Right. But I think something like Fritter piggybacking on the same concepts and dat protocol might be the best option for a decentralized social network. Diaspora, Pleroma, and Mastodon require server hosting and most people don't have the expertise, time, or the money to do that. The barrier to entry to Fritter is lower.

The problem with Diaspora, Mastodon, Pleroma, and similar tools is that nobody uses them. Another interesting option is Beaker Browser and its decentralized social network Fritter, but that is even more obscure than the others and the last time I used it it didn't work that well.

As much as i want it, I can't convince the whole world to ditch Facebook and Twitter for those alternatives at once.

I have a lot to complain about in our school district. But one awesome thing was a boy born gender assigned female at birth who announced his sex in fifth grade. And the school district was fine with it. To my pleasant delight, so were the other kids - and this is an area that supported Trump in the election.

I've never met the child. I wish him well.

I know some people who've lost. Totally different from how they were behaving before. They have no wish to live, they do everything automatically and don't care about the end of humans as well.

This is terribly cynical, but one of the reasons my wife and I had more than one child is exactly this. If one or two of our children die, we still have the need to care for the remaining ones forcing us to get out of bed each day and keep living.

If all of our children died, we would commit suicide together.

You're not a freak. Or we're all freaks. You just don't know of like-minded people nearby.

I wish I still had it, but years ago my sister sent me a long PDF on emotional labor. It was a good read, and an eye opener. I had a lot of work to do in that regard, but hopefully I have grown and I have less now.

As a minor point, one thing I've explicitly discussed with my wife is related to our own personality preferences. Ten years ago we split the mundane tasks more or less evenly and she also did the emotional labor (which was ridiculously unfair to her). But she prefers event planning, vacation planning, gift shopping, and so forth over washing dishes, doing laundry, grocery shopping, and cooking. I do not. So now I shoulder the bulk of the mundane stuff so she can do the emotional labor without doing more total work between regular activities and emotional labor than I do.

I mention that in case it's a position other couples can use. And of course it doesn't have to be a man and woman split. If the guy likes putting up Christmas decorations and the woman doesn't care, then she can be the one taking the kids to trumpet lessons or whatever. Edit: or any other pairing, the sex of the partners is irrelevant.

At the places I mentioned, when I am there literally no one but the owner is working. They have other stuff on weekends and they might treat those people terrible, I don't know. But when I patronize the business, the owner takes my order, makes the drinks, and cooks the food.

I believe you that you got treated terribly.

I'm trying to transition vegan and I spent the first forty years of my life on a pretty traditional American diet. Lot of burgers, hot dogs, pizza, chicken, sausage, omelets, egg sandwiches, and so forth.

The people I know that have been vegan for more than a few years aren't interested in vegan imitation meats and vegan cheeses and so forth. But I'm not ready to just ditch 50% of my dietary habits - maybe I should be, but I'm not - so I've been trying the different substitutes. My experience, for what it's worth:

• The vegan foods that don't try to taste like meat are moderately tasty, but rarely as tasty as meat to someone that likes meat. For example, black bean garden burgers, mushroom burgers, falafel burgers.
• The vegan foods that try to imitate real meat and cheese range from horrid to excellent. They're expensive, but I love the Beyond Meat Burger.

Yeah I have mixed feelings about it. The anarchist view is that there shouldn't be government outside the local direct democracy, period. I understand many of the philosophical, economic, and historical arguments for that view.

But I wonder if we can ever really slay these giants. They've gotten so big.

Raising taxes on the rich could do a lot of good, if it was spent well: universal basic income, public health care, etc... You're right though, most or all of it would probably just line the pockets of the military industrial complex, the pharmaceutical companies, etc.. etc..

Maybe BrowseDuringClass1917 is referring to the fact that most fast food employees get treated like shit?

In that respect voting with your wallet might not hurt Taco Bell but it might help the locally owned restaurant. I visit a local food truck and a local coffee shop once a week each, and most of the time they are each staffed only by the owner. So I'm reasonably sure nobody local is getting abused by the transaction. ;)

(Edit: That said, patronizing local restaurant is only practical if you can afford the difference. I can get a pretty decent amount of food for $3 at McDonalds or Taco Bell. $3 doesn't buy anything at the food truck or the coffee shop.)

As a single anecdotal point, my sister was an omnivore that almost never went to the doctor or took sick days in her 20s because she was too poor. She managed to get better paying jobs and became vegan, and is at the doctor a lot for problems she always had but could not get care for when she was younger.

They are all over the place near me, but then so are colossal SUVs and pristine, never carried or hauled anything F-250s and Silverado-3500s and such.

