OpenStars

The Eldritchen horrors that we saw are not the reason that... uh I mean, there is no such thing as... uh I mean it was a technical glitch, I swear!

The TV series Earth: Final Conflict, made by Gene Roddenberry, had a story based on this premise:-).

Not only that, but also under these conditions. Blaming others for one's own problems used to be a sign of mental unhealth, but now it is considered a sign of "proper management"!:-P

Yeah I still use Blokada 5 on my daily driver - it generally works "well enough" for most things, so I never bothered to switch to 4 on it. But I did notice that if you try to play a game on it, it's like the ad blocker isn't even there, whereas version 4 worked a lot better straight away. I may just not have played around enough with the settings of 5 though:-).

Thank you for helping fill out this list. May I ask why you moved away from Blokada? Version 5 is bad ofc, and 6 is far, FAR worse, but 4 worked well for me.

It looks like AdAway has some nice features since I saw it last, like the ability to whitelist a particular app. If it does not require root permissions, it might be a clear winner even.

I use Blokada - but not the latest version since the company switched from the free open-source standalone app paradigm to a cloud-based continual paid subscription model. It seems like Blokada version 4 (obtained either from the company's webpage or F-droid I forget which) blocks a heck of a lot more stuff than version 5 for some reason.

On the other hand, it also noticeably heats up my phone if a not-well-behaved app (examples include Freemium games) continually resubmits queries over & over again every (or even multiple times a) second. You can block every request that it makes... but it can also keep making them so... at some point you may question whether the cost is worth it.

This arguably relates more to "tracking" than actual advertisements, since there can only be a finite number of the latter but the former can happen all day every day even when the app is not running, if it decides to be aggressive about checking in with its home base. These days, even if you do pay for something, your data is STILL the actual "product" that is the reason the company is in business at all to obtain.:-(

Linux: I love the logic, the precision, the customizability... but I also like it when things werk, which it often has major issues with. Then again, I use Linux at my job on a daily basis, and even on my Unix Mac OSX I use things like the CLI and gVim, so I enjoy having that stability at home. Especially when I need to use a laptop - I need to be able to do things like connect to someone else's wifi without having to install package dependencies first.

I bought an Apple phone once, expecting to eventually jailbreak it. But they took that capability away, so when it died I switched back to Android and will never even consider going back. Now, I too have a Samsung S22+ - and it is the only phone I have ever had that I outright despise. Tbf, I consider that my own fault for not selling my soul to them - yes it is on them for asking such, but I knew who they were, and decided to roll the dice on them anyway. I really miss the days when flagship killers existed, like the most famous one of all time OnePlus 7 (before the co-founder left the company when they announced their new direction to use the ColorOS used on all those cheap Huawei phones), and before that the Nexus line. I might try a Fairphone next, maybe? Or just a cheap dumbphone even - "smart" ones are more like "smartass" these days:-(. Pixels would be great - especially if you want to replace the OS - but I hardly use my camera as it is, and the specs otherwise are not great unless you spend much more, and there seems no longer to be a way to turn that around and get a "high-end phone with a cheap-ass camera".

I thought - though I couldn't readily point to any and I could be wrong - that studies have shown that children seem to have some kind of innate sense of "right vs. wrong"? Like if you walk up and take their candy away from them, they scream "hey, that's not fair!", like that would have a chance of working (and why wouldn't it? but if the scene changed and these were gorillas instead of humans, then wouldn't that have a possibility of getting yourself literally killed, for daring to challenge the larger apes, as an object lesson of power and "know your place"?). So, at least at the early stages, Might vs. Right may be in opposition to that kind of preschool/kindergarten level of morality? And then everything after that is modified by societal pressures - like spoiled children are "spoiled" by teaching them that their wants & needs matter more to their parents than the wants & needs of others. Like maybe they go out to eat and the kid of wealthy parents sees the servants jump at every whim of the master, and by implication the child as well - not understanding yet that they are being paid+tipped to do so - and internalize that sense of "I am a higher being than those sort are".

So if morality changes in the future - as it 100% definitely will - it seems doubtful that the Nature side of it would be altered much, in a short period of time (in the evolutionary/geological timescale sense), and rather that the Nurture side would teach them differently. At which point I hope that they will be taught what works rather than what does not. In that sense, I like how the Bible - the collected wisdom of the ages - and basically every other revered tome like it from all religions across the globe acts to preserve what has been learned. e.g. adultery is bad (hurt feelings leading to all manner of problems), and unless under highly constrained circumstances, murder due to hot-headed feelings in the moment is bad, and stealing from someone is bad (it gets dicey when a rich fuck decides "this is mine now" - is it really stealing to simply take back what is yours? so having mentioned it, I will now promptly ignore it henceforth:-D), and so on. To the extent that these laws may capture something innate inside of us all, then it is good for us to have learned them. Perhaps in the future - or even now already - we can separate out the "religion" parts from what is truly good. As Jesus Himself offered: "be thou not dicks to one another, and instead be most excellent to one another, my dudes".

