I started trying to find apps that was specifically designed for a stoic practice, but that didn’t lead anywhere. Although some of the apps provided useful aspects like daily motivational quotes, educational material and habit tracking, none of them was able to make the daily Stoic routine easier. So I un-installed all those apps and tried going back to doing my journaling and planning in Standard Notes, but I was too hooked on evaluating apps and productiviy systems to just go back. Even though journaling in Standard Notes works well, I still felt that I was missing something, I didn’t feel very productive. And my notes app was at the point a complete mess with notes, todos, articles, plans and writing scattered around in random folders. So I started looking into todo-apps, which I often do when I feel overwhelmed.

I’ve tried a number of todo apps before, and was actually hesitating doing it again now. Earlier I’ve always ended up with a completely overwhelming number of items in my todo apps after a few days or weeks, and at that point I’ve usually just deleted the whole thing. Overwhelm is after all, the opposite of what I want to achieve with a todo list. What I’ve come to realize this time around though, is that the overwhelm stems from my own delusions about what a todo app can provide. I wanted it to be free of effort. This was supposed to make my life easier, not increase my workload! Well, it seems that if you postpone and skip maintenance of your todo lists, the same thing happens to todo systems as with every other system, entropy kicks in, it becomes a mess, and at that point it eats more energy than you get out of it.

I have to say though, that most todo-apps still feels too complex for me. I’ve tried a bunch, but never found them easy enough. This changed when I found TickTick. I finally found a todo app that suits my need. It has all the bells and whistles, but they never get in the way unless you want to. I started playing with TickTick as the place for my Stoic journal too, but quckly realized that wouldn’t work for me. By adding journaling to my todo app, I was transferring the mess from Standard Notes to TickTick. So I decided to keep TickTick strictly a todo list and task manager. Cleaning up all the todo lists I had in Standard Notes, and transferring the still relevant ones to TickTick, but keeping my writing in Standard Notes, helped a lot for the systems in both apps.

using some kind of task list of todo app does require quite some effort, but the effort of doing that is still less than keeping it all in your head or scattered around in documents, emails and notes.

And then came Getting Things Done (GTD). I had heard productivity people out there mentioning GTD, but never really looked into it until the last week. And that’s when I finally realized why my todo lists have always turned into and overwhelming pile of things to do. I was lacking a system, and had never been willing to put an effort into proper maintenance of my task lists. The point in the end is that using some kind of task list of todo app does require quite some effort, but the effort of doing that is still less than keeping it all in your head or scattered around in documents, emails and notes.

This may sound like pretty basic knowledge, and deep down I guess I knew this all the time, but never wanted to realize it: a good productivity system is not broken because it requires effort. No, a good productivity system requires continous effort! It’s an investment that will support you in the long run. The effort of maintaining a good productivity system requires less energy than the overwhelm, confusion and frustration you get without it.

We’ve been trying a bunch of experiments in the garden. A lot of them didn’t work well, but some of them did, and that’s how gardening works.

As you can see from the picture, the complexity of a garden can be overwhelming, and I think that’s probably why many people turn the soil up side down and start from scratch every year. If you can get past the overwhelm of the first couple of years, your knowledge of the plants will grow, and you’ll start to make sense out of the chaos. Let me try and share some of the things I’ve learned.

Never grow grass on your pathways!

The pathways between your flowerbeds are important. They give you access to the soil, enables weeding and harvesting. It feels wrong to leave the soil bare, so it is tempting to grow grass on them. We let it grow, and that was a bad decision! Grass spreads extremely fast, and removing it is really hard work. Find something else to cover your paths with or even keep them bare if they’re not too wide. We still have some paths with grass, and they’re there simply because they are so hard to remove. I will never grow grass on my paths again.

Birds will eat most of your food (if they can)!

I love the birds in the garden, but they don’t leave any of the fruits they like for me, you have to be specific with the birds, what they can and can’t eat. They may have some of it, but for the gardening to have a purpose, you must protect a lot of fruit bearing plants from the birds.

Especially our gooseberries and strawberries need to be shielded, and you have to do it once you start seeing small green berries on the bushes, birds don’t care if the berries are ripe, they pick the berries anyway. We shield with fine masked nets, as that protects from the birds, but it’s also not dangerous for them, or other animals, like nets with larger masks can be.

This year, unfortunately, we were a bit late with the nets, and the result was devastating. Almost all of our gooseberries were taken in a matter of a week. Please don’t make this mistake.

