They should make a “Firefox Core” which contains only the browser with basic features, and then make another version which contains all the “fun” stuff.

I’m not the parent commenter. But I’m Chinese and I can confidently say that living in the United States for your average citizen is far more comfortable than living in China.

You can say all you want about how unfair the US economy is to the average working-class citizen but at the end of the day, it’s still a high-income country, and we have running water, electricity, unfiltered Internet access, good public sanitation, and reasonably-modern housing. There are some villages in China that I’ve been to with a total of six electric plugs, toilets that need to be flushed with a bucket, a barely-working 3G cellular connection, and where you can’t drive faster than 20 km/h without destroying your car.

Don’t take these things for granted, because you don’t know what it’s like to live without them.

I don’t know whether this is true, but it’s not a bad idea for a style guide, but imposing a fine is very heavy-handed. Chinese people speak Chinese and their names in Chinese describe what the organisation does, whereas the English acronyms are just meaningless symbols.

The collection of texts today known as the Bible were not written at once. There’s actually a lot of interesting history about how it came to be, but the short of it is that there were a multitude of maybe-canon Christian texts floating around during the early period of Christianity. These texts were written decades or even centuries apart, and often falsely attributed to authors who did not write them. There was also the Septuagint, a Greek text which was a translation of various Jewish scriptures, many of which now form the Old Testament.

The early Christian church decided which of these were deemed to be canon and which were non-canon. The canon texts were compiled together to form what is now the Bible. Everything else that was deemed not canon is called the Apocrypha. Many of these texts were also deemed heretical or blasphemous to read, publish, or teach by the various ecumenical councils.

Each Christian denomination has a slightly different version of the Bible depending on which decisions and ecumenical councils they accept.

The most interesting difference would be the Bible of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as the Mormon Church), which has an additional text called the Book of Mormon. That was written in the 19th century by a guy named Joseph Smith, an American religious leader who founded Mormonism. According to Mormon theology, it contains the revalations he received from God about various other unknown saints who lived in America and other holy happenings which took place, making the US a second holy land of sorts. His group travelled to the western United States to find their own promised land and establish a Mormon theocracy (they were successful; it’s now the US state of Utah).

There’s no historical evidence that any of these texts were intended to be read as anything other than religious scripture, but keep in mind that in Biblical times, people seemed to have had a really difficult time differentiating texts written by people having fever dreams versus actual genuine accounts of observed events or legitimate attempts to write scripture. If you want a fun time, you can read some of the Apocrypha, which are often similar in style to the canonical gospels but are slightly… weirder. The line between religion and insanity was not so easily found back then. Regardless of their authors’ original intent, the Apocrypha certainly can be read for entertainment in the 21st century.

Interesting fact: CCTV is also the name of China’s state-run television network.

I think there is a line to be drawn between what is theoretically better and what is meaningfully useful.

It is realistically not useful information for an attacker to know what country you are from by observing your UTC offset. It’s simply much easier to guess this information by observing your other behaviours. For example, the text and time of your post is already leading me to guess UTC+5:30 as the time zone in question. But again, knowing what country you’re from is not really useful information most of the time, as even if my guess is correct, that narrows it down to a whopping one-eighth of the human population.

These people are not getting caught. New Yorkers have very elaborate ways to avoid tolls and speed cameras. One popular trick is to have a lever which engages a shutter that covers their registration plate, which they engage only as they approach a speed camera or toll gantry. As soon as they are out of sight of the camera, they roll the shutter back up.

This modification, of course, is highly illegal but it’s very difficult for the police to catch unless they stake out the camera and wait for someone to do this in front of them. Police do occasionally do that, but it’s obviously not a great use of police resources to sit there and simply hope that someone is stupid enough to do this in the sight of a police car.

Edit: You can watch this video for further info: https://youtu.be/WcliB8uBs5w

That’s the same as in New York. If you are caught by police driving a car without proper insurance, registration, or without a valid driving licence, the police can have the car towed and impounded, although, for minor issues, such as expired registration or insurance documents, they usually will just give the driver a warning to remedy the problem. However, if the driver has already received warnings for the same problem in the past, then the police will usually not extend any more leniency.

Driving with illegal modifications such as missing registration plates, purposefully obscured plates, or suspended driving licence, is almost always an arrest and impoundment.

The post only shows the make and model of the car. They probably were caught by the cameras multiple times without a visible plate number. You can still tell it’s probably the same person if cameras in one area catch the same model of car speeding over and over again without a plate.

