Because that is the goal of any totalitarian regime. You think Putin has the welfare of his country in mind? Or Kim Jong Un? No. Money and Power is the only goal. There was an article recently on North Koreans saying how they’re starving and just waiting to die. The people are simply the means to generate wealth and exercise power. Their welfare has nothing to do with it.

I used to think the Republicans were wannabe dictators, but in the last few years they’ve demonstrated that they are actual fascists and a dictatorship is their endgame. There is no way to deny this anymore. If someone tells you who they are, you should listen to them. Republicans are no longer hiding it.

Listen, this is hard thing for me to type but I think is relevant to the Republican mindset. Hundreds of children are being murdered in their classrooms. Literal murder. Of children. This is not enough to sway Republicans on gun control. If actual murder of 6 year olds doesn’t have any effect on them, surely 6 year olds being hungry is not even going to make them blink. This is the reality with these people. They simply do not care about you, or your children, and everything they do is governed only by money and power.

I can’t say that I have. I’ve never used lidarr though so if there is an issue with that I’m not the person to ask.

I find Plex to be pretty bullet proof, and I have family scattered all over the US, and one in Europe, who all use my server and we don’t run into many issues. Very occasionally I’ll get a message something isn’t working and just restarting Plex always seems to fix it. I like self hosting but I’m not any sort of tech wizard. If it took a lot of work to maintain or had a lot of problems with multiple users I’d probably just abandon it, but I’ve been running it for the better part of 15 years now and it’s pretty solid/dummy proof in my experience.

Plexamp has completely replaced streaming services for me. Plex will now sonically scan any music you add and is able to give recommendations through Plexamp for sonically similar tracks, and also use that data to build mixes based on mood and style.

There are all sorts of auto generated mixes that Plexamp will make on it’s own based on the music you have. You can also make a playlist of say, your top 20 tracks and when the playlist ends Plexamp will just start playing songs that match the sonic theme of what you’ve been playing so far. Note that I say sonically similar rather than of a similar genre. I love this because genres are often very subjective, and while Plex does take into account the tags you’ve given things, it also will group songs based on how they actually sound. You can control how many degrees of separation too if you want to keep the theme close to your playlist or just let it wander through your collection.

For me at least, Plexamp is every bit as good as Spotify. My music collection has grown to around 20,000 tracks over the years and it’s pretty easy to get stuck on the same handful of artists. Mixes and auto playlist generation in Plexamp has helped me rediscover music I forgot I even have.

Personally I find AdGuard (not to be confused with AdGuard Home, they are different products) to be the best adblocker out there, both for MacOS and iOS. What’s great about it on MacOS is that it’s not a browser plugin, it’s an application that runs on the Mac itself. This means you can add any app you want to be filtered, not just the browser. I use a messenger app that likes to show ads. I added it to AdGuards filter and now it’s clean.

Also with all the changes that are potentially coming to browsers (chromium) not allowing adblocking this is a future proof solution because again, it’s running at the OS level and not inside the browser. It doesn’t matter if Google tries to stop you from blocking ads because it’s all done externally from the browser where they have no control.

You can add a bunch of other features as well like advanced stealth which randomizes your browser fingerprint, helps to avoid deep packet inspection by your ISP, encrypted DNS, encrypted Client Hello (in beta currently)… it’s really the whole package. I feel like it’s worth paying for because it does much much more than a simple adblock browser extension.