Thanks, I really appreciate it. I am working on making some things better for myself. Its just hard to keep up motivation some says when progress is slow due to other factors and the regret and frustration play on on daily loop most days.

I see this in my future. My mom has made my life a living hell emotionally speaking for years now. It was bad enough before Covid, but still tolerable. After Covid, suffice to say she drank all the antivax koolaid and has tried to shove it down my throat at every opportunity.

Frustratingly, she’s also one of the only people who regularly keeps in touch with me. I’ve already gone low contact but I am not currently in a situation where I can fully cut her off. The low contact part bothers her immensely since she refuses to understand how her actions over the years has pushed me away.

The sad part is, I feel bad about cutting her off. I want a good relationship with both my parents, especially before something like this happens. For this, and many other reasons not relevant to this thread, my life’s a long string of frustration, regret, loneliness, and pain. I don’t see it getting better any time soon. I’m so tired of all the pain and emotional turmoil.

Not what I had in mind when I said that, but intent doesn’t translate well over text. What I had in mind is protection for the school/students from people who would rather enforce their views through force, nothing more than that. The idea is that everyone has a chance to get an education.

Fund free education and health care for everyone in the world regardless of race, nationality and creed. Imposed no matter how much kicking and screaming certain countries might do to oppose it. With appropriate countermeasures for each specific country that opposes it. A random country in the middle east that hates educating girls or whatever? Armed guards and other related measures as needed. US has entrenched for profit health care? Fund legislation that rips out the entire system by the roots etc.

Excess funds would be invested in such a way as to fund those programs in perpetuity. With safeguards put in place so that I can be reasonably certain that it won’t be easy to dismantle from within or without.

Assuming I have enough money left over, I’d do the same for housing.

If I still have money left over if also fund ways of tackling the climate crisis and changing corporate strategy so instead of chasing infinite growth in a finite world the mentality is more about stability and stewardship, of the company and of the planet.

I sort things every once in a while but eventually lose interest or patience. Would be nice to have a way to do it automatically. I suppose llms could help there, but I’m not sure if they’re quite there yet in terms of reliability.

And these are the people who demand id to get back into your account if they find activity they deem suspicious.

At least with a TV you can actually turn off the WiFi and just not connect a network cable to it. In my case the TV periodically tries to connect and prompts me to check the network settings, so I’m fairly sure its not trying to randomly connect to an open WiFi network. YMMV I suppose. A decent workaround would be to set up a diff router or ssid and just blackhole that network from getting online at all. But that can be more technical than some people are comfortable with.

Don’t connect the TV to the internet. Buy a settop box like a shield TV and stream through that.

No, one need only look at the windows recall debacle to see how corporations would abuse the chip, not to mention the potential for advertising beamed directly to your brain and the possibility of malware. Hell even discounting all of that, not that you should by any means, how would upgrading work?

Gaming and reading.

A calvacade of concerns:

1. Black Sheep - I’m the black sheep of the family for various reasons too numerous to get I into here. But suffice to say I have effectively zero contact with most of my immediate family except for my parents. My parents keep trying to force me into fitting into their own view of things, whether it be religion, antivax, etc which has put strain on the relationship when I refuse to fit their mold for me.

2. Forgotten - I’m forgotten by any friends/family that I do still have contact with. They rarely, if ever, reach out on their own initiative. I rarely reach out partly because I’m busy with my own stuff and simply don’t remember to do so, partly because I’m tired of always initiating, and partly because I don’t see the point, as I’ve been burned too many times before and it likely won’t last anyway.

3. Money - I have significant debt that I’m years away from paying off with my current budget, both due to necessary expenditures and not so necessary ones. I’m also significantly behind on my retirement savings, especially if I want to have anywhere near my current income when I retire, if I can ever afford to. Add day to day expenses and couple that with both a desire to still occasionally frivolously spend money and a strong loathing of being in debt and you have a recipe for significant stress all on its own.

4. Covid - I’m one of those people who has enough health concerns that I want to play it extremely safe when it comes to potentially contracting the virus. This has put a serious damper on trying to go out and meet new people.

Frankly I think its a minor miracle that I’ve managed to hold it together as well as I have.