I hate to come across as an Apple shill, but specifically for tablets, I may reconsider them and look for an affordable used iPad somewhere. From my own experience, theirs is the only OS that is designed tablet-first and they accordingly have a larger ecosystem of apps that are tailored to that experience. I don’t think you can find a more accessible tablet UX in the general consumer space.

Windows and Android tablets are fine, but you’re going to have a lot of compromises. In particular with Windows, you’re either going to get the x86 OS with short battery life, or the neutered ARM version that barely anything is compatible with but gives you a few hours more per charge. Android at least is more mobile-oriented and is built for ARM by default, but it makes no real distinction between phone apps and tablet apps, so most of what you’ll get is phone interfaces blown up/stretched into tablet ones. Both of these OSes are also privacy nightmares, so pick your poison there.

There are some Linux tablets out there, too, but they’ve got the same core problem as Windows, where for tablet-first experiences you’re looking at pretty small/specialized ecosystems unless you’re up for building something yourself. Starlabs makes a tablet that you can put just about any major distro of Linux on, but it’s also x86, and it ain’t cheap. There is probably cheaper out there, but you’re essentially getting what you pay for.

Blocking users would actually probably be more efficient because the majority of those posts come from just one or two accounts.

The million drachma question, though, is how.

The entire Internet will need some way to validate that a given user is a human and not a bot, but in practice it’s becoming increasingly more impossible.

I don’t think their concern is necessarily where the products themselves are made, but just where they are sold from.

Big box retailers have been known to crush local businesses because they offer convenience and have more financial resources to throw around. But they don’t have investment in their local communities outside of the wealth they can extract from them, so they can be detrimental influences within the communities where they operate. They cause local businesses to close and offer only the bare minimum to employ local workers.

Local businesses can still carry mass-produced goods, but money spent there largely stays in the community. Rather than the profits going to enrich some C-level execs at a corporate office located who knows where, it helps the local business owner who is more likely to either reinvest in the quality of their business or put the money to some other purpose within the community.

Those are typically the reasons people are thinking of when suggesting that folks buy local. But having local business more easily able to stock locally made goods is also a bonus, which would not be done at a larger retailer.

You wouldn’t see any billionaires.

I’d say leave east/west out of the Yankee/Dixie dichotomy you’re imagining, because every single southeastern state was a slave state that supported the confederacy.

It also falls apart when you go west of the Mississippi River, which was (outside of Texas and California) mostly unincorporated territory during the time of the civil war and not a part of what would have been considered the union or the confederacy at that time.

Also don’t refer to Hispanic Americans as “gringo” because that is a term used in Latin America to refer to people who are not Latin American.

I think the point the previous user is getting at is that there is no continent of “America” in most English-speaking countries—there is North America and South America.

Canada is in North America but it’s not in “America,” which without the North/South prefix, will make most English-speaking people assume you mean the US and not the continent Canada and the US are on.

I do not own a Steamdeck, but I will offer my hot take:

Medical professionals say that you should use your bed only for sleep and sex. Sitting/laying in bed at other times causes psychological associations with other activities that can interrupt its primary purpose.

I treat my gaming devices with a similar mindset. I have a work PC and a gaming PC, and never the twain shall meet. Not that I am worried about the enticing distraction of video games while trying to work, but rather when I settle down to play games, I want to do so with no distractions or thoughts of work. If I’m gaming on the same device that I spent all day working on, it’d be harder for me to feel disconnected from work, and my gaming experience would be diminished.

I’m sure this is not a problem for many out there, but that’s my own preference that has served me well for a number of years now.

That veers into subjective territory, though. From your example, going to a vegan community and declaring that you don’t believe veganism is sustainable would be seen by most as not contributing to discussion, but just trying to troll or incite a flame war. I’d consider that detrimental and downvote.

On the other hand, asking “How can we make vegan lifestyles more sustainable?” would be something worth upvoting.

Communities are not necessarily places where people go to debate or have deep discussions, often it’s just to find solidarity and meme out with good vibes. I’m not going to go to the Elden Ring community and say “Elden Ring is trash”, even if that’s a valid opinion for someone to have, because that’s not really the right place to have that kind of discussion.

Just be careful, some soaps can have abrasive elements. Not simply like, microbead stuff that companies try to use to make microplastics sound healthy, but many soaps with trace minerals or similar. Good for dead skin but can scuff up lenses over time.

Can we keep this specific to Rampart?

Woah, same here! Did you also meet him at that big house party on the morning of December 4, 2024? I remember very distinctly how he was telling everyone about all of the different cities he visited, but how he had never been to New York nor did he ever intend to.

There weren’t many other kids who spoke Cantonese at my school (a couple, but not a lot), but I learned to be paranoid after one incident in English class.

My teacher at the time was like the most stereotypical looking white guy you could imagine. Being a school in a big city, we had a pretty diverse population of students, and in this particular class there were two boys who were friends and would often goof off between themselves in Spanish.

One day about 2/3 of the way through the school year, I have no idea what one of the two boys must have said, but Mr. “Grew up on a farm in Ohio” quickly turned around from the board and interjected in the most native-sounding Spanish my untrained ears could parse. That immediately put the fear of god in them—in all of us, really—to suddenly realize that he had been listening to and understood everything they were saying from the very beginning of the school year, and had just not bothered to say anything until then. I think we were basically an English-only English class from that point on.

Between that experience and other stories I’ve read online, I’ve learned to never, ever assume that someone doesn’t understand what you’re saying in another language. You never know what unlikely language someone picked up because they had a pen pal or their SO is from another country or they lived/worked abroad for a while. Even then, since it’s so easy these days for anyone to subtly pull out a smartphone and let Google Translate provide the gist of what is being said with relative accuracy, you should never say out loud something you don’t want someone else to hear.

Edit: a word

In one sense, as a key component of the UK, they already had that chance somewhere between the years of 1600-ish to 1945-ish.

Or they may just be pushing back on the idea that the PRC has legitimate claim to the nation of Taiwan. People online like to say it because they know it upsets the PRC government. Basically, it asks the question, “What makes the PRC any more the “True China” than Taiwan?”

Truthfully, neither nation is “true China”, and neither are the nations that they were years ago. No one in Taiwan today holds any belief that the ROC government is the rightful government of the mainland in exile.

But Taiwan is unable to be widely recognized as a sovereign nation in its own right to this day because the government of the PRC is still sticking to the “manifest destiny” sort of idea that there is a single, ideal land of China rooted in its imperial legacy, which for some reason the current mainland government feels they have an obligation to claim.

I would like to hope no one nation is the future. Replacing one global hegemony with another is not my idea of progress.

XcQ, link stays blue.