On X, Mr Engel has popularised the idea of “heritage Americans”

Heritage Americans. So like the 6 Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy? Or possibly others in the region such as the Wendat or Lenape? No? Then the Algonquin tribes certainly, like the Ojibwe, Shawnee or the Miami. Not them either? My mistake, you must mean the Cherokee. Huh? The Navajo, Hopi, or Apache then? The Inuit?

Them: “No. You know…”

Nowadays, iOS sees just as many vulnerabilities as every other popular OS.

I’m no Apple fanboy but Apple security is more than the OS. Since they also produce all of the hardware, it means they can do things at the hardware level and either make available or restrict things to the OS that Windows cannot do because Microsoft doesn’t control all the hardware makers.

I’m posting this in Asahi Linux on an M2 powered Macbook. Its been an interesting experience learning not only the benefits of this as a hardware platform, but also its limitations from the FOSS point of view.

There won’t be a vaccine for the next strain

…

and there won’t be a vaccine for that either, unless you’re very rich.

A trip to Mexico or Canada to get a vaccine shot isn’t that expensive.

Full disclaimer: I’m no expert in geopolitics. I’m just an amateur internet reader on the topic.

I think 2026 will be the year China has to decide what it wants to do with Russia. Prior to this China was gaining significantly from sales to Russia of non-military and dual use products when eventually made it into Russian military supply chains through vast networks of brokers from Kazakhstan to Türkiye. Additionally China was able to take payment in oil and refined petroleum products negating global SWIFT restrictions imposed by sanctions.

Three things have change in December of 2025:

• Kazakhstan has now imposed strict controls on exports of dual use products to Russia via Kazak transport networks. This doesn’t mean that dual use products will never find a way to Russia, but instead they’ll have to resort to smuggling which is far less reliable and far more expensive to Russia. This is a major chokepoint for Russian logistics, but also means easy and consistent sales from China are now bottle-necked. The result is China will be moving far fewer goods to Russia.
• The Russian shadow fleet, has been targeted by Ukrainian special operators and drone pilots resulting in the loss of a number of tankers. Additionally the USA has seized a number of vessels through port in Venezuela which also served part of the shadow fleet network. The result of both of these things is that insurance costs have skyrocketed. Vessel and crew availability has plummeted. Crews are refusing to take on Russian shadow fleet work for fear of being blown up by Ukraine or seized by the USA. So this means China can’t get paid for any sales to Russia in any currency it cares about (oil) beyond a trickle through other means.
• Russia has pissed off Türkiye with consistent drone incursions into the nation. This is not good for Russia. Not only is Russia dependent upon Türkiye for avoiding sanctions, but also for regular access to the Black Sea through the Bosphorus Strait. While Türkiye has already restricted Russian military vessels transit years ago, it still regularly allows for Russian civilian/merchant traffic under the Montreux Convention rules. However, there are substantiated claims that Russia has been outfitting tankers in disguise. These tankers can containing drone launching platforms and carry GRU agents to perform asymmetric operations against NATO countries such as disrupting civilian air traffic. With the drone incursion, this might be enough for Türkiye to decide that even civilian tankers are military and deny them access to enter or leave the Black Sea. Just this week Türkiye scrambled a Turkish F-16 and shot down a Russian drone approaching the Türkiye coast. This is a shift in behavior from Türkiye in the past.

Where will Russia go when it has pissed off these vital intermediaries it absolutely depends on to continue the invasion in Ukraine?

There’s a really good chance he’s already dead.

I’ll go one further:

• Assumes the bulb is in reach. When I read the problem I assumed the bulb was in a ceiling fixture out of reach. Nowhere in the text description did it specify the physical location, except “in the other room”.

Crewed or non-crewed even! They can’t even launch crewless Progress resupply vehicles to the ISS right now.

Preliminarily, police said the agents approached a white van, but the vehicle attempted to run them over.

I don’t believe a single thing ICE says. They’ve already shown they exaggerate or straight up fabricate claims to act violently or shoot people.

I doubt I ran into that, and I think a lot of it is just moderators removing things

Have you confirmed moderator deletions from the modlog or is it just a sense you have?

The Fragmentation Trap If you try to do everything yourself (the “solopreneur” route), you theoretically need a “tech stack” of 4-5 different subscriptions.

I’m not sure you appreciate how amazing it is today that a single “solopreneur” can actually perform all those roles all by themselves with software and skills of their own. Each one of those used to be an entire profession that required years of school and tens of thousands of dollars of tools and materials.

