I have never paid rent or utilities or electricity.

Currently live off grid on land I own using solar power. We have all electric appliances. Generator uses propane but only use it 1-2 times a year so it’s rare to refill the tank.

The dump is only a few dollar when we take our trash (under $10) every few months.

Self host on a NAS, have home assistant that helps a ton with power monitoring and control.

My goal in a few years is to provide almost all my needs from my own land. Food, water, shelter, power, etc.

Every once and a while I’ll weld a little ramp to the train tracks on the inside rail of a sharp turn

/s

I get up.

Take that, bitches.

I buy single purpose devices that are fully offline, durable, user serviceable, and useful… and then I go for a long time without buying anything but food. It’s almost like setting a new personal record: how many days in a row I can go without buying a single thing?

I don’t remember the last time I saw an advert.

Like, genuinely, I get politely confused when people talk about them. What do you MEAN you’re not adblocking everything? What do you MEAN you still use a service if you can’t adblock it? WHAT DO YOU MEAN you paid for YouTube?

I dont want to repeat same things that many said here. I think all I can add things that me and others do is maintain my own NAS and services. No google photos, no onedrive, no netflix. Just selfhosting stuff now.

Pirating except when the service/purchase is worth it

I joined a union and organized the election of a workers council at my workplace.
Union dues are 1% of my salary.

In the past 5 years, we managed to enforce:

• the right to work from home
• 20% pay for the time spent on call after hours, plus 1 day paid vacation for each week you’re on call (so I now have 42 days + unlimited sick days)
• a company car for on call duty, which you’re allowed to use privately, too
• work phones for every employee (instead of having to install the company MDM on your private phone)
• convertible desks for everyone
• and a substantial pay raise

I reject fascist propoganda and I listen to antifascist music, I may not have conquered fascism from this world but I have conquered my mind from it. I also attempt to spread antifascism and class solidarity to every online space im in.

Linux, use that hosts file, degoogle (and as much big tech in general as possible). Up next self hosting.

I cook most of my own food from cheap whole ingredients. I’m almost completely vegetarian.

I peer pressure many of my friends into using adblockers and other tech stuff that gives them more agency.

Something that I’m especially chuffed with is that a I actually caused a friend to switch to open source software for scientific research. She’s doing a psychology PhD was getting frustrated with the online experiment setup on the no-code experiment builder she had been advised to use. The platform didn’t allow her to input the experiment parameters she needed and she was complaining to me, and so I had a gander at it, out of curiosity.

I expected there’d be some documentation showing how to use the experiment builder, but there was nothing I could find. Everywhere I looked, there were just more sales pitches. It seems that my friend was only using it because the university had a license for it.

I exclaimed that the lack of documentation and features was ridiculous, given that there’s almost certainly an open source equivalent that does more, is free, and almost certainly better documented. I said that flippantly, but then went and researched that. I showed her a few different options and she ended up going for one called PsychoPy.

As one might be able to gather from the name, that’s not a no-code experiment builder, but rather one that uses Python. However, for my friend, this was a feature, not a bug; although she didn’t already know Python, she was keen to learn — “what’s a PhD for if not to learn how to do actual science?”.

I found it quite affirming because I don’t know if she would have had this thought if not for me. I’m very much a jack of all trades, master of none, due to having many different interests and being spread relatively thin between them. I’m a better programmer than the majority of scientists in my field that I’ve known, but probably worse than most people who actually write code for their jobs. However, gaining expertise in the more computery (and in some cases, philosophical) side of science makes me feel like I’ve “diluted” my scientific expertise compared to my peers. It’s nice that this problem was one at the intersection of my knowledge areas.

Support right to repair.

Edit and add to the Consumer Rights Wiki

Buy things I can actually own (not modern cars / smart fridges which can have features remotely removed at any time.)

Use solar power + house battery + V2G.

Automate everything with Home Assistant.

Provide free source code for all of my projects.

We buy almost nothing new except consumables. I could spend an hour, probably two, showing you around our house and pointing out all the things I made, found on the road, bought used or was given, etc. Our vehicles are 2002, 2004 and 2014.

Not sure we’ve ever bought Christmas stuff. Our house is lit up like none other on the block this year. Wife toted home a milk crate packed with lights the other day, free. The nice tree in the living room? No idea where it came from, sure didn’t buy it at Walmart.

Tried a new coat today my wife got for $1, had to cut the tags off. Damn it’s soft and warm! Had to make myself stop buying shoes and clothes at the thrift, have way too many.

Just got done making my own soap. Still not curing for some reason. :( Got some borax and will try making my own laundry soap next.

This year I grew loofa sponges. Got at least a year’s supply of scrub pads, kitchen and shower, won’t spend a dime on that shit. I’d have a 3-year supply, but made mistakes learning. I’ll grow next year and probably skip a few years after that harvest. Also, the seeds sell for $5/20 on eBay. I have hundreds, if not 1000+.

I work in ads and I use ad blockers.