No, no, that’s crazy talk.

Fingernails and toenails. They grow back.

Nobody said phonics is a perfect method, but against evidence showing it does substantially better at getting kids to learn how to read, you rocked up to contribute what amounts to “This is bullshit, because I didn’t like it as a kid.” We aren’t discussing how private tutors work, but how to get the public school system to get the best results in aggregate.

Every kid learns differently, sure. But we can’t even staff schools at adequate levels to hold decent group instruction, much less provide tailored education for each student, so your reply about everything being wrong until every every child has their unique idiosyncrasies accounted for comes across as a bit daft in the context of the discussion.

There are a ton of parades for one nationality or another in NYC. If you accept one’s like St. Patrick’s day, which are strongly associated with one country despite not being called the “X Nationality Day Parade,” you have the Irish, Scottish, Germans, Dominicans, Panamanians, Japanese and Chinese covered, at least.

That was pretty much how things worked for Ticketmaster in Norway when I had someone bail on going to a festival we were planning on attending together, as I recall. So it can be addressed, just probably need to be in a country with a functional government and regulations.

I get people wanting to bust their humps and do a bunch of work towards a goal. You want to spend a month just screwing around with your new jetski in the summer and doing OT every week for several months or working a second job for that time will let you do it, I get it. The thing that puts me off is the number of people who see just work and accumulation of stuff as the end goal unto itself. They’ll brag about never calling out sick or missing a single day of work, not taking their vacations (or going, but still living in their work inboxes, sending out so many emails they may as well not have gone on one), and saying stuff like “Oh, I could never retire, I wouldn’t know what to do with my time, there’s nothing to do.” And then these people are held up as models that we should aspire to.

I don’t care if a job pays me so much that I could afford a dream vacation, jetskis and all the new gadgets every year if I have to be working so much I never even get to do/use any of those things the salary makes possible. I’d much rather take a job with a salary that lets me do fewer of those things, or even having to skip years between one and the next, but lets me clock out and have enough time to myself to take care of myself and pursue hobbies and interests outside of work on a regular basis.

For long travel, like intercontinental level distances, it probably is pretty efficient with a full plane. I’ve always understood that the waste and environmental damages are more from a combination of the use of private planes, and short routes that really ought to be train trips with the infrastructure to make them a preferable option to flying.

For example, if I suddenly found out that I needed to get from NYC to Boston by midnight tonight, without using a car, it should be a no-brainer to take Amtrak up there. Yet, even with fuel costs for airlines being quite high right now, there are exactly 4 trains leaving Penn Station for Boston that are cheaper than just catching a flight from JFK, and in the best of cases, they take about 4 times as long to cover that distance. It should really be significantly cheaper than flying in order to deter the majority, if not all of those people who do not expressly need to make that trip in just over an hour, for whatever reason, from taking those sorts of flights. Cheap enough that flying simply isn’t price competitive, and that people don’t mind the extra travel time.

It’s fine, they’ve sorted out sleep mode on most hardware a while ago

One thing many people have surprisingly low comprehension of is that people ≠ government.

Regular Israeli civilians did not partake in the war, did not cause the apartheid, and did not steal the land. They were born there, or went there on a promise of entering a friendly Jewish community - not of murdering people.

People defending this have a surprisingly low comprehension of the fact that Israelis, generally speaking, are literate and educated enough to be aware of the fact that most of the “Oh, we’re just a nice friendly Jewish community” is a lie and their taxes and labor will go towards supporting this stuff. Israelis are not stupid people, they are not incapable of accessing news and information from non-Israeli sources. The longer Israel continues to be such a predatory, imperial state, the less sympathy I have for the civilian population that says “Oh, I don’t actually support this, but my mom and dad live here and won’t move, so I have to stay here.” Well, fuck your mom and dad, and fuck you too if that applies to you. At this point, I only have sympathy for the small portion of the population who are either actively opposing this regime from within, or who are planning on leaving and are still in the process of finalizing their departure.

This is catastrophic when it happens to Palestinians, and not much better should it happen to Israelis.