Weeds don’t care about your good intentions

Weeds will grow if they can. I think I had a naive idea in the beginning that my good intentions would make the food plants grow, and the weed stay under ground. I couldn’t be more wrong. You need to remove the plants you do not want! Never with pesticides of course, that kills the soil. You must find smart ways to remove weeds, or even better — cover your soil in ways that make the weeds incapable of growing. In between your plants, when weed does grow, you need to manually remove the unwanted plants, but good weeds removal start long before you put your own plants in the soil.

The place in our garden that has the least weeds, is where we put a layered cake of cardboard, horse manure and rain-rinsed seaweed three years ago. The first year, all we could grow there was basically potatoes, but that changed the second year. We can plant anything on that square now, it grows very well, and we see very few weeds compared to the rest of the garden. Last year it gave us a lot of kale, this year we’ll get tomatoes that grows together with tagetes flowers.

Every year is different

This is our fourth summer with the garden. Every year’s been a different experience. 2016 was the first chaotic year, 2017 was wet full of slugs, 2018 was extremely dry, 2019 was wet, the slugs were mostly dead from last year’s drought, but instead came a new type of snails, and finally in 2020 the garden feels low maintenance, promising a lot of harvest.

If you want to grow a forest garden, but you feel insecure about doing it the right way, then let me tell you that the rules are not very well defined, just go ahead. Organic forest gardening is first and foremost a learning experience in interacting with nature. A learning experience that in time will give you food with relatively little effort. There’s not many rules, even though there’s a lot of opinions. Read about what others have tried, try to understand why it works and copy them. Try some experiments for yourself too, and try to remember what worked for you.

Please leave comments and share your organic gardening experiences!

So what can we do about money? Well, first we need an overview over the problems we’re trying to solve:

- Today, money never really expire. Even though they represent the value of an object or service that will deteriorate, rust, compost or wither in some way, it doesn’t expire itself. Since money does not expire, they are an in-accurate representation of the things we buy and sell with them.
- Since money is sort of just floating around in society, governments have created gigantic bureacratic organizations to collect taxes. It’s impossible to do it right, it’s expensive, unpopular, and not even necessary, at least not at the current scale.
- Money today is mostly created by banks when people get a loan, this is how digital money is created. This is an important part of the current need for never ending economic growth. To create money you need debt, to repay the debt, you need even more money because of interest means you need to pay back even more. Thus there will always be more debt to repay than we have money, and to get more money we need to go deeper into debt.
- Wealth distribution is impossible to get right under the current system, our current money tend to group, pile up and not benefit everyone but a few. Money also means power, so those who have more money, also have more power. Money should not be deciding who’s got power.
- The constant need to balance money means politicians basically have no power to change things in any meaningful way. The way money work ties their hands, big changes are too expensive, like the car taxation in Denmark. I bet Mette wants to get rid of all gas driven cars, but as prime minister she can’t do that, because the economy she’s responsible for would collapse if she did.

All this is a perfect foundation for a nature-destroying civilization. We have a money system that requires us to destroy our planet through infinite growth, consumerism, wealth concentrations and giving power to the rich instead of our elected politicians. The good part is that I know how to solve this with one important change, and it could happen very quickly. This is not the same old story, this is a new story, and it must start with new money.

It’s actually not that hard to explain. We need money that is created by the government. Money should be spent on the common things first, like hospitals, police, the elderly and what have you. Money is first spent by the goverment and from there on, it’s distributed into the rest of society. With the current type of money we have, this printing of money would lead to hyperinflation, so it’s imperative that money expires after some time, gradually. That means that new money coming from the governemnt would be those of the highest value. Eventually money would wither away and give room for new money, the governemnt could continue to create money forever and the potential coming available from this single system change is enormous.

Think about it. If the government got basically all of it’s money from creating it, you won’t need tax collectors anymore. Fair taxation will actually be built into the system by the fact that money looses it’s value over time. The tax rate will be completely equal for all, everyone is taxed the exact same way — their money loose value. It would be the very premise of the system, and so the rich couldn’t lobby for lower taxation when there is no taxes to adjust. Working for the government will be not only be desireable because you got the best money from it, it will be more interesting too as money will be spent on the important tasks in society instead of bureaucracy. It can be any the traditional jobs, as a doctor, firefighter, police etc., but I can imagine that if the government got to spend the money directly on what makes most sense, then we will spend large amounts of money on rebuilding nature and protecting our survival. Meaningful jobs anyone? The government can suddenly afford to think in the long term instead of worrying about where the money is going to come from if they stop taxing the big oil companies or car sales.

