Aaak. I think it was. That'll teach me to work off of decade old memories...

Well, it probably won't teach me.

Why do you think the Germans have the 5% rule?

The 5 percent rule is basically a guardrail built after the Weimar failure, where dozens of tiny parties splintered parliament and helped the Nazis rise through chaotic, fractured coalitions. Modern Germany uses the threshold to prevent that kind of fragmentation again and keep extremist fringe groups from getting seats off tiny vote shares.

lucky 10,000!

Time to go down the Panspermia rabbit hole!

That the primary motivator towards forcing the sale wasn't the algorithm as such, it was the probability that the PRC would use TikTok as a propaganda tool.

The Republicans aren't conservative in any sensible meaning of the word. They are radicals. The Democrats are far more conservative than the Republicans these days.

Lots of medical workers, especially in rural hospitals, are on H1-Bs.

I never stopped coming in to the office. Before that I worked in industrial automation, and that work couldn't be done remotely either.

"diesel engines are known for being especially difficult to start in cold."

When I was in the Army in Korea in 1985/86 one of the duties on the duty roster was to start every vehicle in the motor pool every 4 hours and run it for half an hour to keep it warm. Nothing like getting up at 0200 on a Sunday morning to spend an hour in the motor pool.

Yes, buying. I lived in Cedar City Utah and first encountered Linux in a RedHat 2.0 beige box at a gaming store in Red Cliffs Mall in St George. Probably in 1994 or 5. Came with a couple of manuals, a boot floppy, and a CD. Had the 0.95 kernel. Getting dial-up configured was interesting since the ISP only knew about Trumpet Winsock... Then leaving it running for a few hours in the evening to update everything.

Within a week I was at the local BN buying O'Reilly books.

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

And the likeliest explanation is things connected with the GDPR "right to be forgotten":

https://mashable.com/article/c...

Resolving ambiguities in the law is what judges are for. The existing system is all about writing vague laws and then appointing "agency experts" to fill in the blanks without having to bother with that whole annoying democracy thing to change the law. Some people like it that way though, the submitter seems pretty upset at the idea of lawmaking involving things like voting or separation of powers.