if you have a brokerage account, you may be able to sell USD for your target currency in it. you could do this slowly over time.

if you can’t do that, you might be able to buy an ETF that tracks your target country’s stock market, but some of these are “currency hedged” and in this case you wouldn’t want that. the ETF would have a fee (MER) that is worth looking up. 1% is high.

tl;dr: it sounds like you want to hedge currency risk and there are products for that, but it requires a brokerage account and some decipline, ymmv

i’ve been too plugged-in to trump news. i’ve banned myself from my primary source of that unhappy chaos, and will get it from a news outlet instead which is much slower and less ragey

i’ve gotten into audiobooks again, and that has done a lot to lift my spirits. i’ve plowed through the lord of the rings and am now listening to the silmarillion. i’ve found the silmarillion difficult to read, but much more accessible as an audiobook - and it’s giving me a deeper appreciation of the lord of the rings

eucatastrophe, where art thou?

if i did two big social things in a week like that i would be pretty burnt out and possibly snippy with people. i’d need a bit of solo time to recharge before i could wear my social mask again

the statement by your friend here looks unkind without context

Same, workspaces are great!

Exhibit A: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/firefox-deletes-promise-to-never-sell-personal-data-asks-users-not-to-panic/

Exhibit B: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/

When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

I don’t agree to this as written; and I am not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt given Exhibit A. I think an argument could be made that selling my data to advertisers would help me “experience” and “interact” with online content. Perhaps it would be a difficult argument, perhaps not. I think skepticism is warranted.

Firefox has struggled to find a profitable business model outside of Google paying to be the default search engine, and it looks like these changes are a pivot to address this. I don’t think it will be good for users.

It’s still Firefox, so it’s the same. I installed uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, no different there.

I’m trying https://zen-browser.app/ now. It’s an open source fork of Firefox. The UI is much changed: vertical tabs and workspaces. It was a bit of a shock, but it’s growing on me.

Librewolf has some trouble with some websites. For example, it won’t load one of my own that makes a GRPC request over TLS, stating that the certificate issuer is unknown despite it being the same certificate used on the accepted-as-secure page the request is made from.

I’ve seen this sentiment, but I don’t think it’s credible. I don’t think we should normalize legalese that explicitly enables bullshit; it’s not like it couldn’t be written any other way. It’s written in English, though it has legal intent, and we have words and phrases to clarify such things.

At the present spot price, that’s worth about $100k, I think?

Based on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult

It would put you at just a bit above the average wealth per adult for the entire world, but also just about at the median wealth for North America which has an average weath per adult of 500k. Averages are wonky when some people have SO MUCH.

$11 is wild for all that!

The New Order was enjoyable vengence porn against Nazis, it’s a good time; maybe I need that again!

I’ve been playing the heck out of Harebrained Schemes’ BattleTech; I haven’t binge-played like this in a long time. It never feels fair; 2-1 odds is typical, but it’s always possible. Pretty satisfying to overcome unfair situations. Makes me feel smart and capable! Plus, jumpy stompy robots!