I use StartMail for email and I’ve been pleased so far. You can bring your own domain (though that might be restricted to annual subscriptions, like $60/yr), bring your own PGP key or have them generate one for you, and you get unlimited alias addresses.

I’m just waiting for the day to hear one of the founders eats babies or something, but they seem alright for now. It’s from the same company as StartPage, which very early on was providing a proxy to Google search for increased privacy.

They aren’t without concern based on their parent company. But they offer me enough features to mitigate that they seam leagues ahead of Google or Yahoo for mail.

I think you are overestimating the amount people will pay for convenience or cling to their old ways.

Did e-readers kill the bookstore? Some people will always prefer to cook out of a book or dive into docs to write code.

Or look at the modern streaming landscape. In the beginning there was basically Netflix and everyone was fine paying that monthly fee for the convenience of streaming basically everything. Now we have 20+ vendors all charging for some subset of content. And we have seen a corresponding loss in subscribers as people hit the limit of what they are willing to pay for convenience.

I’ll play devil’s advocate here: agreed that the rest of the (US) economy seems to be slowing or shrinking but remains buoyed by AI / Mag 7 stocks. That said, a lot of the investment reflected above is in data centers and hardware (Nvidia, Coreweave, Oracle, Microsoft).

The bubble pop will hinge on whether there is value in this data center buildup beyond AI. Unless everyone starts paying fistfulls of cash for AI chat, these companies may be able to find another use for all that compute and avoid a total crash. That could be a target for all that investment you mention.

Most medium-large cities also have a few secondhand book stores. For a couple bucks you can get a book, go to a park, that’s an afternoon right there.

I’ll shout out startmail.com, from the same people who made StartPage. It doesn’t come with a calendar AFAIK, but has excellent PGP integration, unlimited aliases, and you can bring your own domain.

I pay $60/year (about 50€), which isn’t bad to divorce myself from Google in my book.

Been using CoMaps for about a month now and this is the biggest hit for me. It’s great for finding restaurants or general points of interest, and I appreciate that I can add that stuff in-app if it’s not already on there.

But sometimes it really helps to know if my drive is gonna be 45 minutes or an hour+…

I’ll take this a step further - I sit or lie on my bed all the time just to rest for a bit or chill for a bit. For me, a made bed with a blanket on top is just enough to separate the sanctuary of under the covers from the outside world.

Like I don’t want to come home after a day of riding around the metro, sitting on a park bench, and then go straight onto my sheets. It’d be akin to rubbing a thousand asses on the place I lay my head at night.

Minor distinction and largely mental, but enough to motivate me to make the bed.