Yes. If Republicans won't consider cutting military spending, they're not serious about cutting the deficit. And if Democrats won't consider cuts to other entitlement programs, they're not serious about cutting the deficit. I lean right, especially on fiscal issues, and there just isn't a party of fiscal restraint right now. Clinton as President with Gingrich controlling Congress made some seriously great moves, including really difficult ones that some partisans resigned over; we've had nothing comparable since. You're right that at present, it's all tribalism.

I self-host an instance for my personal / family use. It's federated, so I can still engage with others; the UI keeps getting better and better; it supports voice and video calls as well as messaging (using Opus for audio, so the voice quality is good); and it's end-to-end encrypted.

Outside that ecosystem, I've used Signal as my default SMS app on Android since it was known as TextSecure. I've been surprised by how many people in my Contacts list have started using Signal since Parler was cancelled.

Six months ago I bought a Dell Inspiron 1501 with a dual-core Turion processor and 2GB of RAM. It came preinstalled with Vista Home Ultimate. I've lived with it for six months now. I kept wanting to like it, reminding myself how everybody bitched about XP compared with Win2k -- the "Fisher Price" graphics, the big Start menu that changed all the time, etc. I figured "Hey, Vista will be the same way. It'll take some getting used to, and then I'll be happy with it."

Six months later, I still hate it. I'm much, much more disappointed than I was in my first two weeks. My biggest complaint is performance; Vista is DOG-slow. 2GB of RAM should be plenty for common tasks; it isn't. The lag is just infuriating, and it affects everything I do. The UAC warnings were such an annoyance that I turned them off. The hard drive, on boot and at other seemingly random times, would grind and grind and grind for more than ten minutes, and sometimes more than twenty, absolutely killing performance (trying to launch apps with the laptop in that state was futile) while not accomplishing anything of apparent value for all the grinding. And this was after examining msconfig and the Startup registry entries trying to figure out what in the world was using all those resources.

My second-biggest complaint are the UI changes that hurt, not help productivity. To pick just one trivial and annoying example, in the new Explorer the little triangle things fade out when you're in the right-hand pane. So you can't tell at a glance if the folders have subfolders until you move your mouse closer to them. Why? Like someone above mentioned, I wound up trying -- for the first time in more than fifteen years as a Windows user -- a bunch of different third-party file browsers just to get a consistent experience across my XP and Vista boxes (I settled on FreeCommander).

I finally nuked the entire hard drive and reinstalled XP (I have regular, automated backups so restoring data wasn't an issue). And WOW what a speed increase. This is a great little laptop now, very usable and capable. The lag is gone. As I tried to with Vista, I've kept most installed apps (qttask, jusched, etc.) out of the startup cycle and the boot time is next to nothing.

Vista brought nothing to the table that I cared about, and repeatedly kicked me where it hurts most: performance and productivity. I installed my OEM copy of Vista into a virtual machine so I have it for testing, and I'm never going back unless forced to. I'll almost certainly wait for Windows 7 before trying again.