This is more historical as fortunately I was able to work my way up in my industry over the years.

A little over 10 years ago I was living in my first flat by myself. 90% of my income from part time retail went on rent and bills. What I was left with was £4 a week for all groceries, medicine prescription fees, etc. (Travel I considered to be bills because I couldn’t walk to work as it was too far)

I just had to buy the absolute cheapest of everything, bulk deals, etc. Anything I couldn’t immediately afford I’d spread over a few months on my credit card.

Anything health related fell off quickly. I never saw the dentist the entire time I was this poor, and I couldn’t afford healthy food at all. I’m still paying the price for that now. I swear my teeth are 90% glass at this point.

It was an extremely difficult point in my life, but I needed that freedom and independence and would do it all again if I had to.

That’s amazing. I love the idea of creating a self sustaining ecosystem like that.

A week is my usual. I know, I know, but my mental health is a lot worse than my body odour.

I used reddit for searching stuff purely out of convenience (which lemmy instance do I choose for the site: query?) but for everyday content it’s exclusively lemmy ever since I went on a mission of deleting all my commercial social media accounts.

You can self host the services you need, but admittedly that’s not feasible for most people.

Thanks for recommending JShelter! I’ll add it to my list

I really wish there was a foolproof way of preventing fingerprinting. Disabling JavaScript unfortunately isn’t really an option, no-one builds websites with progressive enhancement in mind these days.

I sleep with a stuffed animal I’ve had since I was a kid. I don’t think it’s that unusual.

Sign me up

CLion’s worth checking out. It’s free for non-commercial projects.

I lived in the US for a couple of years and when I left I signed up to Traveling Mailbox so I didn’t miss any mail at my old address. Just set up mail forwarding with USPS and you’re good to go.

As far as the IRS goes - you can use your foreign address just fine on a 1040/1040-NR.

I wish these companies would realise that acting like this is a very fast way to get scraping outlawed altogether, which is a shame because it can be genuinely useful (archival, automation, etc).