An interesting customer base might be small communal organisations. At our local scouts troop I had a discussion with a friend, who is also in IT. His idea (not fleshed out) was to provide small local organizations with a stack of already configured open source software to support the typical needs of such organizations (like a wordpress website, a nextcloud for file storage and common calender, limesurvey for surveys and event registration, mailman3 for mailing lists,…). Depending on the needs you could sell the initial setup process (your personal work in setting up and skill transfer) or ongoing support. Though such organizations normally don’t have much money to give away. So probably its not really worth your time financially (though probably really appreciated in the community).

Sounds as dumb of an idea as the one child policy

How could one protect electronics/hard disks/etc from a Crrington type event?

What people want in life often comes from what they experienced themselves previously. You mentioned charity. I’ve put 13 years of my life into being a scouts group leader, organizimg weekly meetups, many events and multiple scout camps a year. I’m very passionate about this, since I’ve got so much out of being a scout since I was 7, growing up with a community, that was meaningful and not harsh and punishing as school. I wanted tp give these experience back to the next scout generation. And during my time as scout group leader I could grew even more, making my own life better through helping others. Soon I will shift my focus away from the scouts (currently its too much together with work; also I want kids soon).

I’m not saying, that you need to do this. I just wanted to explain where my motivation comes from. I get a sense of fulfilment and I’m proud of what I’ve done and I’m proud of the kids, that I saw growing up and now being group leaders themselves.

Finding something, that you are passionate about is very important. It doesn’t need to include external responsibilities. Taking responsibility for your own self, like putting in hard work to learn a new skill, can be as fulfilling as the above.

How would one describe “how stupid” these 99% are? Sure, you can take the distribution of IQ, though that doesn’t mean much.

A good idiom to think about: 99% of people believe, that 99% of people are idiots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYCRwcz2aV8 is really crazy, that americans seem to think, that you need to be able to get out of everything by yourself. In the line of: If something bad happens to you and you are not able to get out by yourself, then it is your own fault and nobody should help you. Though this is already often talked about.

Another scary thing is how little you like your government (being it of the State or federal). It seems Americans don’t want the government to do much, not seeing at as a tool to handle modern problems. Back when I was at Reddit I read a thread about why americans opposed state run free healthcare for all. One user wrote something like “Don’t see, why we should solve the price issue by letting the state (so taypayer) pay”. The user just ignored the immense power, that a government of a big and wealthy nation has. It can easily press pharma companies to set prices low enough, without stiffling research and innovation. But that would be against freedom, I guess? Really difficult to understand.

Though changing the american system is a big task. Months ago I’ve seen a good video on youtube on that topic by TypeAston. I think its this one Would Universal Healthcare Really Work in the U.S.?

Maybe Miaou meant the gender gap in medicine. The big difference in studies looking at the medical details (for example of drugs) in female bodies vs in male bodies

This approach to gun control seems sooo american XD A little bit of money surely fixes the problems

Which then wouldn’t be a legally full verification of your age, thus the legislation would probably require some other means. We currently have a similar discussion in the EU regarding porn sites. Verification methods could be showing your id card and your face to a webcam, or showing up at a verification office in person (at least in germany we have this with our national postal service). Of course the porn sites don’t want to implement this. And I cannot really blame them. Nobody would give a random porn site their real identity and it would still be very easy to get porn without verification.

Age verification on social media is very similar.

Even the extra budget (Sondervermögen) of 100 million € is not nearly enough to do this. Suren technically it is possible, but it would require so much money, that it is highly unlikely, that we would see the parliament in unison here. Currently the Bundeswehr cannot handle millions of conscriptions.

While the prices are surely very high, they are not that high everywhere. My sister just bought a small house with small garden in a smallish city (50k people living here) for 260k. And we are 30min train ride from the next major city

Or gptAssist on FDroid

And the PineTime as an Open Source Smartwatch. I’m not using much of the fitness tracker functionality, but counting my steps is very important for me.