As I’ve commented on here before, I think that personal finance should be part of K-12 core curriculum.

The entire extent of what my K-12 education covered was how to write a check and how to balance a checkbook in 5th grade. And, in an optional driver’s ed class, we had to get sample insurance quotes from multiple insurers to drive home the fact that you should get multiple quotes. That’s all I got in 13 years of formal education.

My home economics class in maybe…7th grade?..didn’t touch personal finance at all. Basic cooking skills, clothing repair, some arts and crafts.

Personal finance is something that basically everyone needs to know, and as things stand, basically they only get from their parents and that’s gonna depend on what their parents know.

In the US, curriculum is determined at state or below. It looks like California revised its curriculum to include a high school personal finance class as of 2024, and students will start taking it as of 2027.

https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/personalfinance.asp

Assembly Bill (AB) 2927, Chapter 37, Statutes of 2024 added a stand-alone course in personal finance to the high school graduation requirements, commencing with the graduating class of 2030–31. It requires public schools, including charter schools, to offer the course during the 2027–28 school year. The measure also calls for the State Board of Education (SBE) to approve a curriculum guide, outlining topics and providing resources for the course.

I think that that’s probably a good move.

deleted by creator

I think that the submitted title doesn’t accurately convey the article title or body.

This is specifically talking about an issue in the military, and nothing in the article suggests that Russian society generally views it favorably.

The article’s title is:

Families of Russian Soldiers in Primorye Region Accuse Commanders of Sexualized Violence and Extortion

Shocked, not electrocuted. Electrocuted is being fatally shocked.

Your microwave probably uses a grounded plug. If this is the US, it’ll look like this:

That third, rounded pin is the ground pin.

When devices have grounded plugs, the case is normally connected to the ground pin.

If you’ve built up a charge, touching something grounded will discharge it.

You might get it in a dry environment, where it’s easier to build up a charge, like if it’s an air-conditioned house or cold and dry.

As to avoiding it…

If it bugs you, it sounds like there are shoes that people wear for jobs where having static electricity buildup is problematic, that have soles made out of more-conductive material than the typical insulating stuff we use, that keeps charge from accruing by letting it slowly discharge into the surface that they’re standing on. Might try them.

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

ESD shoes with carbonized rubber (weakly conductive) bottom

https://www.amazon.com/esd-shoes/s?k=esd+shoes

Or just going barefoot around the house.

I don’t produce music, but for transcription, you might look at Rosegarden.

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

If you want nondestructive editing, my understanding is that you might want Ardour rather than Audacity. I personally find Ardour’s UI a bit confusing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardour_(software)

I looked it up.

https://worldhistoryedu.com/reasons-why-north-korean-generals-wear-so-many-medals/

One of the reasons for the proliferation of medals is that North Korean generals are often allowed to wear decorations originally awarded to their parents or grandparents. This tradition reflects North Korea’s emphasis on familial loyalty and continuity in service to the state. By displaying these inherited medals, generals symbolically link their achievements to those of their forebears, perpetuating a narrative of multi-generational commitment to the regime and the nation’s ideals.

The roots of North Korea’s extensive medal culture can be traced back to the Korean War (1950–1953), during which many awards were introduced to recognize military valor. As the war concluded and active conflict ceased, the scope of these decorations expanded to include contributions in non-military spheres, blurring the lines between military and civilian achievements.

So think of it kind of like, oh, hereditary titles in an aristocracy or something. It’s a “I’m the grandson of person who was important some time back” sort of thing. The people with lots of medals belong to a family that has been in the “in” crowd for some time.

Attaboy!

EDIT: Apparently they already awarded it, and it’s gold!

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/03/26/trump-given-america-first-award-republican-party/89330333007/

Trump receives inaugural ‘America First award’ from Republican Party

“We’re going to do something we’ve never done before. We’re going to honor him with a new award that we’ll present annually from this point forward, but he is the suitable and fitting recipient of the first-ever America First award,” Johnson said. “We can think of no better title for what that is…that’s this beautiful golden statue here, appropriate for the new golden era in America.”

Trump does seem like the suitable and fitting recipient of the first-ever America First award!

Is the Medal of Honor enough? Given Trump’s qualities, doesn’t he warrant some form of higher award that would place him somewhere above all the existing Medal of Honor awardees?

The Medal of Honor has non-gold components. He could make a new medal out of solid gold. And call it whatever he wanted. The Medal of Extraordinary Honor, say.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vqzdyLzlY4

Huh.

You could probably just piggyback off some random DNS server out there that permits public queries. I doubt that most domains are logging everything.

$ egrep "^[a-z]+$" /usr/share/dict/words|shuf|sed "s/$/.com/"|xargs -n1 host -t ns|grep "name server"|cut -d" " -f 4|awk '!seen[$0]++'|xargs -n1 host www.slashdot.org|awk '/^$/ {f=0} /has address/ {f=1} /^Name:/ {if (f) {print}}'
Name: ns2.afternic.com.
Name: ns1.bluehost.com.
Name: ns2.bluehost.com.
Name: ns-570.awsdns-07.net.
Name: ns1.sedoparking.com.
Name: ns02.cashparking.com.
Name: ns01.cashparking.com.
Name: ns1.namefind.com.
Name: ns2.namefind.com.

etc.

That’ll look up the DNS server for a bunch of domains and, omitting duplicates, list all of the ones that can resolve “www.slashdot.org”, which I imagine likely means that they’ll also probably be willing to resolve other domains.

EDIT: Modified the above command line to randomize the order of domains it tries so that if multiple people use this, everyone doesn’t just grab the same DNS server.

Patel has vowed to sue The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick, suggesting in a social media post that the article met the high legal bar to qualify as defamation.

