No mention was made of two other U.S. citizens – George Glezmann and Mahmood Habibi-- who have been held by the Taliban since 2022. It was unclear whether these were the hostages that Rubio referred to.

Don’t get me wrong, the Taliban isn’t exactly on my Christmas card list and I can certainly believe that they’re acting unreasonably.

However. Why were those people in Afghanistan in the first place?

https://jamesfoleyfoundation.org/hostage/george-glezmann/#gsc.tab=0

George Glezmann is a 65-year-old American citizen who was visiting Kabul, Afghanistan as a tourist when he was seized by the Taliban’s intelligence services on December 5, 2022. He is held by the Taliban without just cause or formal charge. George was traveling lawfully in Afghanistan fulfilling his lifelong passion of visiting different countries and exploring various cultures and cultural artifacts.

Okay, so he was into visiting places. Question: Did the State Department issue an advisory saying “do not travel to Afghanistan?” Because I’m pretty sure that we’ve had one up for quite some time.

kagis

Yes:

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/traveladvisories/afghanistan-advisory.html

Afghanistan - Level 4: Do Not Travel

Do not travel to Afghanistan due to civil unrest, crime, terrorism, risk of wrongful detention, kidnapping, and limited health facilities.

Country Summary: The U.S. Embassy in Kabul suspended operations in 2021. The U.S. government is not able to provide routine or emergency consular services to U.S. citizens in Afghanistan.

Multiple terrorist groups are active in Afghanistan and U.S. citizens are targets of kidnapping and hostage-taking. The Taliban have harassed and detained aid and humanitarian workers. The activities of foreigners may be viewed with suspicion, and reasons for detention may be unclear. Even if you are registered with the appropriate authorities to conduct business, the risk of detention is high.

The Department has determined there is a risk of wrongful detention of U.S. nationals in Afghanistan.

Okay. It’s 2025. This guy was grabbed in 2022. Were they already warning about this?

hits the Wayback Machine

https://web.archive.org/web/20220101195051/https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/traveladvisories/afghanistan-advisory.html

Afghanistan - Level 4: Do Not Travel

Do not travel to Afghanistan due to civil unrest, armed conflict, crime, terrorism, kidnapping, and COVID-19.

Travel to all areas of Afghanistan is unsafe. The Department of State assesses the risk of kidnapping or violence against U.S. citizens in Afghanistan is high.

It’s not at all clear to me that the State Department should be going in to pull this guy out via a prisoner trade – as it sounds like the Biden administration was doing with someone else – or having Taliban leaders killed, as it sounds like the Trump administration is talking about doing. They told him “don’t do X or you’re liable to be kidnapped”, and he went right ahead and did X and got himself kidnapped. Now, I appreciate that that is a crummy situation for him, but part of having the freedom to ignore what the State Department says does, I think, include dealing with the consequences when you choose to ignore it.

If the Taliban sent someone overseas to US soil and physically grabbed the guy, okay, sure, I get that. Then it’s not reasonably avoidable for him, and the US government should jump in. But that’s not the situation here. The guy did something very inadvisable after being told “don’t do that” by the government, and that thing had crummy consequences for him.

In fact, blocking communities is more important than subscribing to them!

I browse Subscribed. Whitelisting communities is almost certainly going to be a lot more aggressive than browsing All and blacklisting communities.

That was Nissan. I don’t think that it was ever established that they were, just that their click-through privacy agreement had the consumer explicitly give them the right to do so.

kagis

They apparently say that they put it in there because the data that they did collect would permit inferring sexual orientation (like, I assume that if they’re harvesting location data and someone is parking outside gay bars, it’s probably possible to data-mine that).

https://nypost.com/2023/09/06/nissan-kia-collect-data-about-drivers-sexual-activity/

On Nissan’s official web page outlining its privacy policy, the Japan-based company said that it collects drivers’ “sensitive personal information, including driver’s license number, national or state identification number, citizenship status, immigration status, race, national origin, religious or philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation, sexual activity, precise geolocation, health diagnosis data, and genetic information.”

“Nissan does not knowingly collect or disclose consumer information on sexual activity or sexual orientation,” a company spokesperson told The Post.

“Some state laws require us to account for inadvertent data collection or information that could be inferred from other data, such as geolocation.”

Make a community, specify no politics in the rules? Heck, this community excludes US politics in the rules.

