My guess is the music goes into the past, leaving echos in your memories.

I think it’s more fair to compare average income versus average life satisfaction. (using a scale of 1 to 10) (On this scale Finland is the happiest, and Afghanistan is the least happy)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness

Average satisfaction for Costa Rica (6.61) or Mexico (6.33) isn’t that much lower than the United States (6.89) at roughly 1/4th the GDP.

South Korea (5.95) doubles Mexico’s GDP ($45.5k vs $20.25k) but has a lower life satisfaction.

Or Hong Kong (5.31, $58k) is close the US ($64k) in GDP but less happy than Russia (5.66, $27.4k).

Costa Rica is at the 1.5t per capita probably safe emissions and has a life satisfaction of 6.61 compared to the US’s 6.89.

Our world in data also has life satisfaction versus CO2 emissions and central america looks to be doing fairly well for themselves. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-satisfaction-vs-co-emissions-per-capita

Most of the young adults in America currently can’t afford kids, housing, or cars.

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/25/1225957874/housing-unaffordable-for-record-half-all-u-s-renters-study-finds

The xz/ssh back door made it into Debian testing, So I felt I should wipe and reinstall.

Debian has had a rolling release for ages.

Take it up with men and current gender stereotypes.

“The research, conducted with three other colleagues, consisted of seven experiments involving more than 2,000 American and Chinese participants. We showed that there is a psychological link between eco-friendliness and perceptions of femininity. Due to this “green-feminine stereotype,” both men and women judged eco-friendly products, behaviors, and consumers as more feminine than their non-green counterparts. In one experiment, participants of both sexes described an individual who brought a reusable canvas bag to the grocery store as more feminine than someone who used a plastic bag—regardless of whether the shopper was a male or female. In another experiment, participants perceived themselves to be more feminine after recalling a time when they did something good versus bad for the environment.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/men-resist-green-behavior-as-unmanly/

It’s likely using nature is coded as masculine, while showing you care about nature is coded feminine.

Librature has a list of DRM free individuals and small presses https://libreture.com/bookshops/

Oh I forgot also if you check the details on kobo, some of the books are sold DRM free. Mostly I think it was from Tor, but could be other publishers as well.

There’s definitely the genetic component too, but the scents from soap is an interesting thing to test out.

And for what it’s worth some types of oil of lemon eucalyptus works reasonably well, if you don’t want to use DEET. https://www.consumerreports.org/health/insect-repellent/oil-of-lemon-eucalyptus-insect-repellents-a7989538414/

Some friends really like this stuff “Repel Lemon Eucalyptus Insect Repellent2 Pump” and consumer reports also thinks it works pretty well.

There’s some reports that the interaction of soaps and shampoos influence how tasty a person smells, so it might be worth trying different products.

https://www.prevention.com/health/a43863971/different-soaps-may-make-you-more-attractive-to-mosquitoes/

Write MP3s to them and use them to play one song in a modern car.

(I saw a video of someone playing a clip of music using a USB floppy drive)

I run my own XMPP server. https://joinjabber.org/ has some introductory information Snickket is a all in one service you can host or your can pay them to host https://snikket.org/start/

XMPP servers and clients are a lot lighter weight than matrix, though I think matrix has more fancy features.

They’re both self hostable and are federated to share the costs of running the network.

With signal there’s a non-profit that needs some pretty steam funding to stay in business. (Though they’re popular so maybe they can get it) https://www.pcmag.com/news/want-to-run-an-encrypted-chat-app-youll-need-50-million-signal-says

You’re welcome, and good luck with your project

Dark Sky is a group working to protect the visibility of the night sky. https://darksky.org/what-we-do/advancing-responsible-outdoor-lighting/

They’ve got suggestions on both limiting use of lighting and using lights that don’t point upward, automatically dim, and don’t generate a lot of glare

There’s some weird links between american christianity and oil. At the very least a bunch of the people who got rich off of oil also tended to be devout christians, and used their money to support evangelizing christianity and oil dominance.

There’s a number of different reviews for “Anointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America”

This is an especially detailed one. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/kim-phillips-fein-anointed-oil/

I found the book and it’s reviews after noticing just how biased toward the republicans the owners of the oil companies tended to be. Other large businesses tend to play both sides in politics, but the owners of the oil companies really seem to be really into the traditional gender hierarchies.

darktable used xmp, and that looks like an alternate metadata format, it looks like exiftools might be able to work with the xmp standard, and it looks like there’s some face tagging features in xmp.

https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/106410/how-does-xmp-define-the-face-region

I blame the young earth creationist christians who think that humans are incapable of destroying gods creation, and that the increasing planetary instability means that god will return and put them in charge any day now.

I feel it’s unfair to be blaming phones, social media, and multiplayer video games for being the way teens get some peer socialization in a world that is so deeply unfriendly to teens having independence.

danah boyd spent a bunch of time studying teen use of earlier social media, and then for personal reasons moved on to help run teen crisis text hotline.

Her thought for why US teens are struggling are the lack of non-parent trusted adults in their lives.

“Struggling with a Moral Panic Once Again” https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2024/04/19/struggling-with-a-moral-panic-once-again.html

There’s also some evidence that it’s mostly teens on wealthy English speaking countries that are the most depressed.

“America’s Top Export May Be Anxiety: English-speaking teens are spreading their problems abroad.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/mental-health-crisis-anglosphere-depressed/678724/

I have long thought modern American kids have too little freedom to go places on their own.

“This article is more than 8 years old: The popsicle test: what makes a city good for children?” https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/21/city-good-children-popsicle-test-crime-property-play

I think some players have used a mithril chain shirt as a sleep shirt, which i think is technically legal.