https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbados

It’s not surprising that flags put by a person saying “I am putting these up as a form of showing the middle finger” are interpreted as being a form of showing the middle finger.

It’s the UK. Maybe the V instead?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_finger

Giving someone the (middle) finger, also known as flipping the bird[1] or flipping someone off,[1] is an obscene hand gesture. The gesture communicates moderate to extreme contempt, and is roughly equivalent in meaning to “fuck you”, “fuck off”, “go fuck yourself”, “shove it up your ass/arse” or “up yours”. It is performed by showing the back of a hand that has only the middle finger extended upwards, though in some locales, the thumb is extended. Extending the finger is considered a symbol of contempt in several cultures, especially in the Western world.

In the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, the V sign, “two-fingered salute” or “the fingers”, when given with back of the hand towards the recipient, serves a similar purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_sign

With the palm of the hand facing inward toward the signer (i.e. with the back of the hand facing the observer), this is seen as an insulting gesture in Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, akin to giving the finger.

You can probably do it, but I’m not sure how many users you’d get, as I think that it’d be a less-usable interface.

• You’d need some way to handle voting; that doesn’t intrinsically show up. Maybe you could do it via expecting users to send specially-structured emails.

• If by “fediverse” you specifically are talking about the Threadiverse — Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin — then you’re going to have to also deal with a lack of a way to handle responding to a given comment (unless you intend to forward all comments to all posts that a user has subscribed to to an email address, and then just only let them respond to those).

• Email isn’t natively encrypted, so if that’s a concern and you want to deal with that, you’d need something like a PGP key that users could register, I guess.

• Email clients don’t, as far as I know — I haven’t gone looking — natively have Markdown support, so either you need to throw out formatting or have some sort of mapping to and from Markdown to HTML. I don’t know if something like pandoc would be sufficient for that.

• No native “report” functionality. Maybe you could do it via expecting users to send specially-structured emails.

If what you want is to take advantage of existing native clients, my suggestion is that you’d probably get more mileage out of doing a bidirectional Usenet-to-Threadiverse gateway than an email-to-Threadiverse gateway. That has a much closer mapping in terms of functionality than email. You could do that a lot more efficiently in terms of bandwidth. Your “Usenet group list” would be a set of community@instance name entries, and you map posts to top level messages, and comments to responses to those.

The major downside there is that I don’t think that any Usenet clients have native Markdown support and you still don’t have voting or native reporting functionality.

The only obvious benefit I can think of from either Usenet or email is that there are clients for both that support offline functionality, and I don’t know of any Threadiverse-native clients that do. I think the major point I’d raise would be “you could probably do it, but…what do you gain that outweighs the drawbacks?” Like, I think that you’d probably get more good out of just picking your favorite native Threadiverse client and adding code to that (or starting a new one, if you absolutely can’t stand any of the existing ones).

In 2026, the S&P 500 is really a better metric of US large-cap performance than the Dow Jones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Jones_Industrial_Average

It is price-weighted, unlike other common indices such as the Nasdaq Composite or S&P 500, which use market capitalization.[4][5] The primary pitfall of this approach is that a stock’s price—not the size of the company—determines its relative importance in the index.

The Dow Jones index dates to before we had computers, and because it doesn’t care about market capitalization, it’s quick to compute by hand — you can just get the average of 30 numbers.

But…that also means that it doesn’t do a fantastic job of reflecting the relative impact of each of those individual companies in the index.

Someone else in another comment linked to a memory comparison between desktop environments, and there KDE Plasma used the most memory, with GNOME in second place, but I think that the broader point here is that on Windows, you have one basic graphical shell that basically all desktop users are expected to have running. It’s not completely impossible to hack up a Windows environment to avoid doing so, but it’s a highly nonstandard configuration, and stuff is going to break.

Linux has a much broader range of options available, and those are first-class citizens. Some of them are considerably lighter on resource usage than others.

A lot of users aren’t going to cobble together their own ideal environment the way I do, but there are “presets” of packages that are aimed specifically at being light on resource usage. XFCE has historically been one example; they were slow to move to Wayland, but it looks like they’re doing it now. One doesn’t have the sort of “the OS vendor is giving you one monolithic blob that you need to run” the way you do on Windows.

Once we start geoengineering, though, stopping may be difficult.

I am confident that humanity will not forever forswear geoengineering.

