This is the second time parody metal band Psychostick has foretold the future of US politics, first with "Political bum" and then "Numbers" - complete with muppets!

They were probably most concerned with ensuring that it wouldn't question the primacy of supporting free markets:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/p...

Everything old is new again:

https://damagedglitter.com/pro...

I'd guess the device was one of these:

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

Let's wait for some precedent or at least a strong hint of inclination before we assume that future Dem presidents will also take the wannabe-dictator path from now on. While all future US presidents will have the opportunity to be mini-dictators until some much-needed guardrails are added, so far only one party (and in fact only one man) has taken it.

A Twitter-branded Mastodon instance might have a decent shot at success just due to the branding advantage, nothing since Twitter has been as well-known as Twitter.

If you parked the Venus zeppelin on Mars it wouldn't offer the inhabitants enough protection from the cold or radiation. But that's a minor issue next to the fact that it would explode due to the lower atmospheric pressure.

I guess you missed this part:

That's because most blockchain activity is wash trades, so everything else is small in comparison. Here's something to get you started:

https://www.moneylaundering.co...

Reminder to all readers: Monero and zcash exist, off-chain transactions (including cash-for-wallet deals) exist.

The difference is that Visa transactions are overwhelmingly for non-criminal purposes, while cryptocurrency transaction are (excluding wash trades) overwhelmingly for criminal purposes.

I'll just leave these here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/1...

https://www.rand.org/pubs/comm...

https://www.dw.com/en/north-ko...

https://www.queensu.ca/iigr/re...

https://www.moneylaundering.co...

There are two cryptocurrencies that functionally specialize in helping criminals launder money and evade sanctions, Monero and zcash. They are inherently untraceable and can work as a one-stop money laundromat once you can get currency in and out of them, and the subset of cryptobros who are trying to take cryptocurrency mainstream don't want you to know this. A little money laundering flaring up with some random stablecoin is background noise in the criminal finance world of cryptocurrency.

Catch up to the Chinese on battery tech? They don't have any special battery tech. There's nothing special about Chinese EVs components, they're basically the same stuff everyone else is making their EVs out of.

Biofuels aren't worse than fossil fuels but they surprisingly aren't much better. You can make renewable e-fuels with just renewable power and recaptured CO2, but they take an obscene amount of energy and then the ICE turns most of what all that energy produced into waste heat.

Hydrogen is a fossil fuel industry distraction, it offers the best selection of the worst downsides: An expensive and currently mostly fossil-sourced fuel you need to get at a station like gas/diesel, relatively long refuel times and short range in a vehicle with a higher up-front cost and weight like an EV, and a fuel that is only available at a small handful of stations, needs to be stored at immense pressures, escapes through solids and embrittles steel on the way out, and burns with an invisible flame like only hydrogen can offer.

We won't be able to get rid of liquid hydrocarbon fuels completely any time soon but we can make their uses a small enough fraction of what they are today that they're no longer a major source of fossil CO2 emissions and these oddball "fucking around in the margins" solutions can fulfill a decent fraction of the demand.

My last three landscape sliders were the Nokia N900, Motorola Droid 4 and F(x)tec Pro1, so they survived longer than that, and all three were in the size range of normal phones.