Considering that the longer we avoid this for the Israelis, more of their neighboring countries are going to experience it, I will once again be unequivocal in saying, screw the Israelis in that case. I would much prefer that literally every resident of Israel gets told to screw off back to where they came from, rather than to see the genocide and displacement of the Palestinians be expanded to the Syrians, Lebanese and other neighboring nations, like Israel has already signaled it’s intent to do.

My sympathy for the Israeli people is directly proportional to their opposition to the actions of the Israeli government, which seems unlikely to change much, considering that this is just the continuation of decades of Israeli policy, rather than some exceptional state that only emerged because they were attacked once by Hamas. Contrary to what Israeli propaganda would have us believe, this isn’t something special that is only happening because the Israelis were shocked by one particular attack.

Ont the food shortage front, North Korea kind of got hit by a perfect storm of problems that might not have been so severe, had they not all occurred in short order. In brief, over the span of several years in the 1990s, the DPRK managed to lose their greatest backer and trading partner with the collapse of the USSR, which in turn meant that flaws present in some already failing internal policies could no longer be ignored, and were, in fact, exacerbated. Then they had widespread flooding that devastated domestic agriculture, making a bad situation worse. International sanctions would have also impeded efforts to turn to international markets temporarily to purchase additional food and necessary supplies to turn the situation around. While the US did supply food aid starting in 1996, much like how the US weaponized the embargos on Cuba and sanctions on Iran in a way that worsened their situation during the Covid pandemic, George W. Bush severely cut US food aid, and in some years, it was eliminated entirely.

There’s a whole article on the subject on Wikipedia that is a good start for understanding it. While there are certainly plenty of things to criticize North Korea for, I think the general “Hurr durr, communism is bad, look at all this nice food I have,” take that has become widespread in the US is a pretty reductive bit of anti-DPRK propaganda. Also, I don’t know how much of their relative success before that point was due to the USSR propping up an allied state and how much could be attributed to Kim Il Sung’s capabilities as a statesman, but his successors don’t seem to be his equal either in finding strong parties to ally with or in their statecraft. It’s also entirely possible that they are simply the Juche version of failsons, slowly dissipating their father’s legacy for their own gratification after having grown up fairly privileged and viewing the enterprise left to them (or state, in this case) purely as part of their inheritance to plunder for personal gain.

From what I’ve seen in other articles about the same case, it’s basically nothing special. The North Korean applies under a false identity that isn’t associated with North Korea, and they have (or at least claim to have) relevant education and experience that would make them good fits for roles like programming, then they apply for remote jobs where they can continually work at one job without having to go in and interact with people face to face.

I kind of doubt the problem is being suspected of being an operative, though, so much as ex filtration of corporate secrets and potentially falling afoul of sanctions against North Korea if they continue to employ someone in their company once they have a reasonable suspicion that the person is a North Korean national working under a false identity. They would be helping the North Korean government to maintain a steady inflow of foreign currency that they need, which I’m sure could land them in trouble. Aside from that liability, I would imagine they would beore concerned about company IP and tratedsecrets this employee would have access to being available to the DPRK to do what they will with, as well as others in the government being able to use their credentials to potentially access and compromise systems on the company’s network that this employee could access.

While pointing out that the public at large is just wildly ill-suited to be making policy decisions on many topics which absolutely need to be regulated, lest companies cheap out on worker safety and get people killed, you’re missing the far more pressing matter with this idea. This level on granularity is just absurd for direct democracy. The sheer number of votes such a system would entail would rapidly induce voter fatigue. Besides, even if it’s just opening an app and clicking a button, how many voters have the time to stay informed on relevant developments related to upcoming matters to be voted on to actually have an informed opinion on the topic, and of those, how many would actually turn up to vote for the thing? NY had 39.6% of eligible voters not cast a vote in the 2024 presidential election, slightly below the national average of 36.1%. Last year alone, Governor Hochul pardoned 24 people, according to her site’s press releases, 11 of which were the day before New Year’s Eve, smack in the middle of the winter holidays. You folks really think you’re going to get meaningful voter participation in 24+ elections a year (ignoring how many elections Trump would trigger with his presidential pardons, because this number is already unreasonable enough), when nearly 40% of eligible voters sat out the most heated presidential election in decades?

