Its super strange, I’d run across it pretty frequently from weird super hostile nationalistic youtube comments in the past few years (flag of st George/american flag punisher kind of profile pics, nationality doesn’t seem relevant), but rarely anywhere else until recently on Lemmy. I always imagined it had been common in Australia for a while but recently it seems to have broken containment.

Kind of a self own if used seriously, though. I can’t imagine anyone but a little kid using rhyming slang to try to be hurtful.

That isn’t really how contracts work, NASA is paying Lockheed to do the work and certify its good to go. Unless there is some meeting where Lockheed engineers were saying “the pee gonna freeze” and NASA said nope we have to go we don’t have time to fix it (sort of what happened with Challenger), its up to Lockheed to deliver what they were paid to. In this case a working human spaceflight certified capsule.

It seems plausible to me that a noncritical system like this wouldn’t be specifically called out in the certification of the capsule, we have only made a few like this before, and the worry is more “will this blow up and if something goes wrong can we fix it” not “is the pee tube warm”.

I do think NASA should be more involved in the engineering of these things, but the rich want to mine asteroids or whatever, so they lobby for private spaceflight and that’s what we’ve got now. Thus the corporations get the blame when they screw up, not NASA.

This isn’t the named senators telling people to not use VPNs, this is the senators saying they are worried US citizens are being surveiled as if they are foreign threats due to VPN use.

They are then asking the person in charge of the people doing that surveiling to change their guidance to reflect that reality, as they currently reccomend VPN use.

There won’t be a response, and then I would assume the named legislators will propose legislation to patch this problem which will not be read or passed by any other politicians to the right of these fairly progressive legislators.

At worst its political theater, at best an attempt to protect VPN use, realistically something closer to the former, and none of the outcomes are these senators trying to take muh vpns

Apparently the port of Seattle (who run seatac) have been running fundraisers to help pay for TSA employees transportation and food, which they claim is why they aren’t seeing the level of staffing drop like other airports.

This statement from the port commissionner on the local news site the South Seattle Emerald, explains why ICE is not expected for now.

That isn’t really a problem for where many people live though, nor for very long, so some modest storage medium and transmission lines (which likely already exist to many places dark in the winter) coupled with wind or whatever else makes sense locally would be just fine for those locations where it is a problem. There’s no need to transmit from the Sahara to islands at the poles either, there’s so much sun to go around, and so many places to gather it.

Given that you said you’re in the UK, its probably some kind of what we call in the US “English Ivy” (Hedera helix). In the Northwestern US it gets so heavy that it pulls otherwise healthy trees down, and it is considered invasive, but it’s so pervasive there isn’t much that can be done about it.

I’ve always wondered what keeps it in check in its native range. The way we deal with it here is pulling it up when its on the ground and cutting the vine at the base of the tree when it’s climbing. It takes a really long time to die, but it does eventually wilt away.

I too am interested to hear how it goes, good luck!

Lots of military bases out on the coast though, and some very important shipping infrastructure. Shoot, the US seems to think we can just remove leaders all over the place, why shouldn’t Iran? Bet a lot of very wealthy people have vacation homes out there.*

I would hope that an attack on any target like those would trigger additional outrage at the unnecessary nature of the whole conflict, not bring California in line with the trump administration. But who is to say how people react, hasn’t been an attack on the US continent in many many years. I could cynically imagine Newsom doing a 9/11 style pivot into a presidential bid, though I have a hard time imagining it working.

*In my preferred solution, the US backs off and stops killing people

I’ll never forget ordering a salad at the only place open late in the off season in the south of France (they served “american” food) and receiving the most delicious plate of chopped greens and vegetables I’ve ever had. It wasn’t even my first meal in France. I don’t think it would have been special to a local, it just tasted like food, not like the tasteless papery stuff I was used to.

Raw ingredients are just awful in the US, unless you shop directly from farmers, and every place you might eat out is supplied by the same very low quality company. Its honestly a bit of a nightmare and I think most people just don’t know or try not to think about it.

We can’t have any of those things, because humans are shitty, and are as a whole just in it for themselves.

I disagree, I don’t think humans are, as a whole, shitty. Most people are willing to do good when faced with a moral decision, even one they stand to gain from. Its just the ones that make it into seats of wealth and power aren’t part of that majority, so we see and hear about these awful people far more than the millions of good people all around us.

