Public payphones in the streets and emergency phones alongside highways have also been removed (at least in my country). So yeah, our society expects us to have our own phones with us whenever we’re away from home.

That article reads like they’re trying to sell the bear’s skin before they’ve caught it. They kidnapped the Venezuelan leader, but the rest of the old regime is still in power. The USA doesn’t control anything on the ground, yet they’re talking as if it’s a done deal and that they can just walk in and take over.

I also wouldn’t want to be a us oil company employee that gets send over to Venezuela. Even if the USA somehow manages to take control of the oil fields, there’s likely to be a lot of sabotage and guerilla attacks.

Well, that’s a bit of a relief.

I still believe that my regular toilet has a plume because I can feel the moisture of the droplets, so I’ll continue to keep the lid down, but still good to know that it isn’t that spectacular.

“These invisible particles go on to coat and spread onto surfaces like floors and counters; or objects like hand towels, bathmats or even toothbrushes.
…
Toilets are scientifically proven to continue to produce contaminated toilet plumes over multiple successive flushes as indicated in the above video.
…
Toilet aerosols are known to contain Norovirus, SARS Coronavirus, Salmonella and many other Diseases.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_plume

TLDR: always put the lid down before flushing.

Chlorine washing doesn’t kill off all pathogens, it only suppresses them so that they no longer show up in standard tests. In other words, chlorine washing conceals the presence of pathogens.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/13/science-on-safety-of-chlorinated-chicken-misunderstood "But the academics point to research published last year which found washing food in bleach does not kill many of the pathogens that cause food poisoning. Instead, it sends them into a “viable but non-culturable state”, which means they are not picked up in standard tests, which take a sample of the food and try to culture any germs on it.

The presence of the pathogens is thus masked by the bleach, but they are still dangerous to human health.

Erik Millstone, professor of science policy at Sussex University and co-author of the briefing, told the Guardian lives would be at stake if food based on these lower standards were sold in the UK. “I am satisfied [by the evidence] that US food poisoning cases are significantly higher than in the UK. A minority of people suffer fatal complications,” he said. “There will certainly be fatalities, and they typically affect vulnerable people, such as infants, small children and the elderly.”"

The late medieval Burgundians will have been the first to call it the low countries (les pays-bas). They acquired these territories (various duchies and counties in Belgium + Netherlands + bits around it) over time, not as one piece of land. All those different territories had different laws and traditions, different crown laws (HRE or kingdom of France), different local charters, … It wasn’t one country, so plural makes sense.

Most of those do make sense from a 19th century or older viewpoint, so I suspect that it’s not just a coincidence that those words were linked to those countries. If it was only one or a few with an ulterior meaning, then I could believe it to be a coincidence, but it’s most of them. I more believe that there were chinese word artists at work who looked for words with both a fitting meaning and the right sound.

When it comes to nature, the USA is a really beautiful country. France gave the world the Code Napoléon, which is one of the most influential evolutions in law systems. Britain’s success in it’s colonies and in the industrial revolution was very often based on the endeavours of individuals, ie heroes. Northern Germans are sticklers for following rules, politeness etc (which was back then viewed very positively by others, but has since become a bit tainted because an attitude of the law is the law will often lead to inhumanity). Mexico: not a clue. Korea: I just have vague guesses. Japan, when seen from northern China, is where the sun rises.

NATO is such a big threat to Russia, that as soon as Finland had joined NATO, Russia moved it’s troops away from that area. Russia’s problem with NATO is not that it sees a defensive alliance like NATO as a threat, the problem for them is that they can’t bully and invade NATO countries should they feel like it. Which is also why all the formerly occupied countries that are next to Russia, want to join NATO. Who doesn’t want their country to be safe from invasion by a fascist state? Tankies apparently.

Maybe that the government reactions don’t engage with the anger, is what makes those reactions worthy of inclusion? Actually, scratch that, whether or not those reactions do or don’t acknowledge the anger is irrelevant to whether or not they should be included. Those reactions are relevant to the article because they inform us of what the other involved parties are doing.

