The only way is a data only SIM card.
It won’t have a phone number for anyone to call or text.
Of course you can’t make calls or texts either. You have to setup some kind of SIP service is you need to.

We’re not talking about individual people, but whole corporations and organizations.

For example. Instance.social is shutting down. Now the whole Org needs to migrate 150 accounts to someplace else. Oh and the old posts are being deleted, can’t migrate those.

And the support community you created on there, is going away also. Again, can’t really migrate all the old posts and comments. But the FAQ documentation we put there when people asked about it, can be manually copied to the new place. So that’s something

That’s not a situation any company would want to be in. Better to have their own social home, that they control.

Hard disagree.
Running your own social media server for official accounts, so you’re not beholden to the whims of other providers, is kind of an obvious thing to do for online organizations.

Not being sure was part of my point. We can’t be sure. But all their incentives are aligned in the right way. That’s the best we can hope for. And better than any alternative right now.

You can’t have? Or you can’t be sure?
Because you certainly can have. Just because you pay, doesn’t mean they will log your searches. In fact Kagi claim they don’t. And since their only income comes from paying users. If anyone ever found out they’re lying about that, they’d quickly loose a big chink of subscribers and income. As well as get sued for fraud. So it’s rather unlikely they do.

Unlike every other search provider, Kagi is the only one with a business model that ensures it’s users are the customer, not the product. When actually using it every day, that’s quite obvious in the results. Even when you search for a company directly, it’s Wikipedia entry is usually the first result. The the company site is the second.

Those are very big questions. This Wikipedia Page is a good place to start.

The simple answer is, everything humanity does happens in cycles.
But you can think of it as roller-coaster passing through an infinite series of loops. We keep going forward in the long run. But but the repeating loops take us up and down, even upside down and backwards along the way. In every case, coming down each loop gives us the momentum to reach the next one.

It works in cycles.

The last Guilded Age (think Roaring 20s) ended with the great depression. Which then triggered the creation of all the great economic policies the boomers enjoyed as children, which they’ve been dismantling since the 70s.

Once things get bad enough, (very nearly there now) the cycle will repeat.

I’m not sure you know what post scarcity means.

Imagine a world where nobody needs to work, but everyone can still have any material desire filled at any time.

Think Star Trek. Unlimited energy resources, combined with replicators which use that endless energy to create unlimited stuff without any labor required.

It really is the most efficient way to manage and trade scarce resources. Going back to a barter system wouldn’t be possible with the size and scope of a global economy.

comes with their school districts’ decision to install AI-powered monitoring software such as Gaggle and GoGuardian on students’ school-issued machines and accounts.

That’s kind of standard practice on any company issued devices I’ve ever used.
Unless they’re being given for the kids to own. If they have to give them back at the end of the year, then they don’t belong to the kids.

We’d really need to know what the 30 options are, to recommend one.

But I’d really recomend against it. The point of an HSA is to have cash available for medical expenses and emergencies. Over the long term (decades) index funds do consistently trend up. But on any given day, you never know. Money you were expecting to be there might not be. Now you’ve got a whole other problem.

If you have more money than you can imagine needing in the HSA, pick something with slow consistent growth and low or zero volatility.

Actual instructions are big for an internet comment, and dependant on your specific situation and needs. I’ll recommend some reading.

If you don’t want to spend a lot of time.
Go straight to The Index Card
Bonus points if you read Pound Foolish first.
They aren’t long. They explain what to do, and what not to, respectively. They were kind of written as a pair.

If you’re willing to take a longer journey.
Start with The Richest Man in Babylon, explaining why investing is a good.
Then read A Random Walk Down Wall street, describing all the ways you could invest, but probably shouldn’t.
Then move onto the other two I mentioned first.

If you read all of them you’ll know more about finance and investing than 90% of people.

These books are all quite US centric, but the basic principals are the same everywhere. Though some of the tax advice you’d want to check into locally.

I think I prefer eXcretions

Basically, RSS as you said, is a one way street. There is no feedback. It’s not so much communication, but broadcasting.

Hypocritical for sure.
Not really unexpected, so not ironic.

I would liken the Democrats to Megamind, and the Republicans to Hal Stewart.

they say giving their biometric data to an unaccountable company crosses a line.

The company is unaccountable‽
That’s some projection.

Not really. One can be dealt with if needs be, since they’re US companies. The other can’t because it’s the Chinese government.

Nobody cares because they are US companies.

First, it’s not a TickTok ban. It’s a ByteDance ban. ByteDance could sell TickTok to another company outside China and TickTock would be fine in the US.

Second, it was never about protecting user data. It was about preventing China from tweaking the algorithm to try to subtly influence public political opinion, instead of maximizing generic rage and political polarization, to exploit for ad dollars.