Quik

Why are Vermont reps so based??? Isn't Bernie also from there?

If only we could get that without actually having to endure symptoms...

Yeah I completely get that, I took a week to get to a rudimentary working state and about a month to be content with my configuration with everything else going on in life.

I would recommend making a plan beforehand with what you'll need to do and then starting on a Friday and battle-proofing everything till Monday if you really depend on it for work. Our life situations unfortunately usually expect us to have a fully "working" smartphone with us with like, a clock app (which GrapheneOS hasn't pre-installed) that just works etc.

Stuff like this was incredibly annoying, because with e.g. the clock or map example, just not having a "just works" solution pre installed leads to bad situations, like an alarm not ringing when it's supposed to and stuff like that.

But honestly, this should be easier for you than it was for me, because you already got your go-to open source Android apps– unlike me making the switch directly from iOS.

Do it now rather than waiting even longer and amassing even more personal data on device

This is what allowed Temu and Alibaba and Wish and the like to happen (their business model was to send every single product as a single package worth under 800$, leading to enormous shipping times and waste etc., but they don't have to pay import taxes).

"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say"

Snowden

Credit cards used for credit card transactions

More news at eleven

As a German, this is precisely what comes to mind

Why is this downvoted so much? (purely rhetorical question, of course, this is Lemmy we're talking about)

Let's unpack. Vance, the Vize vize president (sic!) of an American administration that basically sold the position of the president to the richest man in the world, obviously degrading the value of the public opinion (read: democracy) in the process. Also, it should be noted that this degraded well-known narcissist Trump to Vize President, just wait till he finds out...

Regardless, this representative wants to critizice Europe's/the EU's democracies. This representative of the U.S., a country with a two party "democracy" and part of the one of the two parties that is way more involved in antidemocratic practices such as purging voter registration or gerrymandering. Which in and of itself is a bit... wondrous, but still, valid criticism should be accepted from everywhere you may get it from. You just have to keep in mind where you got it from and what could be possible intentions of the entity criticizing you– if Putin warns you that no, you should definetly not start having a working military or being energy independent again you should at least think of in what way he may seek to profit from telling you that.

Vance probably does not want to actually further stabilize the EU, or actually help them in any way– just a wild guess.

Still, this says nothing about the quality of the criticism itself, and, if you just care enough to look it up, his general points in this case are valid: Allegations of Russian election interference in Romania stand without proof and the EU is in many ways inherently corrupt and actively antidemocratic, e.g. the EU parliament still has no right to propose new bills, rendering it functionally useless as a parliament.

Members of the EU Parliament are getting well payed, especially as abuse of funds of the EU parliament is generally accepted– as long as you don't, never speak out against the antidemocratic nature of the democracy game you're playing.

Von der Leyen ptomised multiple times to introduce such a Parliamentary right of initiative– and never did so, while being the person profiting of of a powerless, as she can basically continue her reign over the EU unquestioned.

FYI Trump made the CEO of the company AccuWeather, Neil Jacobs, administrator of NOAA, which is the agency actually collecting weather data. AccuWeather is one of the biggest private competitors to NOAA, and this is obviously a huge conflict of interest.

For anyone interested to learn more about the topic, check out Michael Lewis' book The Fifth Risk.

I agree Biden was not at all what the country needed, but neither is or was Trump.

Biden did not have any clear message, any hope, any drive. He just... was there. Which would be okay for being president depending on the point in time, but definetly not right now, and definetly not 4 years ago.

Trump is much, much worse than that. Under Biden the US government worked and skilled professionals who make up most of government (because running a country is not only politics) were allowed to do their jobs.

Under Trump's first administration this was not the case, which alone should be immediately disqualifying. Entire agencies waited for weeks and months for transition teams that never came, the Trump team didn't even know what kind or number of positions they'd have to fill– and were shockingly unprepared to do so.

There is a lot of incompetency and neglect that went on here, which goes to show that Trump fundamentally does not care for the American people. If you're interested in what Trump did (or did not) as part of his first transition and why it was such a failure, I can recommend The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, although there are other pieces illustrating the point just as well.

As far as I can tell Trump had not figured out how to optimally extract personal gain (mostly monetary) from being president last time and used the discontent of right wing orgs such as the Heritage foundation and the people at Project 2025 with the ineffectiveness how his last presidency to learn how to that "properly".

Yes, establishing a direct chain of command from the president (who knows nothing about the specifics of single low level career jobs in the government, nor should he habe to) to weaken the government's cyber security and create room for NS Germany like Gleichschaltung coming from authoritarian presidents (as Trump is, I'd argue), will definetly make you have more money.

/s.