Movies Anywhere is your friend here. Buy a movie from one store, watch it from any other store. Not sure how it works when one store shuts down, hopefully you keep it in all the other stores.
When you pay principal, you are gaining that much value back as equity. It makes more sense if you think of a loan for something physical like a mortgage. If you pay $100 of principal on your mortgage, that money turns into equity that you own in your home so that when you sell you get that much more (in a simplified way).
You aren't losing the $100 you pay in principal, it's just transferring into an asset rather than liquid cash. With a student loan, that asset is your degree/education. It's a little different than a mortgage because the bank can't repossess your degree, but the underlying logic is the same.
You could also think of it like paying for your degree on a payment plan. You wouldn't expect to get a tax writeoff on your couch just because IKEA let you pay in monthly installments.
To add on to this, a common carbon "offset" is to pay land owners to not cut down trees that they often weren't planning on cutting down anyway. John Oliver has a segment on Carbon Offsets.
Think the restriction might be lifted in the future once this CSAM thing is figured out?
Not a huge deal to me, I don't plan on uploading any NSFW content and my instance has disabled all image uploading (for now) anyway. Really, I'm just curious.
Signal takes steps to reduce the amount of metadata visible, like sealed sender which makes it so that Signal doesn't know who sent a message. Even your payment information for donations is separated from your identity so that they know you are a donor, but not how you donated.
It desn't matter if Signal were hosted on Putin's personal servers. Its security is in its protocol, it's not trust based.
Vulnerability is frightening and challenging, but it's also a crucial part of human connection that can be very liberating. It can be really helpful to acknowledge the need to be vulnerable and to realize the hurdles to it and the benefits of it.
There was a study a few years ago that found that asking someone for help actually strengthens your relationship and makes them like you more. IIRC it was on workplace interactions. The basic idea being that if you ask someone for help, it shows you have trust and confidence in them and they get to feel useful, which people generally enjoy.
Obviously that's going to depend on the type of help. If I need help moving or with some mental issue, that's going to be a more appreciated ask than if I ask for money. Not that asking for money is always a bad thing, so long as it's a legitimate need and doesn't become a habit I think most people would be happy to help out a friend low on cash. It's better to get financial help from friends and family than from some predatory payday loan that is designed to keep you in debt for the rest of your life.
Not saying everyone can do it, just that we're all on the same side. It's important to remember who your friends are. The doctor that works 12h+ a day and has a few million in the bank is not the same as the billionaire playing God and zipping around to all major world events in their private jet while siphoning profits from thousands of workers.
You pretty much need to be a multimillionaire to retire these days and it's not that hard to do with a half decent job and basic retirement planning, especially when factoring in a home to your net worth (which is standard). Millionaires are not the enemy. $1m is 1000x closer to $0 than $1B.
They ought to have a manger/team lead interested in managing. An ad-hoc approach can only get you so far.
Though, you seem to be asking more about Devops than management. If you're making a startup, just cobble an MVP together using as little custom-built tools as possible and redo it if/when you get enough investment to be able to take the time and pay for the necessary resources to do it right and maintain it. You're going to want to redo your first version anway, better to not waste time and effort on complex solutions even if they're more appealing. Saas is your friend.
You can patch some reddit apps like Sync and use your own api key. Even if you don't browse reddit, it's nice to be able to open the occasional link in a pleasing UI.
Movies Anywhere is your friend here. Buy a movie from one store, watch it from any other store. Not sure how it works when one store shuts down, hopefully you keep it in all the other stores.