They are trying to push engagement. But not just any engagement. You might think that they would prefer active engagement, when you search for a thing and watch the entire thing. But you are actually more likely to skip ads when you do that.

What they prefer is more passive engagement, when you just accept the best thing the algorithm pushes. Because then you are not only more likely to passively consume ads, but also be served content that they were paid to promote. Which may not be what you want (or may actively push disinformation and bullshit).

TikTok, Shorts, and all the things like that seem to be specifically engineered to exhaust your ability to request more things and let the algorithm take over what you watch next. That’s their endgame.

Yeah, doesn’t mshta run JavaScript locally on Windows? This looks like a way to force you to run their script

I hope that URL isn’t the real one, you don’t want anyone trying it just to see what would happen

Yeah, no way We’re letting a long haired, bearded freak into our church…

That’s very generous of you, but I would advise against doing this secretly, for a few reasons.

First of all, the information needed to do this (like their loan account number) is considered personal financial information whose disclosure is protected. There is nothing preventing them from giving you the info willingly, but if you try and find it out without their knowledge you may be breaking the law.

Also, technically any gifts between people who aren’t directly related are treated as income by the US government, and there is technically tax owed on it. And yes, paying off a loan would still count as a gift. The threshold to trigger tax on a gift is high ($19k for 2025), but the tax is the liability of the giver, not the receiver. Depending on how big the gift is, you could be inadvertently opening yourself up for scrutiny by the US IRS. But if you are open about the gift and plan it with the recipient ahead of time, you can also do all the required tax planning to make sure you don’t run afoul of the IRS.

I don’t think I need to remind you that the legal climate regarding foreigners in the US on student visas is precarious right now. It would suck if your attempt at a secret gift ended up backfiring and ruining your plans for education in the US.

What you are really asking is whether you should hedge your US-based investments, anticipating a dramatic fall in the value of the dollar. But even if governments and large corporations start keeping reserves in Euro or other currencies, that doesn’t automatically mean the dollar tanks.

You could find a fund that specifically invests in non-US companies. Take note of the fees associated with these, since they will be higher than bog-standard index funds. I wouldn’t go nuts and put all your eggs there, though. Take a portion of your overall net worth to bet against America, but don’t use it all. It is possible that the global economy decides that the business-friendly Trump policies have enough value to put up with all the chaos, and the dollar might even get stronger.

Always remember as a an investor, you are a small fish, in the same tank as the sharks. You will be shark food eventually. Your goal is to simply survive by not being the slowest fish in the tank.

Someone else in this thread offered Crypto as an option. It certainly seems attractive with the current regulatory environment. But make sure that you understand what you are buying if you go that route. There is a difference between an established currency with its own blockchain and governance, and some random President’s shitty token which took no effort to set up and whose market can be tanked by manipulators whenever they want. If you are not interested in the difference, stay far away.

You are all getting it all wrong. It’s not that the right wing has more charismatic leaders, or even better leaders. It’s that the right wing allows their politicians to lie with impunity. Their voters will turn a blind eye to the most egregious of falsehoods, as long as those voters are told what they want to hear.

Their opposition doesn’t have that luxury. Their charismatic leaders must also speak truth. MLK was not only charismatic but he was able to relate the truth about the situation of the time that resonated with people of all races.

Those charismatic people who can also stay true to reality are few and far between. It is very possible that in today’s political environment which is flush with cash, super-PACs, and self-dealing, all those people are simply not in politics. Leaving only the liars, and those are tolerated better on the Right.

SSDs are getting more economical, particularly in the quantities cloud providers buy them in. Wear leveling is getting much better, they are more power efficient, and they have no moving parts to break. It won’t surprise me if a lot of cloud storage is on SSDs, and we might not have spinning rust at all in a few years.

I can see right through that one

Yes, that would be a bad idea. It shouldn’t be a bad idea. But right now, it would be.

Then again, you are probably in for Domestic Terrorism charges for simply protesting against the Car of the People. It’s up to you whether you want to dial it all up to 11.

What Department of Education? It’s gonna get deleted.

Don’t forget the importance of the Citizens United ruling, which gave the green light to funnel unlimited amounts of corporate money into campaigns, reaching a crescendo in this past election when the world’s richest man bought himself a President.

Individual US States are a party to some of these lawsuits, and they have their own duly sworn law enforcement officers. I bet a Federal judge would be able to find NY State Troopers or Massachusetts State Police willing to enforce their orders if there is a judgement in favor of that State in court.

No, there’s a different reason why he thinks the people of Gaza are incapable…

~he’s a super racist Nazi scumbag~

I’m sure he has, and thought that they would make nice golf courses.

You first, Bobby

She’s fake, she can be whatever she wants to be.

But in the US (and I assume in Canada), many people identify based on where their ancestors came from, even if they came over several generations back, as long as their family still associated with that country’s culture. Because let’s face it, unless you have native heritage your ancestors came here from somewhere.

You have to pick a leader somehow. In authoritarianism, the leader is often the one who can take over by force, and can maintain that force over time (even across generations, for hereditary systems). While it’s possible for someone who takes over that way to be benelovent towards their people, it’s far more likely they will be violent and overbearing, because that’s how they got the gig in the first place.

And after a few generations, the one in charge won’t have any memory of how their ancestor came to power in the first place, and just take it for granted that they ought to rule. So now you have a leader who is violent and overbearing, only because that’s how their parent taught them to be, not out of any real experience accumulating power.

The election apparatus in the US is extremely hard to rig. It’s run by local officials, so in order to fix the counting of voters you need to get to thousands of individual county/city/town election boards, all at once. Those boards have members of all parties generally present on them so there is a fair amount of local oversight to overcome, too.

There was a bit of time in the early 2000’s where the voting machines themselves were suspect but some good work by independant researchers shined some daylight on that. Now most votes in the US are either done purely by paper ballots (counted by machines) or on machines that generate verifiable paper trails, and are very hard to just casually alter the count without being found out.

Republicans rig the vote by manipulating their media. Roger Ailes was one of Nixon’s media advisors during Watergate. The lesson he took away was that if the media didn’t hold Nixon to account, he would have never had to resign. Ailes went on to run Fox News in the mid-90s, and the rest is history.

There’s nothing illegal about cryptocurrencies. It’s just random numbers and code.

However, those random numbers have actual value, and governments regulate some transactions, particularly ones that cross national borders, to make sure those transactions do not hide a crime or go to individuals who the government has put under sanctions.

Some people of a Libertarian bent get involved in Crypto to keep their governments out of their business. But those laws still apply, no matter what the medium of exchange is, or how much those people whine about those laws.

Edited to add: I missed the bit where OPs question was about Samurai Wallet. Here is some info about them:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/legal/samourai-wallet-breaking-down-dangerous-precedents

This is from a pro-Crypto online media source, and its bias is obvious. However, it is also from last April. The Biden administration was very hostile towards Crypto. The Trump administration has embraced it, and it would not surprise me if this prosecution disappears in a cloud of “quid pro quo”…

There were, like, six or seven different agreements, I read them all and only declined the most egregious ones, that explicitly said they would share my data with third parties without limit. I understand they need an agreement to cover basic data sharing between me and them, but I will not consent to having them immediately send the data to my insurance agent (or the government).