We can deforest continents or increase the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We are capable enough now to have large-scale impact. To not geoengineer would be to simply say “our only impacts must be unplanned”.

https://tech.yahoo.com/computing/articles/debian-edition-doesnt-linux-172134222.html

The Debian project has just released a new snapshot of its alternative operating system, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, which now includes a working 64-bit edition. This is a massive update for a project that many people forget exists, but you need to know right away that this is not a Linux distribution.

This latest release is based on Debian Trixie, or more specifically, the testing branch known as Sid. The Hurd is the original kernel that the GNU project was developing before Linus Torvalds announced his “hobby” project back in 1991.

I don’t think that Linux is going anywhere, but Hurd does march on!

I love the look of ties and love picking out cool ties to wear, but I hate the actual feel of wearing a tie.

Menswear doesn’t go in for accessories as much as womanswear does, but I guess wristwatch, cufflinks, laptop bag?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/edgarsten/2026/04/02/high-gas-prices-boosting-interest-in-evs-but-will-sales-follow/

The rise in gasoline prices due to the effects of the war in the Middle East is sparking increased interest among consumers in electrified vehicles, according to new data released this week by car shopping site CarGurus.com.

But that interest isn’t likely to pay the dividend of a sustained spike in sales of battery electric cars, trucks or SUVs if the war ends soon and gas prices recede.

"It’s kind of described as kind of a sugar rush,” observed Kevin Roberts, director of economic and market intelligence for CarGurus, in an interview. “Consumers are highly interested in fuel efficient vehicles when gas prices are going up or at a certain elevated point. Historically, we’ve seen that as soon as gas prices start to come down, consumers tend to go back to what they like previously, which tends to be large, large SUVs and pickup trucks.”

That view echoes comments from Cox Automotive executive analyst Erin Keating who declared during a webcast March 25, “the one genie that often goes back in the bottle is gas prices. If tensions de-escalate tomorrow and gas stabilizes at, say, $2.80, the urgency to switch power trains fades quickly. This isn’t a permanent shift in consumer preference, yet. It’s a conditional response to conditions that may or may not persist.”

Meanwhile, in Washington:

Trump delivers jaw-dropping and slurred Iran address that offers no end in sight to unpopular war

I think that the real problem for Trump is going to be getting an AUMF from Congress, but if we assume that the conflict does manage to continue…

I mean, it’s probably a good idea to have them higher, given that if someone wants to use it with some typical out-of-the-box desktop settings, that’s not unreasonable, but while I haven’t looked at the Ubuntu installer for a while, I strongly suspect that it permits you to do a minimal install, and that all the software in the Debian family is also there, so you can do a lightweight desktop based on Ubuntu.

My current desktop environment has sway, blueman-applet, waybar, and swaync-client running. I’m sure that you could replicate the same thing on an Ubuntu box. Sway is the big one there, at an RSS of 189MB (mostly 148MB of which is shared, probably essentially all use of shared libraries). That’s the basic “desktop graphical environment” memory cost.

I use foot as a terminal (not in daemon mode, which would shrink memory further, though be less-amenable to use of multiple cores). That presently has 40 MB RSS, 33 of which are shared. It’s running tmux, at 16MB RSS, 4 of which are shared. GNU screen, which I’ve also used and could get by on, would be lighter, but it has an annoying patch that causes it to take a bit before terminating.

Almost the only other graphical app I ever have active is Firefox, which is presently at an RSS of 887.1, of which 315MB is shared. That can change, based on what Firefox has open, but I think that use of a web browser is pretty much the norm everwhere, and if anything, the Firefox family is probably on the lighter side in 2026 compared to the main alternative of the Chrome family.

I’m pretty sure that one could run that same setup pretty comfortably on a computer from the late 1990s, especially if you have SSD swap available to handle any spikes in memory usage. Firefox would feel sluggish, but if you’re talking memory usage…shrugs I’ve used an i3/Xorg-based variant of that on an eeePC that had 2GB of memory that I used mostly as a web-browser plus terminal thin client to a “real machine” to see if I could, did that for an extended period of time. Browser could feel sluggish on some websites, but other than that…shrugs.

Now, if you want to be, I don’t know, playing some big 3D video game, then that is going to crank up the requirements on hardware. But that’s going to be imposed by the game. It’s not overhead from your basic graphical environment.

I’d also be pretty confident that you could replicate that setup using the same packages on any Debian-family system, and probably on pretty much any major Linux distro with a bit of tweaking to the installed packages.