In this article those reactions at the end do not fit in with the main story of the angry people, because they don’t acknowledge that anger. I’d call them tone-deaf reactions, but a journalist isn’t allowed to write that (except in opinion pieces), so the journalist can only give those tone-deaf reactions as they were (+ provide some context about them, which I appreciated). That the anger of those people was so far only responded to with tone-deaf reactions, makes those tone-deaf reactions very relevant to the anger of the people.

Not unfocused at all imo. The article says that Hong Kong would traditionally hold an open inquiry in cases like this and then goes on to explain why that is probably not going to happen for this disaster (hint: authoritarians don’t like open enquiries). And then at the end of the article there are some reactions from other more remotely involved parties + some context about those remarks. The end of an article is where those reactions are traditionally put and reactions from various parties are always going to be more varied in nature, but that doesn’t make them non topical or “unfocused”.

It used to be that the first result to a lot of queries, was a link to the relevant Wikipedia article. But that first result has now been replaced by an ai summary of the relevant Wikipedia article. If people don’t need more info than that summary, they don’t click through. That Ai summary is a layer of abstraction that wouldn’t be able to exist without the source material that it’s now making less viable to exist. Kinda like a parasite.

As I understand it, the public perception of Trump was distorted by how he was portrayed on The Apprentice: https://www.psypost.org/new-research-sheds-light-on-the-influence-of-the-apprentice-on-donald-trumps-political-rise/

The producers at NBC had to jump through a lot of hoops to make Trump appear competent. Their chief marketing officer from that time is very sorry for what he did: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2024-10-16/we-created-a-tv-illusion-for-the-apprentice-but-the-real-trump-threatens-america

Once Trump became the republican candidate, the right-wing media took up the responsibility of filtering and distorting what their audience got to see and hear about Trump.

Republicans really have something against the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, it seems to get targeted at every opportunity.

Edit: as it turns out, republicans really do have a grudge against the agency, they’ve been targeting it since before Trump got reelected: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/22/conservatives-cyber-cisa-politics-00122794 Countering misinformation campaigns was a bridge too far for republicans.

Would the outcome have been the same without people in the media repeatedly bringing this to everyone’s attention? Probably not, because there would have been no public pressure against it, while the shadow groups that want this would have still been lobbying the politicians.

Something bad is going to happen.
Some people advocate to stop that bad thing.
Even more people are holding their clutches that the bad thing might happen.
Because of public pressure, action is undertaken to prevent the bad thing from happening.
Thanks to those efforts, the bad thing is successfully averted.

Some random person: that bad thing was never going to happen, look at all those gullible people who were panicking over nothing, we could have just done nothing and the outcome would have been the same.

Also known as the “preparedness paradox”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox

Yep, undisputed. Except by religious zealots who resort to bad faith arguments when some of their cultist beliefs are not accepted as fact by non believers, but on those subjects, those people aren’t taken seriously by anyone except others from their cult, so yes, pretty much undisputed.

Then check the sources listed under that wiki article.

If you couldn’t be bothered to look up something as simple and undisputed as this, then it’s really silly to make a stand with “Wikipedia isn’t a source”, it just makes you look like a bad troll.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh

You should have just looked this up yourself. It’s going to be the first result in most search engines.

I’m on Android and android has something called app pinning, but that still allows full functionality of the open app and is thus open to abuse. I looked up the guided access system and it’s a lot better than the android method, but it seems much more convoluted to set up. I just want a simple option: you can look at what is currently playing, but touching does nothing.

I want this, but not just for toddlers, just for handing over my phone to anyone really. Put on some media (photo, slideshow, video), lock your phone inputs, hand it over to someone else to look at, without having to worry that they will invade your privacy as a prank.

Putin is so popular in Russia, that even the dead vote for him.