And this is why I am turning more to religious thoughts lately, though it could be any alternative to politics - non- or not-for-profits, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), or extremely rarely even inside of those, like the Mr. Rogers character was a MOST EXCELLENT human being, both on- and off-camera (and too Gene Rodenberry, creator of Star Trek). Anyway the goal is: how can we help people, even when the major trend of that river of society is trying to bend away from that goal (taking away people's livelihoods, making them work for literally DECADES to pay back student loans that are corruptly administered - i.e. a form of literal, actual, irl "slavery" if you will)? Occasionally I see a story that gives me hope (e.g. this one where he tries to fight against the trend), but they do seem to be coming much more rarely than in the past.:-| In any case, I need to create my own to attach meaning to in the more local sense of my own cares & wants & needs:-).

One problem with trying to define "perfection" is the age-old adage of what does the word "good" even mean? In the engineering sense, it means "good for something", like a spoon is good for eating one type of, more liquidy, foodstuffs, whereas a knife is good for an entirely different and while not totally at least partially nonoverlapping set of foodstuffs, and then a knife is quite a bit different still from either (and as that movie Wall-E perfectly illustrates: sporks have their own whole thing going on!:-P). If you wanted to eat a soup, either a fork or a knife - or chopsticks, etc. - would not be "good". And framed in that manner, we already immediately see that this is a whole non-starter, b/c paper > rock > scissors > ..., which invalidates the logical chain of transitory thinking that if A leads to B and B leads to C, then surely A must lead to C as well, right? (nope! b/c otherwise, paper would beat scissors too) So the best we could ever hope for is to say that item A is good for some particular purpose, not good in any kind of objective, overall sense. At which point... how would "perfection" have a chance there of being tied to something in the objective world, if even "good" does not? Hence it remains subjective, unless we switch the meaning to some kind of objective standard - as in "lacking nothing" i.e. has all components of set X as defined by...

Humans, really all mammals, then have this whole wonderful thing where we are not perfect, and that adaptability to change is what has gotten us this far, even when dinosaurs and cockroaches and fishes and such - as measured by length of evolutionary time - were much more of a "success". They were much more "attuned" to their specific circumstances, i.e. a highly defined set of parameters, whereas we are not, and therefore we are the only species that has even a ghost of a chance of possibly outlasting even our planet Earth instead (that we could create ourselves I mean - ofc whatever animals and such we took with us could go as well).

"Assigned Religion At Birth" -> I love that phrase, Imma have to steal it now!:-P I have already changed mine several times, and I absolutely see no reason to stick with things merely b/c they are old. Tbf, it does have some demonstrated value, but for those of us who can do better, we don't need that - e.g. whenever we see the hypocrisy (e.g. priest "on the take"... or much worse), we can simply nope out and move on to greener pastures.

I would argue that sheeple - precisely like zombies - are not all that dangerous, at least individually, though en mass they constitute a real force to be reconed with. Even there, the necromancer behind them (if present) controlling that force is the REAL danger, b/c even if they lose every single one of those sheeple-tools, they can still come at you with new ones (money gives them power). George Romero's Night of the Living Dead had several perfect examples, where like there were zero zombies present inside of a locked room, but then one of the living people died, and after that there was one zombie present. So it is not "the zombies" that were the chief danger, it was that space radiation or whatever in that case, that could continue to make more zombies. And in other genres like Resident Evil, the zombies were at the extreme low end of the spectrum of danger, which the company hid behind and continued to make MANY more, even more highly dangerous thingies and stuff and junk. And irl, Putin himself is no sheeple. Even if he were stripped of Fox News, and the entire nation of Russia, he still is iirc the literal top number 1 wealthiest person alive on the planet, plus his store of secrets that he could use to blackmail all the most powerful people, would make him (or whoever inherits all of that) quite a dangerous adversary indeed - entirely independent of unthinking Americans voting for conservative politicians. Especially if he also controls the liberal politicians too:-(.

I hope I am not straining your brain too awfully much - I trust you to say no though and slow down your responses, i.e. to take care of yourself first!

Those two are not as related as they at first seem.

For one, the plumbing required is different, as in literally offices don't tend to have bathrooms with toilets and showers inside every office space. Also the lighting would be cut off for all the inside units. Communal bathrooms and no windows works for work but not as good for home.

For another, a lot of the varying housing crises (there are multiple types) relate to affordability bc of being bought up by corporate interests. Another type relates to weird zoning laws of what types of homes are allowed to be built in certain areas - and for these at least, there's nothing stopping good homes from being made except again profits.

So it's not impossible, but there are challenges. Mainly, how can already rich people find a way to make even moar monay? Oh yeah and something something the poors get whatever too.

So that's why we live in this perpetual capitalist hellscape, sheesh just let ~~Prometheus~~ Jesus get it over with already!? :-P

Also... ouch! That sounds vaguely painful, methinks, maybe? :-D