Well the good news is that the Biden admin is currently trying to do something about the situation. The root cause is PBMs basically using their market power to squeeze everyone and redirect all the profit to themselves leaving nothing for the actual pharmacies. The FTC under Lina Khan has been investigating the issue for a while now and is currently starting litigation against the PBMs. It would be nice if we could get a functional congress that would pass good legislation to solve the issue instead of leaning on the limited power of regulators and unreliable and sometimes corrupt courts though.

Wow look at this fat cat over here who can afford to lose crumbs

I use graphene os and its great and fairly easy to install. Only works on Pixel devices though so you would have to get one of those.

To anyone reading this a 6 is a great pick but its worth knowing that the 7 year update promise only began with the pixel 8 so if you buy a 6 in 2024 it probably only has about 2 years of updates left. However they are only like $150 used I think so the value is probably there even if you only get 2 years of use out of it.

I’m not sure about over in Europe but around here the trick to an affordable Pixel is to just buy last years model since you can usually find them lightly used or even new in the $300 - $400 range and updates are only incremental anyway and since they get 7 years of updates now it should be good for quite a while.

For google play protect yeah thats a bummer, I just use my banks website but I don’t know if European banks allow that.

Personally though I love Graphene OS it turned my phone from a device I hated due to anxitey I feel around corporate surveillance into a device I genuinely like again.

I live in St. Louis and you can still get decent houses in nice neighborhoods in the 200 - 300k range though it is getting a bit harder.

Depending on your hardware you should be able to have Handbrake use your GPU to reencode the video much faster than your CPU. If you have Nvidia it would be Nvenc, Intel is Quicksync, and AMD is VCE. If you select one of those as your codec it should go much faster. Check the hardware encoders section on the Handbrake documents https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/1.4.0/technical/video-nvenc.html . Even if you were using windows you would run into the same problem at some point you are limited by how fast your hardware can process the video and no software can make up for that.