Note, this is happening for the same reason Reddit started enshittifying much harder all of a sudden. Discord wants to do an IPO and so they’re going to suddenly start squeezing their users to make the numbers look good just in time for that IPO. Their bet is that they have enough momentum that enough people will stick with them long enough for the IPO to succeed, and after that happens, it’s someone else’s problem.

rate other nations on reputational factors such as trust, admiration, respect, and overall image.

I think you can see why if those are the criteria. Switzerland may not be seen as benevolent, but they can be trusted, and they’re well respected. They tend to stick to their principles, even if you don’t agree with those principles, you can respect that and admire it. Also, while a lot of Switzerland’s economy is finance and tech, the manufacturing industry they have isn’t all that polluting. They have drug manufacturers, lens manufacturers, etc. By contrast, Norway may be a more friendly and compassionate country, but it’s also an oil-based economy.

I like how Taiwan sneaks into the rankings out of nowhere.

Also, Cuba and Venezuela disappeared. Does that mean that somehow they’re ranked even lower than Russia?

Sympathy for being the target of Trump’s attacks. I think even when Justin Trudeau was PM people felt sympathy for Canada as Trump was calling Trudeau Canada’s “governor”, etc.

Denmark will probably go up next year just because they were targeted in the whole “Greenland” affair, and Norway will go up because Trump attacked their government for not giving him the Nobel Prize, even though the government has nothing to do with that.

Well, I’m an IT Geek, as you know… and what’s happening in Minnesota is wrong.

If I were a lawyer maybe I could say something about how what’s happening in Minnesota is illegal, which I wish this guy had done. It’s far too common that something is wrong, while still being legal. It’s wrong for grocery stores to throw away perfectly good food rather than donating it to the needy, but they do that and it’s legal. It’s wrong for garment manufacturers to destroy unsold clothing rather than give it away, but that happens too and it’s legal. It’s wrong for the cops to lie in an interrogation to try to get someone to confess, but that’s also somehow legal.

It would be much more powerful to say “As a lawyer, this is not only wrong, it’s completely illegal. Unfortunately Trump controls the justice department, and the Supreme Court can no longer be considered a neutral arbiter of the law. So, it may be that these clearly illegal things will never be punished. But, anybody who has studied the law and is being honest will admit that the Trump admin is breaking the law.”

The battery is the first thing that tends to fail for me.

My phone is a few years old now and recently I wet it down on the inductive charger overnight and missed, so when I woke up it was at 20% battery. I decided that I’d let the battery drain to 0 before charging it, because AFAIK it’s still true that it’s good to do that occasionally so the battery management software can recalibrate things. So I used it for a few minutes and it very quickly dropped to 9% battery, and then it hung out there for like 10 minutes without moving. I gave up on actively using it to drain the battery and just put on a YouTube live stream and put the phone down. Eventually it moved past 9% battery and slowly drained down to 1%. And at 1% it lasted at least another half an hour just sitting there playing full screen video.

From my experience with previous phones, there’s a chance that the battery management software might be able to tune things so that it is more predictable. But, if I’m unlucky it’s already in its death spiral. It’s a shame because it’s still a fairly decent phone. I might want to upgrade anyhow, but it sucks that once the battery goes bad the phone is almost e-Waste. I’ve used a local guy who does repairs to change the battery in a tablet a few years ago, and it went from having horrible battery life to having good-as-new battery life. But, while the battery is still decent on it, the model is so old it’s no longer getting any software updates, which means a lot of apps simply won’t run on it. So, even if I replace the battery in this phone, it’s getting more and more useless by the day.

If I could load another OS on it, I could find a use for it. I have headless computers and it would be great if this could be a temporary screen / keyboard for those. It could be a dedicated bike computer. I could use its camera and monitor 3d prints. But, none of that is possible if the manufacturer says that it’s too old for them to bother with and their app store no longer has apps for it.