My guess is that Trump doesn’t have Congressional support for an AUMF, which means that all Iran has to do is last for 60 days before Trump has to pull out.

So basically, if Trump wants some kind of deal that uses the military as leverage, he has to get it closed in a matter of weeks.

https://www.amazon.com/100pcs-Trump-Stickers-Donald-Merchandise/dp/B0DVSW4WD8

100pcs Trump I Did that Stickers Gas Pump Stickers Decal, Anti Trump Stickers, Fuck Donald Trump Mega Merchandise

5K+ bought in past month

https://www.amazon.com/Trump-Did-That-Stickers-2-5inch/dp/B0DWN53KXY

Trump I Did that Stickers, 2.5inch I Did that Trump Sticker 100PCS

10K+ bought in past month

So if each of those sticker packs has 100 stickers, and people have bought over fifteen thousand packs in the past month alone on those two Amazon items (and there are more) alone, that’s over 1.5 million gas pumps that you’d need if you were going to use just those sticker packs.

https://www.fuelexpress.net/blog/general-information/how-many-gas-stations-are-in-the-us/

As of recent estimates, there are about 160,000 gas stations across the United States.

Like, people are going to have to be putting them on in layers or something. I don’t think that there are enough gasoline pumps.

On March 20, he fumed that NATO allies have refused to help secure the strait, but he later appeared unconcerned. “At a certain point it will open itself,” he said.

I’d say that that sounds promising for EV manufacturers.

And Chief Justice John Roberts, another conservative on the bench, also had something of a mic-drop moment when Sauer tried to make the point that “we’re in a new world where eight billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S citizen.”

Roberts replied: “It’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”

So, Roberts probably isn’t going to make this argument, and I think that it is very unlikely that SCOTUS would rule that birthright citizenship isn’t a thing — there’s a lot of case law behind it being a thing — but there are a number of methods in constitutional law in which one can interpret the Constitution, and some of them do permit for an increased degree to which SCOTUS should try to actively adapt to changes in the world. You have textualism, originalism…let me go looking for a list, since I can’t rattle off all of them from memory.

searches

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45129

When exercising its power to review the constitutionality of governmental action, the Supreme Court has relied on certain “methods” or “modes” of interpretation—that is, ways of figuring out a particular meaning of a provision within the Constitution. This report broadly describes the most common modes of constitutional interpretation; discusses examples of Supreme Court decisions that demonstrate the application of these methods; and provides a general overview of the various arguments in support of, and in opposition to, the use of such methods of constitutional interpretation.

• Textualism. Textualism is a mode of interpretation that focuses on the plain meaning of the text of a legal document. Textualism usually emphasizes how the terms in the Constitution would be understood by people at the time they were ratified, as well as the context in which those terms appear. Textualists usually believe there is an objective meaning of the text, and they do not typically inquire into questions regarding the intent of the drafters, adopters, or ratifiers of the Constitution and its amendments when deriving meaning from the text.
• Original Meaning. Whereas textualist approaches to constitutional interpretation focus solely on the text of the document, originalist approaches consider the meaning of the Constitution as understood by at least some segment of the populace at the time of the Founding. Originalists generally agree that the Constitution’s text had an “objectively identifiable” or public meaning at the time of the Founding that has not changed over time, and the task of judges and Justices (and other responsible interpreters) is to construct this original meaning.
• Judicial Precedent. The most commonly cited source of constitutional meaning is the Supreme Court’s prior decisions on questions of constitutional law. For most, if not all Justices, judicial precedent provides possible principles, rules, or standards to govern judicial decisions in future cases with arguably similar facts.
• Pragmatism. Pragmatist approaches often involve the Court weighing or balancing the probable practical consequences of one interpretation of the Constitution against other interpretations. One flavor of pragmatism weighs the future costs and benefits of an interpretation to society or the political branches, selecting the interpretation that may lead to the perceived best outcome. Under another type of pragmatist approach, a court might consider the extent to which the judiciary could play a constructive role in deciding a question of constitutional law.
• Moral Reasoning. This approach argues that certain moral concepts or ideals underlie some terms in the text of the Constitution (e.g., “equal protection” or “due process of law”), and that these concepts should inform judges’ interpretations of the Constitution.
• National Identity (or “Ethos”). Judicial reasoning occasionally relies on the concept of a “national ethos,” which draws upon the distinct character and values of the American national identity and the nation’s institutions in order to elaborate on the Constitution’s meaning.
• Structuralism. Another mode of constitutional interpretation draws inferences from the design of the Constitution: the relationships among the three branches of the federal government (commonly called separation of powers); the relationship between the federal and state governments (known as federalism); and the relationship between the government and the people.
• Historical Practices. Prior decisions of the political branches, particularly their long-established, historical practices, are an important source of constitutional meaning. Courts have viewed historical practices as a source of the Constitution’s meaning in cases involving questions about the separation of powers, federalism, and individual rights, particularly when the text provides no clear answer.

