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𝔽𝕒π•₯𝕙𝕖𝕣 β„•π•šπ•”π•œ 𝔹𝕝𝕒𝕙𝕒
0f4c4cc8e93a6f4f4c8f48e8e56c412e3b32ced8de79497723668fbb8fb7f2cf
Landlocked castaway priest in the Age of Disintegration

As election season approaches, I'm thinking about changing my party affiliation to Independent.

I realize that this means I don't get to vote in a party primary. But I am so disgusted by party politics and the way these machines are run, I am in conscience driven to flee. Political parties, at least in the present two-party system, seem to me to be the enemy of the people.

What am I missing?

πŸ™‹

I was 23 when Google started giving out referral-only email accounts with ONE GIGABYTE of storage that had a counter that increased continuously

It was exhilarating

I switched to the paid Proton account (because no ads is worth paying something) and there is ample space, half a terabyte... plus their email client works as a PWA now, though of course that's available to all users.

They had some minor outage troubles back in 2022 and early 2023 but it's been smooth sailing since then

Very much worth paying attention to. I have heard this makes Germans some of the most generous people in the world. I lived in an orphanage in El Salvador that received the majority of its operating funds from Germany. It was attributed to the same cause you mention.

"Moralizing sauce" does tend to stick in the craw.

As I have remarked throughout the book, American exceptionalism is not just something that Americans claim for themselves. Historically, Americans have been different as a people, even peculiar, and everyone around the world has recognized it. I am thinking of qualities such as American industriousness and neighborliness discussed in earlier chapters, but also American optimism even when there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for it, our striking lack of class envy, and the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies. Finally, there is the most lovable of exceptional American qualities: our tradition of insisting that we are part of the middle class, even if we aren’t, and of interacting with our fellow citizens as if we were all middle class.

The exceptionalism has not been a figment of anyone’s imagination, and it has been wonderful. But nothing in the water has made us that way. We have been the product of the cultural capital bequeathed to us by the system the founders laid down: a system that says people must be free to live life as they see fit and to be responsible for the consequences of their actions; that it is not the government’s job to protect people from themselves; that it is not the government’s job to stage-manage how people interact with one another. Discard the system that created the cultural capital, and the qualities we have loved about Americans will go away.

--Charles Murray, COMING APART

I think the hardest concept for most node runners is inbound versus outbound liquidity in your lightning channels. Once you wrap your mind around that you'll be set. Plebnet has great resources and a network of node runners to help.