TikTok is no more in a death spiral than Facebook. This is about complete domestic control of major social media platforms. It’s unclear that ByteDance would sell rather than shut down completely in the U.S.

That’s reserved for Mike Pence. Sorry, a bit of gallows humour.

Here we go again.

This is popping up all over the place these days. That’s Not Good™.

But dude, you lost less than a rounding error of your wealth, your candidate lost by a double-digit margin, and he conceded promptly and gracefully. This is like sending EMS to a burglary at a vacant home. Read the fucking room; this tactic won’t fly this go 'round.

My initial response was “JFC!!!” but given the gap between thinking that and starting to type, I realized “of course they’d do this” was the correct reaction.

Maybe they can get a couple of chatbots and a rural PTA member into a Signal group chat this time.

OK. I’ll revise. No one with any sense is doing this. “Hi, RIAA and MPAA, come after me” is an asinine approach. I realize we have at least one generation unfamiliar with Napster, KaZaa and LimeWire, which replaced ratio FTP servers (which in turn replaced F-Servs in IRC). This is terrible online hygiene. You don’t leave your media out there for all to see. At least password protect access before linking to your friends.

Before even reading the story … why is Alaska missing from the opening graphic?

It’s good to see such organization, but I feel there should be a bingo card for how Orange et al. respond. “Deranged, unpatriotic, nasty” top the list, but there are of course 21 other squares. Maybe 22 … I don’t think they’d endorse a free space.

It’s those damn low-flow toilets that refuse to flush classified documents on the first try.

Not exactly. Much of it radiates out into space. If all the sun’s energy remained in the atmosphere, climate change wouldn’t be a concern, as the Earth wouldn’t have been habitable for humans to even evolve.

The problem with that analogy is toddlers get potty trained well before 80.

The endgame appears to be a final wealth transfer via engineered collapse that ensures the plebs never again have the resources to stand up to corporations or what’s left of the government (the military sure as hell isn’t going anywhere). The dystopian future so many tried to warn us about is, like climate change, already here.

Another feedback loop is that, thanks to thermodynamics, the heat being removed from homes and businesses is transferred into the environment, further raising temperatures.

Who has the technical wherewithal to run Jellyfin but leaves access on the open web? I get that sharing is part of the point, but no one’s putting their media collection on an open FTP server.

The level of convenience people expect without consequences is astounding. Going to be away for home for a few days? Load stuff onto an external SSD or SD card. Phoning home remotely makes no sense.

I grew up in the '80s. It was absolutely unnecessary then, and a pressing need has not since developed. “Be home by dinner” was perfectly serviceable when I’d head off on my bike to see which friends were available to hang out with. Often, I’d be invited to dinner, and the parents would talk so mine knew where I was, usually followed by an invite for a sleepover since it was by then dark.

Abductions of and assaults on kids are statistically far more likely to happen with a known party. This tracking obsession stunts normal childhood experiences, and I’ve not seen any study conclude that kids are overall safer from this level of surveillance.

If uncle Bob is molesting you but your parents trust him, this is all theatre. “At least they’re safe … they’re at Bob’s” my ass. But god forbid you meet up with your friends to build a tree fort outside of an arbitrary radius.

That sounds like a terrible pairing. Who wants cum soup with ice cream on the side?

This was an inevitability. The real surprise here is the concept of Trump parting ways with someone amicably. I still expect him to scapegoat Musk when the economy goes south and the peasants are out with pitchforks over their missing Social Security checks.

Oil by the ton is not how anyone measures it (barrels) in market speak, and cubic metres is not how anyone measures natural gas (therms/mmBTU). This feels like deliberate obfuscation to make this sound more impressive than it is or at least to be so confusing that no one understands what it means.

We also don’t know the grade of crude, which makes a huge difference.

There’s a nonzero chance this is as described by both Heritage and Halevi on the surface. I don’t think we’re getting the full story, as this is about appearances, which don’t win wars (as the U.S. has repeatedly needed to learn).

“KGB” still evokes the idea of Soviet/Russian agents in three convenient letters. Honestly, at this point, I’d be depressed to see a poll of how many people in the U.S. know the USSR is no more. We referred to them as “Russians” in the '80s anyway. Details are unimportant to voters.

CDU/CSU weren’t even nominally Christian in the '90s. It was weird to live somewhere with a secular party with “Christian” in the name and then come home to the beginnings of christofascism under the veneer of secularism. Strange times we live in.

The German government is legally obliged to ensure the human rights to social security and to an adequate standard of living contained in international treaties it has promised to uphold. Related treaties, standards, and guidance on social security, from UN and European human rights bodies, set out requirements for social security benefits to be adequate.

Germany’s Constitutional Court has developed jurisprudence on the minimum subsistence level required to live in dignity. This requires the state to ensure that people are left with at least enough of their earnings to cover their necessary living expenses, and to guarantee a minimum level of participation in social, cultural, and political life.

And here we see the gulf between legal requirements and implementation even in still-functioning democracies. It’s still surreal that Germany is holding but the U.S. has failed.