Justices tend to be viewed as individually favoring some methods over others. There are justices that tend to favor greater use of pragmatism in interpreting the Constitution, and a pragmatist might be more willing to interpret law differently in light of changes in the surrounding environment. I’m pretty sure that Roberts isn’t considered to be a pragmatist, though. I don’t really like the portrayal in the media of some justices as “conservative” and others “liberal” — I think that that this is misleading and presents a view of their actions that is over-politicized relative to the reality — but it’s generally the ones that are called “liberal” that are pragmatists.

searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts

During his confirmation hearings, Roberts said he did not have a comprehensive jurisprudential philosophy and did “not think beginning with an all-encompassing approach to constitutional interpretation is the best way to faithfully construe the document.”[91][92] Roberts compared judges to baseball umpires: “[I]t’s my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”

Yeah, that’s not a pragmatist approach.

searches

Breyer — now retired — was apparently considered to be more of a pragmatist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Breyer

Breyer is known for his pragmatic approach to legal interpretation, which emphasizes practical consequences and the purpose of legislation. Cass Sunstein described this outlook as one that “will tend to make the law more sensible” and praised Breyer’s critiques of originalism as “powerful and convincing”.

And here’s an article by Breyer specifically stating that he tended towards using pragmatism:

https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-138/pragmatism-or-textualism/

Pragmatism or Textualism

I have not tried, in either Reading the Constitution or this Commentary, to describe advantages and disadvantages of different interpretive methods in theory: many scholars have already done so.30 Rather, I have tried to draw upon my own experience as a judge and a Justice, using illustrative examples (particularly those where traditionalists and textualists likely disagree). I hope that by doing so, and, in particular, by explaining why in a particular case I disagree with the textualist approach, I can explain why, in my view, textualism will not work. It cannot keep its promises. To the contrary, textualism threatens to make it far more difficult for law to work well for Americans and for the Constitution to keep its own promises of crafting a workable governmental system, protecting democracy, and safeguarding basic human rights.

I might add that Justice Scalia and I used to debate the virtues of these different approaches, typically before student audiences. The audience would come away believing we were good friends — which we were. They might also remember what I thought was at the heart of the debate. I would say law must adapt. After all, “George Washington did not know about the internet.” Justice Scalia would reply, “I knew that.” Then he would remind me of the two campers, one of whom sees the other putting on running shoes. “Where are you going?”, he asks. “A bear’s in the camp,” the other responds. “You can’t outrun a bear,” says the first person. “Yes,” says the second, “but I can outrun you.” So too, Justice Scalia would argue, textualism and originalism did not need to be perfect; they just needed to be superior to the alternatives. And my system, he would say, was so complicated that only I could use it. I would reply that his system risked producing a Constitution (and laws) that no one would want. Who was right? I hope that this Commentary, alongside my book, will help convince some that a more holistic approach to statutory and constitutional interpretation points the way to a better interpretive path.

But point is, the argument that the Executive was making there really relied on justices being willing to buy into more of a pragmatist interpretation of the Constitution, and I don’t think that that’s likely going to do terribly well with Roberts.

lack of commitment, rather than any law, was the key point.

This is the rub. Can he officially? No.

That is not what the article was saying. It’s not saying that he can actually withdraw. It’s that he has sufficient scope of discretionary action that he doesn’t have to really do anything if, say, a NATO member was invaded and he decides that he doesn’t want to do anything.

That’s not the same thing as the ability to exit NATO on his own authority; the latter would affect later administrations. It’s just saying that it would be difficult for Congress to force a President who does not want to go to war to actually go to war, even if the US was in NATO.

Ehhhh…I don’t know if I’d call that authoritative.

So, first of all — quite surprisingly to me, when I first learned about it, the question of whether a President may withdraw from a treaty on his own, without going to Congress, is an open question in American constitutional law. It seems like something so important that we’d have ironed it out, but the Constitution never explicitly laid out the terms, and it’s never been specifically answered by the Supreme Court.

