Onii-Chan

True, I guess I’m speaking from the perspective of someone who genuinely loves cars.

An older Camry or something just wouldn’t do it for me, but I’m lucky in that Australia used to make pretty reliable cars (modern post-'09 Falcons are unkillable, and get great mileage on the highway - 800-1000km per tank out of mine) and which also have plenty of power and comfort. Not the most technically advanced cars, but I actually can’t stand the modern obsession with car tech anyway, and feel that '08-'13 era really offers all I need.

Honestly, sometimes you just need an auto loan to get out of the “stuck in an unreliable shitbox that leaves me stranded at random every other week and the AC doesn’t work and it looks like shit and fuck this I want something nicer” hole.

I bought a nice new (ish) car about 8 years ago, and 350,000km later, it’s still nice, still reliable, and I still enjoy driving it. Hell, it got me out of the shitty little town I was stuck living in, because I could finally trust my vehicle to go further than an hour from home (being Australian, leaving for any interstate city is at the very least an 8 hour drive, unless you live in Perth, then it becomes a 30 hour drive.) I don’t regret getting a car loan for even a second.

In saying that… I’d never go for another loan unless I absolutely had to. I’ll drive this car into the ground before I get another one.

I’m just using the default GrapheneOS SMS app, but it’s concerning seeing the number of these FOSS apps lately adding major privacy invasive permission changes. Are there a few big companies buying them up for a quick buck, or what?

This is exactly why I use Proton as well. I’m not worried about law enforcement, I just want Google and other big tech’s tentacles out of my fucking business. I don’t want to be advertised to.

This is something I’m very interested in too.

Spot on. My wife and I are actually making plans to move overseas. I’m ready to get out of here, but she wants to wait until the next federal election to get a guage on where things will be heading. In the meantime, we’re saving as much money as we possibly can, because Australia isn’t the country it used to be, and it’s clear that we’re both deeply-incompatible with the general culture of apathy, government trust, and rules, rules, rules. It’s suffocating.

It’s fucking surreal to see not only this, but the amount that Google knows about Pyongyang. I did try to get directions to the concentration camp lol

Australia too. I’ll never understand it, and I live here.

Keep in mind this is the same guy who said that he idolizes the way Musk has been running Twitter. It’s a real shame, because reddit is the only place I know to get actual real answers from actual real people for generally difficult or otherwise niche questions. I don’t use reddit anymore as a user, but without Google search, reddit is done (given that even ex-users like myself still affix ‘reddit’ to the end of a search query.) I have no idea what Spez is planning, but it can’t be any improvements to his site, because holy shit.

If this passes, the rest of the world will follow. This CANNOT be allowed to happen.

Fascism, authoritarianism, totalitarian dystopian thinking, it’s all the same to me when it comes to the State overstepping and blatantly looking to pass laws that remove the right to privacy and autonomy from citizens. I’m no leftist ideologue, I skew libertarian right (although I couldn’t describe all the nuance of my views within the context of a simple label), but if there’s one thing we have in common, it’s our hatred of government overreach and corporate control of the masses.

Fuck authoritarianism. Fuck collectivist bullshit. Never stand for the trampling of your rights.

What fucking fascists.

I never had any real issues with speed using Surfshark, the reason I made the switch was largely about trust. As another user said, as soon as I saw Surfshark start their YouTube advertising spree, and start to bloat their client with unnecessary features, I started looking for alternatives.

I’m iffy about any VPN company that uses YouTuber marketing as it is, and while my threat model isn’t overly paranoid, I believe the VPN company someone chooses to use should have paranoid business practices. After I saw the news on Mullvad’s raid, the authorities subsequently finding nothing, and the fact that a user’s account is merely a string of numbers, I decided it was the VPN for me.

It’s a good day to be a Mullvad user. Switched over from Surfshark a while ago, and I love it.

32 here, so definitely not your age, but I just want to let you know that you’re not as alone in this as you think. I’ve also degoogled my life, I don’t use any social media outside of kbin and reddit (just to keep up to date on my city via its subreddit), use Signal as my messenger, Proton for email, NewPipe for YouTube, InnerTune instead of Spotify and GrapheneOS with aggressive app permissions instead of Android, all sitting behind Mullvad VPN and a privacy focused web browser.

I’ve never felt so free of corporate bullshit, and the ‘convenience’ I’ve given up hasn’t affected my life anywhere near as drastically as I thought it would. I just wish everyone could realize how easy it is to ditch the surveillance machine and still retain an easy, convenient digital life.

I mean, yeah. The only ‘social media’ I have is kbin, and I check it once or twice a day. If it went anywhere, I wouldn’t really give a shit, as I left all the major platforms years ago and adding one more to that list wouldn’t bother me. Don’t group me in with Twitter (x?) users because I called them out on their addiction, when I’ve already done what they seemingly can’t.

These people are addicted to such a degree that they’re functionally on the same level as literal junkies, just without the physical damage. Social media was such a fucking mistake, and I don’t think we’re ever going to recover from it within our lifetime.

Ted Kaczynski was right.