Yeah, I was referring to official forums for technical support or feature requests and the like. I don’t really think that everyday people were usually the ones who setup forums, it is website operators and other techies who set those up. The people who setup an independent forum are not the same people who setup a discord community. Discord has a much lower barrier to entry that usually results in a lower quality information and moderation than a forum would.

I mean, yeah, forums are harder, for sure. $20-35 monthly for a mail provider seems to high to me; I would expect that to be about the yearly cost. But, I don’t really have much experience with an email provider for that use case. Really the problem lies in that a website operator and a community maintainer are 2 very different types of people that rarely intersect.

Discourse is a forum software. Maybe you are mixing it up with something else like disqus?

what might everyday people use to set up forums as relatively easily and cheaply as their Discord servers, and not have them riddled with ads or other clunky elements?

Discourse is a clean open source forum software that is commonly used for application support and well suited for it.

Or if your a real die hard for the fediverse, you could set up a lemmy instance for application support. There’s even a phpBB frontend for an oldschool forum look and feel for it.

Usually everyday people don’t setup forums, that’s the responsibility of the application owner(s) or provider. In this case, the easy option is also the shitty option if measured by discoverability of the content.

Well put.

Uh … Yes. Everyone has an innate survival instinct. Sure in what seems like a shitty situation, life might feel hopeless temporarily, but I’d bet you’ll eventually adapt and get over the initial shock. I’m not sure what you mean by proper, but to me it seems like proper is just shorthand for what is profitable, useful, or easy to people with power.

IMO trying to make execution humane is kinda pointless. It is really just done to ease the guilt of those who participate and watch in it. If you participate in killing someone, you should feel guilty. That applies equally no matter if your carrying out a state-sanctioned murder or a street murder.

I would focus on it the from a different angle. Instead of tracking grocery spending, I would set a number that you aim to not go over for a given month. Based upon the numbers you provided you spend an average of $700 per month on groceries. If you, for example, aimed to start with reducing your by 50% to $350 per month you would save $4400 yearly. That’s a sizable sum of money that you could put towards a vacation or a buttload of smaller purchases.

As far as how you could go about saving that much, I would advise setting a limit on both how many grocery trips you make and how much you allow yourself to spend on each trip. So lets say you decide on about 4 trips a month (roughly weekly). In that case, spending $80 per trip would safely stay within the budget of $350. There would even be ~$30 leftover for a couple of mini trips for one or a couple items.

To help stay in the budget, it might be helpful to take a small notepad along and log how much each item costs at as soon as you put it in your cart. You can stretch your dollar further by buying the products that tend to be more out of sight and less convenient. The products that are highly visible like the endcaps of aisles and that are at eye level tend to be the more expensive options since they are usually rented by the brands to get the prime attention real estate. Stores with a less than traditional layout, like Aldi, are also a great way to save since they are usually cheaper and let you get more bang for your buck.

Another useful practice might be a simple grocery list. After you write it out but before you go in the store, you could order the items based on how important they are to have. Something like sweets < Potato chips < crackers < fruit < veggies < presliced meat < spreads / oils < bread. If it seems like your running total for the trip won’t cover all that’s on your list then you could forgo some of the less important or more expensive items. When calculating the running total keep in mind that there’s usually a ~10% tax on that will be added to the total. So $70 worth of groceries would end being ~$77 after checkout.

As far as apps, I’ve tried some of them and I found they were too tedious for my taste. Even receipts often obscure what the actually product is your getting with a product shorthand that is illegible. That’s why I have ended up breaking out a smallish notepad for tracking purchases instead of using receipts.

I guess this comment got a little long winded for lemmy, but oh well.

Dang. There’s 50 Free games here.

Crypto is a capitalism scam, not an anarchist idea

Source?

Also ooh scary buzzwords, that mean nothing in this context.

You should read up why governments want to regulate currency.

I might if you link me to some recommend links or sources where I can. My understanding is it is mostly to control the money supply.

Crypto is a grift like inflated stocks where the last one holding it is the loser.

Most crypto projects are grifts, I acknowledge that. Even so a few cryptos have actual legitimate use cases like monero.

But I don’t see how stocks has anything to do with that. Cash is used for MLM scams does that mean I shouldn’t use cash for anything?

Some good points there. I would say money is value backed by (state sanctioned) violence while crypto is money backed by a proof of electronic work.

Ultimately humans create value. Simply using crypto gives it value. Government money(fiat) only has value because people and and organizations agree it has value.

Monero is a crypto that tries to be like cash in its anonymity and commitment to nontracking. It has legimate and ‘illegimate’ uses just like cash. You can buy VPNs privately with monero or you can buy dark market goods.

Monero is to cash as lemmy is reddit. Similar to how social media platforms like facebook and reddit are prone to the network effect so is money.

I did just for you. Hope that makes you feel better.

Socialist policies are popular in polling. But as soon as they get called out as socialist, people shut down and revert to their mass produced programming. Capitalism good! Socialism Bad!

Relevant Section under Gift economies:

The expansion of the Internet has witnessed a resurgence of the gift economy, especially in the technology sector. Engineers, scientists, and software developers create open-source software projects. The Linux kernel and the GNU operating system are prototypical examples of the gift economy’s prominence in the technology sector and its active role in using permissive free software and copyleft licenses, which allow free reuse of software and knowledge.

Essentially the line of thought is that open source software is an example of mutual aid and the gift economy.

Why would you hate someone for their beliefs? Is it really such a bad thing to hope and advocate for a future where government doesn’t control the value of your money?

Maybe you’re right. I’m certainly not an expert by any means.

The point I was trying to make is that we have a tendency to see ourselves in a biased way. We lie to ourselves all the time about who we are and what we want.

If you can step out of your own head and judge yourself based upon your actions instead of based on how you think of yourself you can hopefully see yourself in a more accurate way.

I don’t believe I prescribed any behavior. I gave the example to encourage thinking about how you value people based on your actions.

Based upon my actions, I tend to avoid people probably from a fear of judgement, and maybe partly because I think I am better than them because I like to think I’m more informed than them usually. I also like to think and tell myself that I like people even when I don’t necessarily live up to that in reality. In general, I try to assume that people are good, while keeping in mind that they are inherently selfish.

Even if people say and have a lot of naive or ignorant viewpoints, I try to remind myself they may partly hold those viewpoints to feel better about themselves. Everyone wants to feel like they are important, and some people do that by tearing other people down. If the only way someone can feel better about themself is by telling themselves at least they aren’t black, gay, trans, a lib, a commie, a repub, poor, etc. then they must have a pretty sad life.