocking, but protects only your browser sessions.

“Chasm City” by Alastair Reynolds. It’s a standalone novel in a much bigger Revelation Space series. But the plot of this book is quite independent of the series, you don’t need to know the lore to understand it. I think it is very well suited for a movie or a short series.

The setting is hard SciFi, very detailed, but not too crazy.

Nah, maybe one more season… but the last few books are not that good.

Your first passage about criminalizing art is 100% correct and 100% irrelevant. You cannot call porn art. Porn with adults, children, dogs, pumpkins - all that stuff is made for people to get off, not enjoy the emotions that real art provokes in people. Therefore we cannot compare criminalizing porn with criminalizing art.

There are edge cases, of course, when art might be provocative and considered immoral, and maybe even illegal sometimes. But that would be edge cases, highly debated.

Closest one for lower latency. However, the closest location happens to be in a major metro area and is banned by many financial organizations that I use, so usually I connect to the next closest.

But they have missiles, aren’t they? Can’t say it lead to nothing.

Absolutely. Government oversight exists for that.

Oh, that’s a very different discussion… if that housing institution would be elected, preferably on local level, then maybe it could be more accountable.

Why do you think that “ministry of housing” would not discriminate, not invade privacy and charge fair rent? I’m always fascinated how people believe that some government entity would act as a compassionate and just human being, at the same time bashing rich for being assholes.

Power corrupts. In capitalist society capital brings power, and in socialist state it’s bureaucracy. So here you have rich assholes, and when you switch more power to government you’ll get paper shifting assholes. Not much will change for people with no power. Probably it will be worse because rich people and their corporations produce valuable goods and services, while paper shifters usually don’t need to produce anything apart from more papers.

I heard that geo heat pump installation cost is very high. Did you do the math to see how many summers of $60 energy bills it will take to recuperate initial investment?