I normally don't promote specific products. But this one is truly a life saver and deserves to be known. The Schwalbe Marathon winter tires for bicycles with metal spikes. They make cycling in snow and ice during the winter so much safer. It's now my second winter with them on my e-bike and I couldn't be more happy that I decided to buy them. And before you ask: yes, metal spikes on bicycle tires are legal in Germany and in most other countries.
FรR DIE SICHERSTE FAHRT. Fรผr volle Kontrolle auf eisglatter Straรe. Selbst extreme Kurvenlagen und heftige Bremsungen sind gut beherrschbar, dank speziellem Wintercompound, Lamellenprofil und bis zu 240 Spikes.
I donโt bike much in winter, even though I live in Canada with 3-4 months of snow. I have found on short rides just having one on my front wheel is sufficient. I have put it on a separate wheel, so swapping it is a 30 second job. (We do have freeze and thaw cycles when the roads are clear again and in February/March even dry from the stronger sun.)
Look up your vetโs corporate owner with a business entity search with your state. Itโs a state government provided website. I found my vet and the owner , VetCor, one of those private equity firms dedicated to helping pets and their families. Sorry, something coming through my earphones. No they actually squeeze profits out of you, the pet owner.
Got an email from our local vet today announcing that she was retiring, and selling the practice to another independent veterinarian, having turned down several much higher offers from private equity rollup funds.
I am so grateful to Burbank/Toluca Pet Hospital's Dr Skaar for this. Having watched PE-backed rollups destroy so many veterinary practices, killing pets and ruining workers' lives, it's such a relief to know that our vet put her patients first.
ICE is now targeting Somalis in Minnesota. To ICE thugs, every black person is considered Somali now. So theyโre rounding up any black people they find. This was the plan ALL ALONG.
I just looked it up, and this video was taken in Brooklyn Park, a suburb of Minneapolis. I wonder if they've gotten too scared to actually go in the city now?
"Obviously Americans don't care or they would have done something about this/they only care about their own comfort."
Oh. I've seen both of these a lot in the past few days and... I'm convinced a lot of this is divisive bot activity. But, oh, for those which are not... those people have little idea as to the actual conditions here, the state of the political system, the state of the voters, and the state of the country as a whole.
"You obviously don't care about other countries and peoples. If you cared at all you'd be in the streets right now until it was brought to a stop."
The vast majority of Americans are currently on the financial brink -- people are living paycheck-to-paycheck and protesting is a risk to one's wellbeing and literal life. Protest and lose your job, lose your job and you lose your family's health insurance, lose your health insurance and suddenly medication required for life such as insulin literally becomes unattainable. This is, of course, by design. People are pissed, people are furious, but people are also terrified, exhausted, and at the literal end of their abilities to do anything outside of survive. The last fifteen years have conditioned people to do anything they can to protect themselves from the threats inside this country and the flood of difficult news of the last few years has brought us to where people are today: a state of crushing, learned helplessness in which the exterior world outside the window appears perfectly normal but the reality inside is that everything is falling apart and no one knows how they're going to afford the increasing price of food/housing/utilities. Couple this with everyone also feeling a dark uncertainty about the future and suddenly taking any risk at all seems too great.
Until something *really* breaks in a serious way, there's not enough perceived group impact to impart enough cohesion to form a resistant group. Everyone is too busy translating the failures of the system as ones that they have to prepare for and defend against personally because that is what they've had to do all their lives to survive: all problems are individual problems right now -- they're not perceived as issues experienced by a collective because they cannot be thanks to decades of conditioning.
I 100% agree with the YouTuber Owen Morgan on this: "the only reason there aren't riots right now is because elections still exist."
And he's right. Regardless of if people think they do anything or not, most Americans do, and for what it's worth: I think they do, else Republicans wouldn't be bending over backwards to suppress people's votes and gerrymandering their already gerrymandered states even harder.
But right now, everyone is trying to endure until midterms because they all believe they can make a difference at the polls. The moment voting goes out the window is the moment I think people start getting violent.
The other end of this is that I think, despite all their talk about how ready they are for a revolution, few actually want a civil war or violence. I don't think the average person is prepared for the real cost of a revolution. Not when there's potentially a more peaceful way to end this.
I want to have hope that a blue wave in the midterms will restore some sense to the nation. We would still obviously have a long, long way to go before we're anywhere near the civilized nation the average American wants to believe we are, but reversing course on plunging into fascism would be a pretty damn good start if you ask me. And Dems have already stated an interest in seeing every member of ICE prosecuted for violating the Constitution the moment they have the majority. That would also be a start, assuming they have some means to prevent Trump from pardoning them. In fact, I think a much better start would be removing him.
@daedalouseros You're right and this is a very, very big part of it: people were brought up to trust the system and they're going to continue to do so until it shows them otherwise. Right now people largely believe that the 2024 election was valid and that 2026 is where they do the right thing as citizens.
I....have my own thoughts on this and it will be interesting to see where this goes but midterms does seem to be what people are going for in the hope that change can take place through traditional methods.
And, yeah -- I also think few on the good side of this want violence. Stable, lasting change is not brought about through that method. We have to build community in order to do well.
Canada has a very small and pretty depleted military. I have heard - and this is just chatter - that applications to join it have gone up. But I think it would be infinitely more effective to organise something closer to a civil defence force.
Canadians should absolutely learn guerrilla tactics.
Because Canada is a huge country with a lot of underpopulated space, and we seem so friendly. It would be so fucking easy to lull an occupying force into a sense of security and then slit their throats while they sleep.
