I think Venezuela and Iran are more about restricting the oil to China in case of a conflict rather than providing energy for the US, although getting ahead of an anticipated demand increase from AI data centers is probably a contributing motivation.
I don't think interdicting Venezuelan oil in a US/China conflict would be too much of a challenge for the US, given... geography. It certainly doesn't require us to control the country or its oil industry.
For curiosity's sake, what exactly do you think Republicans will do to "kill the ACA"? I doubt they're going to introduce a bill that revokes the ACA in its entirety. They killed the mandate almost a decade ago and the marketplace healthcare plans have continued to limp along, depending on the state. What's next?
It’s simple. One of the original tenants of the ACA was to provide subsidies for most people earning up to what would be the upper middle class between this and the insurance mandates, it would prevent the death spiral where only the sick would sign up for it, making the cost go up until it was almost unaffordable to anyone and unprofitable for the insurance companies making them leave the exchange.
The first blow was when the Supreme Court killed the mandates. The second blow just happened when they killed the subsidies last year.
Not if the ACA continues its current “death spiral” where only the sick sign up making the premiums go up to the point where insurance companies just leave the plan.
No it wouldn’t. American Apparel used to (maybe it still does) make its shirts in a factory in Los Angeles, and its shirts were not noticeably more expensive than the likes of Abercrombie that made clothes overseas. AA couldn’t have competed in the lower end of the market, but their clothes were still not astronomically expensive because the factory was already heavily automated via machines.
The larger cost for a lot of manufacturing in the richest countries is permitting and regulation, plus the fact that the manufacturing knowledge cluster is concentrated in China now, making every part of setting up a factory there smoother.
Los Angeles Apparel is what you are thinking of (I believe owner of AA sold the brand and started this which is manufactured in los angeles). And their t shirts, blank t shirts not dress shirts mind you, are $28 or so depending on weight. Blank hanes or fruit of the loom t shirt made overseas can be had for basically an order of magnitude less than the american manufactured version.
Both of these methods have an undesirable side effect for me, which is that it immediately pops up the passcode dialog saying that a passcode is required to activate Face ID. Depending on the situation, that could be construed as an attempt to actively interfere with a police investigation, which could bring consequences of its own. It would be better if it silently dropped you to the normal lock screen, and only showed the passcode dialog when you attempt to unlock the phone normally.
Another thing I've often wished for with kids is a mode that removes all notifications and widgets from the lock screen - the only things you should be able to do is to unlock the phone and emergency calls. You can remove most notifications with the right Focus, but not notifications to control playing music/video apps, for example, nor any other widgets you happen to put on your lock screen.
The same passcode prompt appears after software updates, multiple previous failed Face ID login attempts, and maybe more.
Not a lawyer, but everyone has a password locked phone and its standard practice for device security. I'm not optimistic for a prosecutor winning on an interference charge.
> Depending on the situation, that could be construed as an attempt to actively interfere with a police investigation
IANAL but I highly doubt this would hold up in court with even mildly competent attorneys. Anyone can easily accidentally trigger it, I do all the time.
> Both of these methods have an undesirable side effect for me, which is that it immediately pops up the passcode dialog saying that a passcode is required to activate Face ID.
Must be an iOS 26 thing? I haven't dared upgrade yet. No immediate passcode dialog on iOS 18 if you follow the instructions above. It does pop up like you describe if you press the cancel button on the screen, but if you are whipping out your phone to play with the screen you're not exactly acting inconspicuously anyway.
Unfortunately GitHub doesn’t let you easily review commits in a PR. You can easily selectively review files, but comments are assumed to apply to the most recent HEAD of the PR branch. This is probably why review agents don’t natively use that workflow. It would probably not be hard to instruct the released versions of Opus or Codex to do this, however, particularly if you can generate a PR plan, either via human or model.
Lots of people know trans people (by which I mean people that have decided to take some visible action to transition) by now - the people in the boonies and flyover states have access to the same internet as everyone else, so a lot of people outside the most progressive cities have transitioned. You have to remember that trans had been at the front of the culture for 10 years (since Caitlyn Jenner) by the time of the 2024 election.
As a former employee in TikTok US Data Services, the division that was stated working to separate the US TikTok service and infrastructure, I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the algorithm reset theory, because the reset this time is qualitatively unlike the others.
Since 2020, when the first Trump administration attempted to ban TikTok, work has been ongoing to separate out the TikTok US business in all aspects from the parent company Bytedance. Setting up dedicated infrastructure for US users was already accomplished by 2023 for the most part, and this included the restriction that US user data couldn’t be used to train or otherwise influence non-US user operations.
However, there were a few major caveats. First, all the actual videos, at least if they’re public, were considered to be Bytedance data, even those created by US users (although the actual user intent signals - likes, watch behavior, and the like, were considered to be US user data). This allowed them to be used to train the main Bytedance-owned algorithm. Second, the Bytedance-trained algorithm continued to form the basis of the algorithm to serve US users. At least when I was there, US user data was used to tune the algorithm for US users, but the algorithm was not necessarily trained from scratch only on US user data in practice.
One of Bytedance’s main conditions for the TikTok US sale has always been that they own the algorithm (both the code and the models) and would not transfer it to the US, so this was definitely a foreseeable issue. With the chaos of the TikTok Us divestment between the Biden and Trump administrations, though, I suspect that it was hard to hire and retain ML engineers that could build a proper replacement for the algorithm in time for the divestment, let alone build one that matches the behavior of the previous algorithm.
If the algorithm is separated between US and non-US as strictly as the TikTok US Data Services mission always aimed for, then TikTok for US users is in many respects a new service entirely that shares the same UI and features. I also don’t know how US users get trained on non-US content, or if they’re even exposed, nor if any other countries use the US algorithm. So this change in content may last at least into the medium term, if not permanently. The question will be if you start seeing more left-wing anti-ICE content in the coming weeks or months.
Lots of people threw small apps on their Github accounts for their own convenience in having a backup, and in case other people might be interested, but realistically never expected to get one more user. I have several scripts, Chrome extensions, and the like in my Github that fit that description. The difference is that coding agents let you write a one-user app at a much larger scale than before.
Welfare perhaps. State, almost certainly not. If this did come to pass, I wonder if the inhabitants would be US citizens or non-citizen nationals, like the population of American Samoa.
Not sure about the US citizens versus non-citizen nationals (I had always thought American Samoans were citizens), but you're spot on that it would certainly not be a state. The people living in Greenland would almost certainly lean blue, and the republicans would never allow the Dems to gain more de facto seats in the house and senate.
I don't think any of the Trump crowd thought as far as these legal ramifications. Send in the Little Green Men, annex, and figure things out as they happen.
The world where he does it and then tries to present it to Congress as a fait accompli. If the security concerns around Greenland are seen as legitimate enough, he’ll get his Democratic congressmen to approve it, particularly as it’s unlikely that it would become a state (too few people).
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