I agree. Sacrificing your mental health for your physical health is counterproductive to the goal of whole well-being. Obsession is harmful. Moderation is key.
"remember that all the non-tech people ask the tech people they know what to use. And tech people are who set up their family's computers, deploy software widely on business networks, etc."
As a techie who has set up and/or fixed many non-techie family & friends' computers and devices, I hear ya. 110%, loud and clear. :-)
However... I wonder how long this will remain true. More and more devices are ready to go out of the box and kids are being taught to use Google products in school.
It's not hard to buy a phone or Chromebook online, log into your Google account and be ready to go.
It's not like the old days when you would have to go to your grandma's house and install a better web browser, antivirus, etc. Most things just work now, for most people.
These shutdowns might hurt Google's brand among the tech-savvy community that uses edge products like Google+ or Chromecast Audio (never even heard of that before today).
But everyone I know still uses Google search and Chrome. Most use Gmail. Schools still give students Chromebooks and teach them Google Docs.
The menu on this site is essentially what a website's index page used to be, back in the early days of the WWW. It was, generally, a listing of a website's contents, modeled after the default directory listing that a web server produces.
So this menu felt very normal to me, but it may be off-putting to newer users of the web who are used to contemporary conventions such as slide-out hamburgers (not to be confused with slider hamburgers :-) ).
Best of luck to you! You already have achieved a major milestone: Actually doing something. Lots of people say "Maybe I should do X..." or "If I were to do X, here is how I would do it..." Fewer people actually do the work to launch the business. Even if your business fails (which I hope it doesn't!) you will have succeeded in that you "showed up," you tried and you ran your own business. That is something to be proud of.
I wonder how much Google pays PC manufacturers to have Chrome as the default browser. A few years ago I purchased a Lenovo laptop that had Chrome pre-installed as the default. The desktop shortcut label was simply "Internet Browser".
Being "nibbled at by a few" could be beneficial when it comes to privacy. Using many services means no single service has a large amount of data about you.
You might not be important now. But you might be "important" in the future due to your affiliation with a political group, religion or even your skin color. You never know which way the political winds will blow. And data is kept forever.
I appreciate Bruce Schneier's pragmatism and his acknowledgement that the problem is bigger than an individual can reasonably be expected to solve, if that individual wishes to participate in modern society. Too often, privacy concerns are met with, "Use Tails + Tor + a hosts file + a burner phone + a burner laptop, etc. etc." But Grandma isn't going to do that, and frankly neither am I. While an individual chooses to use online services, at a certain point societal and career expectations make it not really much of a choice at all. There must be a better way than placing all of the burden on the individual.
I'm admin for several news sites. We chose a third-party plugin for comments because it offers easier account management for the user and better spam filtering than anything home-grown, and like any third-party plugin, we don't have to update that piece of software ourselves. We do read the comments and engage when appropriate.
"why would anyone pay attention to the papers when it seems completely remote and irrelevant to people's lives?"
Local elections directly affect people. Local boards and councils set tax rates and allocate money to schools, police, fire and other public services. Local elections often are covered extensively by local newspapers. Yet voter turnout often is quite low. Why?
This seems like a good case in favor of Privacy Badger's model, where content blocking is based on the number of times a domain tries to track you across websites, rather than a blacklist of URL patterns and file names.