In a community as wide reaching as the internet there are going to be people looking for personal gain over others and they make everyone else withdraw. I don’t think you could ever have a gathering of millions, with some actually representing corporate profit motives, and freely share without risk. But not because everyone in there wants to stab you and take your money, but because a few do and you have no idea who some of them are and one of them is Jeff Bezos and he pays you.

Same. Sometimes when I go for walks in the rain I bring one of those little gardening fork things and clear out the drains. I imagine I look wild wandering the streets with a garden implement but it’s very satisfying and rewarding, especially knowing sometimes that water floods peoples houses.

Of course the US was just filling the same wound Europeans left. I’m not trying to play a blame game here, but if you’re pale, the nation you were born in probably had a pretty big part in our current world dynamic. How far back do you want to go as well? Maybe the Europeans should have dealt with their religious extremists instead of shipping them off to the “New World”, that wasn’t that long ago.

I think this line of reasoning is ridiculous and just serves to benefit the people running the death cult. Just like wishing for bloodshed among a group of people you think is far enough away you can ignore. This is the kind of stuff that trump and his ilk are all about.

Hershey’s is the only widely produced American chocolate with the acid “flavor”, probably the only one at all because its widely disliked. Hershey’s also makes many of the other supermarket chocolate sold here that isn’t bile flavored but they are still pretty gross.

Any other slightly smaller manufacturer of chocolate in america is doing something dramatically different, and if all you’ve had is junk food candy, it’s no surprise you’d think that’s all there is.

Its the same in Europe, without the vomit of course. Most of my experience with EU and UK chocolate has been slimy milky mush, which I think is pretty awful. I know that’s not all European chocolate, but the mass market stuff is pretty rough no matter where you go.

I’m not sure if I’m adding anything new here, but the wall wart appears to be a ballast which traditionally drives fluorescent tubes. There are led tubes you can just plug into a light fixture or lamp with a ballast, there are also ones that want you to rewire the lamp and remove the ballast. I won’t be able to help on rewiring as I’m in the US on our special voltage and I’m not qualified to be giving advice on that here much less anyplace else. There is another type of tube that can operate both with and without ballast (after a rewire).

The first step would be to ensure the tubes you’ve got are ones that need the ballast to work, it should say on the product page. In the US they refer to these as type A, the ones that work without ballast as type B, and ones that work with both as type AB. I’m unsure if that is the same elsewhere, but I do notice the “AB” in your picture, so that may be the case, but you would need to confirm.

If it works with ballast you could replace the old ballast with a new one, which is easier and safer than the alternative, though you may struggle to find one that fits where you want it to and they are less energy efficient. I have no experience replacing ballast, so I can’t help you there, but it may be as simple as getting another ballast and wiring it in. You can probably get a brand new one as they do wear out over time and need to be replaced.

If if works without ballast, since you’ve already removed it, it may make sense to rewire the lamps for the LEDs to run directly off of main voltage if the tubes are made for that and if you can find the resources to teach you how and you have the ability to do so safely. The lamps can be wired differently and the led tubes can require specific wiring. Its not the most dangerous thing you could do with electricity, but its got a lot of room for personal harm and fire if something is done wrong. I’ve done it without incident, but I’ve also rewired my home, adding light fixtures, a new circuit breaker box, and a heat pump, and had it inspected/approved by the local authorities, so I was pretty confident in my abilities. I don’t think its that hard to do safely in comparison to those other things, its just important to be very sure of what you are doing with electricity. Sometimes things can work but are incredibly dangerous still, other times they might blow up in your face. It takes years of training to be an electrician for a reason, you don’t get to make many mistakes more than once.

Also please don’t open up the transformers or ballast, they aren’t safe without the shielding they come with.

Good luck and stay safe.

Guild Wars, the original, is still up and running. It isn’t what OP is looking for, but an MMO released in 2005 is not only still playable and has people playing, but also gets very infrequent little patches. Pretty cool stuff.

I think, based on conversations I have with people in real life and read online, that the people in the US haven’t challenged the 60 years of propaganda about Cuba, and believe it a totalitarian nightmare dictatorship.

I have a close friend who went to Cuba for ecological research (did you know they still have intact reefs) a few years ago, and when they would tell people they were going to Cuba, the most common reaction was a fearful “that’s scary” and a confused, almost accusatory “why”.

I don’t think they realize that everyone else can just go to Cuba, it’s only the blue US passport and a bunch of old white guys, and probably now more Cuban Americans, with their fear of communism and land reform stopping them from enjoying a very nice bottle of state owned rum and an experience of how other people live.