It’s raising questions over whether diverting power to higher-paying customers will leave enough for others

kagis

It sounds like at least some of this is adding generation capacity.

https://www.energytech.com/energy-efficiency/article/55141439/three-mile-island-1-returns-as-crane-center-microsoft-signs-20-year-nuclear-ppa-with-constellation

Three Mile Island Reactor Returning in 2028 as Crane Center: Microsoft Signs 20-year Nuclear PPA with Constellation

Sept. 20, 2024

The new PPA is Constellation’s largest ever with Microsoft, so big that the energy company will restart closed Three Mile Island’s nuclear-powered Unit 1 close by the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania.

I mean, that generation capacity had been offline. Wasn’t providing power for anyone in the condition it had been in.

Oh, I do remember the FEMA conspiracy stuff from back when, believe that that was from the right.

kagis

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

The FEMA camps conspiracy theory is a belief, particularly within the American Patriot movement,[1] that the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is planning to imprison US citizens in concentration camps, following the imposition of martial law in the United States after a major disaster or crisis.[1][2][3][4] In some versions of the theory, only suspected dissidents will be imprisoned. In more extreme versions, large numbers of US citizens will be imprisoned for the purposes of extermination as a New World Order is established. The theory has existed since the late 1970s, but its circulation has increased with the advent of the internet and social media platforms.[2]

Is your concern that Steam might be compromised? If you’re willing to trust PayPal, they’ll use them as a payment processor.

https://www.axios.com/2024/10/08/fema-direct-payments-state-recipients

Where FEMA’s direct relief money is going

Florida, Louisiana and Texas residents have received the lion’s share of FEMA direct assistance since 2015, per newly gathered data.

Texas and Louisiana have been Republican-favoring states for some time.

https://www.270towin.com/states/Louisiana

https://www.270towin.com/states/Texas

Florida is more swing, though has been trending Republican:

https://www.270towin.com/states/Florida

I’d guess – not familiar with the politics – that maybe there’s irritation with FEMA’s speed of processing hurricane aid in those states, and that’s what’s driving Trump’s statements. However, if FEMA simply disappeared tomorrow, along with the aid it provided, it’d probably be generally-disadvantageous to Republican-favoring states.

Ah, gotcha, thanks.

Temu is literally just a front page for AliExpress

?

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

Parent: PDD Holdings[9]

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

Owner: Alibaba Group

They both sell products out of China, and I can believe that the same products might be available on both, but I don’t think that they’re the same organization, if that’s what you’re saying.

My understanding is that AliExpress was originally aimed at B2B (business-to-business) transactions. So it kind of competed more with the traditional Thomas Register – connect a business that wants to find a supplier, though in this case it took a cut on each transaction, sort of a super-distributor. But it seems to have shifted to have more of a consumer focus. Certainly the few times I’ve taken a glance, there are pretty clearly plenty of consumer-oriented things on there today. AliExpress is China-based.

I haven’t ever done more than very briefly glance at the Temu website, but from my recent reading, it and Shein – which you didn’t mention, not sure if it’s available in Australia – they’re a B2C (business-to-consumer) thing, more like Amazon. They’re aimed at the value segment. My understanding is that one major factor that contributed to Temu and Shein doing well in the US was that low-value shipments from China to the US didn’t have to pay tariffs. I’d guess that this was to help reduce the transaction cost of international sales, since any kind of red tape is going to be magnified if you have to do it many times over. So a vendor in China directly selling a pair of shoes to someone in the US didn’t have to pay a tariff. Larger-value shipments, like a bulk import of a shipping container full of shoes, did. That meant that traditional importers, who would buy a bulk shipment abroad, import it, and then have it sold split up via domestic vendors, were at a disadvantage. I don’t know whether similar factors apply to Australian customs policy. These two are China-based.

Ebay is US-based, was originally an auction site that targeted secondhand stuff. You can get new stuff there now, and not just at auction (and Amazon now sells secondhand stuff, albeit only at fixed, non-auction prices, so I’d guess that they compete more-directly with each other). I’ve only used it when looking for exotic expensive stuff that one can acquire cheaply secondhand, or stuff that can’t be found new today.

Yep. I’m stuck driving cars from the mid-2000s at the latest because it’s a deal-breaker for me.

There are still a bunch, but ultimately, that supply is going to dwindle as wear and tear and such takes effect.

