I, Donald John Trump, do solemly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. So help me God.
For a guy who spent some time soliciting million-dollar donations from industry to bling up that ceremony, the climax of it doesn't seem to have been as memorable as one might think.
Wages are still stagnant,
Wages were increasing more-quickly than inflation when Biden left office. We had a high rate of inflation, at which point inflation grew more quickly than wages, during the COVID-19 pandemic. That produces a decline in real wages. However, that relationship had reversed by the time Biden left office.
Apparently the toilet thing isn't true, came from a picture of some jeweler's bathroom.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trumps-golden-toilet/
Snopes does say that he has "gold-plated sink fixtures in one bathroom on his private jet", though.
EDIT: And that jet, ignoring the furnishings, is something like 30 times the price of the jeweler's bathroom with the gold toilet.
Calling the press propaganda was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lying_press
"Lying press" (German: Lügenpresse, lit. 'press of lies' [ˈlyːɡn̩ˌpʁɛsə] ⓘ) is a pejorative and disparaging political epithet used largely for the printed press and the mass media at large.
The Nazis adopted the term for their propaganda against the Jewish, communist, and later the foreign press. In 1922 Adolf Hitler used the accusation of the "lying press" for the Marxist press.[citation needed] In the Mein Kampf chapter on war propaganda, he described what he saw as the extraordinary effect of enemy propaganda in the First World War. He criticized German propaganda as ineffective and called for 'better' propaganda, which, allegedly like that of the English, French or Americans, was to be oriented towards psychological effectiveness.[6] Accusations of "lying" against domestic journalism can be found in his speeches, for example against the "social democratic press", Jewish liberals, etc.
Hermann Göring used the expression on 23 March 1933 in his speech during the debate on the Enabling Act of 1933 in the Reichstag.[8] In the same speech he denied attacks on Jewish shops and desecrations of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries.
In December 1937, Manfred Pechau summarized parts of his dissertation ("National Socialism and German Language", Greifswald 1935) in the National Socialist monthly and listed synonyms for what he called "Jewish-Marxist lying press", including "Jewish journals".[9] The party's official educational and speaker information material, published in 1938 by the Reich Propaganda Management of the NSDAP, includes comments on the anti-Semitic November pogroms in 1938 by foreign media as reactions of the "propaganda and lying press" which allegedly represented a new field of slander against the Reich.[10]
In several speeches by Joseph Goebbels from the first half of 1939, "Lügenpresse" is used to characterize the media abroad, especially in the future World War II opponents, the United States, France, and Great Britain.[11] At this point in time, the German domestic press had been "synchronized" (controlled) and a critical domestic press that the National Socialists referred to as the "Lügenpresse" no longer existed. The Nazi propaganda reacted to the false report of Max Schmeling's death with an attack on the "foreign lying press".[12] There were also variations in this terminology; the Völkischer Beobachter, for example, referred to the "emigrant and international lying press" to deny reports about the poor health of the imprisoned Carl von Ossietzky, [13] and in 1932, it rejected criticism of Rosenberg using the formula "Marxist lying press".[14]
In 1942, Baldur von Schirach described the French journalist Geneviève Tabouis, who published reports on the expansion plans of National Socialism, as "the embodiment of this nifty lying press that was available to anyone who knew how to pay"; in the same context he claimed that "90 percent of all Paris newspapers" were under "Jewish influence" and that the newspaper editorial offices were staffed by "over 70 percent" Jews.[15]
The expression was also used in speeches at carnival events that were used to bolster the party.[16]
After the National Socialist Condor Legion bombed the city of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War and this led to appalled reactions in the world, General Franco's propaganda accused the "Jewish lying press" of disinformation, claiming that this was a press maneuver by the Bolsheviks; this happened in harmony with the Nazi propaganda.[17][18]
In 1948, Walter Hagemann analyzed how the Nazi press used the accusation of the "lying press" against the foreign press. He observed that readers should be made aware of how vigilant and reliable German journalism and politics are on this point. The rejection of the Allied "horror reports" as products of the "Jewish journal" was part of this Nazi strategy.[19]
It's a national park. Doesn't Congress have to allocate and remove national parks?
kagis
https://www.nps.gov/alca/learn/index.htm
Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which includes Alcatraz Island, was established by Congress in 1972.
Well, they allocated it, at any rate.
EDIT: It sounds like they disbanded this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Horse_Hill_National_Game_Preserve
In 1904, Congress authorized a memorial park at the site, and President Theodore Roosevelt established it as Sullys Hill Park. Though not part of its official name, it would be called Sullys Hill National Park, the meaning of "national park" not yet standardized, as this site's small size and lack of a significant landmark was inconsistent with other national parks.[1] It was first named after General Alfred Sully,[2] son of the painter Thomas Sully who gained his reputation by carrying out several massacres of Dakota including at the Battle of Whitestone Hill.
On March 3, 1931, during the Great Depression, the United States Congress transferred the park to be managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service as a wildlife refuge, where hunting is permitted with the Spirit Lake Tribe having both fishing and hunting rights. It is one of only seven National Parks to have been disbanded. Of these seven parks, only White Horse Hill and Mackinac National Park in Michigan, now Mackinac Island State Park, are no longer under the control of the National Park Service.
