They’ve gotten a bit better with this lately I think. Although it has certainly gotten slower over the years, my A52 4G is definitely still usable despite being released over 4yr ago as a mid-range phone.

Has anyone seen customs ever actually search an electronic device before? I travel internationally nearly every month and have never seen this before, even in China.

Thank you for clarifying that this removes the requirement to spend the money where it was allocated. This answers my question and could indeed be worse than a shutdown.

Most MAGA Republicans would rather a shutdown than giving in to Democratic points. The alternative wasn’t Democrats getting one or two of their points in the budget in exchange for it passing, the alternative was a government shutdown.

I fully agree that when the Democrats have power they do absolutely nothing with it, but in this case I fail to see how they could have gotten any of their points in.

So although passing this budget was obviously terrible, how is it worse than no budget at all? No budget followed by a government shutdown would be the ideal case for Trump and Elon to take yet more power from Congress. The Democrats aren’t in any good position of power right now so expecting the budget to include any of their priorities is unrealistic.

Amap doesn’t support English unfortunately. Neither does Baidu. So it’s about as useful in the US as Google Maps is in China.

Edit: Apparently as of late January 2025 it supports English. This is SO USEFUL for foreigners visiting China, it was so annoying to navigate before without being able to read Chinese characters.

Exactly this Russia still has elections and an “opposition”. You can still be in control without necessarily being in the presidential position just as Putin was while Prime Minister after running out of terms.

Let’s just hope that we don’t use that position to terrorize other nations further than we already have

Unfortunately that’s not how a large portion of the population sees it. To many the economy a president inherits matters more than the state they leave it in.

With the Trump appointed supreme court it definitely won’t hold up, but maybe it could delay whatever meaningless charges he can come up with long enough for another election. If we’re lucky enough to have another real election that is at least.

I wish they’d book Four Seasons Landscaping again. That was hilarious, a good indicator of the chaos and incompetence which followed.

This also is under the assumption you’ve met your deductable for the year already which for many HDHP can sometimes be hard.

Their access to news is controlled and for some topics all available news is what we’d call propaganda. Particularly anything about Japan or the Taiwan issue. Most people I know there realize this to an extent but without any other information do still believe the core idea even if skeptical of details.

But at the same time I’d argue there’s no such thing as a population that’s not propagandized. In the US the big news corporations only will present views favorable to their profitability and continued growth. Sure they disagree with eachother, but it’s still always a pro-business view. State news from Russia is (I’d argue rightly) not available on many US platforms to discourage it’s influence for example.

As a portion of median income it’s still far far better than the out of pocket costs in the US (just like pretty much every other country on earth)

Brain worms for everyone!

Generally it’s not too hard to disable the smart TV part of it and just use HDMI for TVs running Android. But on Roku TVs for whatever reason you need to connect them to the internet and a Roku account at least once to unlock the picture settings. Hardware features of a TV like brightness adjustment have no business relying on some random server.

The writing has been on the wall for a while now. All retirement planning I’ve done is based on the assumption that SSA won’t be around by the time I retire. The fact that we can’t even remove the taxable maximum to retain some degree of financial solvency is proof enough.

I think the most likely course of action is that we will get some portion of our contributions back, but not the full amount. I just hope that they don’t raise the retirement age so much to try to retain the illusion of being able to get a full payout. I’d rather get a fraction of my contributions back at 67 than need to risk living to a much older age but receiving full benefits.

Not sure who would buy it full price but in most of the apps if you’re not picky there’s always some amount of deals to get a meal under $5. I only go occasionally as the deals aren’t as good as they used to be across the board and the quality is universally terrible. Taco Bell is also its own unique thing which no other Mexican restaurant will get you so occasionally it just sounds good.

That being said in my area you can go to nearly any proper restaurant and get carry-out under $15 with Texas sized portions. As someone with an unhealthy work/life balance particularly in the evenings, this or bulk curry is how I usually eat dinner.

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…

NYT forecast is 90% Trump now. It’s crazy that anyone would vote for him, really shows that policy plays no part in politics. It’ll be interesting to see how he tears down the judicial system to remove the many charges against him.