tal

Crucially, the beneficiaries on the American side would not be the US government but private investors. The specific companies involved were not determined at this stage. Instead, the US proposed setting up a trust fund to which Ukraine would transfer the rights to develop its resources. This fund would then select the American companies who would extract – and profit from – Ukraine’s minerals.

Notably, the current draft does not appear to have been prepared by the US Department of Energy or the State Department but by Trump’s private legal team, which seemingly failed to distinguish between intergovernmental agreements and commercial contracts.

Uh huh. Well, that sounds pretty sketchy.

EDIT: I'd also add, setting aside the whole Ukraine angle, that that doesn't look all that great to me in conjunction with the FCPA suspension, if Trump's legal team is off looking to cut arrangements out-of-band from the bureaucracy with foreign governments to benefit unspecified private parties in the US. That is, for at last six months, the major legal restriction on American companies on bribing foreign governments is suspended.

https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2025/02/president-trump-issues-executive-order-temporarily-pausing-fcpa-enforcement

On February 10, 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order and accompanying fact sheet directing Attorney General (AG) Pam Bondi to, for a period of 180 days (1) effectively halt the initiation of new Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) investigations and enforcement actions and (2) undertake a detailed review of any such existing matters with an eye toward “restoring proper bounds” on enforcement.

I realize that most folks here are probably interested in the impact on Ukraine, but that's got some serious issues for the US as well.

To be blunt, that's a lot of potential money to be changing hands between private parties without record being made of what terms are going on, where decisions on US policy are involved. The only reason that I'm aware of that we're aware of this in the US is because Ukraine disclosed the offer. I don't know whether Trump's legal team might be writing up other contracts potentially involving other countries.

Florida man strikes again.

Also...why is the Miami Beach squad car painted in rainbow colors? That can't be their regular logo.

kagis

Ah. Apparently this is an ongoing thing in Miami Beach PD of which I had been unaware.

2019:

https://beantowncubanito.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-rainbow-police-car.html

The rainbow police car

Miami Beach also has a patrol car with "POLICE" decorated in rainbow hues. The Ford Crown Victoria is used at community events such as the annual Miami Beach Pride festivities on Ocean Drive.. (Photo below from Miami Beach PD)

2022:

https://www.metroweekly.com/2022/06/miami-beach-police-lambasted-for-releasing-pride-themed-squad-car/

Miami Beach Police Criticized for Pride-Themed Squad Car
Miami Beach Police Department's rainbow-colored car sparks criticism from both homophobes and the LGBTQ community.

2023:

https://www.foxnews.com/media/miami-pride-police-cruiser-mocked-going-viral-twitter-society-unsalvageable

Miami 'Pride' police cruiser mocked after going viral on Twitter: 'Society is unsalvageable’

The Miami Police Department confirmed that the rainbow covered SUV is a working law enforcement vehicle

2024:

https://www.newsflare.com/video/651713/miami-pd-joins-pride-trend-with-rainbow-coloured-car

Miami PD joins Pride trend with rainbow coloured car

Officers from the Miami Police Department joined the Pride trend with a rainbow-coloured car.

Footage shows the cops with the event-goers doing a countdown to reveal the patrol car that was repainted for the day on June 4.

It sounds like it mostly has media on the right upset.

I have no idea why The Guardian is using the image, but maybe they just searched for "miami police" to get a stock filler image and slapped the first thing that came up into their article.

I don't know about the best route or if there's a viable one to get it to its original state, but if you want a replacement, I think that this is what you have:

https://www.amazon.com/Calypso-Basics-88660-Enamel-Colander/dp/B07FM7W1SJ

Amazon's out of stock, but it gives the brand and model number -- "Reston Lloyd 88660", if you want a new one.

Camelcamelcamel says that it was last available in early 2021 for about $33 (with a small price dip at the end):

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B07FM7W1SJ

So I wouldn't spend more than $33 of time and resources on repair effort, since I suspect that there are probably some out there.

EDIT: It looks like their current model is one-tone rather than two-tone:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=lloyd+reston+collander

I don't know if that matters to you.

EDIT2: I see the two-tone being sold on EBay ("lloyd reston collander") new, albeit not currently in pink, if that's the color you have.

EDIT3: Apparently Lloyd Reston is the "exclusive distributor", and "Calypso" is the brand.

If you have magenta -- I'm not sure from the picture you have, looks kind of salmon, in between their pink and magenta collander, but could be lighting -- this is their current one-tone model:

https://reston-lloyd.myshopify.com/products/powder-coated-colanders-magenta?_pos=1&_sid=1949a470d&_ss=r

It's $23.

EDIT4: bonanza.com has two-toned ones, but not in pink or magenta, just orange, black, or lime. And they're significantly-more than the one-toned ones, at $37.

EDIT5: Well, I don't see it on Google Shopping, which is usually kind of the authoritative source, because they index pretty much everything. That being said, it does look like this sold through major retailers, including Wal-Mart, which is everywhere, so I would bet that there are a bunch out there floating around in private hands. Even if you can't restore your existing one, you might keep an eye on used markets like eBay, Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, stuff like that, wait for one to pop up.

I have no doubt that that's true, that internal trade barriers are a larger issue than trade barriers between the US and EU, but they're also kind of two different issues. The EU is not tightly politically-integrated; it has powerful member-state level political interests who are going to want to serve specific domestic interests rather than overall EU concerns. It's not possible for the EU to wave a wand and make that go away, whereas it is very easy for the US administration to not impose restrictions vis-a-vis the EU.

EDIT: I mean, the article even mentions that, albeit not in specific terms, and only in a single sentence.