I think the important thing about Tesla Motors isn't them and their products, it's that the other automakers were sitting on their asses and ignoring electrical vehicles until Tesla came along. Now Nissan, GM, and BMW sell battery-powered cars and most other automakers are working on them. I'll never own a Tesla, but someday I might own a Nissan Leaf.

There's a writer Alfie Kohn that dives into this in great detail. He's not the most interesting writer, but his books are worth checking out if you can get them. There are talks of his on Youtube and such, and he's more engaging there. Short summary:

• Grades and tests kill interest in learning.
• Punishments and also rewards also kill interest in learning.
• People of all ages, including kids, learn better in small collaborative groups instead of when one person stands in front and lectures.
• People are more interested in learning when the topic applies to them. Learning fractions to help with cooking gets more attention than learning fractions as just abstract math. And so forth.
• The best educational projects are as self-guided as impossible. Instead of "We will next study George Washington", how about, "How do you think we should decide who are the most important people in 18th century North America?" And go from there.
• The best educational projects are cross-discipline. An example is having the class design a zoo. The students learn about square footage, budgets, logistics, marketing, animals, animal habitats and their moisture and temperature requirements, animal diets, feeding schedules, worker schedules, parking, and so forth.

Edit: This is all backed up by research, too. America's stronger emphasis on grades and standardized testing in the past 20 years, it's "traditional" and "back to basics" approach to education, is severely hurting kids' interest in learning and their retention of important information.

My kids attend a top-rated public school in our state, and sadly there is basically none of this there. There's a little of it in kindergarten and first grade, and that's it. I got interested in unschooling because my kids have top level grades but two of the four are indifferent to school and two of the four actively hate learning. I am likely to be a parent of four graduates 'with honors' that never read a book again in their lives. :(

"If you switch from Uncle Ben's rice to the store brand, you can save $3 per month and put it into your savings nest egg!"

"Great. I only need to eat store brand rice for eleven years to afford this month's rent. I'm all set."

No. I figure using a website is an explicit transaction. They provide something I want, and I either pay by buying a subscription or else by viewing ads. If the site has lots of ads, I don't want to support them but the correct thing to do is just leave the site.

In real life there's not much I can (safely) do about billboards, signs, and so forth.

On the web the real answer is to stay on sites and services that are ad-free. That just severely limits my options - but most of the things with ads really aren't worth the effort anyway.

....now I just need to convince all of my friends and family to get on open source social networks. How hard can that be? (Ha!)

I don't know your budget, but I thought Hulu offered an upgraded level that gets rid of all ads? Or does it only get rid of some?

That's the main reason I never got Hulu. I only want commercial-free streaming services.

Oh then that's different. As long as it won't stop you from getting your diploma then I wouldn't worry about it. Cool.

I disagree. I think the biggest problem is that if government allowed or removed obstacles to more investment into science and technology, it would just be siphoned off by shysters.

Capitalism is the obstacle.

To be fair, Robin there is still ahead of most Americans. Batman should be slapping some other people around first.

Welcome. I like the crew here, I hope you do too.

Sorry you're having problems with math. I love math, but most educational material for it sucks.

And a lot of bright people freeze up when the pressure of tests is on. One of my brothers took his SATs in his 20s just to see what would happen, and his score was 400 points higher than when he was in high school. The only change was that nobody is going to look at or care about the SAT score you get when you're 27. ...but that doesn't mean I have any useful advice for how to take the pressure off yourself, if that's some part of what's hurting your performance.

The only other tip I have, which you may also have tried already, is looking for Youtube or Khan Academy videos on the topics that are causing trouble and see if any of them are better at helping you understand the stuff.

Good luck. You can use the internet and articulate yourself clearly here, I'm sure you're smart enough to understand the math.

I get angry after the second drink. Not angry at the world, not angry at my friends, not angry at the server. Just angry that I can't think straight and I have to concentrate to walk.

So one drink every month or so is plenty.

I think the real solution to search is distributed, decentralized, peer to peer search like Yacy. Unfortunately, right now Yacy sucks.

I think DuckDuckGo is genuine here, but their headquarters are in the US. To put my tinfoil hat on for a minute, I would not be surprised if their product was either always a tool of US data gathering agencies or else started out intending to protect privacy but then taken over with 'secret warrants'.

The setup is a little tricky - not too bad, but more than I think many people have the patience to sit through. But it works well. I have it set to only run when my phone is charging and on wifi. That leaves me vulnerable to data loss if my phone is broken while I'm traveling, but I don't want to waste mobile data or reduce battery life.