The only time SCOTUS addressed this was in Goldwater v. Carter, and there they ruled on a technicality rather than addressing the core question of the President’s powers relative to those of Congress.

Goldwater v. Carter, 444 U.S. 996 (1979), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Senator Barry Goldwater and other members of the United States Congress challenging the right of President Jimmy Carter to unilaterally nullify the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, which the United States had signed with the Republic of China, so that relations could instead be established with the People’s Republic of China.

Goldwater and his co-filers claimed that the President required Senate approval to take such an action, under Article II, Section II of the U.S. Constitution, and that, by not doing so, President Carter had acted beyond the powers of his office. While dismissing the case the Court left open the question of the constitutionality of President Carter’s actions.

As an interesting note, the UK also had this — as this was also an open question in the British political system — come up quite recently surrounding Brexit, in R(Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. There, courts decided that the Prime Minister had to go to Parliament, couldn’t unilaterally withdraw from the European Union.

But, getting back to the US, a federal law doesn’t address the issue of whether it might be the case that the President can do this regardless of the wishes of Congress. SCOTUS has also found that there are some hard walls separating powers of different branches of the US government, and especially when it comes to foreign affairs, been deferential to the Executive Branch relative to the Legislative Branch. The presidential authority to act in foreign affairs was found to be not dependent upon Congress’s granting him the ability to make use of it. It might be that the President could successfully challenge a law preventing him from withdrawing from NATO without additional Congressional approval as being unconstitutional.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Curtiss-Wright_Export_Corp.

United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., 299 U.S. 304 (1936), was a decision of the United States Supreme Court concerning the foreign affairs powers of the president of the United States. It held that the President, as the nation’s “sole organ” in international relations, was therefore innately vested with significant powers over foreign affairs, far exceeding those permitted in domestic matters or accorded to the U.S. Congress.[1] The Court’s majority reasoned that although the U.S. Constitution does not explicitly provide for such authority, the powers are implicit in the President’s constitutional role as commander-in-chief and head of the executive branch.

Curtiss-Wright was the first decision to establish that the President’s plenary power is independent of congressional permission. Sharply criticized by foreign affairs scholars and legal historians, Curtiss-Wright remains relevant as the legal precedent for further expansions of executive power in the foreign sphere.[2]

Over that stunningly short amount of time viewing and swiping, the algorithm is able to direct hyper-personalized content to viewers.

I mean, that’s…not really a negative. You could argue that the content is largely fluff (which I think it is, when it comes to short-form video), or maybe that material that appeals to a user isn’t what would help them the most or any number of other things, but being able to find and provide content that is a function of a user’s interests is normally something that one would consider desirable. I’d rather do less scrolling past things that I’m not interested in viewing.

The damage to Trump’s approval ratings traces to “about a week into the war when markets started to freak out over the likelihood of a prolonged disruption to oil shipments in the Persian Gulf,” wrote Silver, sharing a graph from GasBuddy data.

The gas prices are now well above any other point in Trump’s second term so far — or the last few months of the 2024 election cycle, which was heavily influenced by voters’ concerns about inflation and other economic issues:

Gas prices are likely to a sore point for a president who an election largely on inflation. In 2024, 40 percent of voters in the exit poll said that “high prices for gas, groceries and other goods” was the single most important factor deciding their vote, and they broke 2:1 for Trump. It would be hard to pick a more visible indicator of affordability.

Silver doesn’t discuss it, but normally, presidents also “prep” the public for a conflict — explain why it’s necessary and such, and Trump has broken from the norm on that.

This is a bigger problem that predates the Ukraine invasion, though war also tends to be bad for fertility and some people will also die in Ukraine.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=RU

The last time Russia had a population-sustaining total fertility rate was a period in the 1980s when it spiked.

I assume so. Here’s a video of someone floating a boat (apparently in air) in it, and then sinking it by pouring cups of sulfur hexafluoride over it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee2NaYRnRGo

If it avoids diffusing into air to the degree that you can scoop it up and pour it, I’d imagine that it’d pour out of one’s lungs the same way.

But if you just want to get most of it out of your lungs — like, you’ve been breathing it and don’t want to asphyxiate — I imagine that exhaling all the air you can and inhaling air and doing that a few times would probably do a pretty good job, the way the Mythbusters video above did with the helium.