1. Started a small mutual fund and retirement fund when I was just starting out and still in undergrad. I did not have much and was fully self sufficient. But someone came to my job and showed us how retirement plans worked and convinced me to start one. Same with a mutual fund. I never put more than $20-$40 in each because I didn’t have much but boy did that pay off.

2. I purchased a small condo in the city with some of the money I put away in #1. Just sold it recently (20 years after purchasing it; lived in it for 5 years, rented it out for a profit for 15 years). I made a lot of money off that sale. More money than I’ve ever seen at once.

3. My spouse and I have always lived below our means. Now we’re not frugal - we go out for nice dinners, travel, have kids. We also have good jobs. But, when we purchased a house we could have afforded to get one that was $600k and instead opted for a smaller townhome in a nice neighborhood for almost half the price. Living this way has paid off more than I could have ever imagined. Both of us don’t have to work. We travel whenever we want. We could technically both stop working in our 40s/50s and probably be fine. It’s a feeling of freedom. We’ve never over-extended ourselves. When our colleagues and friends were buying expensive homes and expensive cars and extending themselves, we just didn’t do that.

To understand why this is happening, you have to go back in history to the end of the slave trade. When the ability to kidnap people from Africa and bring them back to enslave them was legally ended, the white enslavers realized that the only way they could keep slavery going was to force people to breed more slaves. Google that history. It is utterly abhorrent but necessary to understand where the Republican Party is coming from today.

Since the end of slavery, a certain contingent in the U.S. has never gotten over the fact that they couldn’t legally have a sub-class of citizens that they could use for free or nearly-free labor. So they kept trying to find other ways to keep people oppressed, and they expanded that oppression beyond just black people and to any of the “less desirable” groups. Think not just Black people, but also Irish, immigrants, Appalachia. They pit these groups against one another because divided people are easier to control. But the goal is the same - have large groups of people poor for generations who have no other option but to work for slave wages and keep the people at the top very, very rich.

Slavery in the U.S. was a huge economic force, one that a certain contingent (the very wealthy) never got over losing. The next best thing was to create whole groups of people who are desperate enough to work for almost nothing. That’s what we have in this country now. And it works best if those people are constantly putting out more children. That keeps them even more stuck and more desperate, and it keeps a steady supply of cheap labor coming.

It’s no coincidence that they want abortion ended but also want to ensure those same people are continually subjected to sub-standard education, that those same people are “allowed” to send their kids to work (defeating years of progress through child labor laws), that those people are also unable to access higher education, government benefits, or virtually anything that could potentially make their lives better.

Yes, I have observed this and it is very frustrating. In many cases, these “articles” are opinion pieces being circulated by those with a financial interest in commercial real estate (or someone carrying the water of someone who has such an interest). Those who have any sort of financial interest in commercial real estate are going to be against remote work for obvious reasons.

Cities and real estate moguls arguing that people have to engage in an absolutely fruitless, draining, exhausting, expensive commute to keep a handful of people rich. They want to punish you to keep some elite people rich.

What needs to happen is workers need to fight back as much as possible. If your job can be done remotely, make it a priority to work for a company that allows you to do your job remotely. There’s NOTHING about my job that requires me to go into an office. I have worked successfully at home for many years and if my organization required me to come in, I would do everything I could to leave and find something else that allowed me to telework. If you’re looking for a job and have the luxury of being a little bit choosy, let recruiters know you will ONLY consider remote options.

Anecdotally, I think these opinion pieces are way overblown. My spouse was recently contacted by a recruiter about a job. The job was not remote and my spouse told the recruiter they would only consider remote-only options. The recruiter sighed and said, “That is what I keep getting told.”

I starting using Reddit in 2010 or so when I was going through health issues and was looking for information. I became very active on Reddit over the years, occasionally helping to mod a couple of communities. I am not a hugely “online” person, but I loved Reddit as a source of information and advice from actual real people. Particularly for those of us living with chronic health conditions, Reddit in particular was hugely important.

But I don’t use Reddit anymore. The whole API fiasco was the last straw for me, and I also just didn’t see it remaining a vibrant place full of valuable information. So I deleted my accounts and left. Haven’t been back since.

And we need to make that process of getting kids who need it that basic foundational education as easy and cheap as possible. I would say the best thing we could do is make sure they have the opportunity to be de-programmed as soon as they are adults.

And sometimes they are living there and simply cannot afford to relocate. Relocating is very expensive in the U.S., especially if you want to relocate to an area that has better education.

