Trump dictates that other countries comply & submit to his bullying, ELSE US’s tarriffs will bludgeon their economies until they obey.

Which is why the EU is currently making trade agreements with just about everyone on the planet. The USA handing out tariffs like candy is a lot less relevant when you can pivot your trade elsewhere on fairly short order.

Such an agreement with Canada has been in the works for the last ten years. All that’s currently missing is for it to be ratified by all involved countries, which might go a bit quicker now given how the States are behaving.

I’m pretty sure that several members would say no if they tried to join. Accession requires (among other things) all member states to ratify the treaty of accession.

Agreed. Oddly enough, my Meshtastic contacts are much farther away than my farthest MeshCore contacts but MeshCore seems to be much livelier.

Note that what Gore said was that he “took the initiative to create the Internet”. That’s actually true; his lobby work for a civilian network were one of the most significant factors in commercializing ARPANET. He never claimed that he invented the thing.

I haven’t been on there a lot and due to time constraints I’m mostly just lurking. It seems that I can see more people on Tastic but Core seems to be more active in terms of messages.

Both are almost absurdly easy to set up, especially on an nRF5-based device where you can flash a firmware by just mounting the thing as an USB drive and copying a file over. You don’t really need to buy two devices to try out both unless you really want to use them simultaneously.

Meshtastic gives you three hops by default (and strongly advises against going beyond that, even if the maximum is seven). The furthest node I see right now is about 200 km away.

MeshCore gives you 64 hops. They can afford that because MeshCore devices send way less telemetry by default; Meshtastic assumes that you want to broadcast e.g. your GPS position regularly. The furthest node I see right now is about 50 km away.

By the way, while LoRaWAN is a thing, neither Meshtastic not MeshCore are really designed for data traffic. Owing to the low (and shared) bandwidth, they’re more like IRC over radio.

If you want a power efficient device with an enclosure, Seeed Studio make some decent stuff. I run a pair of Wio L1s (one on Meshtastic, the other on MeshCore), which cost around 40 € complete with antenna, battery, and enclosure.

Sure, more expensive than a bare V3 but more convenient for actually taking them somewhere.

There seems to be more traffic on MeshCore than on Meshtastic, probably due to its greater range. Also, the core library seems to be MIT-licensed.

Besides, given the goals of Meshtastic/MeshCore (low power long range text communication without a radio license), LoRa is a sensible choice: It operates in appropriate radio bands, is power-efficient, and hardware is readily available at reasonable prices.

Sure, something like DASH7 would be more open but it’s also much harder to find hardware for. The most ideologically pure stack in the world won’t do anything if there’s not enough users to actually form a mesh.

WiFi is useless when you’re trying to send messages over long distances without any infrastructure beyond “I tied a few battery-powered transceivers to trees along the way”. It has completely low range and high power draw.

Packet radio gets you a lot of range but may require a license for legal operation. It also has high power requirements; you’re not going to run your radio setup off a 1000 mAh battery for a week.

I think they’re talking about Planet Zoo, not Project Zomboid. After all, they’re talking about “expanding the zoo” and comparing it to Planet Coaster.

Probably that they’ll do fuck all when China invades Taiwan.

I’m pretty sure that whether it can is irrelevant. Unter Trump it won’t because China playing strongman appeals to him more than petty things like allies and an independent semiconductor market. Also, he can very clearly be bought and Xi can just send him a couple yachts with tacky decor or something.

He has pretty much torched all of the USA’s soft power and standing as a trade partner.

GWB had already done some damage to both, which Obama tried to repair (more so on the trade front). Then Trump I happened and made it very clear that the USA were no longer a reliable partner and probably not even politically stable in the medium term. Biden tried to salvage something but then Trump II happened and conclusively buried what little goodwill the States had left.

I don’t think the pax americana is going to survive the decade and neither is the petrodollar. It remains to be seen whether the States will become a local hegemonial power, a failed empire with lasting ambitions á la Russia, or will even fade from relevancy entirely. I don’t expect them to remain a superpower.

Also note that the EU has just signed a free-trade agreement with Mercosur, meaning that the EU and pretty much all of South America are pivoting trade away from the USA towards each other. Conveniently, that should also make both of them less reliant on China.

We just signed an FTA with Mercosur. That’s a major trade bloc. I think we’re doing good on that front and it demonstrates that we have the capacity to just pivot trade home away from the States.

Still, I do agree that counter-tariffs don’t feel too great as a response, even with the new FTaa in place. It might really be time to bring out the anti-coercion instrument.

The letters are too consistent (each “O” looks the same etc). It’s a font.

It typically doesn’t. Most countries don’t care about where your ancestors came from. Being fluent in the local language and culture will generally give you a leg up if you already qualify for immigration so I hope your family kept those alive (and not Americanized versions like Irish-Americans wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day). But your ancestry is usually completely irrelevant.

Those genetic test results absolutely don’t mean anything. If you’re culturally American with an American passport, you’re American and that’s it.

For another ring was made and this one was made of gold and fetched almost 700 bucks at the pawn shop.

It’s about PMMA sheeting (aka plexiglass), right?

I always describe pansexuality as “bisexuality with more politics and an ugly flag”. The basic idea is the same (not being attracted only to one gender) but pansexuality is more explicit about there being more than two genders and liking most or all of them.

And due to social media dominance, the far-right party (AfD) is set to become the strongest power with the next election if things don’t change.

Mind you, that party has been confirmed to be radical by the constitutional protection agency; that assessment has only been temporarily retracted because they got an injunction against it that now needs to be resolved. Court procedure is the only thing keeping them from being recognized as a threat to the democratic order.

The other major parties see no reason to comment on this, especially not the conservatives. Those same conservatives refuse to rule out a cooperation with the AfD, instead wanting to “face them on content”. That means parroting their talking points and then acting surprised when this doesn’t drive voters away from them.

In previous elections I voted for the pan-Europeans who, in a saner world, would be steadily on track towards beating the 5% cutoff. Unfortunately, right now the far-right threat is too big for me not to hold my nose and vote strategically. I’m not happy about that.

But hey, who knows how long that’ll even matter? Like always in such a situation, I expect the AfD to use bullshit delay tactics to stretch that injunction until after the next election, get voted into power, and then kill the investigation. Because rules don’t apply when you have enough backing. And I’m deeply afraid of what they’ll do to the country as the governing party with a conservative lapdog rubber-stamping everything they say.