I’m glad other countries have been stepping up to help the people there, the Cuban people deserve happy and comfortable lives, and we clearly don’t have the appetite to stop starving them of that right now. Until we shake that propagandized view, I don’t imagine that will change either.

No? That’s a weird deflection from the misery of a people, to point at other miserable people and imply, look they’re worse off so we can ignore everyone else. Or are you just lost, read a different piece, and replied to the wrong thing.

What you’re doing sure looks like deflection using whataboutism, but why deflect something you’re not at fault for? You don’t have to help the US government defend their actions.

I know it’s just a little sarcastic comment, but that’s only true if everyone goes along with it. Show them pain in their bottom line and it won’t seem so necessary to their shareholders and lobbyists anymore, and you’ll have a lot louder voices arguing against that law.

Also I’m totally cool being a ‘hermit’ if by hermit we mean chatting with friends on IRC and hanging out in real life, I’m always up for a LAN party.

You could say the same about people voting for the lesser of two evils. Just lazy hypocrites who can’t follow their own chain of thought to its necessary conclusion: genocide and kids in cages but polite, and just out of sight enough that we don’t have to join the kids in the streets.

I wouldn’t say that about either though, we’re largely talking about people who genuinely want to improve the world we live in and have morals, we shouldn’t be spending our time punching those people for wanting to do it “wrong”.

Its ultimately on the DNC and the Harris campaign for doing a terrible job providing a candidate and a platform for their wide coalition. We should be hammering them now, instead of those darn ‘lazy voters’. If we don’t, they are going to make the same mistakes, and we’re going to get another Bidenesqe four years of back to normal followed by a return to right wing populism when nothing gets better for anyone under one term president Center-right.

Sounds like something a Russian asset would say taps head in american

Joking aside, I agree, the US has rotten bones and that’s hard to shake or build upon without the rot spreading. I’d argue, though, there aren’t many nations in the world that aren’t built on racism and genocide, xenophobic white people really got around a couple hundred plus years ago.

There are people in the US that weren’t raised racist, and ones who were but fell far from the tree, just like there are anywhere else. I think the major failing those people (I’d like to say we) have here is a lack of imagination of how we can move to a better tomorrow. The problem is so big and runs so deep its hard to think about its shape much less ways to change it.

Our media pushes us very specific propaganda, our health care is a joke, our education floundering (broken if you live in some places), and our lives demand most of our waking hours to pay for food and shelter. Its no good excuse, but largely Americans aren’t evil, just tired, sick, and poor, and they don’t have the extra to give until everything around them is crumbling. That looks lazy to people who haven’t lived it, but you’ll have to trust this lefty on the internet when I say its not lazy, maybe some learned helplessness, but definitely tired. Come to Mississippi (please don’t do this and don’t read it as a threat) and live for a couple weeks, you’ll see it quick.

Shoot we’re also talking about a pretty big place. Oregon to Virginia is a long way and there’s a pretty big culture gradient in the middle.

I hope our friends around the world block us out, push their leaders to dismantle the crap institutions the US has exported for generations, and really question their own biases before it gets as bad as this. I don’t think the US is unique in any significant way, y’all are susceptible to these things too, it’ll just be a different flavor and a different time, and I’d like to hope we will have fixed our shit by then in time to have your back, but I’m pessimistic.

I try to differentiate between nations and citizens here, where I can. We aren’t our grandparents, but our government literally is and was made by them.

Also trump did get help from Russian organizations to get elected in 2016, so there’s clearly ties, and not in the same way to China or Venezuela. Also also he can be both a fundamentally American creation and a Russian asset, that would be very effective as a way to dismantle the post WWII status quo, which seems to be a specific goal of Putin’s Russia. FWIW I don’t really think he’s a direct asset, though there are 100% people around him on the take from whoever will pay, I’m just imagining why someone might believe that.

I don’t think the company knows what it is anymore. They still pretend to be all about quality coffee and customer connection, but then push wild promotional drinks and very low service times while closing stores and cutting staff. They are clearly a fast food chain, but deny it, and do a poor job of it while also being a lousy place to hang out.

I worked at corporate for a while, and the culture, as it appeared to me, was all about folks vying for promotions and more desirable projects, with little weight put into what was or wasn’t good for the people who are in stores, customer or barista.

Maybe the new CEO has a better grip on this stuff, but his remote hq next to the golf course tells me he’s not gonna be better, also his previous company, Chipotle, isn’t exactly a place I seek out in 2026.