This type of money would also take away from banks the ability to create money through the creation of debt. Just imagine what that will do for the housing market. Imagine how it will play out when you take away the insane inflation we’ve had on the housing market. Prices would go down, that I’m convinced of. All debt will be erased. Enormous debt is part of the old system, and must go away, let’s give ourselves a housing market reset and let those who can’t get into the market a chance. It will make no sense to keep the debt around, because the old money will be invalidated, the banks will no longer be able to use it for any purpose, the debt would be worthless digits in a computer. Not even sure if we need banks anymore, perhaps banking will be a single digital service run by the government. It would be up to our elected politicians to make that decision.

The effects on consumerism will be absolutely profound. When your money expires, you’ll want to spend them quickly, having a large savings account won’t make sense. Being rich will be a pain; your money will just disappear. Money will no longer be so lucrative, real things will be of higher value. Farmers will probably be those who get the best money after the government, we all need food to survive, so farming would become be the most lucrative private business available. This in turn has the potential to solve a lot of problems around farming. We have way too few people working on farms today. We try to compensate with machines, pesticides and monoculture, with the effect that we destroy our soil and surrounding nature in the long run, and ultimately ourselves. Taking care of soil is a time consuming effort, and it needs resources in form of people who care about it, who depends on it. If we do this right, better money will contribute largely to the enormous problems we have with modern farming methods. Other products, like smartphones and cars will be less valuable, they don’t support our survival directly and people will only buy them if they have a large enough surplus, which they rarely will hav since hoarding of money can’t lead anywhere. People will want to keep their expensive things longer, they will demand that their phone is repairable, because saving up to a new one is very taxing, literally. Those who can fix stuff will also be highly valued.

One beautiful side effect of this, could be that the exploration of space could be intensified if we want to. When the government can channel money in whatever direction we think is useful, then space exploration becomes an exiting thing for people to collaborate on. With the new better money in the system, grand projects would belong in the government, and the government would be controlled by voters because politicians would actually have the power to introduce the changes we elect them for — the money is always available, all they need to make sure of is where they’re spent. Not only space programs could be funded this way, but all sorts of large projects, be it building a glorious library or a new hospital, a train station or whatever — politicians will be much better enabled to do what they promise.

And last but not least. The new money system will strengthen our democracy. People sometimes say that democracy isn’t moving fast enough to make big changes, to save the world from climate change. I used to think this myself, but couldn’t come to think of any other system that could do it either. China isn’t a democracy, they’re not exactly environmentally friendly either. The Soviet Union was responsible for some really horrible natural disasters. No, democracies are slow because the underlying monetary system prevents action. When the government does not create money, but have to balance it with taxes, it becomes really hard to do it right, or to do anything. The car tax issue in Denmark is a good example — do the right thing and the economy goes down the drain. With the new money system, money becomes a tool that our elected officials can direct at what needs to be done. It becomes pure prioritizations of funding the right thing, not a balancing game of taxes and expenses. Democracy today is what I call Adjustment Democracy — politicians can only twist and turn some small knobs to keep things more or less stable. We need a democracy that has the power to do what it was elected to do.

I think this explains the idea. The technical implementation of this system is not yet thought through, but I have some basic ideas. What I know is that it’s possible, and we should start creating a backend for this as soon as possible.

What do you think? Let me know how you feel about this idea.

Lately I’ve started a big personal project. I’m moving away from Google. With this post I am explaining why I, and how it’s going.

The project is still only a couple of months old, and I’m still far away from deactivating my Google account for good. Actually I’m not sure yet if I ever actually will delete the account, but at some point I will at least stop using it for any other purpose than keeping it around and feeling safe.

I used to be a total Google pusher. I recommended Google products to everyone. They did the job, and they were free to use. I was an early adopter of Gmail, I embraced Google Docs, Keep, Calendar and Maps, and even considered switching to Google Photos and Music at one point. I trusted Google, even though their business model was a bit of a mystery to me. I decided to trust them due to their history of security, environmental friendly focus and their corporate values. There’s no doubt about it, Google has created a complete and useful online toolbox, and it was working very well for a long time. The only thing I didn’t fully understand at the time, was how they made money when there were virtually no ads in the Google products. How could a company living off ads afford not to show ads? Of course I knew they made money of ads on other webpages, but why did they choose to leave them out from e.g Google Docs. Gmail made more sense, because they were honest about the fact that they used to scan your emails to target ads. But Google Docs.. I still don’t quite get the business model.

