ruraltech

There are tons of places with houses that are affordable. Living in a large city, especially in California, Oregon, Florida, New York, or Washington will strain anyone but the wealthy. More sane and slower-paced places that have jobs, or better yet, if you work remotely, work in an inexpensive market and pocket more money for retirement. I've long wanted to move to a remote smaller city with little happening. You can bank a lot of money doing this. There are plenty of cities with houses in the $75-130K range and not dumps, either. People could bail out of expensive cities, make a serious profit, pay cash on the other end, and bank their entire paycheck. We're talking property taxes in the $500/year range as well.

If the TV has no Internet connection, the mic is useless. I use an Amazon Firestick in developer mode connected to a network that uses a P-hole and other mitigation efforts to keep all the nasty tracking, beacons, etc. minimized. Nothing is 100%, but we can come close. What I'd like to see is a browser that doesn't allow scanning of fonts, etc. There has to be a way to perhaps fake what they can see and poison their data collection.

I use a Pi-hole for the network, but this doesn't block YouTube ads (sadly). Since I refuse to see ads of any stripe ever, I discovered that my Amazon Firestick can be put in developer mode and then install SmartTubeNext. Looks very similar to YouTube, but blocks all ads, sponsor content, and other nonsense. Pure videos.

I of course also use UBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes, and Referer Block on the laptop in addition to the Pi-hole. I do the same at work, as they allowed me to use a Pi-hole since I'm IT and on my own portion of the network on a private VLAN.

Since some people use laptops in lieu of TVs, you can always use FreeTube, which blocks ads by default and can also be proxied in the settings so YouTube cannot see your location. https://freetubeapp.io/

How to block ads on Amazon Firestick https://troypoint.com/youtube-without-ads/

SmartTubeNext https://smartyoutubetv.github.io/