I worked at one of these places in the US, they absolutely do exist. It was a free “market” stocked daily with produce, meat and a huge assortment of food products and our “shoppers” pushed carts around our market and picked whatever they wanted off the shelves.

I agree with your main point though, shit is fucked and things aren’t getting better and our political system is broken beyond repair.

So this isn’t a VPN service, but having read your comments it might work…

When I was in Sweden recently I needed to do something online with the appearance that I was in the US. First I tried using a couple of VPN services but they were detected by the website I was trying to use and I got an “access denied” message. So my travel partner activated their Verizon TravelPass and let me hotspot off it. TravelPass gave us a regular Verizon wireless address out of California and I was able to complete my task. Unfortunately though it’s $12/day.

Done! Wouldn’t have bothered voting if I hadn’t read your comment, so thanks for sharing. Voting was really easy, just had to enter my member number and zip code.

I’ve never understood the appeal of Target. There’s a huge Target 60 seconds down the street from me and I never shop there except to get one or two items. It’s expensive, has a ridiculously small grocery section while clothing takes up half the store, and they’re so worried about shoplifters that they have multiple security staff standing at the door giving everyone leaving the stink eye.

I suppose this qualifies as an unpopular opinion, but it’s some of the most cringeworthy pseudo-intellectual garbage I’ve ever read.

You view nature as useless and hostile, but you ignore its most basic undeniable benefits – food, oxygen production, climate regulation. You view cities as clean and efficient utopias, while ignoring that they’re plagued by crime, air pollution, industrial waste, disease outbreaks, noise, social isolation, and the urban heat island effect. Your preference for steel and concrete over living ecosystems doesn’t change the fact that those ecosystems keep you alive.

You identify as an anarchist (lol, of course you do) but you admire “Soviet tech optimism” which was based on central planning, state control and authoritarianism. You argue in favor of neoliberalism which is directly opposed to anarchism. You claim to be anti-degrowth and pro-sustainability, yet degrowth promotes sustainable technology. Your political viewpoints are a confused, incoherent mess and maybe someone more knowledgeable than me in that area will take the time to point out your other contradictory statements and misrepresentations.

You don’t consider what happens if most plant and animal species die, or its devastating effects on food production, the climate and human survival. None of that matters to you because your worldview doesn’t extend beyond your home and wifi network. Of course the fact that billions of people find comfort and purpose in nature is incomprehensible to someone like you whose life is devoid of meaning.

Your “meat flesh prison” comments are especially pathetic considering that all human experience (including your miserable urban-online existence) is mediated by biology. You can delude yourself into believing you’re above the disorder of the natural world, but you still rely on the very biological processes you claim to despise.

This is an embarrassingly bad take and you come across as someone incapable of forming real human connections. Most of the rest of us will be out embracing the chaos, beauty and unpredictability of the real world while you wither away, unhappy and unfulfilled, in the sterile prison you’ve created for yourself.

Haha yeah that’s a tough one! I’m in Colorado where Colorado potatoes are almost as ubiquitous as Idaho potatoes, so honestly lucked out there.

As an American mine is Europe/Canada > the rest of the developed world OR blue states > Mexico > other countries > red states. It’s surprisingly easy to avoid food from red states. For tech/online services I prefer European over everywhere else.