Why Spain: Expat communities, cost of living, friendly visa options, beautiful climate.

Why leave: Sick of U.S. politics and the way it directly and indirectly affects us and how difficult it is to escape from it - it’s a major point of conversations with family and friends, it’s on the local radio, local subreddit, local social media pages, etc.

Also, I have over $7k in personal medical costs annually (out of pocket). That’s just me, not my family cumulatively. For Ostomy supplies, iron infusions, and more.

We have a slew of Englishian slop we can yeet to make communication more interesting and dynamic, if not hauntingly vulgar, and darn me to heck if I’m to be judged for engaging in a lil’ bit of fun while I got me this few decades to see how things play out with these daily consciousness experiences.

Get your hands off my words, I say.

Because one day in the not too distant future, that consciousness will run out the clock, and it’s game over, man! Game over!

Eventually, and likely in the lifetimes of most people living today, we would have to see something akin to universal basic income (UBI) that covers the necessities in order to stave off massive civil unrest.

If the white collar labor of human beings can’t compete with the output of AI, we either all become blue collar workers or we re-invent the concepts of work and play.

I’m not aware of any existing or proposed economy framework that adequately accounts for the automation that is nearly here at scale. We are not just automating away jobs - we are automating away the value that human beings have within a productive community. Before the mass starvation will come the mass suicide. Our culture teaches us that a feeling of self worth is derived from our perceived productivity. If we cannot feel successful, we may lose our wills to live.

I will never install the Facebook app on my phone, so I use a browser instead. The experience is almost unusable. I can’t rate people. I’m not even sure if I can send messages. I can’t list things. The UI appears to support features that don’t work in practice.

No biggy because I just use a Firefox container and use my laptop instead, where the web version actually does work.

I don’t buy new MacBooks. I get them refurbished from MicroCenter, Apple, or elsewhere.

In 2024, I picked up a 2021-released 14” M1 Max MacBook Pro w/ 2 TB and 64 GB for $1800 from Microcenter. Because Apple is so hostile to repairs, I have been paying for AppleCare+ and will continue for some time. But I don’t see myself truly needing to replace this machine for another 2-3 years. It’s my daily driver for BBedit, some IDEs, music apps, Firefox with dozens of tabs, Mail, Messages, iTerm2 with half a dozen tmux sessions.

True - my computing needs are not demanding. But for those of us who offload commuting to remote servers and mostly use thin clients, the computer is a joy to use.

I’ve been dabbling in Ableton Live Suite 12 Lite, which came with my Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol S88 MKII midi keyboard, and this machine never breaks a sweat.

The M-series are seriously as close to BIFL as a consumer laptop can be.

Meanwhile, my wife’s daily driver is a 2013 13” MacBook Air w/ 128 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM. And an Intel i7 from that era. I won’t defend this though. She’s insane, and I don’t know how she lives with herself. I purchased it used from a Craigslist seller to be my daily driver 14 years ago, and it lasted until I upgraded to a 2020 M1 MacBook Air base model, which I later donated to a friend in need.

> LinkedIn users attempting identity verification may be unknowingly handing sensitive personal data to Persona Identities Inc., a company that distributes information to government agencies, credit bureaus, utilities, and mobile providers.

^ Link from a LinkedIn page I found on a Kagi search.

I can view some LinkedIn pages but not others without logging in.

Even though I’ve never posted to LinkedIn it only use it as a public résumé, my account was flagged as needing identity verification. I’m pretty sure this happened a year or two ago when I changed my email address from one domain I owned to another domain I owned.

I’ve never been able to log in since then, and there is no support path. The only available way past it is to simply submit all the info to Persona.

The person you are responding to was saying that for that to be true (Israel = civilized western nation) that either it is civilized to do all those awful things or that Israel is not doing those things.

Obviously, both are false. So you are responding to someone who agrees with you all the way.

The third party software is really good, but come on, Apple, take a hint.