sylver_dragon

We dun fucked up when we made tarring and feathering CEOs illegal.

I’m torn between the beach house and the mountain house. I love the beach and would love to be able to wake up and wander out into the waves. Especially if the beach features tropical waters and soft, rock free, sand. Though, this home could easily be monkey pawed by placing the house on some rock strew nightmare of a beach with cold waters (or the opposite, for those folks into foot killing beaches). That said, such a beach house would invariably be overrun during the tourist season, and hell being other people, this would greatly reduce the joy of living there.

The mountain home, on the other hand, offers a wonderful sense of solitude. And skinny dipping with the wife in a hot tub is a fantastic way to start an autumn evening. Though, even in the mountains, you can find subdivisions where the houses are piled on top of each other and the “sense of solitude” has trouble being maintained with the neighbors plainly visible though the trees. And once you get into full blown winter, the cold can start to wear on you. So again, possibly a mixed bag, depending on the specific circumstances.

So ya, I guess I’d take the beach house and just take vacations to somewhere else during the high season. Maybe set it up as an AirBnB or the like for those times. Though, the idea of random strangers doing gods know what on my mattress kinda creeps me out. Guess I’d need a storage unit with rental furniture to swap out during those times as well.

Why do you expect to receive someone else’s work for free? Part of the reason the web has become so enshitified is that no one is willing to pay for anything anymore. We all expect everything to be “ad supported”, and then we act shocked when everything is covered in ads.

That said, there are usually open source alternatives for most software packages out there. They may not have complete feature parity or have quite the same slick UI as the commercial products. But, they do tend to be both free in terms of cost and ads. E.g for image editing, there is Gimp. It’s not going to replace Adobe Photoshop in professional spaces anytime soon. But, for a home user who isn’t willing to shell out the Adobe Tax, it’s a reasonable choice.

But, the reason so much is paywalled is because everything takes time and money to create. Someone has to pay that cost. Maybe it’s advertisers, maybe it’s a dedicated team of volunteers. But increasingly, creators are asking users to pay directly.

Decades ago, my father would have some fun with the receipt checkers at Costco. After a shopping trip, we’d commonly have lunch at the cafe in Costco. When leaving the store, he’d hand the receipt checker the receipt for lunch rather than the receipt for the items bought. More than half the time, the checker would just swipe the receipt with a highlighter (their way of marking it “checked”) without noticing that it was the wrong receipt. So ya, it’s complete security theater. Anyone with a modicum of thought can figure ways around it, and it only accomplishes inconveniencing the people who aren’t trying to get away with anything.

17 and 19 is a two-year gap, that’s totally fine.

Might want to check the laws in your local jurisdiction. In the US, in some States this may be OK under Romeo and Juliet Laws (check your local laws if the whole “kill yourself from a misunderstanding” bit of the story is required). But, some States do not have such laws. No idea if/how this applies in other countries.