Putin also was able to only serve for two terms, so he replaced himself with a crony until he could change the law to remove term limits…

I don’t know what’s up with the algorithm pushing these lately. If it’s a video with 4 views from a channel with no subscribers I’m probably not interested in it. Sometimes they have a good thumbnail/title so I give them a chance but 9/10 times it’s terrible. Also often extremely right wing for whatever reason.

Sounds like Russia is already expecting hyperinflation

I thought that without blocking cookies the tracking is still active, even if you’re not being served ads from them. In those same LinkedIn privacy settings you’re automatically opted into having your data used to train AI models.

LinkedIn has some of the most obfuscated and complex ad targeting settings I’ve encountered. There needs to be a retirement to have a one click solution to disable ad personalization.

Honestly the sacrifices they make are pretty reasonable for every day use too. I used ultra cheap Umidigi smartphones for four years as a student and they held up quite well with a huge upside being shockingly good repairability. The biggest downside is the rear camera usually, I wish I had better photos from those times.

You can get the Umidigi G9 5G for just $99 shipped on aliexpress. Even budget phones under $100 get 8gb RAM, 128GB storage , and 90hz displays now. There really aren’t as many sacrifices as you’d expect, and by the time you spend $200 you even get plenty respectable cameras that would be flagship quality just a few years ago.

He’s far too busy with X, Trump, and his relationship drama to have any time to do anything close to being involved. Of the company’s he’s bought or been involved in creating SpaceX is toward the bottom of his priorities from what I hear.

Not a Tesla fan and I absolutely despise the cult around Elon. SpaceX is a bit different though. Luckily with Elon’s many, many side project misadventures he’s pretty hands-off with SpaceX. Ultimately it comes down to being largely engineer driven and given sufficient (but yes, still government) funding to try new things without the scrutiny of direct government agencies. The hours are usually terrible from what I hear, but this varies team to team.

My biggest complaint is that they do lowball engineers using the stock as reasoning for why it’s worth accepting. FWIW historically that has been the case, and many engineers there do effectively have golden handcuffs. But expecting infinite golden handcuff level growth forever is unrealistic.

At the same time those Republicans who they’d hope to gain support from by allowing to vote by mail now believe that voting by mail will lead to fraud.

Honestly early voting isn’t too much of a pain. I already know I’ll be out of town for work on election day but because of early voting I’ll be able to get it done before then. It’s silly how complicated a process they make registration and how most of the polling locations are churches, but allowing voting by mail won’t fix the main issue here, registration.

Web browsers don’t integrate to a single account and payment system, nor do they preemptively load entire websites before you start browsing. So you’re always waiting for actions to complete or for images to load which feels slower. Mobile websites also tend to be very bloated slowing things down further than if the same functions were done natively in an app. There’s also no consistency between websites so you never know when something will/won’t work nor how far away you are from checkout. And then to top it all off there’s browser compatibility, which is typically pretty poor for anything that isn’t Chrome/Safari.

If a web browsers could really do the same thing all these companies wouldn’t feel the need to make their own device specific apps.

And you can repair them without needing to shut down a whole railway. All these projects to put solar panels in novel places are totally pointless and solving a problem that doesn’t exist.

This is why everything apps are so popular in many parts of the world. Using a mini-app from the internet running within another app is far preferable to downloading a whole app you may never need to use again. The way they do it in China is so seamless even if you’ve never visited the business before. There’s never any special account creation or entering of payment information.

Obviously it’s pretty terrible in terms of user privacy since the everything app has basically unchecked access to all of your personal information and habits, but the convenience is incredible and feels decades ahead of how apps work in the US.

Did you know that you can save 11% on EVERYTHING?

I literally bought the soft toy bear that sings the jingle. I’m surprised they haven’t expanded toward the coasts, I never even considered going to Lowes or Home Depot when I lived relatively nearby one. I was initially not a fan because they put the local True Value out of business but the selection and prices are just too good at Menards with much more silly charm. And the 11% rebates were amazing if you remembered to actually mail them in.

Not sure, this was 2 weeks ago. Apparently the season was somewhat earlier than normal this year. The C&O Canal trail is the place to go though.

This goes a bit deeper than their connection to America. The whole reason they were aligned with America in the first place was their mutual hatred of Iran. The Saudis HATE Iran. Coincidentally Hamas’s biggest supporter is Iran. Israel surely knows this and for similar reasons why most of the Arabian peninsula states are keeping their distance from this war.

I finally managed to try pawpaws this year. It was quite nice in Maryland and they’re all over along riverbanks. They had nearly identical taste and texture to the sweetsops available throughout Asia, just with larger seeds. I have no idea why they’re not widely available, the flavor is sweet and mild like most fruits that are popular in the US.

WMATA busses need serious work and there aren’t enough bike lanes for last mile connectivity, but by US standards it’s about as good as it gets outside of NYC.

The busses are the main differentiation between European and US cities in my experience. Only Seattle and SF get close to running a decent bus service.

The generics I’ve tried all work but noticably worse. The quality of the bristles is different and it doesn’t leave the same clean feeling. The price of the genuine replacements is stupid and they keep increasing it, but I’ve given up on finding a good quality generic one and just pay the price. They don’t need replacing that often anyway.

If anyone does know of a good quality C2 compatible replacement please do let me know though.

Using stock as collateral for loans with insanely low interest rates is very, very common among even engineers in big tech. It’s a well known loophole passed on by the older engineers/managers at the companies to the younger ones. From the perspective of eventually paying the tax it doesn’t help, but inflation will outpace the interest on one of these loans so it does lower the effective rate and more importantly for the economy as a whole is cash earned/spent without having been taxed. Ya it will need to be paid back eventually, but that can take decades.

There are a ton of things to be upset at Apple for, but as someone who would never consider owning an iPhone I do understand where they were coming from. The problem was the aging batteries no longer being able to source sufficient current to run the processor at full speed. Since the batteries in iPhones are nearly impossible to replace this meant the phones would crash whenever performing a demanding task leaving much of the battery capacity unusable and the phone e-waste. By throttling the processor they reduced the current peaks and allowed these phones to continue operating.

My Moto G4 had the exact same thing happen, but without a software update to throttle the phone and hide the issue from me it started to crash all the time. I simply replaced the battery, but for most people the only option in this case would be to buy a new phone.

Apple probably should have made it an option even if enabled by default on phones with aged batteries. That way you’d need to acknowledge the risk of running at full speed again and not be upset when the inevitable crashes come. Of course Apple being Apple they refused to give the consumer the option so simply throttled them all.

Despite the outcry claiming the opposite, I’d bet that decision significantly reduced the amount of phone waste from non tech savvy consumers.