Glad you're keeping an eye on this!

I'm using the google one. Not ideal, I know but I wanted to be able to text from my laptop.

The issue I've had with texting has been - it won't notify me of a text. I have to manually go into the text app and look for messages.

It's been at least 4 months. I posted on https://discuss.grapheneos.org/, no results. I'm not terribly upset about it, I'd troubleshoot more if I were.

Yes, absolutely, if you cut off that constant dopamine hit of stimulation, your brain may change back, and you'll be able to be more thoughtful. It takes a little while, it's boring and frustrating at the beginning.

I remember moving from a house-share living situation to a separate apartment. In the house-share, there was TV and cable. But in the apartment, I decided to not get a TV, and not pay for cable. I did look longingly at the little cable plug in the wall for a couple weeks...and then the desire was gone.

I've been with people like your friend. Just recently I sat next to a guy on a plane who spend the entire 3 hour long flight swiping on little short videos. It was impressive and depressing and also a little scary. I tried to engage with him just a little bit, but he had zero interest.

Yeah I'm also one of those people that for whatever reason is compelled to read these types of stories. From stories of the Holocaust, to people that suffered in the Cambodian Khmer Rouge regime, to British prisoners of war of the Japanese in WWII - I've read quite a few of them.

You'd think that I would be some kind of superman if I ever got into this kind of situation. But I don't think that's the case. Mostly I'd probably understand better about how bad things can get, and how you should have a Plan B before you need one.

You might enjoy the book I Will Bear Witness by Victor Klemperer. This is the diary of Klemperer, who was a non-religious Jew in Nazi Germany, whose wife was "Aryan" and who was also a WWI vet, so he was somewhat protected. Here's a note about it, that I wrote up in a previous comment here.

Fascinating book. Anyway, in regards to the "heads up" - the Jews weren't immediately put into concentration camps when the Nazis took over in 1933. What happened was that anti-Jewish edicts came slowly, step by step. The first one that affected Klemperer was that he could only teach Jewish students (he was a college professor). Then he lost his job (which was a government job). Then he couldn't own a car. Couldn't have a pet. Couldn't walk in parks, couldn't walk on roads next to parks. All kinds of crazy new laws, slowly tightening the screws.

I use ppq.ai. You can pay with lightning, and like the name says, you pay per query - ppq.

With ppq.ai, you can easily switch out between different AI models. I often use DeepSeek (super cheap, pretty good, a little slower), but just tried out Google Gemini (wow! really good, also about 15 times as expensive as DeepSeek.)

It's great to be able to switch around like this.

They definitely tightened their belts. I find it really interesting how, when money became worthless, people experimented with other forms of money - gunpowder, sewing supplies. People used whatever they had that didn't go bad, and was somewhat easy to exchange.

Proto money.

Depends...would people around you have access to the internet? Or is the internet just gone?

If NOBODY has access, then it's an entirely different story/question.

I see. So you're saying that as soon as BOTH parties have hit collab cancel, the btc seller would immediately get his bitcoin back (the entire sales amount) and you would receive your bitcoin back (but just the bond, your fiat is gone)

I actually posted it in the Simplex chat. And the response from a coordinator was..."at this stage, there is no evidence of a scam"

And...thinking about it, what is, actually, the evidence that it was a scam? Because at the point where you where, the seller of the BTC would have already posted a bond of the entire btc amount, no?

So if you were to send the fiat (via gift card), then at the most, the seller could just say they never got it. And then it would go into a dispute status. They still wouldn't have their bitcoin.

Am I missing something?

Bot, right?

Here's my 2 cents - this is the latest scientific fad/hype to distract us from the really important stuff.

The really important stuff is:

The microplastics hype is a distraction.

Portability is great.

Check out the support options for Umbrel: https://umbrel.com/support

I poked around in the forum for "seed phrase", wonder if this guy had the same problem you're having?

In order to recover, he switched to a Taproot script type.

Wow.

Thanks for the details.

Have you reported this on the Telegram group or Simplex group?

Tell us more?

Can you un-initiate a collab cancel?

I wouldn't trust this study. It's run by a German NGO called Mein GrundEinkommen - My Basic Income (https://www.mein-grundeinkommen.de/). They're very much in favor of a UBI, the whole website is about how great it is.

There's no way the results from this study would have been any different, run by an organization like this.

Their poster child (https://www.mein-grundeinkommen.de/menschen/4816358) was a veterinarian, had been one for 15 years, and was overworked and unhappy. She quit her job, and then got one of the UBI subsidies. (Or probably that's just what they say. I'm guessing the truth is that she got the subsidy, and THEN quit her job, that would make more sense, because they had said earlier that her family relied on her income).

And then she saw the light, and decided to work full time for "climate change", and sustainable tourism.

Is it tough to do, when there's other kids?

My son had a birthday party he had put a lot of work and planning into. About half the kids there were on their phones the whole time. This was at least 7 or so years ago, I believe now it would be worse.