The trick is to put a tiny dummy load on the USB charger. Just buy the cheapest USB cable, cut the end off, and solder (or twist) a resistor between red and black. Boom.
Had a whiny USB power strip at my office desk that stopped whining when my phone was plugged in. Small resistor took care of that perfectly, cheaply, and nondestructively. Got a kick out of confused colleagues asking why I had a dangly cable plugged in with nothing but electrical tape on the end.
“We’re too poor to afford to risk anything” is insulting to all the popular revolutions which happened because people were actually poor. Like, sorry not sorry, but the median American proletarian may live paycheck-to-paycheck but still lives in untold luxury compared to a 1917 Bolshevik who had to go to war sharing two boots and one rifle with multiple people, or the median revolutionary in Nepal last year (one of the poorest countries in the world).
Americans really have it too good to risk it all, that analysis is correct. They could have it a lot better, sure, but threat of not having it so good anymore is what keeps them complacent.
Convict you in absentia then use the judgement as an excuse to freeze your bank account and ban you from all forms of banking (something that the US has the power to impose on foreigner because they hold every western bank by the balls due to their reliance on the fed)?
I don’t know if they would do it, but it certainly wouldn’t be unconstitutional; the US have long made it clear that foreigners on foreign land don’t have any legal rights whatsoever. I would be having a long conversation with lawyers to get some hard assurances before going down that path.
De Wever is a far-right populist, this is just bluster.
Don’t forget about the political clash as well. Flemish separatist movements have always ran into a brick wall: Brussels is majority French-speaking, entirely within Flemish territory, and wants nothing to do with their nonsense. No matter how much Flanders might want to cut off Wallonia and reunite with their orange daddy, they won’t be able to bring Brussels with them, and that would be political and economic suicide.
This American obsession with those awful abbreviations is exhausting. Foreigners should not have to remember if AL is Alabama or Alaska or MI is Mississippi or Michigan, especially when lacking any context clue as to which one it is. “ME” for Maine is straight up evil. Can you name the TLD of Peru of the top of your head?
There are places where abbreviations make sense: where there will be extreme repetition (TLDs, letters) or where space and readability are under tight constraint (license plates, next to the points counter on a football broadcast). An already extremely sparse infographic with no hard layout restriction is decidedly not either of those things and should therefore just use the full goddamn name instead of trying to signal “hey look this is made by an American for an American, fuck everyone else”.
… This is not a made-up thought experiment though? We do have empirical data? Out of the five (5) companies mentioned in this thread, one (1) does not fit the pattern outlined in the OP. Seems pretty clear that something is going on. Unless you can point to some kind of sampling bias (by finding additional counterexamples), I don’t see how you can just chalk it up to confirmation bias.
Sure, it could all be coincidence, in the same way that maybe the dog really did eat my homework. Not a very convincing explanation.
Interestingly I never see this kilometric leeway given to tech companies when discussing, say, their technically unproven surveillance practices, which pretty much everyone readily accept as fact.
That so many people are fighting this particular point is inherently curious. For “some reason” accusations of misogyny require a much higher burden of proof than many other kinds of accusations, which is really more a reflection on the people debating this than on the tech companies themselves (which we already know are run by complete and utter human shitstains anyway).
Except the Armageddon is real but no-one will rise up to save us when every major city is nothing but glowing embers under an ever gray nuclear sky while the remnants of humanity fight each other with sticks over the last grain silos.
So-called American “revolutionaries” make me sick with their reckless disregard for the unavoidable responsibility their country has with regards to their military. An “accelerated downfall” won’t just affect you bozos. Especially not if the means are “stoking the fire of imperialism”.
If I could press a button to accelerate the US downfall and magically contain the fighting to the lower 48 in a way that leaves whoever is left standing nuke-less, I would, but that’s not an option on the table, so barring that, please vote against the guy who really can’t be trusted with the nuclear briefcase, yeah???
The complete fracturing of children’s education post-war cannot be understated as a society-wide catastrophe.
Ironically stay-at-home mothers were already not the norm pre-war for the poors/minorities. Which participated in generational poverty as those children had a worse access to parenting and education. But the post-war middle class suddenly fell into that pattern as well, with similar results.
On top of that you’ve got the meteoric rise of car-centric urbanism, fracturing communities. It used to take a village to raise a child, now they can’t even walk across their neighborhood unsupervised because the roads aren’t safe for children. Indirectly, parents trust fewer and fewer community members to watch their children, making the task of raising small children unusually difficult and tiring.
Countries with more socialized childcare and better working conditions were better off overall, but the entire western world is facing a natality crisis because it truly is harder to raise a child now than it used to be. Which is absolutely bonkers because the world is also richer and more productive than at any other time in history.
Or it’s the opposite. I refuse to watch shows without giving them my undivided attention, but that kind of pacing begs to be background noise while you do something else.
Sometimes there is nothing significantly plot-relevant happening for entire episodes at a time, both for bad reasons (the incentive structure for children’s show rewards empty filler slop with zero plot value because it’s easy to re-run) and less bad reasons (children like repetition). Both of which are painfully evident throughout the whole experience.
Good for you if that’s your jam, if you find it comforting or like it as background noise or like it because it leads to better paced seasons down the line or whatever, but I refuse to accept that it’s an issue for me to dislike objectively horrendous pacing.
I tried but like most children’s shows I just can’t deal with (at least the early seasons’) pacing. It’s excruciatingly slow, full of obvious filler content, and doesn’t seem to be trying to get anywhere.
