I mostly agree with you except that I believe we can change other people. Maybe we can’t change a specific person, but I think (or at least I would love to believe) that we can influence people we interact with, in big and small ways.

Love the detailed answer with all the links, thanks!

And for the sake of completeness, what resources would you recommend to a beginner?

My issue with this is that, especially as a foreigner living abroad, I cannot always answer which shop might have the items I’m looking for.

I wish Google Maps allowed searching for shops by their inventory, like it does searching for restaurants by their menu. Even better, an open web protocol like RSS where shop websites can communicate to all crawlers what items are being sold where and which are out of stock, so that it’s not a Google Maps monopoly but an ecosystem…