This is the new American way. Zero-sum thinking all the way down. Anyone else’s win is our loss. Every situation must have a winner and a loser. Win-win situations are considered immoral for these people. We’ve moved past rugged individualism to a full-on Hunger Games mindset.

I use an Nividia shield that I’ve had for about 5 years. Have an alternate ad free launcher enabled. Still works really well. I use it mostly with Kodi streaming from SMB, some Jellyfin though I have Jellyfin hosted on a Pi4 so video quality is somewhat lacking. The 4k upscaling still works very well and is somewhat unique among streaming boxes

The point is that you can move elsewhere without losing access. There is no central control

I am still on some meta services because my family is there. But I only post stuff relevant to those people. Everything else is fediverse and bluesky

People should be leaving Reddit. They are poor stewards of our content for innumerable reasons. Go back to forums. Go to Lemmy. The key thing is that we should not have centralized arbiters of our discussions online.

As an American, it used to be fossil fuels. I’d go elsewhere and it’d be 3x the price. But lately we seem to be catching up. One thing where we’re still likely cheaper are high-end electronics. At least, it looks like the iPhone is still cheaper in the US than almost anywhere else. I remember living abroad a few years ago, colleagues would ask if I could buy an iPhone or Mac on Christmas break and bring it back to them lol

Journalists need to be paid. Ad revenue is in freefall, and it never really supported long form content that doesn’t endorse a product. If you want real news, it has to be paid for somehow.