But then, at some point they decided to ditch the “Don’t be evil”-slogan they had. I think they were embarassed by it. It does have a silly ring to it, but still to me, it was what part of what made Google trustworthy. It felt as if Google employees did follow the no evil advice until it disappeared. It summed up what made Google different. Quickly after that they turned into a normal corporation, and these days they’re no better than the rest. They decided to play along with the Chinese government and accept sensorship. They recently had a security breach, Google virtually never had security breaches before. Then they re-designed Chrome and Gmail into something that reminds me of what happened to Microsoft in the 00’s. They are now designing their products in a more “playful” way, reminding me a lot of Windows XP. The loading times of the new Gmail is horrible, at least for me in Firefox. And it is painful to look at. It feels literally painful to my eyes in a way, and I’ve heard others say the same. And the business model is still questionable: they live of ads.I never really could come to peace with the ads. So I decided it was time to leave and give someone else a chance.

The process started, and I can tell you that it’s not a quick switch. Especially if you’re using Gmail, then leaving Google takes time, planning, research and decisions. There will be trade-offs, but there will also be improvements in the products you choose to switch to. My process started with trying to find a single package that could replace every Google product in one go, and while that more or less exist, none of them satisfied me enough to choose them. Of course, I could go with for example Microsoft, but what’s the point in that? It’s a complete and functionally good alternative, but not a better one when it comes to matching my values and criteria. I’m not only searching alternative product feature wise, I am searching for companies that makes the world a better place as a side effect of me paying for their excellent services.

My criteria are:

• A good product. Usability, good looking UI and great features. The product needs to work well and not get in the way of my productivity. The whole point of computers in the first place was to increase productivity and give you new opportunities.
• Environmental concern. I want to spend my money on companies that clearly cares for the environment. Very strong focus on other types of social responsibility might compensate for lack of focus on the environment.
• No ads, I no longer trust companies that base their income on advertising.
  Open standards and perhaps open source. It’s important that I can import and export all my data easily to a different service.
• Reputation. The company needs to have a good reputation for me to trust them.
• It has to feel right. If my gut tells me to back off even all other considerations seem to match, then I move on.

Trying to find a complete Google replacement that checks out on all those criteria is currently to my knowledge not possible. And that’s OK! There’s advantages to not putting all your eggs in one basket. It’s OK that my online drive has a different UI style than my webmail. It’s OK that I need different passwords for my notes and my calendar. I think many of us are drawn towards the dream of having it “all in one place”. But the truth is that it’s not in one place. Google Docs started out from Writely, a product Google aquired. Gmail had little to do with Google Keep in the beginning. And so on. They were separate products, sharing login functionality, some central Google Account settings and some other features I have forgotten. Many of the integration features you find in product packages is related to navigation, like having an app tray with all your products in. This navigation advantage can easily be replicated in your browser with links on the menu bar to different products that fulfills different roles in your pack of chosen applications. And not to forget: password managers remove the need to have one login for everything. When the password manager remembers all your logins, then the hassle of logging in to several services are minimized. So I decided to pick separate products for separate functionality.

I realized I had already chosen Standard Notes for note taking and to-do lists, Sync.com as my online drive and photo backup, Keeper for password management, Ecosia for search and Firefox as my browser, it was time to settle for a new email provider. I was long thinking about getting an end-to-end encrypted service like Tutanota or Protonmail, but in the end convenience won over some security aspects. I eventually decided to go for Runbox. The reasons being that they seem to have a solid focus on security, sustainability and privacy. Combined with open standards like IMAP, CarDAV and CalDAV, and very well implemented two factor authentication, it makes a compelling package that strikes the best balance for me. I can synchronize my email, contacts and calendars with the client software I choose, and it’s easy to take my data and move on to a different service. Their current stable web UI isn’t very appealing though, and for a long time this kept me away from Runbox. I discovered that they’re not too far away from releasing Runbox 7, and that seems like a very well designed UI for email and contacts. I like services that’s improving, I like getting new features, and it seems that Runbox will not fail me on that point. When Runbox 7 is going live, I hope to write a review of the whole solution.

