If your retirement window is 5 years, you're probably very very fucked.

If it's 10 years, as long as you're assuming social security is going to contribute $0, you're probably still pretty fucked.

15 years? Maybe, but at that point that whole global climate change thing we're ignoring is going to start getting more serious, so I'd wager on fucked.

20? Please, you're already in the trenches of the Water Wars, so your retirement plan is machine gun when you go over the top, sorry.

Basically retirement is going to be you dying once your insurance lapses and someone coming along later to pick your corpse up and billing your family for doing so.

(I'd love to be proven wrong, but 'What's the worst most awful thing that could possibly happen' seems to be the right choice these days.)

Listen, I can't just not use Amazon. Where else am I going to get my SYPHILICHODE nail trimmers and LEAKCROTCH underwear?

You can't just find horrible garbage to buy ANYWHERE, you gotta buy it on Amazon.

I can live without it for a week, but man, these underwear don't last too long so I gotta keep buying more!

(/s in case this was not sufficiently clear, but this is the ultimate problem with all these pointless little internet symbolic gestures: nobody will notice, remember, or care about them since they're only going to be a very minor stoppage in buying things, which everyone ends up buying ANYWAYS after the week is over.)

I have an endless amount of respect for ANYONE that's willing to swallow their pride and do shit like this when it's in the interests of other people, their country, or whatever.

Takes an actual good human to go 'fuck it, this guy is a complete piece of shit but I'm going to make nice because it's what I need to do for others'.

Can't imagine Musk or Trump or JD doing that, ever.

Elon has always been a terrible person

The problem with Elon is he's been provably an idiot for the past 25 years.

The first thing I ever heard about Musky is that back in 2000-ish he wanted PayPal to take their infra, throw out all the Linux/BSD in use, and move everything to Windows NT.

Anyone who was even remotely IT adjacent in that era can come along and tell you how utterly moronic that idea is.

Anytime I've ever heard him blather on about some stupid shit that doesn't exist except in his delusions or talk about, well, ANYTHING technical or specialized all I was ever able to think of is that he got lucky that Thiel didn't drain all of his blood and leave his corpse in a ditch.

Hey, I live near that McDonalds!

It's right across from the Dallas Zoo, so you can imagine that there was a not insubstantial traffic of kids leaving the zoo and getting a McNasty with Cheese with their parents.

Everyone around here hated that they turned something fun and unique into another corpo hell hole of blandness, so there's that at least.

A lot of this reads like you have, like all of us will, just kinda gotten old and aren't into or interested in the same things you were 20 years ago.

But, while the magic does wear off, you also went back to the same kind of locations an expected your new adventures to measure up to your past adventures, and that's a recipe for disaster because comparison is the theft of joy. Maybe you need to go to somewhere dramatically different, like perhaps Africa or the mountains in Chile or Bolivia?

(Also you sound shockingly bitter and come across in text as more than a little grumpy, and people can pick up that aura so uh, some of this might also be on you.)

But, I also wonder if people are using meta or x platforms to do the exact same thing?

Absolutely. And they're using Youtube, Fediverse platforms, old-fashioned forums, and anything else that you can have user-generated content posted on it.

TikTok is being singled out because the real story of 'every platform has CSAM and CSAM for sale' is not very palatable for the oligarchs that own the platforms, and it's much simpler to point to a foreign-owned platform as "the problem" and not the ones they run/invest in.

until you were able to watch porn

You mean you never watched 3gpp encoded 240p porn over WAP sites via a java browser on your dumb phone?

....what? Stop judging me.

"I don't like cold war relics!" declares man currently sucking on Vladimir Putin's dick.

how something like Zen

Zen is a Firefox fork.

I have to ask: what are you going to do? Shoot Facebook? Snipe iCloud?

Start blasting Google?

Pretty sure a rifle is in no way a useful tool for any sort of online privacy.

What's hilarious to me is that this was totally a Thing when I was younger.

Not for measels, because we weren't braindead dumbfucks, but for chickenpox.

You'd have whole groups of kids get together to have everyone get sick at once, instead of one kid at a time for months and months as it spreads through classes at school.

IDK if it made sense, but it was legit a thing that people were doing.

Of course, there's a vaccine now, so if you're still doing this you're one of the aformentioned braindead dumbfucks.

It's an internet liberal problem. They'll go along with the groupthink, but not a one of them will be willing to lead the group because being wrong is punished more harshly than just doing nothing is.

So, you get endless debates about the rightness of doing something, vs people just doing it.

The WaPo was establishment propaganda even before JeffyB bought them, so really all that's happening now is that he's saying the quiet part out loud.

Sounds like a fantastic plan.

The handwringing about if we're being nice enough to the alt right is directly contributing to why we have so much mess we're now having to deal with. The approach seems sane to find music that's very specifically nazi rock, so they're being extremely limited in response, imo.

Screw em, kick them out of anywhere you find them, and then nail the door they used to get in shut.

<MAGA would like to know your location.>

The implication seems like, “we all talk to each other and if you lie to me you lose all of your accounts”.

Well uh, yes, in some cases, that's exactly the correct interpretation.

A lot of tracker admins DO talk to each other, because this is a fairly small world, and yeah, nobody wants a shithead around so they'll definitely let other people know who their shitheads are so they can be handled before they become a problem.

Nothing inherently wrong with that, imo.

Ah HP printer drivers, my favorite form of self-inflicted malware.

My favorite HP sucks story happened many a year ago. The boss's shitty HP multi-function POS died, and we got him a nice Brother instead, and then went to uninstall the drivers.

Somehow, and the reason for this is totally unknown to anyone other than HP engineers, the driver 'uninstaller' decided that today's hilarity would be that it was going to uninstall.... everything.

After about 15 minutes of the drive churning away I got concerned, rebooted it, and found that nearly 75% of everything on it had been deleted by the uninstaller.

No fucking idea, but that was a fun thing to explain and then fix.

I hate to go 'Boy, I don't buy it' but, uh, I kinda don't?

This is one of those things that COULD happen, as long as every teacher, every administrator and the state itself were all intentionally trying to make it happen.

CT has standardized tests that are required to be taken to progress through school, so how can someone who can't read or write pass those?

And EVERY teacher she had from first grade on just accepted the fact she clearly was unable to read or write, and thus was almost certainly not doing any work, and just decided that's a-ok and we'll just pass her along anyways without doing anything?

Somehow feels like there's a lot more to this story than just her side as presented by that article.

"Work 50% longer weeks so you can make something that'll both make me richer AND cost you your jobs!" is not the motivational speech he thinks it is.