This is actually a terrifying prospect that would only make the situation worse. The kids stuck there and being educated in this propaganda are the ones who will need higher education the most! It is not their fault their parents are living there. And while some parents may have a choice in the matter, many do not as relocating in the U.S. is very expensive and impractical for some families.

I actually feel like the opposite is needed - that public universities go out of their way to accept kids who were educated in Florida in the hopes of actually being able to educate them and break the cycle that is currently feeding this wave of fascism.

This is what gets me. Christian Selig pointed out in a number of interviews that Reddit could have easily made this work without alienating a huge segment of their user base. I get this vague feeling lately like CEOs are intentionally trying to tank their products, because no one so well paid could actually act so dumb.

Memmy has more customization options and I’ve found it to work a bit better than WefWef. For me, WefWef has been very sporadic in its functionality, with it sometimes just generating errors and requiring me to refresh.

I can’t imagine not using a password manager. I am a long-time user of 1Password and have been very happy with the service and apps. I recommend it to everyone. Worth every penny and then some IMO.

Here’s my hope as a 40-something who came of age when the internet was just taking off.

I REALLY HOPE this is the push we need to move away from corporate-owned social media. I have high hopes for federated platforms and forums that are much more like what the internet was when it started (but better because now we have mobile devices).

I realize a lot of people see social media as being some evil thing, but we also fail to realize how much good it has done. Marginalized communities have come together online and formed real movements. People living with health conditions have been connected to one another for support and also life-changing resources and care. People who were isolated because of disability found communities.

I would like to see old-fashioned blogs and RSS make a comeback. I’d like to see forums and federated sites like Lemmy take off. I’d like to see social media sites that have been given way too much weight in society collapse. I don’t think government or reputable media outlets should ever be using a corporate for-profit entity as a means for distributing information.

I don’t recall the specifics of the one article I read about this, but yes, I think being able to declare bankruptcy gives an out for at least some of the debt. I believe there was also some way that doing so protected Tesla but can’t recall exactly how that worked.

This just doesn’t seem like a “he’s just bad at running a company” situation. A company of Twitter’s age and maturity could have run itself for quite some time if Elon just let it continue on. He’s doing this intentionally for some self-serving reason.

That’s exactly why. He didn’t want to go through with JT and I think devaluing the company might be a way for him to get out of it via bankruptcy. I remember reading that somewhere and thought it made the most sense. He’s a dude with a lot of money (at least on paper) and I’m sure he has people with a decent amount of financial acumen advising him what to do or at least trying to steer him in the right direction. I don’t think it’s any 6D chess or anything, just finance and tech bros playing finance and tech bro games.

IIRC, causing its value to plummet is the easiest way for him to get out of this whole fiasco via bankruptcy (remember, he was basically forced into buying it). He played a stupid game and won a stupid prize and now he’s desperately trying to find a way out.

This only makes sense when you understand that he’s intentionally trying to destroy Twitter.

Depends on the app you’re using but usually you just click on the hashtag of interest and then click on the + button or something similar in the upper right corner of the screen. That’s how you do it in both Mona and Ivory.

I like mastodon but the content you see is only driven by two things: the people you follow and the hashtags you follow. Basically, you follow people and hashtags to effectively create your own “algorithm.” Once I understood this and really made an effort to follow both people and hashtags that interested me, my Mastodon feed became way more interesting than my Twitter feed.

I also like the quality of the interactions better on Mastodon. Because of how the whole thing works, you’re not going to get bombarded with horrible stuff in most cases (at least the chances seem to be far less for that kind of thing happening).

But it definitely takes more time and energy to curate compared to Twitter.

If the content gets great enough, that will happen. Going to take time, but it will absolutely happen. Especially with so many people deleting their comments and Reddit having their feet held to the fire with people making complaints about them violating GDPR.

Lemmy, Mastodon, and the entire Fediverse are really what the internet was supposed to be. I am glad to see the pendulum swinging back and I hope it continues. I am mostly really excited about the mobile apps being developed for Lemmy. Those are coming along at lightening speed and I those will be THE THING that makes Lemmy happen.

A lot of this has more to do with the mindset people approached Twitter with than the service itself. Honestly, I always approached Twitter the way you describe Mastodon here. I just wanted to find people who had interests similar to mine and connect with them, as well as find interesting news. Maybe that’s why moving from Twitter to Mastodon has been to seamless. Just a lot less anger and hate on Mastodon from what I’ve experienced. A much nicer atmosphere.

I would love this! At least for Mastodon and Lemmy, which I consider somewhat similar. I use Mona for Mastodon and would love have a separate tab within that app for accessing Lemmy. I just really like the design and feature set of the app and having it extended to Lemmy would be so nice.