Moving to a new email-address takes time and persistence though. This is why I decided to get my own domain this time around, so that I hopefully never have to go through the process of changing my main email address ever again. I strongly believe that emails should be personal, and not be tied to a specific vendor. Just like domain names can be bought at one place and moved to another host, you should be able to move your email around from provider to provider. The only way to do achieve is to have your own domain.

And that’s where I am today; in the middle of moving from one email address to another. I hope to write more later. I want to write about how to be highly productive using small independent suppliers of online services. The next product I need to replace, is the collaborative editing capabilities of Google Docs. I need to be able to collaborate on documents with others, I need it to be on the web, on my mobile and all that. When I discover the product I need, I plan to share what I found, so stay tuned!

It’s time we realize the absurdity and consequences connected with advertising. The absurdity is the enormous consumption that never would have taken place if the ads didn’t influence the consumer. The consequences are cities littered with ads, people feeling bad about themselves because they don’t look like the photo-shopped people in the ads, and worst of all, it’s driving environmental destruction. I don’t understand; how is this legal anywhere?

I guess advertising started out as a way to help people find what they were looking for. I can imagine it started with simple shop signs in ancient Rome or something like that, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that, what once started as visibility of your shop, telling you where you could get that bread you would buy anyway, has slowly turned into something very different. It is now a business in itself, a business who’s purpose is to drive consumption to earn more money, consumption that never would have taken place if it wasn’t for the ads. With the internet it all accelerated further. Giant companies now run their operations mostly based on income from ads, and they earn enormous amounts of money.

In the beginning of the ad based internet, I thought it was really cool. I could have services like Gmail, Facebook, Hotmail, Yahoo and so on for free. They’re all doing the same thing, but let me use Google as an example here. Google created extremely good web based software, and it was mostly free to use. The software they created was exactly what I was looking for at the time. I still use it, your email-address is the ultimate vendor lock-in, but I have a long term plan to find an alternatives, like posteo.de. The only catch was it being ad supported, but I was thinking that I wouldn’t buy any of that stuff anyway, so that was OK. What puzzled me in the beginning though, was that Google’s own products almost didn’t contain any ads at all, like Google Docs. I knew they earned basically all their money at the time from ads, but why wouldn’t they have ads in their own services to make even more money? Took me some years to realize that the information I provided to Google by using their services, was used to “improve” the advertising shown to me on other web sites. The same goes for most of the other ad driven companies as well. This is as you know already, an important privacy issue. But still, privacy issues are to me the least concerning part of advertising. Other consequences of ads are much more concerning to me.

Here’s a list of the negative consequences coming from ads that I could come to think of:

• Increased pollution from increased consumption. Increased consumption leads to more production, more production leads to the use of more natural resources, more commuting of workers, more transport of goods, and so on.
• People feeling depressed and having low self esteem because their life, things and looks can’t compare with the fake crap they see in ads everywhere.
• Privacy issues from using services that’s using your information to target ads.
• Cities, roads, buses, taxies, bus stops, walls, web pages, all littered with ads. It makes life uglier.
• All the extra paper produced for ad pages in newspapers, magazines, ads delivered in your mail and so on. We have killed entire forests only to show some ads!
• People spending their money on shit they don’t need because the ads worked. Money they could have spent on a real service, like subscribing to an independent news service or a doctor.
• Gambling issues, there’s so many ads for gambling services online, it makes me sick.
• Tourism! I don’t have the numbers here, but I guess people would be traveling much less if there wasn’t a constant push from ads telling you that the good life needs to involve a lot of traveling and flying. People need to travel every now and then to get inspiration and find themselves, but the constant flying around the world and looking at things, that’s just silly.

And so on. By allowing all these ads, we’re allowing all these issues to grow and get worse. Recently there’s been a much needed debate around ad based online services and privacy, but if the privacy issues requires a debate, then the other consequences require so much more. I’m tempted to use the revolution-word here, but I will refrain from that.

Some of you might argue that companies need to be able to tell about their services, and that it’s helping people find the products they need. Well sorry, but you’re just simply plain wrong. You don’t need advertising anywhere near what you have today for healthy businesses to run. When people need something, they will look for it, and all you need at that point is a service like yellow pages. You don’t need a constant noise around you telling you about every product you can imagine for companies to survive. You need a neutral service where people can look for the service or product they need, and then choose a supplier. Companies delivering products and services people actually need will survive just fine, they will get all the money people spend, the other companies will go bankrupt. And that’s a good thing.

