Yeah, I feel like hot tubs are great only if someone else is maintaining it for you. So either go somewhere and pay to use it, or own one and pay someone to keep it running well.
Ramen. There are a lot of ways to do the broth faster, but nothing beats the real thing that needs to be boiled over several hours; and I don’t have the time to do that. I make a lot of other japanese dishes myself but ramen will always be eaten at a restaurant.
On electric toothbrushes, my hygienist basically told me: Imagine how many times you go back and forth manually with your hand when brushing. Now compare that to how many times an electric toothbrush can do the same in the same time frame. So the latter is more effective.
I saw the other day Tuta complaining that Outlook has been sending emails from tutanota.com straight to junk/spam. What’s surprising is tuta.com emails were fine. So not sure if their domain change had anything to do with it, or if MS is doing the same thing as in the OP.
Not counting climbing a mountain with ice (and no snow falling), my actual first snowfall was in the 2021 snowpocalypse in Texas of all places. So it wasn’t actually a great time. We were fortunate enough not to lose power and water though, so other people definitely had it way worse than us.
As the other comment said, it doesn’t matter what you post. What matters is that you’re using it. So just have an account for contact reasons as you were told. Don’t use it for anything else. Don’t put info on your bio and don’t browse because the more you scroll and navigate, the more data points they get from you. Also, if it’s really for contact purposes only, you can just use messenger on your phone and never install the main app.
And here’s what I saw on a comment from another post about this. From arstechnica:
The company added that it does not “listen to any conversations or have access to anything beyond a third-party aggregated, anonymized and fully encrypted data set that can be used for ad placement” and “regret[s] any confusion.”
It doesn’t have to be black and white. As many comments have already mentioned, it all depends on your threat model. Sure, it’s literally impossible to be completely private or anonymous unless you never go online and live like a hermit, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take steps to minimize what personal information companies get from you. You can still care about your private data while at the same time not sacrificing convenience.
My bank has some neat online banking features that break down where my money comes from and where I spend it on. It also compares my current expenses to my monthly average so I can see if I’m spending more. I’m sure I can do better by doing it on my own, but for someone lazy like me, it’s a good starting point to get an overview of my finances.