I doubt that. Patel is a public figure. The US has a high bar for defamation to start with, and it gets harder for public figures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan

New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), is a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled the freedom of speech protections in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution limit the ability of public officials to sue for defamation.[1][2] The decision held that if a plaintiff in a defamation lawsuit is a public official or candidate for public office, then not only must they prove the normal elements of defamation—publication of a false defamatory statement to a third party—they must also prove that the statement was made with “actual malice”, meaning the defendant either knew the statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether it might be false.[2] New York Times Co. v. Sullivan is frequently ranked as one of the greatest Supreme Court decisions of the modern era.

I mean, you will almost certainly be able to build machines that outperform the Steam Machine 2 in bang-for-buck if Valve isn’t subsidizing it, which they said that they won’t. If not at release, then a few years in, because a console-style periodic hardware release model will lag whatever’s at the bleeding edge.

The desktop I’m typing this on isn’t gonna be cheaper than the Steam Machine 2, but it is unquestionably going to be more powerful.

But that’s not gonna be what the Steam Machine is for — you could always build a DIY gaming PC, unlike with consoles. It’s an open platform. I had a media PC plugged into my TV with a TV interface card a quarter-century back. What Valve is gonna be aiming for is going to be ease of use, the “you plug it into your TV, plug it into power, turn on gamepad, play games that target Steam Machine 2” thing. That’s where consoles have been able to pick up users that haven’t done the PC.

I don’t have a YouTube account, and have no interest in getting one. I hid shorts with this browser add-on:

https://github.com/Vulpelo/hide-youtube-shorts

Go to answer a text and when you return to the lemmy tab your whole reply is gone.

What app are you using to compose responses?

If it doesn’t have enough memory, Android will kill an app…but my understanding — I haven’t written Android software — is that apps are supposed to be able to save state before this happens.

I’d think that if the app isn’t saving state, that’d probably be an app bug.

If you want to use that particular client, you might be able to work around it by composing your response in a Markdown editor (that does save state before being killed) and then just pasting it into the reply.

Whenever I see a comment on social media that I think is wrong, I feel the need to correct it.

https://xkcd.com/386/

An article I was reading (on marine cable cutting, unrelated topic) mentioned a clause in marine insurance policies.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/october/repairing-submarine-cables-wartime-necessity

Standard marine protection and indemnity insurance policies exclude wartime coverage, stating: “In the event of war or war-like conditions between any of the following states: The United Kingdom, the United States of America, France, the Russian Federation, the People’s Republic of China, the insurance against war perils shall automatically terminate.”

It might be that whether-or-not the US is involved determines whether shipowners or insurers are on the hook for a ship getting shot at.

Though…reading it over, maybe it’s only if it’s specifically one of those fighting another of them.

I assume that the oracle here would handle picking that, if that’s optimal.

Totally ahistorical. Catholics (in America) are practically synonymous with liberalism going back to the 1930s. They’ve been in the tank for the Democratic Party since Kennedy.

searches

It looks like there’s some commentary out there on this already:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/04/14/donald-trump-attack-pope-leo-2026-midterms/89606369007/

President Donald Trump has stepped on a political hornet’s nest with his attacks on Pope Leo XIV that have infuriated Catholics worldwide. The rift with the Vatican could exacerbate an already challenging 2026 election season for congressional Republicans as Trump risks alienating a key constituency.

Several conservative-leaning Catholic leaders have publicly called on Trump to apologize – which the president rebuffed – saying they shouldn’t have to choose between their faith and their country. “There is no doubt that President Trump’s post insulting Pope Leo crossed, again, a line of decorum that plays an important part in diplomacy,” Kelsey Reinhardt, president and CEO of CatholicVote, a political advocacy group, said April 13 in a post on X.

Catholics are the single largest religious denomination in the United States, accounting for one-fifth of the population, according to the Pew Research Center. Catholics are 10 percentage points more likely to lean toward Republicans than Democrats, Pew found in 2025.

Trump lost the Catholic vote to Joe Biden 52%-47% in 2020, according to CNN exit polls. He won over Catholics 59%-39% against Kamala Harris in 2024.

2026 is expected to be a tough year for the GOP as forecasters shift more races in Democrats’ favor.

Republican pollster Brent Buchanan said his polling firm Cygnal has been tracking Catholic voters since the 2022 midterms. He said that American Catholics have repeatedly shown their independence from the Vatican’s policy guidance but that if Trump persists in squabbling with the pope, it could spell trouble for the GOP this fall.

“The papacy is an institution that has existed for thousands of years,” Buchanan said. "Even if you don’t ascribe to Catholicism, you know who the pope is and you have an idea what the pope stands for, and it’s usually broad, positive, moral things.

“Catholics tend to be one of the swingier groups in the country, and pretty much whatever direction Catholics go politically, the country goes politically. They’re almost like a bellwether of sorts. So it’s unnecessary noise for an important swing group.”

Political scientists note that Washington and the Vatican have been at odds over policy before, but this war of words is uniquely bitter.

“There’s never been anything this public, this personal or this partisan,” David Campbell, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution, told USA TODAY in an interview.

QUIC works hand-in-hand with HTTP/3’s multiplexed connections, allowing multiple streams of data to reach all the endpoints independently, and hence independent of packet losses involving other streams. In contrast, HTTP/2, which is carried over TCP, can suffer head-of-line-blocking delays if multiple streams are multiplexed on a TCP connection and any of the TCP packets on that connection are delayed or lost.

SCTP was going to do that too. It hasn’t seen much uptake.

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

Features of SCTP include:

• Delivery of chunks within independent streams eliminates unnecessary head-of-line blocking, as opposed to TCP byte-stream delivery.

I think that that’d depend on the local business. I recall having a commercial establishment reject some dollar coins I had because the clerk didn’t recognize them and clearly had no idea that a dollar coin existed.