Typically those children shows’ pacing tends to get a lot better in the latter seasons as the audience ages out and the showrunners are trusted with bolder story arcs, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are tens of hours of slop to get through before that point is reached.
Wait wait wait wait, where does this idea come from that the German people weren’t to blame for Nazism? They were to blame. They were blamed. Their country was partitioned, their army was dismantled, their families were torn apart, and they endeavored to teach future generations what they did wrong. It did not even remotely make up for their nation’s crimes against humanity, but they were “lambasted”.
Do not weaponize history to justify your own apathy. These lessons were paid in blood. Yet new blood is being shed, and every American who does not fight against the regime is responsible. Yes, it’s an unfair ask; no-one wants to live through troubled times. But you are living in them so stop cowering behind historical wrongs to feel better about your inaction.
“yet”
Just as a thought exercise, can you fathom and put into words a hypothetical breaking point that would wake people up to the madness around them?
Because here’s my prediction: the regime will commit atrocity after atrocity, each one somehow more monstrous than the last, and nothing will happen, because your first paragraph will still be true. They will start wars and nothing will happen because your first paragraph will still be true. Then suddenly WWIII will happen and the regime will be unstoppable. Then, some manner of nuclear exchange, potentially marking the end of human civilization, because all fascist regimes end up destroying themselves – too bad this one has the power to take the entire fucking world down with it.
If you are right that Americans won’t fight for decency now (and I think you are), then all hope is lost. All historical precedent says that we are past the point of no return and you’ve forfeited your - and quite possibly humanity’s - future.
Extra bonus: their vetting process doesn’t involve a willingness to fuck patients over for extra cash.
Funny when here in Belgium, the government put a couple decades ago a cap on the number of doctors who were allowed to graduate medical school (numerus clausus). The goal is to reduce the number of doctors to pay for (with the support of existing doctors who want less competition).
The predictable result of artificial scarcity? I live a major city and if I want an appointment with any specialist it’s a 6+ months delay or a 1-2 months if you can justify a daytrip to Brussels. This is having real tangible impacts on quality of care.
Obviously I would not trade my healthcare system for the American one but let’s not pretend that money and greed aren’t factors.
He’s a political pundit. Part of his job is, at all times, to be entertaining and attention-grabbing. That means his appeal and success are directly tied to how abrasive he sounds at any given time. That’s the unavoidable pitfall of the profession, and it’s been true since long before the internet and even before television.
Punditry content is not for me personally, but I do think it is filling a niche. Especially as very very few online American content creators have been willing to engage with politics directly.
I am not saying it did not sell. That’s the one thing it did really well. But it’s hardly a hot take to say success is not a measure of quality. Plenty of mainstream slop out there. HP is slop. It’s not offensively bad, but it’s certainly not good.
Over 6+ books it’s really sub-par writing to have a character who does not really grow because they already did not have any internal flaws or conflicts. The upside is that it’s really hard to hate a blank slate MC and you don’t risk writing yourself into a corner. I’m sure this is no small part of why there is so much HP fanfic specifically – it’s hard to write those characters badly as they lack so much depth!
Tons of things did the HP formula better, with well developed characters, good worldbuilding, good plot, good themes, yada yada. e.g. The Magicians (only saw the show) or Misfits&Magic. And in all of those the protags face strong personal hardships and are drastically different people by the end. Yeah, it’s hard, but that’s what storytellers do.
Harry Potter has no true self to discover. From the first to the last page of this pile of rags he is a wizarding Mary Sue with near-infinite privilege and the personality of an oyster. The story opens with “yer a wizard” in the first 50 pages and that’s the end of his character arc. From then on he’s a mere vessel for the reader to experience the world and the author to move the plot along.
… As a matter of fact, what even is the biggest character arc in that story? I don’t remember much, but Neville and Hermione have a glowup and Harry’s uncle dies or something? And the weasleys open a shop? I certainly don’t recall anything that lends credence to the idea that Rowling even believes that either individual people or societies are capable of profound change. The story begins and ends basically in the exact same place except the characters are 10ish years older.
There are ways to do good, approachable, clickable science communication without resorting to lies, ommission, or exaggeration which is futurism.com’s whole schtick. There’s so much happening in science that doesn’t get covered by these low-quality sensationalist outlets because a misleading headline about petri dish cancer or mouse Alzheimer’s gets more clicks and requires far less research than an article about whatever interesting advancements actually happened in science this week.
Except the Trials where that precedent was supposedly established actually allowed a great many people to escape conviction using that exact defense, then the prosecution subsequently gave up on the trials altogether. The Nuremberg trials were a travesty of justice, not because the Allies set up kangaroo courts, but because in an attempt to avoid such accusations and through unbelievable prosecutorial incompetence they let almost every Nazi who was still alive run free.
What I’m getting at is, don’t expect justice to magically administer itself.
Americans loooooooooooooooove pointing out at their population density as a thought-terminating cliché although it’s very rarely relevant to any discussion.
The size of your continent does not influence the size of your metro areas, dipshits. LA isn’t the way it is because Wyoming is empty, LA is the way it is because a bunch of dumbasses decided that local mass transit and terraced housing should be outlawed and bulldozed in order to fuck over African-Americans communities.
USB is 5V so I suppose a 10 mA draw (500 ohm resistor) would be sufficient. 20ohm would be 250 mA/1.25W which is certainly overkill for a dummy load. I don’t recall exact values but mine barely needed any load to shut up.