Interesting question…

As an overall answer: humans are incredibly adaptable, so as a person living in the US, it almost never subjectively feels bad. For goodness’ sake, I knew people who lived in Chicago’s Hyde Park (one of the most dangerous neighborhoods) and happily biked to work. I personally lived in what people would describe as a “hood” and a “third-world country” for a good year and a half, and honestly felt really safe over there. Because of this, I honestly don’t think anyone can give an objective answer solely from their living experiences.

Objectively, the US is a developed country and is not terrible, but regarding your specific points:

1. Yes, the government passed shitty laws, and chose to not pass a lot of not-shitty laws.
2. Yes, there are more mass shootings than the country should have. I’m not going to say why.
3. Insured healthcare isn’t expensive (correction: some stuff are still too expensive even after insurance). However, uninsured healthcare is incredibly expensive, and unfortunately people without employment/self-employed have to purchase their own insurance… which is also stupidly expensive. Also, a lot of things that should be insured aren’t.
4. The different states are certainly different. US politics is very polarized, so heavy-blue and heavy-red states are quite different in their approaches to… many things in life. Whether they are good or bad is up to you.

I mean, people living in Switzerland complain about their countries all the time, even though almost everyone else in the world envy the way they live… so it is possible that some might be a bit overblown.

Hey OP, I am similar to you in most aspects but I’m a lot younger, so please take it with a grain of salt…

I also live in Texas, and honestly I thought a lot of less privileged folks or ppl with family ties would love to be in your situation and just leave? It’s not just about politics. Even if tomorrow Texas becomes a liberal stronghold, it will still take possibly at least a decade to fix ERCOT, the climate issue, and flooding issues (if you live in Houston)… This clusterfrick alone was enough to prompt me to never live in Texas again once I’m done with grad school

Besides, my understanding is that there are a few left-leaning metro areas which have suburbs (or live in the city!) that don’t cost that much more to live in compared to mid-/upper-mid-class TX suburbs, so there’s probably no financial disincentive to move either

mailbox.org and skiff are „too expensive“ with 3€/month.

Ah… I do use mailbox.org and I’ve self-hosted with docker-mailserver before.

I agree, selfhosting mail is a really big pain, and at least where I live most ISPs don’t open the ports necessary for mailservers, so I had to spin up my own server & it was more expensive than just using a mail provider. Could potentially be the cheapest option if I could host it from home & just use a RasPi or something

I’m happy with mailbox.org; the Standard Tier price is 2.50 Euro/mo if paid in full if that helps. Probably not the cheapest option especially since it’s not unlimited, but they do allow domain matches at Standard tier or above, and there are other goodies like calendar/video conferencing/cloud storage & stuff.

Second this!

Phones give out a lot of personal information on their own lol. On top of the phone, don’t forget that social media apps like Threads also require you to login… with credentials stored at FB/Meta… that they can derive all the aforementioned information on, as well as other type of things (Amazon purchases? Stuff you watch on youtube.com? Google queries?..) by using some creative tracking technology. You basically gave them a dog tag to identify you whenever you sign up for services after all

For shittier apps like Thread, apparently they also do some weird stuff like forcing the app to be on once the OS boots, so… yeah.

Surprised no one else mentioned this… the answer is negative many months (or years?), most are Mastodon instances and probably not many people are familiar with most of those instances tho.

There was a fairly serious controversy months back when mastodon.cloud was purchased (if I remember correctly) by the same company that owns pawoo.net and another large Japanese Mastodon instance, the company is for-profit. Several right-wing shithole instances obviously have ads and are for-profit. Also there are a few instances owned/operated by for-profit companies, Medium immediately comes to the top of my mind.

Problem is a fairly significant portion of Mastodon admins I know were so staunchly against anything touching for-profit companies within a 12-ft stick that they immediately defederated from all of the said for-profit company affiliated instances…

To answer the second question… I don’t know. Again, the larger Mastodon instances (over 10,000 users each) I’m aware of seem to do just fine on user donations now, but the concept of profit comes every now and then. Paid moderators/admins was also something to keep in mind for this topic.

Self-hosted SearXNG. Very easy to self-host, and (for the most part) works just fine

Not sure if this has anything to do with me being Autistic but I eat the same thing every meal… pasta, with veggies and protein (depending on what I have). Breakfast just means additional coffee. If I really don’t have time then it’s bakery and fried burrito from the nearby supermarket.

Tried to have a more “typical” American breakfast for a while until I realized I’m lactose intolerant so that never went anywhere…