You can have direct democracy to an extent, but for the most part, you’d still need to leave the politicians and technocrats to do their jobs. Sure, there ought to be mechanisms for either the people or the government to trigger a popular referendum on a given matter (say, voters strongly feel that none of the politicians or governing bodies are reflecting their will on a matter, or a broadly popular policy is being blocked by obstinate opposition factions in a closely divided legislature, for example), but they really ought to remain exceptional incidents. Otherwise, you’re doomed to get bogged down by rule by committee under a different name, and nothing is ever going to get done.

If nothing else, you don’t hand over more information to help them develop leads, and it makes more work for them having to subpoena the providers for suspected contacts and hope they get the emails they want from them. Depending on what it is they want to get you for and how many contacts you had that they would need to follow up on, that could be enough to make it no longer cost-effective to pursue.

Man, Microsoft doubling down on the whole “Let’s force most of our customers to purchase entirely new computers to use the next release!” strategy after it went so well for Windows 11 is just hilarious. Especially with hardware costs skyrocketing due to AI BS.

We don’t need an autopsy, just like we don’t need another article telling the public, who has already long since realized this, that Israeli influence and Zionism in our politics is toxic and that we need to cut ties with it going forward. We really just need a few things to happen. Least likely of all, if Democratic leaders finally pulled their heads out of their asses and started paying attention to doing their jobs and winning over voters, rather than just focusing on their bank balances, it would potentially preclude the need for more if they had the fear of their constituents turning on them to keep them in line. Failing this, it would be great if more people got politically active and, along with taking action and organizing between elections, they showed up to the primaries and voted out assholes like Charles Schumer. Finally, it would be great if current electeds and progressive candidates who manage to primary zionists in the party actually began taking steps to initially isolate the remaining Zionists, with the aim of eventually expelling them from the party if they don’t renounce Zionism and stop screwing over the civilians of Palestine (along with the other nearby countries Israel is constantly trying to steal land from), this country as a whole, and the world at large. The Israeli state, as it has existed since its founding in 1948, is a force for evil in this world, and needs to be stopped entirely. In a just world, Israel would be as isolated on the world stage as North Korea is at present.

The Democrats need to clean house already, and stop the shit with “Oh, but we’re a big tent party, so we have to be open to a littlel support for colonial genocide amongst our members.” Everyone alive knows this is a losing issue for them and is only getting worse by the day. The names of leading Democrats, like Jeffries, Pelosi, Harris and Schumer, are all going to be black marks in the pages of world history in the future. Quislings for a new age, but now they can claim they’re multicultural, since they’re not just reviled in their home land, but by anyone with a conscience and sense of morality the world over who comes to learn of their existence and actions. And I’m sure they’ll still be trotting out that Schumer is hated only by antisemites, Pelosi only by misogynists, Jeffries by white supremacists, while Harris gets the distinction of being hated by racists and misogynists. It’ll be just as effective at getting them back in the good graces of their constituents as it’s proving to be now.

What flights are you on that you need a powerbank?

As @SpeedRunner@europe.pub said in another post, it’s not necessarily just about the time on the flight, but when you might need them after. Later this year, for example, I’m planning on heading to Europe and will attend a music festival while I’m there. I’ll be out all day, and would like to be able to use my phone to stay in touch with my travelling buddies, take pictures, maybe get a cab back to the hotel, or whatever else. It would be pretty nice to have a powerbank to keep my phone charged then, as well as for other days where I’m planning on being out sightseeing all day. If you’re already forbidden from storing them in your checked bag, and now you’ll be banned from bringing them in your carry-on, what exactly are you meant to do, then? Buy a new powerbank every time you travel? Just for my trip and travel group, we’d need to purchase and discard 4 of them on this trip, as we’ll be staying a few days in one country for sightseeing before hopping on a plane to the opposite corner of Europe for the remainder of the vacation. That’s a lot of added e-waste and expense.

