Too late, they own my soul already. I have successfully resisted Meta, X, Microsoft, and any number of lesser daemons, but the one true G has shown me their light and I am unable to look away.

I’m reasonably happy with XFCE/Xubuntu - it’s not as slick of a desktop as KDE or Gnome, and in some ways that’s a great thing.

Docker in a snap is too meta for me.

Agreed, not a secret, and not wanted. I uninstall Firefox and install Google Chrome from a .deb - disadvantage: you have to update it manually. Advantage: it doesn’t update itself automatically.

All in all UBI would be a huge win, the poor could do more with a STABLE small income than they do with the unreliable sources most of them operate off of now. The whole needs testing bureaucracy can just die, saving Billions in administrative costs. Services and stores for low income people could do much better when their clientele has reliable income instead of being flat broke most of the time.

In my view, if UBI is good enough, there’s no more need for minimum wage, let people volunteer if they want to, pay to work in some highly desirable jobs, that’s fine.

I believe the primary objection comes from the people who hire the poor, they can’t imagine people working without the imminent threat of starvation and homelessness. If that’s how your workplace operates, that needs to change. With UBI I believe a lot of workplaces would self-regulate better, because if they don’t their employees will just quit.

Florida is making some progress on the early childhood side, they’ve been funding “Free VPK” for 20+ years now, and unemployed parents get automatic “Florida KidCare” insurance (basically Medicaid) for their children. Still, could be better.

Maybe we won’t be guillotining them anytime soon, but we can at least slow their roll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVgNJf6CsBA

https://youtu.be/aLhWzMOccTg

Friend of ours is a well educated psychologist, she does drug counseling in lieu of jail. Convicts in her program have 4x better outcomes and her program (including her salary) costs the county less than 1/10th what they pay to keep drug charge convicts in jail. Still, the county refuses to expand the program and pays far more to send the majority of their drug cases to jail, because that’s how the judges want to handle it.

Rent by the hour does tend to be more expensive…

Taking a tangent: with reliable UBI the homeless and poor would have enough of their own money to reliably pay for whatever type of shelter they desire, whether that’s a standard apartment, or a bed in a big shelter dormitory for less per night, but either way: they would have a reliable source of income to pay for it with, instead of having to scrounge needs-tested welfare + whatever else they can scrape together.

NorthEast Florida has: https://www.melanatedgrowersinc.com/