Yeah, ICE.

WSA is deprecated, though.

But how much longer does AfD’s popularity line keep going up before the government does start working? Do we even expect the current government to be meaningfully different from the previous in that regard?

4 years comes quicker than you think.

One predicates the other, though.

Clearly Germany is not doing enough to put a stop to the rising conservatism movement, and the next election might not end as favorably as a result.

Part of it is also the constant push to try to weave the principles of confederacy into the fabric of American history via monuments and memorials, to build up this idea that the confederacy is part of the modern American identity rather than antithetical to it.

See for example the recent controversy surrounding the military installation called Fort Bragg. Braxton Bragg was a slave-owning confederate general who, by all accounts, was not even a good leader. But given the fort’s location in North Carolina, one of the former confederate states, it got its name presumably due to local military officials sympathetic to the “Lost Cause” narrative, and stuck until just recently.

In 2023, the Biden administration pushed to change the name of the fort to “Fort Liberty” so as to continue removing these Lost Cause memorials and end this myth, but this year the Trump administration just recently renamed it back to Fort Bragg, ostensibly now named after a different Bragg who was just a paratrooper during World War II. But no one is fooled by what they’re trying to do.

It’s almost sad, really, just how badly they’re clinging to this myth even today. But I guess more scary than sad, given that half of the government is essentially run by traitors. And it’s really been that way for a long time now I suppose, but shocking how strongly they still choose to hold their ground on these ridiculous narratives when pushed.

Luckily digital signboards will always be an option to replace TVs with if the situation becomes truly dire. The sorts of no-frills displays corporations buy to display whatever media they want in store.

Might not come with sound, but you can pick up a cheap sound bar and it will still be better than whatever cheap speakers commercial TVs try to cram in there.

They’re up there with some of the other nonsensical memes I see here and there.

I guess Microsoft really changed the world.

I’m assuming America is only paying El Salvador for prisoners America sends to El Salvador. They don’t give a shit what El Salvador does to their own domestic prisoners, or America’s, quite frankly.

Yep. Even if you’re buying a product which is by meaningful standards “100% American made,” consider the invisible costs. The cost of the packaging that they use, the cost of the supplies/equipment they use in production and the upkeep required to maintain them, the cost of the infrastructure they use for logistics and operations, etc.

All these less visible dependencies affect the cost of doing business and can still be impacted by tariffs if anything comes from overseas, even if the product itself is just a bottle of maple syrup made in Vermont.

It doesn’t matter who the hell wants to buy TikTok if ByteDance still doesn’t want to sell.

I don’t know why we keep having these sorts of conversations when they’ve signalled they have no intent to give in to the demands of the US.

The real TIL is always in the comments

My experience is more “feels” than fact I suppose, but I’ve always seen it that any adjective or noun playing adverb to another adjective or participle should be hyphenated to the word it describes.

Red-hot coals (coals that are hot to the point of being red)

Red hot coals (coals that are both hot and red)

Ruby-red shoes (shoes that are as red as rubies)

Ruby red shoes (ruby shoes that are red)

Smooth-talking rogue (a rogue who talks smoothly)

Smooth talking rogue (a smooth rogue who talks)

Bamboo-eating panda (a panda who eats bamboo)

Bamboo eating panda (bamboo is eating a panda)

Fuck Oracle.

Two, if one counts Death of a Unicorn as well, in spite of its comedic elements.

Definitely not a good thing. I use Proton VPN, but only because I paid for a license before I realized the CEO is a scumbag. A lot of people are moving away from Proton’s platform, so a browser choosing to bundle it in is just privacy-violating bloatware for everyone except for a subset of users who are also still using Proton, and also for some reason don’t just have the standalone app installed.

I hope you’re right, but this is the sort of dialog one might have had about the US a couple years ago. It’s alarming how quickly the tides can shift.

Not sure what the prior user might be referring to either, but here is a good boycott list for tech companies that have connections with Israel. Mostly American, but some European.

https://boycott.thewitness.news/categories/technology

There is nothing socialistic about the National Socialism he preaches.

How could it be so easily understood back then, and yet so deliberately ignored by people today who keep calling Hitler a “socialist”?

I don’t think I’d even want it to be, to be honest. The original book was really just fascist apologia, and the later adaptations of it had the foresight to use that premise instead for more effective social commentary.

Edit: I should clarify that I don’t think Heinlein himself was a fascist, but Starship Troopers is easily read as such.