@Eetschrijver @fsinn Yes. The US has fought several colonial wars in the last 80 years. Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were not successes. Invading Canada, or Greenland will look more like the Troubles in Northern Ireland. And good luck shipping stolen oil and minerals through a 1000kms of hostile territory.
'We are taking immediate action to remove this hotel from our systems. Hilton is โ and has always been โ a welcoming place for all,' Hilton said in a statement.
Everyone has limited resources for thinking and decision making. It's rooted in the biology of being a live, organic human.
So to an extent, our biology wants to have easy answers that require no thinking. All day, we have to think and make decisions that are much more immediate or important to us: gotta pick up the kid at school, gotta finish a work project (need the $$$), what can we do about the backed-up toilet, et al.
This is the document, Trump does not want you to see.
In 1916, under President Woodrow Wilson, the United States signed the purchase of the Virgin Islands from Denmark, in a convention in which the United States recognised Denmark's right to the whole of Greenland.
Danish MP's of The Defence Committee will convene in the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility at 18:00 to discuss the defence of Greenland.
The U.S.A. is now a rogue state. Remaining reasonable gov'ts need to work together to isolate the madness- all trade should be stopped. Forget tariffs, it's time for sanctions.
Why on earth should I care about what the CEO of Microslop has to say on this matter? Maybe if he hadnโt slapped his SLOP application all over Windows, I wouldnโt have switched to a different OS.
UK urged to unplug from US tech giants as digital sovereignty fears grow - theregister.com/2026/01/06/uk_โฆ should have been done 10 years ago at least....
โIntersex people are individuals with sex characteristics which do not fit the typical binary views of male or female bodies... Consequently, many people, like the author, only find out later in life or not at all that they are intersex.โ- Lexi Breen, Gender diversity in individuals with intersex variations
My niece comes to the U.S. most years from Europe to visit her grandfather.
This year she was stopped at the airport, taken into an interrogation room, accused of being a prostitute, had her phone taken and scanned, and released.
You know, in case you were wondering why tourism to the U.S. is down.
If I ever travel outside the US again, before I get on the return flight, I'll wipe my phone, since I have a nice backup on the cloud, go through customs, and then restore.
... that's if I'm allowed back in the States again. You know ... because ... reasons ...
@GayDeceiver you might want to watch this video first. Better solution would be to purchase a cheap handset specifically for travel with minimal data.
The authorities already have the ability to retrieve deleted data, and routinely ask individuals to explain why theyโve recently deleted large amounts of information from their [own] devices.
In this respect, the US has already reached Russia's level: you cannot travel there without fearing that you will be accused of some random crime or arbitrarily detained.
Microsoft renamed the whole Office suite to Copilot. ๐คฃ
Please bear in mind that calling "AI" output "slop" makes Satya Nadella sad. Under no circumstances should you call their office suite "Microslop Slopilot". That would just be mean and you're better than that.
*) Copilot might not be your favorite app.
Edit: Apparently they only renamed the "Microsoft 365 hub app" to "Microsoft 365 Copilot app". Whatever the hell that means. Sloppy branding, eh?
I agree with your points here, but a correction. This isn't a rename of the Office suite, just the Microsoft 365 Office application, which is standalone and a wrapper for the web suite of apps.
If you'd asked me back in October about this one, I would've said one of the best written Sunset Shimmer meets Twilight stories, but still just another one of those stories, but its really hit its stride. Not only is Sunset much better written than canon, not just the arrogant student of Princess Celestia who dove through a mirror into another dimension when she didn't get what she wanted, this one is a teenager with what that brings, angry about the Princess not being her real mom, and as we see about when this really starts getting good, an inferiority complex. Yes, this Sunset is a real person, one that runs into Twilight, and realizes that the system is failing her. When she asks a Professor for help getting Twilight into Celestia's school, its pass admission day, and Twilight is too young, the Professor puts a price on his sponsoring her, Sunset will have to be her official mentor. She's been teaching Twilight and Moondancer, but make that official? She does decide to do it, but struggles with the choice. Things really got good in the last chapter, canon Twilight hatches a dragon egg, something the fandom has generally assumed was an impossible task to see how the student handles failure, here that's unquestionably the case as Twilight examines the egg and realizes its a rock. When she points this out, she's told she wasn't brought here to identify it, but to hatch it, that's the test. Could you be more blatant? And umm,
Click to open/closeshe hatches it and gets her cutie mark, one slightly different from the show.
Yeah, this one is looking real interesting, assuming the author keeps this quality up, I have to wonder where they're going, will this just go on for the entire show, stop at some point only for there to be another story, or...? Seriously, if you like Sunset or young Twilight, you really need to read this one.
While I'm here, let me point out another good one, Twilight's Me Time. Originally a one off, the fans demanded it continue, so it has. Nothing real deep here, SciTwi (EQG) decides since she's board, she'll spend summer break with Princess Twilight in Equestria. Two nerds that have a habit of experimenting first and thinking second, what could possibly go wrong? Yeah, this is just a silly thing, easy reading, but definitely a fun read.
@Andrew Pam Yeah, up until she decided to help Twilight get into school, it was a good Sunset meets Twilight story that I'd read and forget about when it was done, but after that its pretty much guaranteed a slot as long as the author doesn't fall flat on their face.
And thanks for letting me know Twilight's Me Time was continued - I read the first chapter but hadn't noticed the continuation, so now it's on my tracking list.
@Andrew Pam Yeah, I stumbled on it on the front page a week or two after the second chapter was posted, and clicked because it made no sense that it was being featured again, and imagine my surprise to see it continuing.
Hans on the Bike
in reply to Jan Wildeboer ๐ท • • •