New York does have a point system. If you get 11 points within 18 months, you will get an automatic driving ban. Speed violations are worth a minimum of 3 points.

https://dmv.ny.gov/points-and-penalties/the-new-york-state-driver-point-system

But in order to be assessed points, you have to be caught. And many times, prolific traffic lawbreakers do things like cover up their car’s registration plates to avoid being ticketed by automatic speed cameras.

Selected quotations:

The required input for the computer is usually inscribed on the chassis at the bottom. However, the text is usually faint and can be easily rubbed off after the computer has been used for some time. Mine says 20 V 2.25 A.

A hundred “rifts” have opened up in the MAGA movement, but this does not seem to have had any noticeable effect in policy-making decisions.

If you are using the laptop at the same time, there is a chance that the charger may not provide enough power to the computer to operate and force it to temporarily draw from the battery to supplement the power from the charger. This causes additional wear on the battery.

For example, if you plug in a 15 W charger and the computer wants to draw 20 W, it will draw it from the battery. Spikes in power consumption are not uncommon during ordinary use as the CPU will temporarily engage turbo mode during certain tasks, such as when it is loading a Web page or starting a program. Depending on your operating system, plugging the charger in may also cause the OS to disable battery conservation features which leads to more frequent spikes in power consumption.

None of this would be a problem if, for example, your charger delivered 45 W of power, because during those spikes, it just means the battery receives slightly less power as more of it is consumed by the computer.

If you are not using the laptop at the same time as you are charging it, I can’t think of any potential negative effects.

Okay, so let me put it this way:

Housing might, in theory, be guaranteed in your home town. This is a strength of China’s system, I grant, and it’s one of the few examples of one of their socialist policies which actually somewhat works. Their national pension scheme is the other thing I can think of that functions decently well.

But it’s certainly no Soviet Union where if you go up to local officials and say “I have no job and I want to work”, they’ll find something for you to do pretty quickly.

I do have to agree with you there. Though too much urban migration does come with its own problems. Chief among them that I observe is that it severely depressed wages and lack of work. China is moving through its own sort of gilded age right now with rapid technological advancement and extreme inequality.

For a purportedly socialist country, China lacks a lot of state infrastructure that comes along with that. The USSR guaranteed work and bread, at a minimum (mostly), but in China, a curious sight emerged which I observed in some of the poorer neighbourhoods of Hangzhou: old people pushing around carts of discarded cardboard boxes and tin cans. They weren’t employed as cleaning workers. They were collecting these to sell for their recycling value. And even though the Westerner might laugh at the notion of making a living collecting literal garbage for pennies, it only takes fourteen pennies to make a yuan and ¥5 will buy a bowl of rice, fending off starvation for another twelve hours. Now, homeless people collecting rubbish to sell for scrap does also happen in the US, but the US at least doesn’t claim to be a socialist country.

China has no functional social safety net, government assistance is minimal, and workers are exploited by a ruling class of wealthy elites with minimal interference from the state, in a shockingly similar way to capitalist countries. You cannot even form a real trade union in China, because all big companies are already “unionised” with workers represented by farcically corrupt organisations which work in tandem with the capitalist bosses.

I will give one more example: Coco is a nationwide chain of beverage stalls which sell tea, coffee, and juice drinks. I walked past a location in Shenzhen which was advertising that they were hiring. Their offer of pay: ¥200 a day, for a 10-hour shift, six days a week. In one of the most expensive cities in the country. I took a photo of this but I couldn’t find it to post.

As someone who is Chinese and living in the US, Americans who have not been to China overestimate its shittiness and people who have been to China once or twice overestimate its glamour. Outside the cities, the rural areas can be real shit-holes. I’ve been to a tea plantation where there were a total of six electric plugs in the entire village and the toilets flushed with a bucket which had to be filled from a pump outside. It’s not the level of rank poverty you see in many developing countries, far from it, but it’s a lot worse than even the poorest parts of Appalachia in the US, where at least people usually have electricity and running water.

Sorry, but I really am failing to make the connection between how learning a second language as an optional class leads to “freezing migrant families out of public sector jobs and services”. You don’t even need to speak English to access those most of the time. In my city, nearly all public services are available in English and Spanish at the minimum, and frequently Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russian as well.

Can’t believe Portugal is nearly the same size as Portugal

America really has a litigation culture, not because people are particularly fond of lawsuits, but because problems which are generally solved by legislative enactments or actions by regulatory bodies in other countries, aren’t in the US, and thus the only way to find out who is right is to go to court.