Libb

I suppose you’re asking if I’m French? Yes. And, yes, it’s a French operator (Bouygues Mobile)

And, yeah, I used to use one like that.

Anyone have any advice?

• Ask them for their number, and see how it goes? Worst case, they will say ‘no’, end of the story. Maybe the will ask why you don’t have IG and that will be the start of an interesting conversation.
• Try to meet different kind of people? I mean it seriously. I know a lot of people around me who have IG/Facebook/X and so on but at the same time none of them make it a requirement to use it.
• Use a second phone/number for that crap content only? I barely use my ‘real’ phone (I have nothing installed on it beside what I’m required to use) still I do own a second phone just so I can easily share a number with all the services and various craps that ask for one. It’s a phone I never answer to, despite it being constantly harassed by callers. And that peace of mind (my real number is almost spam free) only costs me the 2€/month (plus the phone, I purchased used). You should be able to do something similar for social networks: have a second phone without anything personal on it, just with IG.
• Accept that you’re doomed to use IG because it’s with those ‘IG people’ and no others you want to spend your time with? I like to spend time with people reading books, it’s kinda expected we indeed read books. Would I not like to read, I would not spend as much time with them.

A pencil (edit: less than 1 dollar most of the time)

How would he live or what would he do in life? More importantly, what should be done with him to make him useful or at least neutral rather than being a negative on the society?

Are you a tool, or an object yourself? Can I throw you away because you’re broken, or because a newer version of yourself has been released, or because I don’t like the way you age?

Probably not because, at least in your own eyes, you don’t consider yourself a tool or an object. You’re not something, right?

Why is that? Because you’re a person. You’re a human being.

Well, good for you and, also, nice to meet you my dear fellow human being.

The thing is that with or without skill, we all are human beings too. We’re persons, we’re not tools at the disposal of some ‘owner’ who is free to break it and throw it away when not needed.

Given that, one realize that the fact of being alive is not about being ‘employable’ or ‘useful’. It never was. Believers would say it’s a miracle or a gift, I’m not a believer myself but I kinda understand that idea: it’s… so much more than all we can understand.

Sure, each of us may need to be able to get food and shelter, true that, but then your question instantly stops being about ‘what should we do with unemployable people’ to become the, imho, much more interesting ‘why is that civil society (aka, all of us) is allowing a handful of its own members, the billionaires and corporations, to decide they have the right to destroy the way society works for all of us and to render a lot of us unable to earn their living, just so that handful of billionaires and corporations can make more money? And why is that we should not object to their decision?’

Now, since I answered your question, allow me to ask you mine.

Why do you think people should be categorized by their ‘usefulness’? And, if we were to accept your premise (which I obviously don’t want to), would you happen to consider yourself one of those ‘useful’ that would still deserve a place in that new AI and robotic-powered society?

edit: typos + my usual poor English

Have you had your health checked recently? If there is nothing wrong, maybe you’re like me: I was getting bald at a relatively young age and then my hair started greying out.

Instead of fighting it, I decided to assume it and make it simpler to live with for me. I shaved myhead and have not looked back since then ;)

Easy: destroying the world out of sheer stupidity and greed.

Writing things down, using the pen and paper I always carry with me. Doing so, I don’t try to make literature or to sound smart, I just write things down as they come. Later on I’ll read them back, that’s quick, and decide if they’re worth using or if I strike them out and forget about them.

• It frees the mind (no need to waste brain power to remember stuff)
• It helps brainstorming freely, even by oneself
• It helps remember stuff I would otherwise don’t remember
• It helps mixing ideas I may not even consider mixing together

I would not be able to work as efficiently without the simple but so powerful pen and paper.

Like the others: jam.

No worries, I just wanted to make sure there was not some mistake. Here is my edited reply:

Two things:

1. why can’t a teen not sleep? At his age, the body needs to sleep because its constantly growing and changing. That would be the first thing I would try to understand and fix. And if it is something the kid is not willing to discuss with his parents, which is ok too, maybe with someone else they can trust.
2. if you have discussed with your son and there is no ambiguity between you I would just make sure that you sleep under separated sheets or whatever (he is not a little baby anymore and the body of a teen boy can react in ways neither you or him would be willing to see happen), provided you made it clear this should not become a habit because sleeping with mom may not be the best way to develop good sleeping habits.

Hope this helps.

(end of the edited reply)

…27 year old mother with a 12 year old kid equals 15

Thx a lot… captain obvious. I wished for the op to answer the question themselves.

Edit: at what age did you have you kid?

Sorry for the edit, I just realized your son and your age and it raised some questions… I will put back my answer once this has been clarified ;)

Being bored is not a bad thing. If by being bored you mean ‘not doing something’ and not being ‘busy’ because then it means one can start thinking by oneself. Something that seems to be severely lacking in our so modern and so constantly busy societies.

If you want to know what are my usual activities, beside welcoming boredom, I would say: read, write, paint, go out for a walk (that’s amazing too, for the body as well as the mind), spend time with my spouse, making stuff with my hands.

But it has kings and queens and knights, armies of pawns and thick towers to defend them during merciless battles. It also has bishops, but I much prefer the French name: les fous aka the crazy ones ;)

It’s a beautifully deep game, and it’s refreshing to be able to pour time into something with staying power that people of every age play all over the world.

So much this :)

Would chess count?

I mean chess is not not popular by any stretch of the mind, a lot of people around the world are playing it every single day and that won’t go away anytime soon, but I’m always surprised to see so much more excitement going on around a new version of This or That video game that people will play for a little while before switching to a newer version than for chess. Despite its apparent simplicity (and lack of visual effects), chess has remained a challenge for the smartest among us, and will keep on being so no matter how much better computers can be playing it.

Neither Tuta or Proton will neatly integrate with Apple Mail if you want to send/receive encrypted messages. At least the last I checked it required for Proton a separate client that was not bug free (can’t remember for tuta).

If you don’t care about encryption, you may want to consider the Swiss Infomaniak.

They have a cloud offer which includes cloud storage (1to base), calendar and email, plus the online version of MSOffice, all being hosted on their Swiss servers.

I don’t think any country has ‘a view’ on the way to speak their language. I mean, would there be a law, some rules and sanctions against accents?

People may have their own opinion on the matter but that opinion will vary widely from one person to the other.

My opinion, which was already mentioned in another comment, is that anyone making fun on someone speaking a foreign language can (and should) go funk themselves.

We should welcome those kind of efforts instead of mocking them, and we should also be happy to be encouraged to speak more foreign languages ourselves. I say that as I a French that’s poorly speaking a few languages and would love to speak a lot more.

No, but why would I want to watch another of those Americans pretend they’re a super hero saving the world while they only care about shoving their shit deep down our throats and then make us thank them for that?

Not knowing what usually makes you cry and what kind of movies you may enjoy, here are the first movies I know make me cry. Me being a a 50+ years old dude:

• Somewhere in Time
• The bicentennial man
• Love Story.

And those are from Ghibli:

• When Marnie was There
• The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
• From Up on Poppy Hill
• Only Yesterday
• The Red Turtle
• Porco Rosso