Daily jogging, healthy diet, and meditation make the biggest difference to me.
The biggest change I'd like to make would be to defeat my social media and entertainment addiction - not even entirely, just contain it to a 2-hour window every evening. I keep failing at that, but there were weeks/months when I was successful, and it made an enormous difference, way more than I expected.
I switched to mac after about 10 years on linux, and I'm not going back.
I'm also very annoyed by most of the things you have listed, but there are two things that are a deciding factor in favor of mac for me:
1. In addition to webdev I sometimes need to do design, graphics, 3D art, and on linux most of the software just doesn't work. There's absolutely zero chance I'd be willing to cope with GIMP and Inkscape instead of using Photoshop and Affinity designer. There's a lot of other software (for screen recording and video editing, for instance), that works on mac and doesn't on linux.
2. On mac, things just work. On linux there's more customization, and open source software, but you pay for it dearly by having to spend hours (sometimes days) tinkering with configs and installing dependencies every time you're trying to get anything to work. I didn't mind that before, but at this point, I'm too old for this sh*t. I just want my laptop to work and help me do my work and make stuff, I don't want to cross my fingers and pray every time I need to install something I need to get anything done.
That's a big part of the problem - a group of people have unilaterally decided that they're the grown up ones, and they know better, and dismiss everyone else as toddlers.
Using that wonderful justification, they proceeded to censor everyone who disagrees with them, including the points of view that later turned out to be correct.
When you decide that you're a smart adult, declare every dissenting viewpoint to be "disinformation", and, therefore, you get to decide for other people what they do or do not get to read or think, and then you get it wrong, people will be justifiably upset. Even if you get it right, people will be upset.
So here's a wild suggestion - why not treat other human beings as adults capable of making up their own minds about things?
They are turning on the microchips Bill Gates implanted in everyone any day now. Even Trump has had 3+ vaccines. I don’t really understand what we are debating as two equivalent sides here.
Its funny because I find all the Prosecute/Fauci conspiracy theories about gain of function research, unproven/unprovable Wuhan lab leak theories and pizza gate and anti-vax and that Trump + Fox News anchors are triple jabbed all while whipping up lies to gain political capital “exceptionally uncharitable” myself.
Why does everyone think that they know better how to spend other people's money than the people who have earned it?
Somehow the people who didn't have the intelligence and discipline to spend decades successfully doing things that make them rich are so sure that they would be able to do better with their (totally hypothetical) wealth than the people who did.
Everyone loves to claim some kind of moral superiority over the billionaires, but I don't see these critics spending a significant portion of their wealth on charity.
Why does everyone think that the person receiving money knows how to spend it better than any other person?
Notice I didn't say "earned" because the entire premise of some is that one cannot morally "earn" a billion dollars - that something is fundamentally broken in our society when wealth can become so centralized.
Some people make fun of the idea that government is a decent decisionmaker for spending money on society, whenever raising taxes on the wealthy comes up. Where do you draw the line? Do you think they currently are taxed perfectly? Do you think no one should be taxed? How would the infrastructure these companies relied on get funded?
Oh, I see you committed another trope of comparing the earnings of anyone on this thread (and about 95% of the country) to a billionaire. The floor for living comfortably, or even somewhat luxuriously, is a much higher proportion of the wages of a middle class household than it is for a billionaire. I make 0.02% annually of just this bonus. Don't you think that makes a difference in the equation?
I don’t ones a ability to make money is even vaguely correlated with once ability to spend well for the benefit of society.
Hell the whole reason why democracy is thing is because monarchies of yesteryear have proven quite decisively that the ability to raise capital and spend well for society are not even remotely linked.
We need to consider very carefully as a society what the impact of the billionaire class has on how our society develops, and the outsized impacts they can have on democratic processes.
Personally I don’t think having such wealthy individuals is a good idea. Their wealth is so great it’s pretty much impossible for them not to get wealthier, and do it at a rate greater than than the vast majority of people. And their ability to deploy that capital to influence society is scary, effectively taking the role of government to provide social services, and placing it in the hands of a wealth few.
We’ve already seen what more extreme individuals are prepared to do with that power, just a Hobbylobby and David Green’s continued vendetta against abortions and safe contraceptives.
The alternative to a billionaire deciding how to spend the money they have earned is a politician deciding to spend the money they didn't earn.
I trust a person who has generated billions of dollars worth of value over a buerocrat who won a popularity contest.
Besides, I don't think it should matter whether or not these people spend their money optimally. They've made this money, it's theirs. Don't take other people's stuff.
> We’ve already seen what more extreme individuals are prepared to do with that power.
Until we leave in a featureless dystopia where all people are perfect clones brought up in an identical environment, there will be power disparity between people. It can be based on inheritance (like in monarchies), or ability to commit violence, or charisma, or political skill, or ability to create value.
Between all these options, I'd much rather live in society where people get to keep the value they have created. It seems to me the most correlated with merit (not perfectly, but better than the alternatives), besides, it is morally right.
Eh, call me old fashioned, but I like to vote for the people who have significant influence over the society I live in.
Politicians may not be perfect, but they’re much easier to hold to account that high net worth individuals. I personally consider that a killer feature when picking my power brokers.
We already take others people stuff for the public good. It’s called taxes. That money built the roads you use everyday and props up the society you live in by helping to ensure that everyone gets a decent quality of life.
Simple fact of the matter is that no individual has any practical use for wealth measured in billions. It’s wealth that could be better put to use help the poorest in society, and helping us navigate the next hundred years of climate change and associated social unrest.
> People are not paid based on what they need, they're paid based on value they provide
If that were true then he'd be paid far less. Tim Cook does not provide value to Apple to the tune of billions of dollars. The people who work for Apple do.
Elsewhere in this post people have said that his compensation is 0.03% of Apple's market cap.
It would not be hard to believe that Tim Cook's decisions had a larger impact than that on Apple's market cap because he has extremely high leverage as the CEO.
Both are infinitely nested tree editors, that enable you to organize information very conveniently. Great for writing, brainstorming, taking notes.
On iOS I use Editorial (a great text editor) to write down all my notes, and I use #tags to make it easy to search all my notes by topic (like #webdev, #health, #books, and so on).
Also Track and Share is a great habit tracker, and Things 3 is a great todo list manager. The more thoughts I can offload from my brain into the app - the better.
On my laptop I use Emacs org-mode, it's fantastic.
I currently use Garden of Life Primal Defense Ultra. Because of the subtilis in it and not having too many histamine creating lacto strains. May or may not help you but did it for me.
I started with 1 a day and worked up to 3 a day over some weeks. I felt like crap for about 2 weeks. Like having a cold sick. Just no nose running and such. Then better than ever. Now I take one in the morning and one in the evening.
Oh and so I don't forget shortly after I also started keto. Real keto w/ less than 20g carbs. Did blood tests that confirmed I was in ketosis. That's the "and feeding them right" part. Did it for about a year which normalized all my off blood markers except for cholesterol which also improved but not below what is condered normal. Did it for a year. Now I no longer do keto but keep the sugar mostly away.
The biggest change I'd like to make would be to defeat my social media and entertainment addiction - not even entirely, just contain it to a 2-hour window every evening. I keep failing at that, but there were weeks/months when I was successful, and it made an enormous difference, way more than I expected.