Based on recent research, mouthwash is now in question in my books.

We aimed to assess if daily usage of Listerine Cool Mint influenced the composition of the pharyngeal microbiome… Listerine use was associated with an increased abundance of common oral opportunistic bacteria previously reported to be enriched in periodontal diseases, oesophageal and colorectal cancer, and systemic diseases. These findings suggest that the regular use of Listerine mouthwash should be carefully considered.

Basically, it differentially kills good bacteria, leaving more of the bad kind.

https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/jmm/10.1099/jmm.0.001830

I’m very excited for COSMIC, but I’ll probably wait until 2024 before giving it a spin. Parts of it already look good, but it will take some time to give it the polish it needs for a good professional work environment experience.

Note to anyone scratching their head: As far as I understand it, the Freedom of Russia Legion is a Ukrainian-supported group of Russian citizen-soldiers fighting against Putin in Russia. If anyone has more information, please feel free to add or correct me.

When you’re just trying to get work done: pick a solid, well-tested high-profile distribution like Fedora, Pop!_OS, or Debian (or Ubuntu). Don’t look for the most beautiful, or most up-to-date, or most light-weight (e.g. low CPU usage, RAM, etc.). Don’t distro hop just to see what you’re missing.

Of course, do those things if you want to mess around, have fun, or learn! But not when you’re trying to get work done.

A coffee bean is a seed from the Coffea plant and the source for coffee. It is the pit inside the red or purple fruit. This fruit is often referred to as a coffee cherry, and like the cherry, it is a fruit with a pit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_bean

I read this as “buying clubs”. Like, buy clubs and hit stuff. My first take was “Ah, the violent revolutionary type.” :)

Word of advice–be a good person to your colleagues, and let friendship possibly develop after one of you leaves. I’ve made many friends throughout the years once we each know there is no pressure to be friends. I’ve had many job leads throughout the years because people I previously worked with thought I was a great colleague.

On Android, I replaced Authy with the open-source Aegis app. It’s just as functional, allows exporting, and doesn’t tie your data to your phone number (nor store it on a central system–not sure if Authy does this or not).

I’m sorry for your suffering and heartache. I wish you the best.

Here’s my take:

1. We’re built for about 150 relationships max (Dunbar number), and yet we benefit from cooperation above that threshold. Rather than make it so we have to have a personal relationship with everyone who could possibly benefit us, we accepted a ramped down version of relationship we call “transactions”. This is a very weak replacement for a relationship, but it is a sort of “micro-relationship” in that for a brief moment two people who don’t know each other can kind of care about each other during an exchange. Through specialization, we can do something well that doesn’t just benefit the handful of friends and neighbors we have, but tens of thousands and possibly millions of people via transactions (e.g. a factory, starting an Amazon business, etc.)

2. There is a process called “commensuration” in the social sciences, where people start to make one thing commensurate with another, even in wildly different domains. For example, to understand the value of a forest and to convey its importance to decision makers we might say “this forest is worth $100 billion”. It’s kind of weird to do this (how do leaves and trees and anthills and beetles equal imaginary humoney?) But slowly, over time, we have made many things commensurate to dollars at various scales. (I don’t think this is a good thing, but it does have benefits). In short, more and more things that were part of an implicit economy of relationships (e.g. can the neighbor girl babysit tonight?) have entered the explicit domain of the monetary economy (e.g. sittercity).

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IMO, in order to participate in the huge value generated by this monetary economy, people sometimes lose the forest for the trees (so to speak) and forget what really matters (e.g. excellence of character, deep relationships, new experiences, etc.) because it seems like we might be able to put off those things until “after” we square away this whole money thing first. But maybe “after” never comes–and the hollow life of a consumer capitalist drains the inner ecological diversity of a soulful life.