The Pakistan Meteorological Department has issued a countrywide weather alert, forecasting widespread rain, hailstorms, and thunderstorms from today through May 5, 2025. In response, the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has urged provincial and local authorities to take preemptive measures to deal with potential emergencies such as urban flooding, flash floods, and landslides.
Well, sounds like they've got water for a bit.
“I’m just saying [children] don’t need to have 30 dolls, they can have three, they don’t need to have 250 pencils, they can have five,” Trump said.
Before it was 2 dolls instead of 30, or a 93% reduction.
Now it's 5 pencils instead of 250, or a 98% reduction.
But more broadly, if I were Trump, I don't think that I'd be focusing public attention on standard-of-living reductions among American children.
Bloomberg has shared reports from unnamed insiders that the device, codenamed Hypernova, is expected to launch later this year and will feature a monocular design, as in it will use only one display rather than a pair of screens – two details we've already heard.
This single panel would sit in the lower-right corner of the right lens, so it should allow you conveniently see information by looking down without obscuring your vision greatly.
It sounds like they're kinda trying to compete with the watch market or something. Like, not trying to display something that you'd spend your whole time looking at, or even a virtual overlay, but just some status information that you can glance at without being super-obvious about it.
They also have cameras. I don't totally get the use case for cameras plus single screen on lens. I guess maybe you could take a picture of someone's face, upload the photo to Meta, do facial recognition on it, and then have personal details sent back to the screen at the bottom of your right eye. Like, maybe that'd be useful for people who don't want to be in a position of awkwardly forgetting names or security personnel or something.
EDIT: Or maybe people who want to photograph people without it being obvious that they're doing so, and want to have some kind of status display that they can use to see what their camera is doing?
Just seems like an odd combination of features.
EDIT2: Not to mention whatever they're paying for the Ray-Ban branding, so they're probably not pushing for a really price-sensitive use case.
Meta helped fuck over the global economy.
What?
EDIT: You mean them spending a lot of money on VR stuff without it really generating a return?
I don't know if you're in the US, but if so, it's probably not that anyone purchased those rights, but rather that under, as I recall, Western US water right conventions, where land is more arid, if someone is a pre-existing user of water, you can't go upstream from them and block off water from flowing to them (which people would probably tend to do, otherwise).
kagis
Yeah. Apparently the legal term is "prior-appropriation water rights".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior-appropriation_water_rights
In the American legal system, prior appropriation water rights is the doctrine that the first person to take a quantity of water from a water source for "beneficial use" (agricultural, industrial or household) has the right to continue to use that quantity of water for that purpose.[1][2] Subsequent users can take the remaining water for their own use if they do not impinge on the rights of previous users. The doctrine is sometimes summarized, "first in time, first in right".
Prior appropriation rights do not constitute a full ownership right in the water, merely the right to withdraw it, and can be abrogated if not used for an extended period of time.
Origin
Water is very scarce in the West and so must be allocated sparingly, based on the productivity of its use. The prior appropriation doctrine developed in the Western United States from Spanish (and later Mexican) civil law and differs from the riparian water rights that apply in the rest of the United States. The appropriation doctrine originated in Gold-Rush–era California, when miners sought to acquire water for mining operations. In the 1855 case of Irwin v. Phillips, Matthew Irwin diverted a stream for his mining operation. Shortly afterward, Robert Phillips started a mining operation downstream and eventually tried to divert the water back to its original streambed. The case was taken to the California Supreme Court, which ruled for Irwin.[3]
EDIT: Oh, though they do say that the rights can be sold, so maybe someone did purchase them.
They're all right, I suppose, but it wasn't dissatisfaction with search results that caused me to want to use Kagi. Rather, that I wanted to use a search engine that has a sustainable business model that didn't involve data-mining me or showing me ads.
If Google or whoever offered some kind of comparable commercial "private search" service with a no-log, no-data-mining, no-ad offering, I'd probably sit down and to compare the results, see what I think. I kind of wish Google would do that with YouTube, but alas, they don't...
Kagi does have a feature where they will let you search the complete Threadiverse that I make use of, since I spend a lot of time here; there isn't really a fantastic way to accomplish this on Google or another search engine that I'm aware of. They call that their "Fediverse Forums" search lens; that's probably the Kagi-specific feature that I get the most use out of.
They have other features, like fiddling with the priorities of sites and stuff like that, but I don't really use that stuff. They do let you customize the output and stuff. You can set up search aliases and stuff, but I can do most of that browser-side in Firefox.
They have the ability to run a variety of LLM models on their hardware, provide that as a service. I have the hardware to run those on my own hardware and have the software set up to do so, so I don't use that functionality. If I didn't, I'd probably find some commercial service like them that had a no-log, no-data-mining policy, as it's more economical to share hardware that one is only using 1% of the time or whatever.
I dunno. They have some sort of free trial thing, if you want to see what their search results are like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_sexual_reproduction
Sex has been around for a while and such an elimination hasn't happened, so my guess is that, unless changes in the environment make it a more-prominent negative selection factor, homosexuality isn't going to be eliminated via selection of genes in the near future.