Up to now, Europe has focused on either single or national goals without counting their collective cost.

The problem is, that's a pretty important sentence there.

The average person does not deal with files anymore. Many people use online applications for everything from multimedia to documents, which happily abstract away the experience of managing file formats.

I remember someone saying that and me having a hard time believing it, but I've seen several people say that.

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files.

Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.

Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAcademia/comments/1dkeiwz/is_genz_really_this_bad_with_computers/

The OS interfaces have followed this trend, by developing OS that are more similar to a smartphone design (Windows 8 was the first great example of this). And everything became more user-friendly (my 65+ yo parents barely know how to turn on a computer, but now, use apps for the bank and send emails from their phone). The combined result is that the younger generations have never learned the basic of how a computer works (file structure, file installation...) and are not very comfortable with the PC setup (how they prefer to keep their notes on the phone makes me confused).

So the "kids" do not need to know these things for their daily enjoyment life (play videogames, watch videos, messaging... all stuff that required some basic computer skills even just 10 years ago, but now can be done much more easily, I still remember having to install some bulky pc game with 3 discs) and we nobody is teaching them because the people in charge thought "well the kids know this computer stuff better than us" so no more courses in elementary school on how to install ms word.

For a while I was convinced my students were screwing with me but no, many of them actually do not know the keyboard short cuts for copy and paste. If it’s not tablet/phone centric, they’re probably not familiar with it.

Also, most have used GSuite through school and were restricted from adding anything to their Chrome Books. They’ve used integrated sites, not applications that need downloading. They’re also adept at Web 3.0, creation stuff, more than professional type programs.

As much as boomers don't know how to use PCs because they were too new for them, GenZs and later are not particularly computer savvy because computers are too old for them.

I can understand some arguments that there's always room to advance UI paradigms, but I have to say that I don't think that cloud-based smartphone UIs are the endgame. If one is going to consume content, okay, fine. Like, as a TV replacement or something, sure. But there's a huge range of software -- including most of what I'd use for "serious" tasks -- out there that doesn't fall into that class, and really doesn't follow that model. Statistics software? Software development? CAD? I guess Microsoft 365 -- which I have not used -- probably has some kind of cloud-based spreadsheet stuff. I haven't used Adobe Creative Cloud, but I assume that it must have some kind of functionality analogous to Photoshop.

kagis

Looks like off-line Photoshop is dead these days, and Adobe shifted to a pure SaaS model:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Creative_Cloud#Criticism

Shifting to a software as a service model, Adobe announced more frequent feature updates to its products and the eschewing of their traditional release cycles.[26] Customers must pay a monthly subscription fee. Consequently, if subscribers cancel or stop paying, they will lose access to the software as well as the ability to open work saved in proprietary file formats.[27]

shakes head

Man.

And for that matter, I'd think that a lot of countries might have concerns about dependence on a cloud service. I mean, I would if we were talking about China. I'm not even talking about data security or anything -- what happens if Country A sanctions Country B and all of Country B's users have their data abruptly inaccessible?

I get that Internet connectivity is more-widespread now. But, while I'm handicapped without an Internet connection, because I don't have access to useful online resources, I can still basically do all of the tasks I want to do locally. Having my software unavailable because the backend is unreachable seems really problematic.

It takes a lot of pressure to trigger an anti-tank mine. I don't think that you'd manage it just stepping on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPP-B_Wierzba_mine

This is a current Polish anti-tank mine. WP says that it's apparently similar to the Soviet TM-62.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TM-62

Operating pressure: 150 to 550 kilograms (330 to 1,210 lb)

To be fair, he's always smiling and his predecessor had to be the world's least photogenic Pope, so it's probably something that he's focused on doing himself.

Vinegar is nasty

I like salt and vinegar potato chips.

the only way to get that link back is by using a slightly different player that pays us less and YouTube more.

Add a "watch on YouTube" link above or below your embedded videos?

I mean, some of those EOLed nearly a decade ago.

You can argue over what a reasonable EOL is, but all hardware is going to EOL at some point, and at that point, it isn't going to keep getting updates.

Throw enough money at a vendor, and I'm sure that you can get extended support contracts that will keep it going for however long people are willing to keep chucking money at a vendor -- some businesses pay for support on truly ancient hardware -- but this is a consumer broadband router. It's unlikely to make a lot of sense to do so on this -- the hardware isn't worth much, nor is it going to be terribly expensive to replace, and especially if you're using the wireless functionality, you probably want support for newer WiFi standards anyway that updated hardware will bring.

I do think that there's maybe a good argument that EOLing hardware should be handled in a better way. Like, maybe hardware should ship with an EOL sticker, so that someone can glance at hardware and see if it's "expired". Or maybe network hardware should have some sort of way of reporting EOL in response to a network query, so that someone can audit a network for EOLed hardware.

But EOLing hardware is gonna happen.

I remember commenting a couple months back on one of those "Arab-Americans not voting for Harris" posts, something along the lines of "it's your vote, but I think that you're going to find that you'd rather have Harris than Trump" and listing some past policy moves like the embassy in Jerusalem, and then someone downvoting and responding something along the lines of "identical candidates".

One issue that has come up recently in discussions on here is that it's hard to get dumb TVs or computer monitors in large format in 2024.

Not impossible, but surprisingly difficult. I went looking for a large computer monitor for some user who wanted a large one. I eventually found an older one on Amazon still for sale, but it's not that easy to get large computer monitors, which I think is part of what drives people to use smart TVs as computer monitors.

You can get projectors, but that's not what everyone's after.