Life expectancy is a useful summary statistic but not really a guide to healthy.
The main reason for the increase there is a reduction in child mortality, not an increase in overall healthiness. Ironically, one of the main factors improving the adult population statistics is the decrease in smoking.
But look at something like HALE (Healthy Life Expectancy from WHO[1]) that's much lower and is currently decreasing.
I get what you're saying. And seeing your detractors here, I can't argue with the data.
I wonder though if we didn't trade the low-hanging fruit of lung cancer for the kinds of things that kill us now. I won't argue that we didn't add a decade to our average lifespan, but it does seem our lives have become more sedentary than they were. (Mine certainly has—but then I'm also forty-plus years older, ha ha.)
I wonder how 70's man and 70's woman fared who didn't smoke or live with a smoker—if you compared just that group with modern man and woman.
What seems to me is the ads seem less staged and processed than current ones. They're wilder and not as softened as every media are now.
As for people pointing at lifespans for the healthy part, how much of the change is systemic use of anticoagulants? And of course less tobacco, but I wouldn't rush to say people are in much better shape now.
Nice to hear your experience, as it sounds similar to where i'm currently at. I'm in the south of Norway and there's not much activity on Meshcore yet. I had set up a repeater on a nearby hill, and then one Saturday I started receiving messages in the public channel. At first I thought someone was passing by in town, but I soon realized (and confirmed) that these were messages from Denmark! Some were 200+ KMs away (mostly over sea). I was chatting to people and even able to login to a remote Repeater. I was flabbergasted. Now I'm using the amazing antenna coverage function within the MC app to find best locations of repeaters, which is a fun pastime on itself, especially in a hilly environment. It's a fun and educational exeperience if nothing else! It reminds me very much of packet radio back in the 90s, similar vibe.
Juggling! I used to juggle when i was a teenager, managed to juggle 5 balls and clubs. Then after decades of neglecting it, i picked it up again and i found the joy in this hobby again! I can highly recommend.
Agreed, GPG is not the most intuitive tool, but once you are familiar enough with it, it opens some doors.
For me termux and pass (from F-droid) have solved my password management for many years. I never have to struggle finding passwords. The security aspect of it is the least I care about, it's the convenience and simplicity of it.
Since the passwords are all just files on a disk inside a directory tree, you can use any old file system tools to find your passwords. Same for MFA. I store the base32 string inside pass and that's the end of it.
I use pass also on my phone in combination with Termux. I keep the passwords stores in sync using git. pass on android also supports copying your password directly into the clipboard, which is especially nice on a mobile device.
Perhaps we should stop calling open-source software "free" due to the stigma that comes with it. It's no longer a selling point, nor should it have been.
There are about 5.5 billion people on the internet. Firefox's "small" market share of ~5% is still about 250 million users.
I'm reasonably sure that a small fraction of those 250 million people are even aware of the concept of "Free Software" or "Open Source", or how it relates to Firefox.
Open does not imply any freedoms. A software source could be openly put in the public but without license, hence you would not be free to use it nor to learn from it.
