I’m lucky - I’m in a Midwest town as well (between 1500 to 3000 people) in the US. A couple of years ago, fiber got installed. I’m getting about 900Mbps down and 99 up, no data cap, for $84/month. Before that I also had Mediacom, and the data cap was infuriating. So glad I could switch!

I would argue that’s actually a good thing for the average user. Computers and other personal electronics have become so reliable that you rarely have to delve into those tools as an average user. You can actually see the trend of simplification and everything but Windows - Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android are all immutable operating systems where user data and applications live separately from a read-only operating system partition. This is obviously not the case for all Linux distros but the point still stands.

Working in IT, I’m glad to see that despite the move to immutability in the Linux world, I actually have access to more tools than I did on base Ubuntu. blendOS and NixOS allowing you to spin up an operating system of your choice in a container, pull down whatever programs you want, all without cluttering your system? It really is the best of both worlds. Plus I still need a rock solid system, Knowing that I will always be able to apply an update without anything breaking is a huge win for all users. Back to the original point, technology has become so reliable and easy to use that you feasibly can just open your browser every morning and leave it at that. No hassling with clearing cache or anything, it just works.

Set up NextCloud, sync your photos to your own NextCloud server, and you’re good to go. The crazy thing is it’s becoming trivial for even a non-technical user to set everything up. Tail scale means there is no reason to put forward if you are just using it for personal use, and you literally just have to log into tail scale with your Google account on the server and your phone. You can run next cloud in a virtual machine with virtualBox, and that’s literally it. You don’t have to deal with updating, being stuck in PHP or dependency hell, none of that. Seriously, we are at such a crazy time in history where you can set up your own cloud infrastructure with an hour of work for even an non-technical user, and stop paying for iCloud photos or Google photos storage each month. It saves you money and improves your privacy

Do tell, I’m curious to learn more. Does it really matter if it knows how many pages you’ve printed? It’s not going to magically tell you you can’t print anymore when you can see that there’s still ink in there

True, we’ve gotta be the ones to push friends and family to fight that

This reminds me of watching the movie about Professor John Nash in health class. For the next 3 days all any of us could talk about was “what if I’m making you up?”

(For those who don’t know, it’s a movie about him and his experiences with schizophrenia)

But there are private and open source alternatives to these things. Home Assistant is the way to go for home automation, same with Apple’s HomeKit (all local communication via your network only)

I mean sadly you’re right - people like to hate on our defense spending in the US, but who does the world look towards when Russia invades Ukraine? It sucks that it needs to be this way, but if we don’t have a strong deterrent to other countries then we’re just asking for problems. Look at how aggressive China and Russia have gotten recently, with China inching closer to an invasion of Taiwan. Who’s going to be laughing when the US is there to help Taiwan?

My local government (county and city) do this here in the US, it would be nice to see this on a state and federal level too though