Lays chips in Canada redesigned their packaging last year to add a sizable “Made in Canada” logo on it. They knew people would care enough about it that they didn’t just put a sticker.

A day should be enough to travel from NYC to Washington DC, via Istanbul.

The Happy Birthday song is 3/4 time actually and Happy is on beat 3, at least the one I know of.

So many things went wrong. The ATC will be the administration’s scapegoat, but the issue is chronic underfunding and overworking of the staff. This controller was dealing with all this at 3am, by themselves managing both ground and air frequencies at a massive international airport…

ATCs need to go on strike again or something. Let’s see ICE bums try to manage airport traffic.

A duck walked up to the lemon cake stand. And he said to the man, running the stand…

Biggest for me is no promoted garbage. Second is that I can have more indepth conversations than on Reddit. Your replies can get seen if you post on “Hot” even if they’re not cheesy one-liners. Quality of discussion is far better than my last few years of using Reddit full time (until 2023).

Once in a while I glance at the Reddit website and there’s just so much short form video on the front page that it’s so annoying to know what’s going on.

Of course the more popular discussion topics (USA, tech, politics) are largely going to be the same as Reddit.

One advantage of this model is that moderation is more tailored to the instance topics of interest, without losing too much of the wider sphere. So .world can handle most of the popular general topics, but mander can handle moderation of topics from a more scientific lens, .dbzer0 can handle the intricacies around copyright law, .blahaj zone vehemently protects users right to call themselves whatever they wish, so on and so forth. With Reddit, if the site admins don’t like something you do, you get shut down no matter whether the community there accepts it or not. Here, if that happens and is unpopular, people can leave and go to another domain without leaving the federated network. Another is that servers hosted in countries outside the USA (feddit.de, lemmy.ca etc.) don’t necessarily have to follow USA law, while Reddit does.

Quit the Lawyer, Hit the Facebook, Gym Up

Many small server instances are paid for out of pocket (you can make your own too, about $60/year renting a cloud server and $10/year for a domain name). Bigger servers rely on user donations.

The Lemmy software development relies on donations as well, but they also receive grants from NLNet. Some of the grants are tied to accomplishing specific features. Third party app developers generally rely on donation support as well, if they’re not doing it just for the fun of it. Unsupported projects tend to get dropped after a while, though, so money does help keep up motivation.

The scammer is not going to be on the phone with the victim for 24 hours continuously.

Yeah, I take issue with that, but I don’t think it would be used if people complain to banks that reading the flag bricks the app.

I tend to favour privacy over big tech control, but I recognize we have to at least consider the cost-benefit of these tradeoffs, to live in a society. Of course I’d prefer a phone with no warnings, no nagging, if you get scammed that’s my fault and I will keep my phone that way if it means I will stay off Android 15 and de-Google my next phone. But Google’s plan is within the realm of an acceptable compromise to me because sideloading is still available to everyone without registration with Google. Each person will feel differently about it.

Taking your position to the extreme, if trading liberty for comfort is “always” a bad idea with no exceptions, you can turn off your phone and do without the comfort of it. (Only saying this because always is the word you chose to use.) To accept cellular and home internet services to communicate in the public realm requires you to give up some level of privacy, though of course it can be possible to stop a lot of the unnecessary surveillance that happens along with the necessary tradeoff.

If the process doesn’t include any phone home stuff, and is just a one-time cool off period to prevent scammers, this is acceptable to me. That should be enough to get potential victims to self-question, ask more knowledgeable people of what’s going on to avoid being unknowingly hacked, without being naggy every time for users that want to do what they want.

Making a software “foolproof” will probably invent a bigger better fool, hoping for some sort of free crypto app jumping through these hoops, but this should weed out most of the basic scams.

If you can be respectful of the local culture where you’re visiting while you’re there, you’ll be fine. Being an obnoxious American tourist is just as bad as an obnoxious Chinese tourist. Outside of unwarranted xenophobia, your behaviour matters more than your race.

What’s going on in the Adirondack mountain range in upstate New York?

Forget a backup plan. Their main plan was half-baked, at best.

Soooo Tucker, this “Democrat” silencing of critics that you’ve harped about for years and years… it’s actually Republicans that do it, way worse and on super false pretenses. Enjoy your reward for being a forever constipated-looking Republican talking head.

Trump hikes Americans’ (Democrats and Republicans alike) cost of living “just for fun”.

Trump and his staffers are desperately trying to find a way to TACO but still somehow claim victory like his other two expeditions in Venezuela and Iran (2025), because it clearly didn’t have the effect they thought it would have like when Bush II did it.

Unlike the US, Iranian forces had a plan that was formulated for years. Doesn’t mean things will go as they envision, due to US, Israeli, Gulf state, and internal factors putting a lot of uncertainty in the mix. Iran is okay with the current situation in the short term unlike the US, but there is elevated risk for a potential coup, an Israeli-style drawn out genocide and annexation, just a stalemate war of air defense attrition, or who knows what in Iran. There will be pressure from all sides to figure something amicable between the belligerents, hopefully sooner than later.

I predict: Oil/gas prices will stay high for months, air ship and truck transportation costs will be somewhat higher and goods will be a little higher for the same period. Over the next year, governments, businesses and people will turn to electricity and renewables pretty much out of necessity (look at Indian residents turning to Induction Stoves in droves) that will lower our needs for fuel which will hopefully offset the shock from future oil supply crunches. Optimistically, it could accelerate the world’s efforts to net zero.

Sorry, I’m taken already. Isn’t that right, Nicole the Fediverse Chick?

Hey can we all do that, just like, all the time? That’d be nice.