Caedarai

Plenty of people I know have gotten the little echo dots or the bigger alternative with larger speakers for Christmas or birthdays. Technically they didn’t spend money, but their friends and family did.

Does it make a difference that the tea is never in the microwave? It’s only the method for heating a single cup of water, not of heating the water+tea set.

I think part if the motivation here would be to allow the doctor present at a school to determine whether a child is participating in the correct sex-appropriate placement. Like using the correct locker rooms or bathrooms in case teachers or other students bring up an issue (for example if a boy were to go into a girl’s locker room and claim to really be a girl). Since appearance doesn’t line up with sex in many cases nowadays, the inspection would be to determine the real sex of the individual. Some school activities will involve nudity (changing before entering a swimming pool, communal showering after a sports match or gym class, etc.) so the authors of this were initially pushing for any teacher (such as the supervisor in a locker room or the teacher of the associated class) to be able to inspect/determine the sex of the individual.

Neither. Tea bags are for chumps. It’s so much tastier to use fresher loose tea leaves of whatever mix you prefer (and you can control how strong you make it, plus you end up with less waste). I just boil the water in the microwave then when it’s hot I take it out and add the tea.

You could disagree, but I think it’s out of touch to suggest most of the US (or at least most of the voting center in swing states) would prefer her over a moderate. And that would be the biggest factor in determining who would win an election.

This seems to be a gross misunderstanding of public key cryptography. Public keys allow you to verify an existing signature is valid and made by the correct entity, but they absolutely don’t allow you to forge a signature: that’s actually what they are designed to prevent.

You pay CAs for certificate issuance, not for signing. You could sign all the QR codes in a city with a single CA-issued certificate as long as the standards for it were all accepted.

Well, because it won’t be signed by a trusted CA for that task. Like if CAs had a category of certificate issuance that applied here (the standardisation issue) then it would be easy to spot a fake (which wouldn’t be correctly signed). Alternatively, you could take the European approach of having everything government related (like public street parking, though Europe mostly uses apps for that, not signed QR codes) rely on government entities and those in turn on a national set of government CAs.

Licking a wound isn’t grooming or maintenance though.

It’s to do with where people stand. Most people in the US, despite their rhetoric, would be more centrist than many people realize (and between both major parties). That means most aren’t in agreement with much of what Trump is doing internationally or with respect to Musk/DOGE in application, though most might support broad ideas of ‘putting the US first’, ‘reducing the size/cost of the US government’, ‘stopping illegal immigration/deporting illegal immigrants’ etc. But crucially, this also means that most eligible voters are also right of the vocal elements of the left that play up political correctness, identity politics, and social economic policy (economic policy further left-wing than what we see at the moment). So in an election, if neither side really aligns with the majority of voters, it’s easy to see how voters can be swayed by voting against the current party in power, voting due to marketing/propaganda, or voting against the party that seems most radical in ways that differ from voters’ ideas/interests. Trump didn’t campaign on annexing Canada, or invading Greenland, but he did campaign on deporting illegal immigrants and reducing the size of government. And many people saw Harris as a continuation of Biden but with a more socially liberal (or further left on this) attitude and a stronger association with identity politics. So if Trump in his first term didn’t do much that most people would consider lasting harm (despite his antics and buffoonery) and campaigned on ideas that the majority agree with, whereas Harris was a continuation of an unpopular presidency/government (at least at the end) but with a flair of things that most people don’t align with, well, the result speaks for itself: a landslide in the electoral college. The only way forward for democrats is to capitalise on the mistakes Trump is making (unpopular decisions and attitudes), to seem reasonable and grounded to the majority, and to not veer off and start pushing for social issues most of the voting center doesn’t really buy (so for example focus on creating a better immigration system and treating immigrants fairly, but not legalising illegal immigrants. Or pushing for general social protections, workers’ rights, consumer rights, better and broader healthcare coverage and business regulation without straying into a focus on minority rights, trans terminology battles, antireligious discourse or attacking tradionalists/older folks’ viewpoints.) If you can win the center you can win the election. And you do that by appealing to the traditional center (and definitely not by antagonising it).

I really doubt moving to a place like Albania, with far, far lower salaries, a massive language barrier, and a plethora of internal problems would be considered an improvement by most of the US citizens here.

At this rate, maybe AOC or similar will become the democratic candidate in 2028, and basically lead to another Republican landslide. Democrats, at least the politically active ones that would sway these things (not leadership), keep putting a large emphasis on identity politics, political correctness, and a certain ‘victim’ ideology which is out of touch with many of the centrists who ultimately decide the election. Kamela Harris, despite her shifts in policy, is a gauge of this, and yet in these areas she and AOC are nowhere even close, but the AOC-type group is where I see the biggest push among younger democrats. From the point of view of winning a general election, this could be concerning for democrats.

Mint really is simple to use. Other than the desktop (layout, look and feel), and a few changes in system apps (the backup app, etc.), you won’t need to change much about how you use it. Even the bare, raw internal config files would basically be the same (if you copied your user profile over), because Mint is Ubuntu under the hood.

The honest truth is that it takes some time to get to an ‘expert’ level where you can be confident about what you’re doing, but simply setting it up and using it for basic tasks (following some guide) is pretty darn straightforward. Most people that have issues tend to have them with use cases (eg. someone wants to edit photos but can’t get the same results as with Adobe Lightroom with alternative applications) or with specific bits of hardware (maybe they have a laptop which requires specific windows-only drivers to get the full functionality out of the trackpad, WiFi card or battery optimisation). So if you set it up and the hardware all works, you’ll probably be fine for all the basic tasks most people need, and you will gradually pick up advanced knowledge as you go along.

It’s better to just sell it and not replenish the stock than to dispose of it all at a massive loss. The US sellers won’t get more money either way, but this way some losses can be avoided on the Canadian side.

For car journeys, Here WeGo is very good, and is actually the mapping system in a number of European cars. It was a Nokia property, but now it’s owned by European and Japanese car companies. https://wego.here.com/ It can be used on the web or via the mobile app.

Wow, this is excellent! I was sort of wondering whether the leftover bread and pastries from the shop nearby got donated or something, but apparently they and the little supermarket next to them are both listed in the app and sell their leftovers at 6.30 each morning to anyone who wants them. This could end up being dangerous (loads of pastries for less than two euro for the lot)!

Well that’s rather concerning about the future rule of law, and the ability of the FBI to conduct investigations without political interference…

They’d be able to help secure Europe, could get some sales to EU countries and such, but I see this as a project that would deal directly with established armies (and countries’ defence budgets) rather than going through the EU.

While that’s fine for a situation in which an European army existed, Orban would almost certainly veto such a proposal. In fact, he’d probably veto the EU spending a substantial amount together and call the EU warmongers. The solution is to have countries act independently on paper (with leadership coordinating) so that the EU doesn’t have to get involved in such a way that vetoes can block progress. That’s just the state of affairs at the moment.