I agree with your lack of affection for cloud services, but I think your view might be a little skewed here. Does a senior mechanic need to understand the physics of piston design to be a great mechanic, or just gather years of experience fixing problems with the whole system that makes up the car?

I’m a Senior Systems engineer. I know very little about kernel programming or OS design, but i know how the packages and applications work together and where problems might arise in how they interact. Software Engineers might not know how or don’t want to spend time to set up the infrastructure to host their applications, so they rely on me to do it for them, or outsource my job to someone else’s computer.

I rate this post 2‽

If you want to live vicariously, check out this playlist. A guy did just that and his channel is great.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0HiM4heFTOoxnxAnv_WJJArugTScPBUg

You can also try Pinchflat, Its a web front end for yt-dlp, super easy to install ASA docker container.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-trump-promises-to-settle-war-in-ukraine-if-elected

The US is, as a matter of fact, and never has been, a democracy. It has always been a representative republic. Direct democracy as your comment envisions it is very difficult to implement and results in mob rule. If this is something you strongly believe should be stopped, get in touch with your federal senator and congressional representative to make your views known. Call, email, write paper letters, and encourage others to do the same. Make it clear that they won’t be reelected if they allow this to continue. We don’t have lobbying money, but it’s hard to keep taking bribes if they no longer have a position with which to provide a return on that investment.