Let’s dream of a world where people who supplies what people actually want and need earns all the money. A world where people go to work and make a living because they deliver something useful, living a meaningful life. Where ads are nowhere to see, but instead you have great services where you can find the supplier of the things you need listed. Where pollution is cut in half, because driving consumption is no longer the point. Where Facebook didn’t have to be free, because if you needed a social network, you would gladly pay for it. You could also afford it, because you didn’t buy all that stuff you didn’t need.

What do you think? Do you agree? Any ideas what we can go about to end advertising? How do we start?

So actually, I did decide days before departure that I wanted to pack as lightweight as possible, but I didn’t know that I would in the end have shave off about 7kg’s of that light backpack! The trip started out together with my eight year old son, and the first day I carried around 18kg’s on my back. I was worried we wouldn’t find water, so I carried 4 bottles of water. Also in addition to the regular stuff like a tent, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, clothing and food, we’d also brought an axe, a complete Trangia stove with a bottle with 1 litre of denatured alcohol, and I was carrying my sons sleeping pad, as it didn’t fit into his backpack. The backpack itself, Bergans Trollhetta 75L weighs over 2.5kg’s, so there was plenty of weight to carry around. The backpack is definitely a high quality product, as it made it possible for me to carry all this weight around without breaking my back, but over time I realized that neither the total of 18kg’s or the 2.5 kg’s of the backpack can be right for me during longer hikes. Actually I think a total weight of 7–8kg’s is more what I should aim for.

The numbers I present above are a little misguiding to be honest, the trip was split into two sections, I started with a backpack of 18kg’s when walking with my son, but later I continued with my wife, then I started with a backpack of about 14kg’s. The weight was lower then because we shared more of the heavier stuff. But the thing is that I neither did have to carry 18kg’s around when walking with my son, or 14kg’s with my wife. With some small adjustments to my equipment and attitude, I could in both cases have easily gone for a 10kg backpack.

First of all. I did not need an axe. My son thinks it’s fun, but it’s not necessary, not when hiking in Denmark at least. Second, the Trangia 25–3UL with a kettle is simply too heavy for 2 people in my opinion. It’s great when the whole family of five needs dinner in the camp, but it’s complete overkill for two on a longer hike. It also uses alcohol, which has some advantages, but again, it’s heavy. Gas options exist for the Trangia, but they don’t make it much lighter. The complete Trangia set with a liter of alcohol weighs close to 1.5kg’s! The lesson: I mostly used only one pan. So now I’ve invested in a super lightweight canister stove from GoSystems, the Fly/Ti. It weighs 50 grams. I’m going to use this stove together with the smallest pan from the Trangia. The next thing to cut down on, is water, if you can that is. At least, you don’t need to carry much water with you on the coast to coast trail in Denmark. There’s water available on almost all the camp sites along the trail during summer. The first day when I carried around 4 bottles of water — I only needed one of them. That alone was 1.8kg’s extra weight. The key is to plan your water re-supply. You always need enough to survive of course, but you don’t need to carry around water to do the dishes if there’s water where you’re heading.

And then there was the clothes. I ended up with one set of layered clothing and two sets of underwear and wool socks. This is enough. For summer I only need a pair of long johns, thin hiking pants, shorts, one or two t-shirt’s, merino wool sweater, rain gear, a cap and.. I think that was it. I did try to use a super light weight rain poncho instead of a full rain gear too, but that was a disaster. It was light weight alright, but it was the single most annoying piece of equipment I’ve ever owned, so that was the only lightweight solution where I should have gone for a heavier version. So I’ll go for normal rain gear from now on.

But all in all, the lighter I got, the happier I got. The less I can manage without, out there on the trail, the better I feel.

Not using Firefox never felt right. I wanted to use Firefox as I support Mozilla’s mission. However as long as I felt it getting in the way of my productivity, I only used it for private stuff, and some times not at all. But I’ve always kept an eye on what’s going on with Firefox, and about a year ago or so, things started to be promising again. And here the other day, with the release of Firefox 54, things are really starting to look good again, I had already switched back to Firefox, but version 54 really confirmed that my choice was right. Let me explain why.