On some cars, you can disconnect the power to the cell radio module. I’ve read some posts about people doing that on newer Toyota Corollas.

kagis

Not the post I’m thinking of, but an example:

https://old.reddit.com/r/GRCorolla/comments/1f1vl94/for_those_of_you_looking_to_disable_the_dcm_and/

I remember they said that you used to be able to just pull out a single fuse in the fuse box to kill power to the telematics module, but with newer models there’s some second fuse-box that’s not very user-accessible in the guts of the car that controls it, and getting power away from the module on those is a more-elaborate task.

Also, I’ve read that on multiple Corollas – someone else in this thread mentions this also applying to Subarus – one of the speakers and the microphone is routed through that module to provide it access to the microphone and the sound system, so if you disconnect them without additional work, you’re going to lose one of your speakers and the car’s built-in microphone.

EDIT: I also have no idea how firmware updates get pushed to your car. It might be that updating firmware is part of the regular service, or it might be that they rely on over-the-air access to your car’s cell modem. But either way, I could imagine pulling the thing meaning that they can’t update your car’s firmware, which could be a cost.

I’ve no idea whether it would be useful for specifically mushroom identification, but I have before wondered before whether maybe future cell phones could incorporate some kind of hyperspectral imaging camera and light to permit for identifying things that look identical to humans.

Foliage that looks fairly-indistinguishable to human eyes can look different if you can sample at more points on the spectrum than the three that human eyes can check for; this has been used to find marijuana plantations with hyperspectral imaging from the air. But if you can get right up next to something and can control the light that it’s exposed to, I would guess that it’d be an even easier task to identify something. Doesn’t have to just be plants, either.

Based on this guy’s experience, no.

https://blog.mycology.cornell.edu/2006/11/22/i-survived-the-destroying-angel/

I survived the “Destroying Angel”

I took three home with me. I couldn’t find my Mushroom book, was in a hurry, so I trusted my judgment, fried them up in olive oil, and ate them as a side dish. I should have recognized then that they weren’t inky caps, because inky caps exude a black substance when you fry them.

They honestly did not taste that good, rather bland in my opinion. I thought to myself, “Gee, I don’t think I’ll ever pick and eat these again.” (Little did I know the truth of my thought at the time).

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

The name destroying angel applies to several similar, closely related species of deadly all-white mushrooms in the genus Amanita.[1] They are Amanita virosa in Europe and A. bisporigera and A. ocreata in eastern and western North America, respectively.[1] Another European species of Amanita referred to as the destroying angel, Amanita verna—also referred to as the “Fool’s mushroom”—was first described in France in 1780.[2]

Destroying angels are among the most toxic known mushrooms; both they and the closely related death caps (A. phalloides) contain amatoxins.[1]

https://mushroomexam.com/destroying_angel_mushroom_look_alikes.html

Destroying angel mushrooms (Amanita virosa and Amanita bisporigera) are highly poisonous fungi that are often mistaken for edible species. They are white or pale in color and have a distinctive bulbous base, a ring around the stem, and a volva (a sheath-like structure at the base of the stem). They can resemble other edible mushrooms, such as meadow mushrooms or button mushrooms, which can make them difficult to identify.

First, I think that the concern is national security, not privacy. I don’t expect that it’d necessarily have a privacy impact one way or another.

Second, if you’re located in Europe – I notice you’re on a .de home instance – I’m not sure whether this would have any direct impact for EU users if just the US operations are sold.

A massive battery fire in California could cast a dark shadow on clean energy expansion

Fire may be a risk for grid-scale battery storage, but I’m not sold that it’s a fundamental one.

The article points out that this isn’t intrinsically tied to battery storage – one can store the batteries outdoors so that heat gets vented instead of trapped in a building if one battery catches fire, and that the reason that these were indoors is because the facility was one repurposed from non-battery-storage.

But even aside from that, the energy industry works with a lot of very flammable materials all the time – natural gas, oil, coal, flammable fluids in large transformers. While there’s the occasional fire, when one happens, we don’t normally conclude that the broader electricity industry isn’t workable due to fire risk.

It doesn’t appear to list any Elden Ring wiki. Does it have one?

I suppose that that route has the benefit of rendering them safe.

It might not tell you that it’s Subaru’s connectivity system (absent context), but I bet that if they’d written it that way, it’d at least let you know that it’s probably not SpaceX’s satellite Internet service program.