• 13 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Paying education loans even after 20 years of working in public service? Seems like a failure of the education system. I’m from Europe, also been to India a lot on business, and never have I seen anything of this magnitude. You can get a good education even in India for a very nominal tuition fee that middle-class parents are also able to cover without taking out loans. For poor families, it’s virtually nothing in good state universities. The idea is that education will empower even the poor and they’ll be able to get a good job and become tax paying citizens. Not like if you’re poor, we’re still gonna crush the heck out of you with more debt. The latter seems to be the strategy employed in the US. In most European countries, education is virtually free covered by taxes. Of course taxes are high but it benefits everyone in terms of healthcare and education. Is that really so bad? Isn’t it the government’s job to make sure EVERYONE has access to good healthcare and education? Then why does it feel that it is a money-oriented corporation running the country rather than a government?

    Sorry, went on a rant there. Whenever I see something like this it just makes my blood boil. Teachers, firefighters, nurses still paying student loans after a decade or two, that’s a failure of the education system right there.
























  • My experience: I got a Nothing Phone 2 recently and decided to degoogle it. Using ADB commands, I removed every google app from my phone, from the Dialer all the way up to the PlayStore, apart from just 2: Play Services and Maps. Both work fine without a Google account. I did take away all permissions of Play Services and it still works fine. Without this app, you will stop getting notifications from most of your apps so it is necessary.

    Open source alternatives that I turned towards:

    1. Google Dialer -> Simple Dialer
    2. Google Contacts -> Simple Contacts
    3. Google Photos -> Simple Gallery Pro
    4. Google Play Store -> Aurora Store and Droid-ify
    5. Google Messenger -> QKSMS
    6. Google Calendar -> Proton Calendar
    7. Google Drive -> Proton Drive
    8. Google Chrome -> Mozilla Firefox
    9. Youtube -> Youtube ReVanced (Not FOSS, I use a throwaway account here with Vanced Microg)
    10. Google Translate -> Translate YOU
    11. Google Files -> Material Files
    12. Google Docs/Slides/Sheet -> Collabora Office
    13. GMail -> Proton Mail
    14. GBoard -> OpenBoard fork with glide typing

    Everything works fine :)