You’re indirectly helping Google though. If the second hand market is better for Pixels than other devices because of Graphene, then people are more willing to buy Pixels, so Google sells more of them.

They’re going to consider that assault on a police officer, and might either shoot back, or at a minimum arrest you and make sure you see prison time.

If you don’t like it, you should have edited your posts as soon as you found out they weren’t Canadian. It’s now what, a day since you posted that they were Canadian here, then doubled down on that here, and you still have yet to edit either of those posts to indicate you now realize you were wrong.

Sounds like you’re the one who should read further.

Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt were born in Oakland, California. Frank Edwin Wright III (Tre Cool) was born in West Germany, because his father was a US Army pilot, they relocated to California. The band was formed in the Bay Area. There really isn’t anything about the band that’s Canadian.

I have good news for you…

Speaking of Hollywood, it was a Japanese movie that made me realize how ironclad their “shoes off” rule is, compared to ours.

Where I live, it’s shoes off, but nobody’s going to bat an eye if you forget something inside and keep your shoes on while you go back and get it. Even if your shoes are dirty, as long as you clean up the mess you made when you get back, it’s no big deal. So, it’s shoes off, but it’s not like there’s a special zone by the door where you must switch footwear and you must never wear shoes after that point.

So, what I saw when I watched the Japanese horror movie “The Ring” surprised me. It was a movie where people were running in terror, they were out of their minds in fear, but even in that state, when entering a house / apartment, they’d still take off their shoes. For me, as a westerner, it was really distracting to see someone take the time to observe that shoes on / shoes off rule even in a state of utter panic. But, the reason they did it that way is that for a Japanese audience, it would have completely broken their suspension of disbelief if someone entered a house / apartment and didn’t remove their shoes.

How can Canada be a shoes off country if Britain and America are shoes-on?

Weather.

In Canada (except near Vancouver) you have to wear winter boots whenever you’re outside for many months.

In most of the UK, and part of the US, you never get snow.

People wearing winter boots change them when they get home. If you’re just wearing sneakers or something, it’s more reasonable to keep wearing them around the house.

I think there are probably a fair number of homes in Canada (especially on the west coast) where people wear shoes around the house. There are probably even places where people switch from winter boots to “house shoes” or something. But, I’d imagine that there are many more “shoes off” houses in Canada just because of winter, and many more “shoes on” houses in say Miami or Phoenix or Los Angeles where it never gets cold.

Similarly, I would be that even though Argentina and Chile are listed as “shoes on” countries, my guess is that in the deep south where it can get wintery, they at a minimum change their footwear after coming inside in the winter.

The most fun take I heard about this: “Why are they playing a football game at the Bad Bunny concert?”

It’s called football because it’s played on foot, as opposed to polo or other sports that were popular at the time when the rules for football were first being written down.

Where’s a scarf?

There’s a site I use where you can download sports videos. Often you can find the “compressed” version of a gridiron football game. An NFL game on TV typically lasts 3 hours from the kickoff to the final whistle. The game clock runs for 4 15-minute quarters, but they stop that clock all the time. Any time there’s a point scored, the ball is turned over, or the clock hits a special value (end of quarter, 2 minute warning to the end of a half, etc.) they stop the clock and while things happen there’s a commercial break. They also have commercial breaks every time either team calls a timeout. But, what’s extra ridiculous is that there are “TV Timeouts” when the network itself calls a timeout so they can show some commercials. Anyhow, that’s how a 1 hour game expands to fill a 3 hour slot.

So, these compressed games, you’d think they could shorten it to just 1 hour, right? What’s amazing is that they actually manage to compress it to about 30 minutes. Not only do they cut out everything happening while the clock is stopped, they even cut out stuff when the clock is running but nothing much is happening – the players are getting up to the line, the quarterback is calling out before the snap, etc.

So, gridiron football is about 83% filler, and 17% actual action.

What was Wenger doing putting Walcott on that early?