ICE is under DHS. DHS is also doing a bunch of wildly unpopular political “investigations”. There are also a lot of concerns about surveillance in general, which DHS is definitely doing (like buying adtech data on everyone) It is not at all controversial to call for scrapping the whole department. Maybe the messaging needs refinement.

The US is currently run by the world’s most notorious pedophile whose actions directly made beef more expensive to the point that the Hamburger Helper brand is now basically becoming the Hot Dog Helper brand

Add some gochujang? Add some hot sauce? Canned tuna can be very good if you know what to do.

NASA flies U-2 spy planes over wildfires. They might be able to do the same thing with the SR-71. I really don’t know, that’s my best guess for a realistic use case.

There could be some legitimate uses (NASA operates U-2 spy planes over wildfires to this day) but it would not surprise me at all if it is for some dumb reason.

I said like a smart plug. You could easily add those features to something relatively dumb like a smart plug instead of having some insane data collection computer in your fridge

My fridge is old enough it can purchase alcohol in the US (21+ years old). It has an ice maker and water dispenser, both inside (nothing in the door, fewer things to break). The only tech I would want it to have is something like what you could get with an IoT smart plug - basic metrics like temperature, power draw, door open time, etc.

AFAIK the same model I have is still available in some form, and is still available without any wireless connection capabilities. I’ll probably buy it again.

I don’t think it is strange at all that the Russians want them in power since the Russians are also Nazis.

Moto Pizza in the Seattle area rode the Detroit-style pizza hype up, expanded, and apparently tried out robots (didn’t know this until I read this article). I don’t know if they will fail, but it wouldn’t surprise me, they could be on that “expanding too fast” trajectory. Some of their other expansions have been into malls. I haven’t tried it but their business model seems bad.

In the Seattle area there’s another related thing happening, a company is trying to make a semi-automated Detroit style pizza thing that can fit in a food truck. There’s a few of them around and they don’t seem to be doing well. One of them is literally named “67 Pizza” and yes, it seems to be named after the whole 6-7 meme.

There’s a ton of app builders out there that are basically some crypto scam wrapped around Claude (or whatever). There’s a lot of idiots pumping out code slop.

You’re incorrect here, self regulation in this context means letting the individual industries try to follow all sorts of laws/regulations on their own. For example, Boeing was allowed to self-regulate for some time (and they probably still are to some degree) meaning the FAA and other relevant government agencies were not doing things like inspections - they left a lot of it up to Boeing. Then Boeing had two 737 MAX crashes due to MCAS and a door panel blow off near Portland, OR

They kinda aren’t though? In many ways they are but they had a whole plan with Project 2025 and they actually went through with a good chunk of it.

I think it is dangerous that people keep referring to them as stupid. They are in many ways, but they are primarily evil.

I just had my birthday and was excited to be no longer eligible for the draft. I don’t think this will actually go anywhere (we have evil trolls running everything, they’re probably doing this “for the lulz” or to “own the libs” or whatever)

A draft at this point would result in massive civil unrest. I’m pretty sure even casual MAGA people would lose their shit. The Iran war is already massively unpopular.

8TB external hard drive ($160) + old laptop + “H265 sources” = way cheaper than a bunch of streaming services

I’ve begun my switch over to Mint from Windows. Its kinda wild to suggest normal users to switch to Arch of all things. Netflix (and streaming apps in general) straight to Jellyfin is also a stretch because there are… extra steps

Or they’ll just build a backdoor into it (it probably already exists) and never talk about it again.

I put Google cameras on my house years ago out of convenience and this is it, I’m spending the money on a PoE system where my footage stays on my own hardware.

There’s sort of one in the US city I live in. The city manages it and as far as I know they don’t care if you go pick a few apples. It is part of a public park that used to be a farm/orchard, then turned into a small golf course, then was partially sold off for housing development and the core farm/orchard area was either given to or bought by the city. It also has a community garden which always has a waitlist for new plots.

That’s the weird thing about the US: we do actually have nice things, and communities that want to improve things. We also have suburbia hellscape.

My US city has a few parks with apple trees, herb gardens, and other edibles. I don’t think there’s any law or rule against people going out and harvesting small individual use amounts as long as you don’t damage the plant. They do send out volunteer crews at harvest time (for the apples at least) and donate the harvest to food banks.

I don’t buy rosemary because there’s a bunch of parks around with rosemary bushes.