Wasn’t there a limit on how much of an extension Trump could grant? I’m having difficulty finding articles about the first extension he gave them, but for some reason I was thinking that he legally only had the power to give them 90 total days of extension. Not that Trump cares, and not like he’s following any laws about limits on his power.

Considering USAID was instrumental in the ending of Apartheid, it would not surprise me if that’s part of his plan already.

Based on their current management model of “desks on wheels” they’d probably be most comfortable becoming a worker-owned coop. I know I’m in dreamland, but it would be amazing if they could go that direction when Gabe is gone.

Dirtier than the ones I’ve been to within the last couple of years, but I’m also comparing a Wichita KS area Steak-N-Shake to Seward and Columbus Nebraska Amigos/King Classic - so maybe not the most fair comparison.

Boost. It was my preferred Reddit client back before spez Elon-ed Reddit, so when the Lemmy version released, I purchased it to thank the dev for putting in the work to support Lemmy. It made my move to Lemmy super smooth.

I also use Voyager on occasion.

Not saying Ford wasn’t an exploitative nazi sympathizer, he was. But can’t leave the Dodge brothers out of some of the blame while you’re handing it out. They’re the whole reason companies have to put shareholders first, after they sued Ford for trying to invest dividends back into the company and employee wages.

Another common thing I’ve seen is people paying cash for the nice thing they can’t really afford and then realizing they can’t afford necessities like groceries and then those end up going on the credit card.

On the topic of fentanyl, if I may be so bold as to ask, do that many Americans genuinely give a shit about any fentanyl coming across any of our borders? I suppose those who do drugs that are likely to be cut with fentanyl, but as an American whose drug use consists of at most alcohol and legal weed, fentanyl isn’t something I’m particularly worried about. I’m not saying it’s not destructive or dangerous, but it’s not something I ever feel worried about. Maybe I’m just too poor to be exposed to people who do the kind of drugs that get laced with fentanyl, or maybe I’m lacking more empathy than I realize, but while I’ve seen sad examples of people whose lives have been destroyed by opiates and fentanyl in news programs and documentaries, I also have a hard time not seeing the fear of Fentanyl as anything more than wealthy parents like Trump, who know their kids are doing cocaine or other drugs, worried that their kids (like Don Jr) will accidentally OD on some laced drugs, which again, maybe it’s an empathy problem on my part, but maybe if you aren’t smart enough to test your drugs maybe you shouldn’t be doing them. I don’t know, it just seems like dhe dumbest issue to tank the whole economy over (unless that was the goal all along, and you just want a boogeyman-scapegoat for an excuse). It’s not that I even really care about “the economy” that much either, but I do care about ordinary people being able to afford housing and food.

There is a plan going around over on TikTok that everyone should delete their Meta accounts on the 19th (when the TikTok ban goes into effect). We’ll see how many actually do it, but so far it’s fascinating to watch.

Trump already asked them to delay the ban until after he gets into office (politico article source). This might say less about his promises, and more about the Supreme Court not being as much in his pocket as he thinks.

But why would it matter? A QR code works regardless of the technology used to display it (be that paper, a screen, or a bunch of rubix cubes). What would the benefit of requiring digital boarding passes be? Unless the airline wants to force passengers to use their app so they can sell customer data and sell ads, there’s no real benefit to the actual boarding process.

I might be getting whooshed, but she’d be the same age “by now” unless there was some interstellar-type time travel going on. (Not trying to be a jerk, and your point still stands, just getting a small chuckle about the idea that someone not smoking would have aged an extra 20 years in the same amount of time).

China needs us economically as much as we need them for manufacturing. Sure, we’re trying to be more independent and make more domestically, and they are trying to be more independent economically through BRICS. Neither country is doing a very good job of attaining their goals of independence, but to keep up appearances both countries like to simultaneously pretend there’s not a relationship and also that they are the top in the relationship.

The reality is both countries have some wealthy “oligarchs” who exploit workers and governments that mostly only work to benefit themselves and their oligarch friends. China will take out an oligarch here and there when they decide they’re getting too powerful, and Americans get to elect some of our leaders, other than that we’re not very different. Deep down both governments understand it would be political suicide to antagonize the other to the point meaningfully harming them. At least both current governments that is, Trump is probably too dumb to realize we need each other, so that’s a potential wild card, but North Korea is almost certainly a bigger threat to both the US and China than we will to each other for decades.

I still use DDG as my “daily driver” (I know there are better options for privacy and avoiding big tech, but I haven’t yet found anything independent that is good enough for me to switch to full time yet). I bookmarked Stract a while back, and it proved useful a few months back when Microsoft had an outage that took down Bing and by extension, Duck Duck Go. I do like Stract, their index seems to be enough larger than MoJeek (another independent search with their own index) that it gives me better results.

Stract might not be as open as I’d like, but it’s nice to have as an option, and I’m never going to complain about having more search providers with independent indexes.

Yeah, it’s like they think buying solar panels from overseas is the same as importing oil from overseas. When China is selling real “energy independence” from for less than you could make it yourself.

I have had someone tell me that they’d rather live in an economic system “like we have in America” where people have a chance at rags to riches, than a system “like Germany, where the social safety net means the average person doesn’t have a chance at making it big.”

If anyone ever tells you wealthy people are intelligent, don’t believe them.

While I would never wish for a trans woman to have to endure that kind of environment, I’d love to see a trans woman take that as a challenge and go win just to make the “you can always tell” crowd lose their minds. Unfortunately it would probably be super dangerous considering how violent people can get when they discover they can’t always tell, so it’s probably a horrible idea. But a person can dream.

Honestly, Unreal has been in a different league ever since Epic started dumping Fortnite money into it. That’s probably why Unity tried to start charging more, because they’ve been falling behind for the past few years and can’t afford to keep up. Not that I think it’s good to leave Epic/Unreal without decent competition, but I’m more inclined to blame Fortnite for the downfall of Unity than the indie devs Unity just scared off with their desperate cash-grab.

The big ones for me are a cover/replacement for the fabric face gasket, prescription lens inserts, and for long play sessions a fan insert for the headset can be a nice to have, but I don’t run mine all the time since sometimes it’s just adding noise. The face gasket has probably been the hardest thing to get right, since a lot of third-party ones either don’t have enough padding, or are hard to swap in and out, so I kinda prefer having a full extra magnetic insert so I can easily change between the original which is most comfortable for me, and something else that I’m less worried about sweating all over for more active games.

I’ve spent over $1500 on VR (HTC Vive, and Valve Index, plus some accessories for both). I’ve never been able to talk myself into even a Quest 2 for $200 back when they went on sale shortly before they raised the price due to “supply chain issues.” I enjoy VR experiences and I’m personally okay with paying enthusiast prices for hardware that improves the experience, but I want nothing to do with Meta/Facebook’s ecosystem, at any price.