naevaTheRat

Using a condom doesn't require trusting a third party to keep you out of gaol, and has lots of regulatory industry around it guaranteeing quality.

VPN companies are not ideological projects, they are businesses bound by the laws in the countries they operate in optimising for profit. They will abuse your trust if it makes them money or frees them from criminal liability.

Assuming the government defs doesn't care and wont cooperate with lawsuits.

Yes and no. Knowing your IP is sort of like knowing a PO box you rent. It can be used to try and transmit stuff to you, it can also be crudely geolocated, or if the person you're buying it from gives you up it can be traced directly to you as a person.

If someone wanted to, and you had terrible safety practices (such as opening mail you aren't expecting, the digital equivalent would be having software listening to ports) they could send you something harmful but this is probably not very likely unless you are pissing powerful people off (e.g. you're using that IP to distribute anti mossad documentaries or something :P). Your biggest threat is that somebody finds out who you are by going to your ISP and making them give you up.

If you are confident that this is very high effort and you are a small fish it's not much of a risk.

If you actually need privacy you should use something like tor, or a box which you have access to that can't or wont be traced to you (e.g. you have access to someone else's by covert means, you bought a server with cash in the mail, you bought a server in a nation that will never cooperate with the nation you're antagonising) which you tunnel to and use as a proxy.

A VPN is not necessarily very secure and doesn't mitigate the most serious threats like phone home programs that will ID you over the clearnet later. Trusting a VPN is extremely dicey and should absolutely not be relied upon to keep you out of gaol. It's better than nothing, but shouldn't be over emphasised.

whimper was a dovecot and postfix machine. Email isn't very fun

I don't have many now, just minstrel (it plays music) but previously they've always just be sounds. Rawr, groan, whimper, bark, moan, growl etc.

Except minstrel (it plays music) :p

If you're into it there's a civilian science thing inaturalist. They have a dogshit app you can use on your phone to take geotagged photographs of anything/one living and your best ID guess. Giganerds then come along and fully ID it, useful to help learn stuff and you contribute to maps for biological diversity and conservation studies.

you can also search up observations which can be fun if you're trying to find a particular species.

It's cool stuff. I enjoy cataloguing all the papaver somniferum I come across since. Our government encouraged people to grow it around ww1 due to a morphine shortage and it's too funny that it's still everywhere in urban spaces. Looking out for it makes walking around more amusing, like "Oh there's that weed that if I pick I've just committed a giga crime".

Awww shit I love that fungi. I see it occasionally in pine plantations.

The name escapes me now but some sort of cup fungi.

not a bro bro.

Hiking is good though. My life quality improved dramatically when I remembered I actually enjoyed being outdoors. I think something lots of people forget is kids spend a lot of time exercising and outdoors with friends. Ok friends are tricky when we all get busy and have to split off to find work and housing but exercise and being outside is something we generally manage.

It's easy to be all "oooh childlike wonder how I long for your return" but I guarantee everyone will feel less ennui if you just go outside and move a bit.

There are still cool rocks in the ground. Touch grass, look for rocks, photograph fungi, watch a tree grow through the seasons, skip a rock, laugh at clouds with rude shapes. It's all still there.

aren't those turkeys being taken to be murdered?

Nice argument there, but you see you typed something wrong at 2 am therefore I will not engage.

I am so smart and cultured.

He's a multi millionaire who admits to still eating red meat despite having the funds to hire a professional chef to make delicious plant based meals every meal. He also admits to eating chickens while decrying it.

Fuck me for holding people with more power to higher standards I guess.

He's also intensely classist and has deeply problematic views about overpopulation. Doing the very British thing of talking about too many African people while completely ignoring the massively asymmetric resource consumption that he takes part it.

I just think if you're one of the most privileged people on the planet and you think the world is dying you ought to live a life which if the average person lived would be sustainable. Not do some token effort, far below that of your average poor person, and claim that's all you can manage.