I think the “don’t hold it don’t own it” advice does make sense for a small amount of portable gold if you’re considering a scenario like a fascist government taking over and needing to flee the country with any wealth you can, predicated on the assumption that other countries are still relatively stable.

There are also a lot of silly people who hoard pounds of gold for apocalyptic currency which you’ve pegged.

Supernote is an eNotebook and is writing focused rather than book focused, but it uses a stripped down fork of android and you can easily side load other android apps onto it including e.g. F-droid. You can use it without an account and with no network connectivity (loading content via USB), or your choice of cloud providers, including recently self-hosted storage.

I mostly read library books so unfortunately I have to go through Kindle, but you can use the Kindle app on the device and it works pretty well. Not as many features as a dedicated device, but the basics work great.

Major caveat: it’s not backlit so you need a book light/lamp/headlamp, which is a big pain.

The Japanese and Korean vehicles for the American market aren’t any better to be fair.

Had a volt, I don’t even think they were selling them 3 years ago. I had a 2011 or 2012, one of the original models before the update, from from 2019-2022 or thereabouts. Had to replace the radiator, 12 volt battery, reset the traction battery, and replace the coolant system hoses. Again, huge PITA but got more than double the MPG of the 2001 sedan it replaced and held its value decently.

All cars period are bad investments. That’s being said, I had a volt for about 3 years and I saved more in gas than I lost to depreciation and expensive maintenance. I bought it before there was an EV that could do my daily commute that wasn’t horrendously expensive; they were a good transition vehicle 10 years ago before batteries and charging speeds improved, though they’re definitely a huge PITA to maintain.

“I need a laptop because I work on the go a lot”

“Just get a carrying case for your desktop so it’s easy to haul”

A big unsecured bump sticking out of the bottom of your phone during normal daily use is a great way to ruin your port. Plus then you can’t charge while using your media.

Most demographic information in the US (all?) is self-reported, and unless you were in the American southwest, Hispanic community prevalence and cultural influence in the broader US is pretty recent, so I suspect that not many U.S.-derived Native Americans are mislabeling themselves as Hispanic.

Traditionally it actually went the other way: Native Americans, while second class citizens in a lot of respects, were more respected than black people or dark-skinned immigrants. So, for instance, there were tons and tons of light-skinned black folk passing as Native and marrying into white families in New England especially. It was a big topic in genetics when things like Ancestry DNA reports became more common and lots of people who’s great great great grandfather was Cherokee or whatever found out he was actually an escaped slave who passed as Native.

That being said, most Latin American Hispanics are of at least partially indigenous descent, so in a broader sense most Hispanics in the US are indeed indigenous, they’re just descended from Nahuatl/Mayan/Quechua/Mapuche or some other indigenous ethnic group, rather than one of the groups that is today considered ‘Native American’ in the US.

David Sedaris in a commencement speech gave some advice that has really stuck with me and is quite apt, I think. To paraphrase, “you can’t win everything, so pick one or two issues to be passionately angry about and try to change and focus on those, or you won’t get anything done.”

Found the quote, Oberlin 2018 commencement: “Choose one thing to be terribly, terribly offended by, and be offended by this as opposed to the dozens or possibly hundreds that many of you are currently juggling… Stand up for what you believe in, as long as I believe in the same thing. Those of you who’d like to ban assault rifles, I am behind you 100 percent. Take the front lines, give it your all, and don’t back down until you win. Do not, however, petition to have a Balthus painting removed from the Met because you can see the subject’s underpants. The goal is to have less in common with the Taliban, not more.”

Or that he already crashed the economy during his first term, jfc

Nonviolent protests work fine, great even, they just have to be disruptive. The Civil Rights movement was largely nonviolent and got results because they striked, took up commercial space so commerce couldn’t operate, and gummed up the works so productivity stalls. The suits won’t care about violence either if they have ways of escaping, they only care about direct impacts, be it directed violence or economic harm.

I think machine compatibility plays a huge role, some machines do mostly ‘just work’ while others are a pain. It also definitely requires some tinkering, though mostly on setup or on the first week or two in my experience.

Also, ymmv and a lot of people swear by them but I’ve never had good luck with Ubuntu based distro, they’ve always been super buggy with hard to track fixes for me. I like fedora a lot better and it similarly has decent (though not nearly as extensive) community support for weird bugs, but I know people swear by many things.

Yeah, I’ve had one hardware glitch that support sent me a detailed video how to fix by resetting the mainboard within a few hours of writing them, fixed it within 10 minutes. Other than that any issues I’ve had are linux-funkiness, like odd sound profiles on the speakers that I could fix myself, and have been gradually taken care of through updates along the way.

Taller, worse station wagons since the extra height dramatically increases fuel consumption and rates of severe injury in crashes, while also making rolls more likely.

Just in case there was any doubt, the data shows 2024 as the warmest, with 2023 and 2025 competing for second.