Good stuff to think about. Thanks! I think I’ll keep the email issue on my mental list of things to address as I keep FOSSifying and self hosting things.

I have been fortunate to stumble into Mazda ownership a couple times in my life. I had a 1989 MX-6 coupe with a 5-speed manual ~25 years ago, and currently drive a 2012 mazda3. They have been doing a lot of great design for many years, and I think flying under the radar for many people. And the enjoyment of driving has always been on their radar. Hell, consider that they still make the MX-5 Miata! I think I wanna get me a fun little RWD zoom zoom with a soft top and a 6-speed.

If you look up the 2025 mazda3 interior, you see buttons and gauges, with a small central infotainment screen. Plus you can get that car in AWD with a turbo these days.

Not just him but undoubtedly millions of fellow Americans.

When one is dead and broken inside, they look to external quantitative factors for validation. They convince themselves that the more measurable & “objective” those factors are, the more they must be representing some underlying truth. They represent the meaning of life.

And the shitty thing is that those who only care about money and power see the worst of humanity getting rewarded with more money and more power.

Their fucked up personal lives aren’t evidence of something wrong with them. They are evidence that such silly feel-good nonsense is unnecessary at best, and a terrible weakness at worst. You know, the kind of shit you’d expect from a cartoon villain in a children’s movie.

Edit to add an anecdote: I’m sure people from conservative families will feel this one. Say in front of one of the broken people that Musk is an idiot and a bad father, and the reply will be something like “well he’s made a million times as much money as you, so that shows how smart you are!” Or maybe “his kids are set for life - have you done something like that for your kids?”

I guess the votes so far disagree with you, but I could see your icky feelings coming from the same stuff that I perceive with the “walking brand.”

Everything is planned and rehearsed. He reminds the viewer repeatedly how he can be trusted. But it still feels like every word was passed through a committee to make sure nothing bad leaks out.

In my social circles I’m the fun parent that the kids like to play with, and maybe some acquaintances have gotten creepy vibes on occasion, but that’s more a reflection on society at large and how fear and negativity sell news. Nothing that can’t be solved with transparency and consistently just being a decent person.

I’d say this move seems too dumb even for fiction, if that wasn’t the SOP for the entire country I live in.

Given the context though, I’m curious if one of you privacy experts can change my mind on how I approach email.

I don’t use email for any meaningful communication where I expect privacy. It is essentially the way for companies and a few other organizations to send me low priority information and/or confirm my identity to reset a password or whatever. Because of that, the only attributes of an email service I really care about are reliability and availability, including not having emails silently blocked for not coming from a “trusted” provider.

So what is the practical risk of just using a Gmail address for that stuff, equivalent to hiding in plain sight? Yeah it helps Google fine tune their advertising model for me, while I’m running Linux on all my machines and blocking ads on any device I touch. My social media is Lemmy and my streaming service is Jellyfin.

Am I risking too much if I use it as the corporate contact point that it is? Am I just letting my white/straight/cis/male privilege show through?

Yeah. In my experience babies can be pretty fun people to be around and they have much healthier ways to express their emotions.

I remember thinking highly of some of his early content. Like this guy could be a decent educator.

Now every time I see him, he just comes across as a walking breathing brand rather than an interesting individual.

I think they misspoke by saying “benefiting from” rather than something like “actively leading and pushing for.”

Anybody who is able to read these comments has incidentally benefited from some human suffering somewhere, thanks to systems put in place and often obfuscated by others. That is in no way equal to going out and actively harming people yourself.

It’s part of the reason that “cutting the head off the snake” is a common phrase. Like if somebody wants to see Putin killed because of what he’s doing to the world, that does not mean they want to see every Russian he forced into that military wiped out at the same time.

He led an enterprise with the goal and the result of making a bit more money by ending and ruining numerous lives. And he made it the most extreme case of such an enterprise.

And yes, when somebody has a life threatening or disabling condition, and their established medical provider prescribes the best standard of care, and the money guy says “nope I don’t think you need that, denied” they are actively doing harm to numerous people for a small monetary return. That is evil.

It is LAWFUL Evil, however. Yes, just like in D&D, but it is an apt description for many real people. Genuinely bad people can appeal to the “rule of law” just as easily as genuinely good people when it suits them.

It is not an accident, or an unforeseen consequence, or even negligence. It is an intentional decision to harm others in order to make a bit more money than he would otherwise.

Compare with something like a drunk driver. They are generally looked down upon, and if somebody drives into a tree at 100mph with a BAC triple the limit, not many people outside their own family will shed a tear for them. But that does not mean those people support the death penalty for DUI convictions. If the driver kills somebody else and lives, then maybe it turns into negligent homicide. They get a pretty bad punishment because their actions can directly be proven to have caused an innocent death. And it may have been predictable, but it wasn’t intentional.

Brian Thompson set policies that caused many orders of magnitude more death and suffering than any drunk driver could hope to. And more importantly, his plans were to continue doing more of the same. So it’s not a question of what punishment he deserved, but of preventing future death and suffering. You know, the #1 thing that makes homicide justifiable.

However, having “the law” on his side, there were legal and corporate structures in place to insulate his decisions from the direct 1:1 cause and effect tied to each individual death and to each individual day of suffering. That gets him off the hook legally, but in no way does it do so morally.

I used to think more like you. Surely since the rule of law is the ideal, we should choose that side of any argument like this. But I have seen too much bad shit done by people whose primary skill is arguing in bad faith to make horrible things sound palatable. The law is not divinely inspired, it is written by humans. And sure, most of us will agree that people can get it wrong. But it is even more important to recognize that laws can be created with malicious intent as well.

And I will not be blocking you, because I would like to hear some of your actual thought process and hopefully not a low effort quip or just crickets.