1. Multiprocessing: Firefox now uses multiple processes, meaning the whole browser no longer crashes just because a JavaScript in one tab is freezing over. Not only is this working very well in regards of stability, but it makes Firefox much faster when working with complex web apps. Mozilla also managed to do this while keeping memory usage relatively low.
2. The new compact themes: Not long ago Mozilla starting bundling Firefox with beautiful dark and light compact themes in addition to the old classic one. These themes are really important as I never really could settle for any of the third party themes, and I was so tired of the old look. You have no idea how much this matters. I use my browser all day, I probably spend more time looking at my desktop browser than anything else in the world.
3. Firefox for iOS: Not being able to use Firefox Sync with my iPhone was no good. It meant I had to use some other browser on my phone which would not sync with Firefox. This gave me yet another reason to switch away from Firefox on the desktop also. The introduction of Firefox on iOS was most welcome. Also, the ability to define your own search engine in Firefox for iOS, makes it a good alternative if you e.g like to use search engines like Ecosia.
4. Containers: Now this is still in test pilot, but to me this is an important thing, an absolute blocker if it’s not there. As a developer I really need to separate system users from each other when testing software. Chrome has profiles which enables this, Firefox sort of has profiles, but there’s no good way of switching between them. Containers found a middle way, instead of having completely separate profiles, you separate tabs into containers. I have my personal stuff in the “Personal” container, and then I have containers for each test account I’ve created for work. Now I can have it all in one browser window, and that is fantastic.

That’s the four things that made me switch back, and I’m happy I did. There’s still things missing of course, like proper two-factor authentication for Firefox Sync, compact theme on iOS, some add-ons that exist for Chrome but not for Firefox, but there are all nice-to-have’s, not blockers. All in all, switching back to Firefox made me a little bit more productive while getting that good feeling from effortlessly supporting some cause you believe in.

The bad news are actually good news
Trump will, if he acts as he speaks, be a total disaster for the environment compared to how e.g. Bernie Sanders would be expected to perform. There’s nothing to discuss here. Trump has implied he’s willing to destroy almost all of nature in the name of business, except “we can leave a little bit”. It’s absolutely horrendous what he says. So, his actions directly will not have any positive impact. The thing is though, that the Americans didn’t choose Clinton for president, is a clear sign that things are finally starting to change. This is a great relief. For most people there are multiple burning issues to handle. They have kids to feed, a house to warm, a job to keep, because if not, they will be evicted from their homes. They need this every day, right now, and it’s getting harder day by day. At the same time seeing the rich getting richer for no meaningful reason. Juggling two jobs. Depression and apathy always on the horizon. You cannot expect people to change their lives completely because of higher sea levels in 50 years, if they cannot live close to a proper life here and now. The fact is; Americans finally said stop. They said stop the best way they could, by not electing Hillary Clinton for president. No more “same old, same old”, as Sanders would have put it. The only option Americans had if they wanted change, was Trump. Sanders was taken away from them, and they were forced to choose between two evils. It tells a lot how tired people are of the current state of things when Trump could become president, that he could even get close to it. People in the US must be completely and utterly sick of the situation. Just like people in Europe. We have to respect this, and also be able to see that despite the fear they must have felt about Trump becoming president, they faced their fears and did it anyway. They are willing to risk it all just to get some change. Any change. I wish it would have been Bernie Sanders.

This is the opportunity
This is just the beginning for America. I feel it. This is the start of great changes to come for the whole world. Things are changing all the time, but what electing Trump signals, is that more than anything, politics will change. That haven’t happened in a while. Trump should be a wake up call for other more sane politicians that they need to change, and they need to do it now. If not, Trump will have eight years on his hands to destroy the country. Literally. Physically destroy the country, perhaps even the planet. Trump is clearly the wrong track in the long run, but now that the quest for change has started, better options are likely to surface soon.

So how exactly does this benefit the environment?
Easy one. The environment has been almost destroyed in the name of keeping up status quo and not changing anything significant. Any change that makes the current political farce crumble is an opportunity to change the significant things. You can’t do that with the old politicians only talking about tax adjustments and a few more jobs here and there, and yes; doing a little bit for the climate. We need drastically different politicians that are willing to try things like universal basic income, erase all debt, reform the monetary system, switch to 100% green energy, shut down the military and spend money on things that matter. That’s what we need. Trump won’t be doing any of this, but Trump is the sign that tells us that finally change is possible. People are ready to try something new.

Let’s seize this danger and opportunity with a brave heart and accelerate the change in the direction we need. When change is welcome, anything is possible.