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

I’d probably start there.

Downvoted for editorializing the title.

Would be fine with the original NPR title. Put your opinions in the comments, not the title.

Honestly, he could just bomb Iranian oil infrastructure, has explicitly stated within the past month that he will bomb Iran if Iran doesn’t comply, and my guess is that that’d be a Plan B. Like, the Trump administration doesn’t lack for leverage here if it wants to terminate Iran’s ability to deal in oil.

https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-says-there-will-be-bombing-if-iran-does-not-make-nuclear-deal-2025-03-30/

Trump threatens bombing if Iran does not make nuclear deal

WASHINGTON, March 30 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump threatened Iran on Sunday with bombing and secondary tariffs if Tehran did not come to an agreement with Washington over its nuclear program.

I think that there was a brief bit in my high school world history textbook about the period that mostly focused on our involvement due to the Great Depression, the US financial sector seeing something of an implosion, pulling funds from Germany — who was, at that time, dependent on US finance to keep industry running — and that exacerbating the political situation. I doubt that a lot of that would stick in people’s head for decades, so if you’re middle-aged, that probably wouldn’t be something people recall. Also, I read my world history textbook cover-to-cover, and the actual curriculum didn’t cover all of it, used chunks out of it, and I can’t recall whether the curriculum dealt with that section or was just material that I read on my own.

I believe that most of it dealt with the World War II era, which involved the US considerably more, rather than the interwar period.

I’ve read more myself, but that was later and probably would not be representative of what a typical American would do. And a lot of that was due to personal interest in military history, which focused on World War II, rather than German political processes in the 1930s.

I’ve taken dedicated coursework on the political situation in Germany around the time. I’ve read English translations of Mein Kampf and Zweites Buch. I’d probably be more familiar with political happenings in the 1930s in Germany than in another non-US foreign country — like, I could say more about Germany in the period than about Mussolini in Italy. I could give a rough outline of Hitler’s arc, the internal concerns that drove his base, and some of the critical moves that let him ultimately gain power. The early NSDAP and power struggles there and in the SA. I’ve read diaries of several German citizens (not just Anne Frank, but yes, her as well) from the World War II period to understand the wartime civilian experience, which probably gives at least some insight into what the typical person around the timeframe felt, though that’s a small number of datapoints.

But if what you really want to know is “would a typical middle-aged American (“40s and 50s”) have much familiarity with the political situation in 1930s Germany”, the answer I’d give is “probably not much”.

Oh, thank God for that much, at least. The other guy whose name was I saw getting floated as a replacement was Steven Witkoff, a real estate guy that Trump used to talk to Ukraine and Russia. I’d vastly rather have Rubio there.

EDIT: Also, OP, you’ve got a typo in your submitted text:

Maltz

Should be “Waltz”. Not sure if that was in the original article text or not, but if it was, it’s “Waltz” in the current article text.

Choice of Games makes games that are unchanging text. You could probably do okay with that.

Actually…come to think of it, they should figure out some way to hook up with an e-reader manufacturer, sell their games in those stores. Like, those games also have basically zilch by way of memory or computational requirements, and I bet that the same kind of person who’d buy a dedicated e-reader to read books would probably be more-interested in a text-heavy game.

Thanks, that was actually a pretty good look at them.

I do think that they did raise one point that I wouldn’t have thought of. The color eInk doesn’t have great resolution, but they were viewing old comics printed using halftoning (what the guy in the video was calling “cheap dot patterns”). Comics at the time were, had to be, designed to deal with being printed that way, and that results in images that could deal with really low color resolution. So specifically for viewing them, the color eInk display was a pretty good match for the content.

Problem is, I just can’t see how many people would buy a monitor just to view old-style comics.

I think that eInk is a good match for a portable e-reader that you potentially take outside, where it’s already available in the role. Outside of that…

In another comment response, I linked to some place (DASUNG) out of China that makes eInk monitors.

They make 25" eInk monitors in both black-and-white and color. That’s $1,500 and up, though.

Personally, for me, it wouldn’t make sense. The real selling point of eInk for me is:

• It’s reflective, and eInk is almost the only kind of reflective display out there. That means that it works reasonably outdoors under sunlight and glare, without having to blast enough light to overwhelm the sunlight. But…with a desktop, and especially mixed types of monitors, you’re not going to be lugging those monitors outside under the sun.

• If you’re looking at mostly static images in a lit area, eInk has extraordinarily low average power use, since it only consumes power when updating the image on the screen. That makes it a great fit for e-readers. But…for a fixed computer monitor, I don’t care much about power consumption.

And with that, you get drawbacks of having limited refresh rates, limited size, high price, limited or no color (and if you have color, worse contrast) and not being able to display brightly-lit, emissive stuff.

I mean, yes, eInk does look like paper, and if you’re really set on that particular aesthetic, then it’d have some value there. But for me, that value is just really limited. Yeah, it’d be kind of novel for text to look like it’s on paper, but it’s just not a game-changer.

These guys make eInk monitors:

https://shop.dasung.com/

if you can live with a black-and-white eInk monitor, they say that their fastest model can do 60 Hz.

