Even if you disagree with my assessment of Russia’s annexation, isn’t an international body ( that Russia itself has membership) working with your people, with guarantees for self rule and an end to the war better than status quo?

If you’ve supported Donbas independence, with wishes for greater ties to Russia instead of Europe, you still get that in this agreement. Donbas can still legitimately join Russia in a few decades, and still trade with them now.

I get that you’re making some weird comparison to Iraq and Afghanistan, but who besides the world itself would be the colonizer in my recommended arrangement? The world itself in my recommended United Nation governance followed by a local government chosen by their own legitimate referendums with international observers and gun free polls? Is that not better than Russia just claiming them with no say by the people (unless you believe the sham referendums under armed watch in a war zone as legitimate)?

It’d be great if popular show casts like BBT would do more PSAs.

Putin should offer the following as a peace deal:

• Russia not blocking Ukraine NATO and EU membership
• a true independent Donbas and Crimea administered by the UN for 2 years, followed by UN observed free elections resulting in self government while retaining UN security presence. After an additional 8 years, UN will allow membership, withdrawl its security forces (unless asked to stay by the host nation), and each nation can freely apply for EU, BRICS, or other associations as their people desire. Ukraine and Russia agree to not accept either as provinces for 30 years.
• a full Russian military withdrawl and demilitarization of both Donbas and Crimea
• return of Ukraine held Russian territory and Ukrainian withdrawal from the Donbas
• agreement to build a new NATO / Russia arms reduction treaty within 2 years with teeth for withdrawling.
• Russia agrees to not annex territory for 20 years.
• Putin stepping down as President.

While both sides would lose a lot form their goals of the war, it could be potentially acceptable to both sides. Otherwise I just see this continuing to escalate until Moscow falls or nukes are dropped.

Yep donate to a lot, but I make sure it’s out of my planned donation budget or out of my (set amount) “feel like it” budget categories. I consider patreoning creators / journalists / FOSS seperate from charity, but I try to pay a fair subscription amount I’d give to paywalled stuff. Political donations I do occasionally as well but that too is not charity.

CharityNavigator is important to vet charities, and a good starting place to look for charities in causes you care about.

I try to focus 50/50 on local vs international stuff, which amounts to 10/90% impacts due to wealth discrepancies. I donate typically to organizations doing the work, but also do a smaller amount to UnitedWay (which if you are too tired, stressed, or distracted to do charity research is worth the lost efficiency as they do a lot of charity vetting for you).

I don’t donate monetarily to strangers on the street, but I do donate (time and money) to shelters and assistance programs who can bring a lot more aid per dollar than I can.

If you work for a corp, be sure to check if they have a matching program, you can double your impact.

I highly recommend using a email alias provider as you’ll get a lot of spam. I block most charity calls/text attempts to my phone number if they get it (I don’t understand how that is effective at all, but they all seem to do it).

Not really a album but MyNoise.net has a lot of good generators for background noise. Radio Free Fedi’s Comfy channel also is great for chill study music, and it only plays indie artists that have Fediverse accounts with links to the artist support pages where you can either buy their albums (or songs to build your own piecemeal) https://radiofreefedi.net/.

If it survives a month you can buy another $500 clunker instead of losing the same to a new car loan, though they are far more rare these days (the example clunker typically now costs closer to $2-$4k now, or ~4 months of new car loan payments that you’d be stuck paying for 6 more years). The sweet spot is 10-15 year old cars under 200k miles and using small loans if you can’t pay cash. New cars are for idiots and the financially independent, but newer cars 5-10 years old can be worth the price/stress tradeoffs for some once you can afford one.

You’ll also get far more savings primarily riding a bike (and ebikes make this far easier once you can afford one) since most of your trips are likely under 5 miles, and your old car will last a lot longer for when you really need it. You might even find you can get by without owning a car.

I hope more governments and institutions start self hosting their own AP publishing, at least for microblogging.

I also hope we get more multiparidgm app platforms like friendica and mbin.

Loops and Peertube are super promising, especially with peered hosting to manage bandwidth hits. It’d be smart for major creators to have a delayed archive in self or group hosted instances to help with discoverability and fight risk of content loss. Canadian Civil is paving the way.

I predict there will be more integration with tipping / patreoning platforms.

I predict there will be some ATpro features like federated identity and moderation extended into AP, or a blessed version of ATpro from the W3C’s Social Web group (Bluesky is already working on transferring ownership of the protocol to IETF). Either way apps will simply migrate or find bridges and the wider fediverse will grow.

You can put Lemmy communities in lists so they don’t spam your home feed. https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-the-lists-feature-on-mastodon/

Cool to see that the app is just a nice wrapper to query OSM data and not using yet another dumb silo. Its also just a webapp and not a native app spying on your data. https://en.stnameslab.com/american-search-app/ is the app.

I wonder if this would make sense as a https://mapcomplete.org/ layer

Considering your comments, you are probably in a mindset where I’d recommend reading the funny named “How to Be Miserable” by Randy Patterson. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25898044-how-to-be-miserable

If books are too much right now, you can get a great summary by CGP Grey’s video based on it https://youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o Be sure to watch the footnote video after too (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qGCAE1jte8)

In addition to Joplin, Logseq is really great too, though with more of a text-first, outline based, zettle approach.

If public transport mapping is your goal, it might make sense to try out the MapComplete Train Station https://mapcomplete.org/stations and Bus Routes https://mapcomplete.org/transit themes which give an easier, more focused, mapping interface. Quest apps like Street Complete can also make getting into OSM a bit easier, though OSM Beginners Guise is great too. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Beginners'_guide

Yes! https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Public_transport though it is a bit complex to fully add routes, adding stops is super easy!

Ready Player One

On the microblogging side of the fedi, “fedihire” and “jobalert” hashtags seem to be frequently used for job postings, and “getfedihired” and “jobsearch” for those posting that they are looking.

I’ve never heard if it either but I too am not on TikTok and I use ad-blockers nearly everywhere.

OpenStreetMap’s platform is the only real way to compete against Google and Apple and it’s why Microsoft even though it has Bing Maps, has licenced to them resources like satellite imagery for mapping. It’s awesome in bigger population areas but there’s still a lot to map in rural places outside the EU.

Review is harder. Right now the leading open platform afaik is Open Reviews (aka Mangrove Reviews) which has tie-ins to OSM projects like MapComplete. OsmAnd and OrganicMaps have open tickets to hook into that ecosystem. You’re right about the userbase problem though, I think it (or a successor) needs AP federation to really take off. That being said there’s several active non-Google nonfree alternatives like Yelp and TripAdvisor as well as niche sites for things like camping, parks, and schools.

Neocities is trying to be a modern reincarnation https://neocities.org/

Man I feel old, back in my day we weren’t allowed to use anything more powerful than a TI83 on most exams and the answers were on scantrons or paper due to fears of using the internet to cheat. These days with GPT I’m surprised that’s not even more of a concern.