That said, there are good free open source tools that do most of those big things you cited. Examples include

• photo editor - GIMP
• Kdenlive - video editor

Would love to hear your thoughts on navigating this expensive landscape.

Starting any business requires money and time. You can “buy” shortcuts in time by spending money on more expensive tools. Alternatively if you have more time, you can do things more manually.

For rich people, it’s not about using it or making a practical purchase. Its a way to show others how much you care about them (none).

I was thinking about this topic just a few days ago. I have another theory. Yes, yacht ownership is a method of communication, but they’re not trying to communicate with the common people, but instead indicating to each other of their level of wealth so they can find equal peers or greater peers to associate with, or greater to avoid.

A rich person with $10M net worth has almost nothing in common with a rich person with a $1B net worth.

Considering OP has a Taiwanese flag in his username as well as a Japansese anime character name (with the kanji as well as the romaji, and a Chinese name (the hanzi as well as the pinyin), I’m guessing OP is at least moderately aware of non-Western cultures practices on the topic and I don’t immediately suspect OP is judging people for their answers either way.

This article doesn’t explain how closing the power plants saves consumers money.

If this is like most aging coal plants, they cost more to produce electricity than they can sell the electricity for. There’s a whole bunch of reasons for this but the short answer is that cheaper sources of electricity are available.

It doesn’t explain how existing energy demands can be met in spite of the closures.

Its attached to one of the largest power grids in North America, the PJM. Power generators bid for generation contracts once a year. There are dozens of other power plants stretching from New York into southern Ontario on this same grid. If the operator had scheduled this one for closure, that decision was likely made 2 to 4 years ago and all this time has been in planning for that transition.

It doesn’t explain why Trump wants them operational and his perceived benefits (even those unfounded and blatantly wrong).

It doesn’t sounds like the DoE provided any reasons, but we can likely guess this is trump and his cronies trying to destroy green energy and prop up more expensive and polluting fossil fuel sources to enrich themseleves.

In this case, I’m a spaceflight fan, so I like talking about the topic. Also, I don’t do it for this specific poster, its clear they didn’t even read the article or understand it, but for other that may be thinking the same vague question (because of a flawed premise) that this poster did.

Wouldn’t it make more sense for Brazil to send up their own satellites with rockets that are already capable

I’m assuming you mean “rockets that are already capable” from other nations? Brazil already does this.

than to waste time, money, energy and

Brazil isn’t wasting any money. This is a South Korean company launching a South Korean satellite from Brazil. In fact, Brazil is benefiting financially, which could, to your original point, feed more people because they have the money from these launches.

hurt the environment by trying to launch their own?

Funny enough, launching from places like Brazil is actually less environmentally damaging than launching from the USA, China, or Russia because this Brazilian launch site is on the equator, meaning less fuel is needed to launch from here than other nations with spaceflight programs. This geography is why Europe’s launch site is also pretty close by in French Guiana.

So if your concern is less environment impact, you would want MORE of the worlds rockets to come from here.

I’m not saying Brazil doesn’t need to launch a satellite, I’m saying they don’t need their own rocket program.

As already stated, this isn’t a Brazilian rocket, nor a Brazilian rocket program.

I already addressed that. There are more problems that humanity needs to solve that spaceflight can address.

They don’t need more.

How do you know? Feeding people isn’t the only problem facing humanity, and its not only problem spaceflight can address.

On the downside, Energy Dome’s facility takes up about twice as much land as a comparable capacity lithium-ion battery would. And the domes themselves, which are about the height of a sports stadium at their apex, and longer, might stand out on a landscape and draw some NIMBY pushback.

This is surprisingly good! I would have figured it would have taken far more than twice the land than a Lithium battery solution.

I was thinking about much larger scale bubbles in “unwanted” geological depressions such as old open pit mines or rock quarries. The depression in the ground might offer more protection allowing it to scale up higher in volume.

Your internet traffic is already encrypted in transit, that what the “s” in https means.

You don’t get the “s” until you have the “https”. Your DNS request which turns www.TheWebsiteYouDoNotWantKnown.com into its IP address happens before you have the “s” in “https”. By default, that request is sent in plaintext, and frequently by default, to your internet service provider. So an outside monitor may not be able to see the contents of the website once you establish your https connection, they likely know that you went there and have a good idea how long you stayed on it.

While its also possible to encrypt the DNS request with DoH or DoT, its not on by default and requires the user to take configuration actions in their browser. If they’re looking at VPNs for the first time, they likely don’t know this and are sending their DNS requests in the clear.