My only basis for evaluating the (public school) US K-12 education system is my own observations on the quality of teaching that was done to my kid when he was in public school, and contrasting to the education I was provided with myself growing up in Europe. The contrast was stark. Most of the 6th and 7th grades were for instance spent on rehashing the exact same subjects as in 5th grade without any significant development.
I was fortunate enough to afford moving him to private education starting in 8th grade, and that made a very significant difference.

I've cleaned the USB-C port on the phone many times, including using contact cleaner/deoxit. It did not make a difference.

The USB-C port on my 5-year-old phone is now functioning only intermittently. On a good day I can charge the phone. On all the other days I can't. And that is after going through a large number of power adapters and cables.
The USB-A ports on my 10-year-old laptop all function well, no issues there. Being used on a daily basis.

for enabling the heated seats? Inquiring minds want to know.

That's just, like, your opinion, man. :)

I like Firefox. I tried many other browsers, but I always keep going back to it. Yeah it could be better, but the same can be said for all other browsers many times over.

Enjoy the choice.

Firefox 141.0.3 on Artix Linux, no AI tab grouping either. Whew. Keep it this way.

I have. A few actually. It was on a music channel where the creator used AI to make imagery for her original music. It was tastefully done and clearly labeled as AI-generated imagery over original human-made music. It was also very easy to tell that it was AI generated.

Brand recognition is a double-edged sword. I am less likely to consider a brand/product for purchase the more ads I see for it.

I've avoided all Ubisoft games after the DRM on one of them nearly broke my PC about 10-12 years ago.
Of course I don't assume that my drop missing in their ocean made any difference at all, but maybe I'm not the only one.

Yes; I did not say that it's impossible, only that it's very difficult. And then they never did it again, because it was easier to do with the conventional isotopes such as Pu239 and U235.
In all isotope chains there are candidates for use as fissile bomb material, but some are just not worth the effort to use.

The U233 produced in thorium reactors is mixed with U232, which is very difficult to separate and highly radioactive, which poses great obstacles to using it for bomb making purposes.

Try Pulsar instead for playing music. It does not behave like that and I find it more lightweight and with a better UI than VLC for this purpose. I still use VLC for video.

I played with svt-av1/ffmpeg about a year ago and my conclusions were about the same as yours or worse. Depending on the source material, the space/bandwidth savings were between about 15% and -10% (yes, 10% larger than the source material) while power consumption and CPU utilization was much larger that software h264/265

The main problem with perchlorates in dust isn't that they're oxidizers. They are directly poisonous to humans, they shut down the thyroid gland which regulates metabolism. Breathing martian dust = breathing poison.

BTW I run Arch.