The modern world needs to change. Humans are getting more and more depressed, broken, struggling and mentally ill just to get more and more exposed to ads, social pressure and the lot.

This is by design. People are rightfully criticizing the US for barely protesting our fascist regime. But everyone is either living paycheck to paycheck or well aware how quickly their savings will burn away if they get fired. So protests in the middle of the week, when politicians MIGHT see it, are a no go. And weekend protests mostly are ineffectual and just antagonize people who “just want some peace and quiet on their day off”

UBI is definitely something we have needed for decades now. I personally come down on the side of UBI for basic living expenses but encourage people to work for luxuries and advancement (and if that sounds like the dystopia of Mars in The Expanse…). But we need something so that people can actually live without a job as we put more and more work into automating those jobs away.

As for the topic at hand: I was fortunate enough to have a 9/80 job for a number of years (basically every other Friday off) and loved the schedule. And it is why I am so skeptical of the 4/40 movement and am increasingly suspicious it is a poison pill.

Because it isn’t like the workload is going to drop. So people are going to be expected to get a full week’s work done in four days. For some that is going to be trivial because they have such a small workload (that they are super eager to find ways to use AI to automate…). For others? That means early mornings and late nights and even faster burnout where they have to fit every single errand and the like into that Friday off and have even less energy to do anything on the weekend.

Like I said, I loved my 9/80 and it was really nice for making me value that every other Friday off and try to do something with it. But the number of times I had to swap a Friday last minute because of meetings or just come in for a half day to get a deliverable done…

And the logical reality is that companies will decide 4/40 is good for productivity… and pay people 90% of their former salaries because “We respect the work you are doing but you also only work four days a week…”. 90% of already stagnating salaries during a time of global inflation.

Having consistent uptime and not locking broken IMAP behind a paywall would beat Tuta.

I have a proton subscription (although I am in the process of switching to fastmail since that better suits my needs) but I think “privacy respecting email” is a fool’s errand and increasingly a red flag. In a lot of ways, it is no different than a VPN: They can say whatever the hell they want. If you are in a situation where you are trusting them then you have already made a mistake.

Proton et al ARE awesome because you can get a mostly functional email for free without any other identification (mostly functional in that a lot of services put the proton domains on a spam list… because anyone can get a burner). But if you are sending ANYTHING sensitive, you want to be encrypting that. And you want to do that in a way that is not asking the company to do it for you.

So as long as thundermail doesn’t require a phone number or some other form of personal ID to make an account: f’ing A. After that it is just a question of their support for IMAP et al (highly probable considering… Thunderbird) and what it costs to use your own domains.

While I obviously support and use lemmy:

You DO realize that lemmy has even fewer protections against bots and no vetting of instance owners (or even mods on those instances), at all, right? The big difference is that there won’t be a news post about “special interests” controlling discourse on here.

I guess I was warmer on the “ports” when I thought it was some proprietary or straight up PCI-E connector. Instead of just a USB-C port.

Which I guess gets down to how solid those “rails” are for the 20 dollar dongles. Because if you break the inner C port, you are in the exact same mess.

Which… gets back to it being hard to really figure out how much of this is “teething issues” versus “this is secretly kind of shitty?”. Because replaceable ports is GOOD. I would even be cool with the underlying USB-C as the interface port. But “I need to have an hdmi port on my laptop and will spend 20 dollars on a proprietary dongle” is stupid. As opposed to "I need to have an hdmi port on my latpop. This also works on my tablet and my steam deck and any other laptop because it is a 20 dollar dongle that has an HDMI port, 2 USB A ports, and does power pass through. Which, again, feels like Apple shittiness while also increasing e-waste.

Which I think gets to where I am on a lot of the framework stuff. It sounds awesome but the implementation is REALLY straddling that line of “is this a teething issue or is this actually worse than what we currently have?”