Same. Hard times are coming, and I have a suspicion it’s going to be worse than 2008.

People will need to do what they can do, and I don’t blame them for surviving.

Germany has multiple temporary exceptions to the Schengen regulations. One has been on the books since 2015. Two more were entered more recently.

Countries who participate in Schengen are allowed to have temporary exceptions for internal borders for exceptional circumstances, as determined by the country itself. This is within the guidelines of Schengen, so OP’s story is not abnormal.

It’s good to know for the sake of privacy, I suppose, if you didn’t know there were exceptions and you were trying to avoid being identified by specific governments. But unless you’re a person of interest to German authorities, they likely won’t care who you are.

As an American, I’m already subscribed to [email protected] and [email protected].

I’ll eat those tariffs to ensure the companies that stood at Trump’s side feel it in their stock portfolios.

The purpose of tariffs (in a normal world) is to make it harder for domestic entities to buy international goods. Typically, this will spur growth of a particular sector of industry within a country over time.

The way Trump is using them as a battering ram in an attempt to punish other countries, rather than incentivize steady growth, is why the US market is tanking and likely headed to another recession (or worse).

By retaliating in kind, the EU will be incentivizing their citizens and companies not to buy from the US. This will hurt companies that are based in the US, like Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc., further sending the US economy into freefall and bolstering the European economy, since they aren’t trying to punish every single trade partner in existence.

There may be other ways they try to move money around to avoid the tariffs, but governments are aware of how big businesses operate and often try to close those kinds of loopholes. Since this has become a global political issue, I would imagine they’ll be keeping a more watchful eye than normal on things.

Mini Apps version 1.2 makes mini apps load faster within the World mobile app, adds haptic feedback, enables customization, and allows you to pin your favorite mini apps to your phone’s home screen without needing to open the Worldcoin Wallet app, according to the company.

Eww, why would I want to have a garbage cryptocoin app that opens other apps?

Cryptobros are so weird. Like, their brains have been so thoroughly addled that they can’t see reality except through crypto

If you would read that source you cited, it would explain what’s happening.

In September 2024, Germany announced it would temporarily introduce checks at all of its land borders, in order to tackle irregular migration. The controls were scheduled to be in force for six months.[172]

There’s a table under the section “Regulation of Internal Borders.” It shows existing controls as of Jan 2025. Germany has some due to:

Terrorism, European migrant crisis, increase in irregular migration from Turkey through the Western Balkans, strain on the asylum reception system, human smuggling

This is not something abnormal, it’s something you didn’t know about.

You may be right simply by Point 3 alone. It’s one i hadn’t considered.

Still, if that’s true, we’d be fighting a similar kind of adversary, but one that isn’t dismantling vital institutions like the Dept. of Education, USAID, etc. I wish we’d had that future to work with, because I worry about the children that will grow up having to deal with the consequences of their parents electing Trump; their paradigm will be shaped by the coming crises.

The fight could have gone on in both scenarios, but now, a lot more people (domestically and abroad) will get hurt in the short and long term, even as the fight does continue.

Anyway, thanks for the respectful reply. You’ve made some good points, and given that a lot of my side of the discussion is speculative, I don’t know that there’s much point in going much further. We have to deal with the current situation, awful as it is.

Stay safe. Stay strong. Hopefully we never have to meet on some frontline.

I actually think that was foolish for one reason: pick your weakest opponent to fight in future battles.

Democrats are weak and feckless. The majority of them can’t even unify around the active fascist takeover. I would rather be fighting for a better future against them than a fascist proto-dictator who has easily managed to get most of his party to fall in line and kiss the ring.

We killed our weaker opponent too early and made the stronger opponent even stronger.

I ultimately agree, but this is a good start

Just for fun, I tried three more pens and writing in an inverted position (i.e. towards the ceiling):

• A Bic Crystal
• A Papermate Gel
• Some random pen from an auto shop with a nonstandard ballpoint tip (so probably some brand other than the first two).

All of them failed. Interestingly, the Crystal lasted the longest, but when it failed, it was almost immediate.

I’m not saying this is an especially scientific test, but I’ve now tried four different ballpoint pens, all from different manufacturers, and none could write upside down. Gravity is an important part of how they work on Earth.

It may be that you can still write in space, but I would hazard a guess that it has to do with whether you can keep ink on the ball. Since there’s no “down,” how you write or how you hold the pen when you take breaks might make things better or worse.

It’s cool, though, that he put it to the test. When I just put my pens to the side, they get refreshed and are able to write again, which is why my hypothesis is that it’s down to whether you can keep the ball continuously wet or not.

The current Democratic Party might be awful, but that doesn’t mean we can’t replace them with better leaders.

Fine. Most people here aren’t fans of the current Democratic Party.

Yeah, I know it’s not precisely correct, but it’s a fable that’s commonly understood as an example of over-engineering. I’m open to better and more factual examples, if you have any!

Did a check of their Terms, and they appear to be incorporated in Delaware (a common practice, since Delaware hides and protects a lot of information from public disclosure), but any legal challenges go through Santa Clara, California, so that’s probably where their headquarters is actually located.

Big yikes.

Just tried it, and the ink stopped. There’s no wick in it and apparently any capillary action is stopped by gravity. It wrote for a little bit for as long as there was enough ink sticking to the ball, but that didn’t last more than a few sentences.

In zero gravity, since there’s no gravity pulling the ink in either direction, a typical ballpoint pen would likely write inconsistently as the ink shifts in the tube from inertial forces, like a pen that’s drying out.

You may be right. It’s just easier to get the sentiment across that way than expound about how it’s ridiculously complex and overbuilt to achieve menial results.

AI: The “pen that can write in zero gravity” when pencils exist.

This framework was tested on nine complex challenges. It achieved an 85 percent success rate, whereas the best baseline only achieved a 39 percent success rate. This suggests its applications in various multistep planning tasks, such as scheduling airline crews or managing machine time in a factory.

85% isn’t good. It’s a vast improvement, but it’s not a good rate at scale. If you have 100,000 actions, 15,000 are wrong. If you have 1M customers, 150K are calling customer support.

Also, even if we’re talking about smaller scales like scheduling airline crews or managing machine time, how is AI not overkill? You have to have relatively massive amounts of hardware for the payoff of what a handful of people could do. Or a “dumb” algorithm. Or a signup sheet. And now we’re adding additional computing overhead?

AI is still a solution in search of a problem.

I would, but I just switched to LibreWolf, and in the process, my settings got wiped out, so I’m still rebuilding.

Surprisingly, there’s still plenty of websites that don’t need much JavaScript at all, so I think it’s better to just start fresh for your personal use.

NoScript is pretty straightforward. Default behavior is to block most JavaScript, but they have a few that have been let through to keep the web mostly functioning. You can go into settings and change the default behaviors or just ignore all that and start whitelisting things as you go.