Kanye West. Maybe he was never 'all there' mentally to begin with, but the guy was clearly a role model to a lot of young people and utterly destroyed his own legacy.

Linux phones for me. Really impressed by how these things have come in the last 3-4 years, and now we're getting close to having at least one that's usable day-to-day (with plenty of rough edges, obviously). As soon as that happens I hope more people will decide to take the plunge and really start pushing things forward.

I don't see the point. If we've learned one thing already, it's that the users must control the platform. And that can never happen with Reddit

We should replace all of men's (pointlessly tight and uncomfortable) formal attire with loose-fitting, Qing dynasty-style robes.

Sleeping on a thin futon laid out on the floor (Japan / Korea). And riding a bike or e-bike everywhere (Netherlands), even though US cities and infrastructure are hostile to humans

I'm almost exactly the same age as you. If I've learned anything up to this point, it's that people would start to have better and richer lives as soon as they cancel their cable TV subscriptions, delete all social media accounts*, and delete all news apps from their mobile devices. I really believe smartphones are a huge culprit in making people miserable, and it's because we've let these things get totally out of hand instead of consciously making them as boring and utilitarian as possible.

The issue of being 'informed' or not can be covered by reading Wikipedia's current events page for a few minutes each week. That should also free up plenty of time for people to focus more on what really matters day-to-day, which is their local community, friends, family and neighbors. Useful information is actionable, and actionable information can be found when you're laser-focused on your local area and the ways you can help improve it.

• Lemmy / kbin isn't social media, IMO. ; )

Your best bet right now IMO would be flashing PostmarketOS onto a used OnePlus 6, which is cheap, has good specs and none of the battery issues plaguing the Pinephone Pro. That said, it's not 100% ready to be a phone yet- for now its best use case is as a mini-tablet / PDA kind of thing. Really feels like carrying a pocket laptop around, which is pretty fun as a starting point.

What's rude is bringing disgusting bacteria (E Coli, etc) and potentially-toxic chemicals into somebody else's house by not taking your shoes off. There's just an objectively-right and wrong answer to this one.

Is that an argument in favor of glued-in batteries, though? A lot of users' phones aren't going to make it for six years if it's non-trivial (or impossible) to swap out the battery for a new one.

Not being able to run Signal on my Android tablet feels really inconvenient. That would be no. 1 on my wish list

Minus the sandboxing and security improvements, apparently

I'd say no, the benefits vastly outweigh the drawbacks. But yeah, it's important to have enough discipline to get outside and do plenty of stuff that doesn't revolve around the internet

No, at least not in countries (e.g., the USA) that rely on the state to micromanage every aspect of zoning, and which therefore allow NIMBYs to derail progress at every possible step.

In a better world we would draft new laws to throw out our entire zoning system, and start over with something much more flexible at the state or national level- ideally based on the approach Japan uses, which defaults to mixed-use for every building and makes NIMBYism structurally impossible.

Please just realize any article about Sarah Palin is basically clickbait. She has nothing of substance to offer, and no one is more informed after hearing her hot takes

Also insanely unhealthy to consume stuff like this on a day-to-day basis

Think this is what you're looking for?
https://sub.rehab/

Reading novels (or just fiction, in general). Not sure why but I simply lost the ability to do it a few years ago. Still like to read a couple of nonfiction books every month, but feel like I'm missing something lately

Kitty, but most commands are probably happening in eshell. Feels more easily scriptable to me

Regular and diet sodas are both clearly junk that humans shouldn't be consuming.

The US has a pretty severe urban / rural divide in most of its states, but I don't think it's enough. You'd usually need a pretty clean split along territorial lines for that.