Not your point, but tropical fruits are one of the US’s major food imports, because we have high consumption of them and not as much tropical territory where they’ll grow. Thus, under tariffs, they’re going to be one of the things seeing more-substantial price rises.

https://www.thetakeout.com/1842020/foods-likely-impacted-by-tariffs/

14 Foods That Are Most Likely To Be Impacted By Tariffs

There are a lot of fruits you can buy locally or even grow at home, but some of America’s favorite fruits — like tropical fruits — are largely imported. Take, for example, bananas. The Banana Association of North America is warning that the total cost of bananas nationwide could go up by $250 million per year due to even just a 10% tariff rate. The large majority of bananas in the United States are sourced from Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

I remember a Milton Friedman lecture from the 1970s specifically using banana prices becoming exorbitant under high tariffs as an example of why protectionist trade policy is not a good idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0pl_FXt0eM

Friedman: You know, you could have a great employment in the city of Logan, Utah, of people growing bananas in hothouses. If we had a high-enough tariff on the import of bananas, it could become profitable to build hothouses and grow bananas in those hothouses. That would give employment! Would that be a sensible thing to do?

investigates

It sounds like a fair bit of them are either firing employees or insulting them. I don’t really get the appeal, but I also was pretty oblivious to Donald Trump until his Presidential run, so I assume that there are people out there who enjoy it.

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

The doll includes 17 phrases,[6] which Trump recorded.[4][12] The phrases, activated by pressing a button,[14] consist of quotes used by Trump on The Apprentice and in his 2004 book, Trump: How to Get Rich.[3] Phrases include:

• “This one’s easy for me—you’re fired.”
• “I have no choice but to tell you you’re fired.”
• “I should fire myself just for having you around.”
• “You really screwed up!”
• “You really think you’re a good leader? I don’t.”

I think that you guys may have been kids in different decades.

IRC chats

IRC networks are still here. Grab an IRC client, connect to Undernet or whatever network you like. Fewer people, but not gone.

forums

You’re talking on one!

flash games (maybe not, with security concerns…)

You can probably run Flash stuff — I had some difficulty the last time I tried getting old Flash stuff running on Linux — but frankly, I’d rather run open stuff like HTML5’s Canvas and Javascript. It was one company’s attempt to establish a proprietary platform on the Web for multimedia. I’m really not sad to see it vanish into the past.

video sites that didn’t suck absolute ass like Corptube

I think that YouTube in 2025 is substantially better than the streaming video situation in 2003, but there are YouTube alternatives available today.

https://eonvpn.com/blog/youtube-alternative/

That includes the Fediverse’s PeerTube. I’m skeptical that the numbers are going to work out there for it to scale up due to bandwidth costs of video, but if you like the Threadiverse, it’s probably the closest video analog.

Also on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang just so happened to call on the Trump administration to loosen restrictions on the sale of AI infrastructure outside the US.

“We need to accelerate the diffusion of American AI technology around the world,” Huang said in a press briefing. “The policies and encouragement from the administration really need to support that.”

Not to say that Trump’s tariff policy isn’t an issue, but I’d say that you’re leveraging your monopoly position to keep supply down even in the US, Nvidia.

Show me the price/capability gap between “AI-oriented” and “gaming oriented” hardware vanishing, where a small increase in on-board VRAM that has a limited impact on your production costs doesn’t lead to enormous increases in what you’re charging, and then I’d be more convinced that you’re in dire need of more market to serve.

My experience has been that it depends greatly on whether you’re bringing people with you that you want to hang out with all day.

https://www.amazon.com/Stevenson-Entertainment-Group-Apprentice-Collectible/dp/B0002UADAK

BRING HOME THE LEGEND: Consistently overcoming the odds, Donald Trumps’ name has come to define the meaning of success. Now fans and collectors can bring home the legend as this officially licensed 12-inch collectible figure.

17 AUTHENTIC QUOTES: The Donald Trump figure “speaks” 17 inspirational quotes, including his classic line, “You’re fired”.

Also, looking through the reviews:

My granddaughter’s Barbie would have had a new friend, but it did not talk. Returning this doll. Cute idea though.Returning the first one. AMAZON sent me a new one. IT DOES NOT TALK😡😡I am MAD!!😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡

I’m now imagining some little girl being given a Barbie and a talking Donald Trump doll for her to role-play domestic scenarios with during her formative years.

American kids might “have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,”

Operating on the assumption that most households aren’t buying their kids 30 dolls (and those that do are probably going to be under the least economic pressure to cut spending), if American households actually cut spending on their kids by a proportional 93% of whatever they were going to spend, I expect that midterms are going to be interesting.

It was fun, everyone was out on the streets, kids were playing and laughing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_European_power_outage

On 28 April 2025, at 12:33 CEST (11:33 WEST; 10:33 UTC), a major power cut occurred across the Iberian Peninsula affecting mainland Portugal and Peninsular Spain, where electric power was interrupted for about ten hours in most of the Peninsula and longer in some areas.

Ten hours isn’t a huge deal unless you’re maybe in an elevator or train or something where you get trapped.

But if it goes up to multiple days, things like availability of water or ability to receive communications become increasingly-important.

And while it didn’t happen here, sometimes the reason that power is out is because of a larger disaster. Maybe a wildfire or earthquake or whatever. And a lost of power can make responding to problems that that creates a bigger problem.

Also, we’re switching from ICE vehicles to EVs, and while the up side is that that means that a lot of people probably have a much bigger-than-in-an-ICE vehicle battery handy that they can power small devices from for a while, it also means that without grid power, more transportation infrastructure goes down. Someone in this thread mentioned the postal service. I don’t know whether the USPS can generally operate without electricity (lighting in mail rooms? Automated sorting machines? Mail transport via airplanes? Maybe at reduced capacity…), but they’re migrating to battery electric vehicles, and with those, I don’t know what kind of mail service they could provide if the electrical grid is out.

Well, I suppose it depends on what people are out for. Like I said, if it’s death that they’re interested in, then, yeah, it would. But if they’re okay with the crashes without the death, then I’d think that it’d be okay.

You can provide a link if you want too. That is not one.