If I understand it correctly, it's "federated" in the sense that you can create similar infrastructure to Bluesky's using ATProto and have your posts show up there, but that reality seems pretty academic because not many people are doing that compared to Mastodon.

Microstrategy is an analytics company that buys bitcoin to pump bitcoin - they own something like 1% of the total supply.

Tether is a cryptocurrency that lets you do tax fraud by being pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, but can be exchanged in-kind for bitcoin so you don't actually trigger a taxable event. It's run by iFinex, a company that also runs the Bitfinex exchange. I'm not really sure that they actually have 120 billion in cash

I have no clue who actually runs these companies tho

The timing of the click captcha loading is randomized and it probably is looking for human-ish cursor movement? (Like you're probably moving your hand in imperceptibly small ways that are difficult to replicate). Clicking before it loads and doing it repeatedly probably triggers detection.

IIRC in Norway they have "Taco Friday"

I wouldn't suppose that people are required to inform steam that they're dead. Therefore, I'd assume the easiest way to bequeath games/DLCs, etc, is to get a wishlist from your loved ones, and then gift all of those games prior to death on a credit card that you might not be able to pay, due to being dead. Steam gets the money, the CC company gets shafted. Alternately, share your credit card details with a loved one and that list, and have them order within hours of your death (this depends on whether or not you were plausibly alive when those CC transactions took place)

Here's an explanation

Having a bunch of canals makes every trip longer. It was kinda annoying when I visited because a one mile trip was like 1.5 with all the crossings. Otherwise awesome city.

Marx: "Societies develop their economies in stages and industrialization is necessary to achieve socialism."

China: Develops the economy through industrialization, which means a controlled capitalist economy run by socialists

Western Leftists: "

Isn't there a campaign against food waste going on in China right now

China May Be Spying On You Through Your Coffee Maker

IDK, maybe the possibility of surveillance by anyone could've been avoided by not putting a general-purpose, wifi-enabled computer in everything?

Yes, you can outfit planes for more than one purpose and they were commonly used for troop transport.

It's Crazy Train by Ozzy Osbourne I think

Lol I feel like Normandy would immediately disown two islands full of Brtsh people

It looks like you could pretty easily do this with some PVC/ plastic pipe but the thickness is too consistent to actually be metal IMO.

No man's sky?

the weird furniture thing looks to be an oversized (overscaled?) film camera without an apeture. I can imagine they used the keyword "instagram" or "Film Grain" in their prompt.

EXPLAIN SETTING UP AUDIO SOFTWARE ON LINUX TO ME OR I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU! DON'T DUMB IT DOWN INTO SOME VAGUE SHIT! EXPLAIN JACK TO ME RIGHT NOW OR I'LL LITERALLY FUCKING KILL YOU! WHAT THE FUCK IS cannot use real-time scheduling (FIFO at priority -4) ? WHAT THE FUCK ARE JACKD and QJACKCTL? DON'T DUMB IT DOWN OR I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU

But seriously I've tried getting some music-making/software synths/recording/tracking software together and every time I just bounce off of it because setting it up is just too much effort/out of my regular software wheelhouse/the documentation is like 5 decade-old forum posts with 2 replys.

I'd say so - since you're coming in relatively cold you're probably not so used to Windows that you'd get frustrated with how Linux works compared to it, and if you're just using it for regular, everyday stuff like web browsing there's practically no difference.