Firefox is just the browser, Mozilla is the organization constantly wasting money on features Firefox’s users are actively hostile to in a bid to tempt away people already using Chrome. Not the OP, but I’d be down to donate to Firefox’s development directly, but I wouldn’t want to make a donation to Mozilla hoping it would go toward Firefox, only to find out they took my money to build some new LLM integration that nobody asked for, only to sit unused for years before being quietly shuttered in favor of the new tech buzzword of the day.

No, the issue is one that has been around a long time now and has been completely ignored because most people don’t speak Spanish. Almost all mainstream Spanish media, from shows, to news, to social media has been far, far, FAR right for decades now. Like, it makes Fox News look like MSNBC.

Aside from that, they know they have a captive audience for many of their viewers, who are unable to go fact check them by consulting English-media. This is true for monolingual Spanish speakers, but also for many folks who have learned enough English to get by in their day-to-day lives, but who are not comfortable following or discussing something more complex like politics in English.

Pretty much every time I would watch the news with my mother-in-law, if they had an interview or clip from a politician dub over into Spanish, I’d catch them engaging in some fuckery with their translations. Either they would deliberately omit parts of what was said to make the translated part sound worse, or they would choose key words where they would pick a translation that is related to a more accurate word for the English word spoken, but with a much more negative connotation to it.

They’d also ignore when right-wing conspiracy theories get debunked in English, and just keep on pushing them for months after they’d been discredited with no mention of this fact, as though they were widely held, mainstream beliefs.

Then again, white Americans who don’t interact with either group very much seem to consider all Latino and Black Americans as two monolithic voting blocks, ignoring the reality of the many different cultures, national backgrounds and ethnicities that comprise either group. Lots of white people just think of them as solid, unreachable Democratic voters, for some reason. There are plenty of people in either group who the Democrats can’t reach, because despite agreeing with the rest of a Democrat or Progressive platforms, they hold deeply conservative religious or cultural beliefs on abortion and sexuality. Like, I hear people saying “¡Maricón!” on the daily more often than I heard edgy kids dropping the f-word on the middle school playground back in the day, and nobody bats an eye because rampant homophobia is still a cultural given in a lot of places, unfortunately. If you actually interact with any people of color on a regular basis, it’s probably not as surprising to see how the right can pull in greater numbers of POC by playing to the right themes for those deeply held views and prejudices.

Every time I bring this up people down vote me into oblivion

This is because you’re parroting blue MAGA nonsense while ignoring reality. Racism and sexism can certainly play into it, but you’re never going to be able to turn things around if you ignore other contributing factors and just go “I can’t hear you over the racism and sexism in your voice,” as you shove your fingers in your ears.

Attributing everything to racism and sexism when there is a massive and glaring factor that even the DNCs own internal audits place higher priority on, is like walking up to the scene of a car accident, seeing the black ice on the road and the skid marks leading up to the tree the car is wrapped around, and concluding this wouldn’t have happened if the driver had kept up with their scheduled oil changes. Nobody is going to take your analysis seriously when you ignore all the other contributing factors.

You know what? That’s all on me. For some dumb reason, I had it in my head that she was a Democrat. I’ll just go put away my pitchfork now.

How many times do this rogue Democrats have to buck the party line to work with the fascists before we actually get some party discipline? Yes, I get the whole “big tent party” thing, but there should be a point (which has long since and repeatedly been passed) where the party closes ranks and starts either censuring these members in a meaningful way, like a monetary fine or loss of some campaign funds or something, and escalate right up to expelling them from the party and making them campaign openly as the republicans they really are.

I’m not saying they should be policing every single action of them, but when you have assholes like Joe Manchon or Susan Collins, who tank key pieces of legislation that represent major planks of the party or directly work against the interests of the constituents, it shouldn’t be up to grass roots movements to primary these bastards, much to frequently do so against the DNC continuing to back them. They should already be gone based on their part misdeeds, and the party should be proactive in this.