I had no idea Yupik was Canadian, or for that matter anything more than an Amazon seller. I guess it’s time to give their catalog another perusal.

Henson safety razor. It’s the only product I ever purchased based on sponsored recommendations, and I actually didn’t regret it. It’s hard to clog, easy to clean, and the minimalist design compared to other safety razors helps with tight spaces. The handle’s grip pattern works better than you’d think too, without scraping flesh.

After using it for about a year, my partner (who uses razors a lot more and has really sensitive and fragile skin) finally worked up the nerve to try it. Now we have two.

To be clear though, it is a luxury product. You can get a quality safety razor that works just fine for half the price, easily. I probably still wouldn’t have grabbed one myself, if it weren’t a Canadian product. You can go for the titanium version if you’re an utter financial masochist.

Even better. It’s an aggregation of links to aggregated links, posted on a link aggregator.

Ah, but who curates the curators. 😛

Ok, now I’m hearing you loud and clear. This is also true and based, with abundant parallels. Like, teenagers think being aloof, distant, or mysterious is cool. More mature adults tend to end up deciding that being open, earnest, and genuine is sexy, even if they don’t care about the things you do. Passion is what’s cool, and apathy is just either insecurity or emptiness.

To me, there is an inherent satisfaction that comes from defying soulless entities trying to dictate my habits, values, and most notably dependence for their gain. There is inherent value in having greater freedom of choice and lower cost to changing my mind than accepting vendor lock-in would permit. And there is greater financial and lifestyle security from reducing the role of cash flow (and big tech) in sustaining that lifestyle. It’s actually pretty comfortable relying more on other forms of self-help, including services that no one can manipulate against my will, or outright rug-pull on me.

I never really though of such things as irrational, but rather assigning different weights to the inputs we’re tweaking and outputs for which we’re optimizing. My values and “weights” are somewhat described by the personalized examples of benefit I presented - albeit scoped down to one particular context. The principles or values that resonate with any particular person do so for a reason. I think if we analyze those reasons deeply enough, we’ll find both the internal motivation and external incentives to either change them or commit to them.

Conversely, I don’t imagine nihilistic choices ever feel particularly good or right.

I think the notes of “America doesn’t care about your principles or actions” are what rubbed people the wrong way in your original comment. And that’s probably because it speaks to that sense of nihilism that likely isn’t well represented on an open-source, Canadian-hosted, left-leaning, mainstream-alternative platform. But such people I would argue, based on global outcomes, are much more representative of the general public even in Canada. I’m upvoting your original comment now, on the basis that this underlying point is a message many need to hear, and probably articulated in the way that those people would hear.

That’s a message I can get behind, but I’ve been making conscientious purchasing/spending choices for years, sometimes decades, in order to satisfy my own principles. In realms like privacy and intellectual freedom, it meant constantly fighting upstream while general consumer habits gave a mandate to everything I don’t want and left no room for anything I do want. It means being the only person in a group not on Facebook, and also sometimes not really in the group any more either. In realms like buying local, it means being the only annoying person clogging the aisles scouring labels for origin information or paying way more for products that lack the demand which brings scaling efficiencies.

I wouldn’t make different choices today. All the costs of self-hosting and maintaining personal tech infrastructure, trying to work with niche tooling and integrate narrowly-focused independent systems, and missing out on some mainstream stuff still do not outweigh the benefits - at least for me personally.

But let me tell you: it is profoundly more satisfying having a large-scale movement behind you, collaboratively sharing the burden and also having a real, economy-shaping impact benefitting the values that matter to you.

It can be for both reasons, and it won’t matter how the administration spins it for their base. Starving the beast weakens it regardless of any backlash.