Absolutely.

Continuity is extremely important in trade relations. If I plan to tie my economy to yours I want to be certain that the rules of those ties won't suddenly change. That's not the case with the USA anymore; that's one side of the coin.

The other side is that the USA are a big market that has, until recently, been fairly reliable. There's a lot of money to be made by dealing with them and there are a lot of established relations that would be expensive to change. In some cases companies can't even pivot to other markets as their business is too specific.

So trade will continue but the States are no longer guaranteed to be the preferred partner. Especially when making new trade deals the USA no longer get the benefit of goodwill. Previously they could argue that signing a deal with them meant decades of reliable access to a large, stable, and prosperous market and that a few unfavorable tradeoffs are worth it. Now they can't even guarantee that the deal won't be unilaterally canceled within months or that their market has much purchasing capacity. As a result everyone else is much more inclined to seek alternate trade deals and play hardball when the USA come to negotiate.

The current government is the worst one by far that I can remember us ever having. (That obviously means postwar.)

And that includes highlights like the Schröder cabinet where we unnecessarily deepened our dependency on Russian gas and implemented an unemployment policy so bad it had to be declared not to be in violation of human dignity by our Constitutional Court (which I consider one of the court's greatest missteps). For the record: Germany considers dignity to be one of the most important human rights. I consider the unemployment benefits system we've had since 2005 to be a literal human rights violation. And Merz is worse.

Or the Merkel cabinet which decided that the best way to prepare the country for the future was to cut infrastructure spending to near zero for twenty years and then make a Pikachu face when bridges start collapsing and the railroad network becomes unreliable. Merz comfortably outperforms that degree of incompetence.

The Merz cabinet manages to take the worst possible stance on just about every single matter, including matters that weren't even up for debate until our so incredibly esteemed chancellor just had to open his mouth again. I'm ashamed to be represented by these people and I'm ashamed of how the country conducts itself under what they call leadership. They're blatantly working against everyone, domestic and abroad, who isn't rich and they absolutely do not care about how much suffering they inflict.

The only thing worse is that due to the CDU/CSU's steadfast refusal to take a stance against the hard-right and known-antidemocratic AfD, those assholes have a fair chance of becoming the dominant political party so the next government might be even worse.

The flared base is to keep it from tipping over during travel, which space stations are known to do a lot of.

Mind you, they immediately went and developed less harmful versions of warp drive; both Voyager and the Defiant are known to do better in this regard. There was less than a year between warp drive being found harmful and the Defiant getting pressed into service. Voyager launched a few months later.

Getting subspace-friendly warp drives into ships must've been an extremely high priority for them to retool at least two ship classes late during development.

(Also, it was mentioned a few times again, even if only barely. TNG mentioned it a couple times in the same season and VOY mentioned it once. Not much but something.)

I prefer the Picard/Q version of the song.

Not if you've been taught that everything is a zero-sum game, which apparently many people believe, especially in the States. If you believe that one person gaining something necessarily means that someone else loses something to an equal or greater degree, caring about other people inherently means having to compromise on your own happiness.

Of course it becomes a lot easier if you believe that it's possible to win together and that giving a little can make a huge difference in someone's day.

I'd say that ATLA is an animated show but doesn't feel like a cartoon. For me personally, "cartoon" and "anime" are different subcategories of "animated show or movie".

Try working on a codebase that's all event-driven hexagonal CQRS with hand-crafted SQL for persistence. Add additional buzzwordy methodologies to taste.

Adding a single property to your product means you now have to update an aggregate class, several DTOs, and several event classes and handlers before you can even think about touching the UI.

And that's in your main solution. There's also at least one facade service you'll need to make compatible and you also need to update the event simulator used for testing. The latter night involve having to touch every single line in a 2000 lines long SQL script.

Having to go though three separate 600-2000 LOC PRs for one PBI isn't that exotic.

Yes, normal people do backflips while holding smartphones. This is very relatable. I am glad that Apple showcased this entirely normal human behavior in a video that is very relevant to my everyday life.

Seriously now, earlier ads like those where they had people film themselves while skydiving at least made a statement: Look how our phones can make nice videos in shaky conditions. But the only thing this tells me is that Apple have become so uncool that they must attach themselves to random celebrities in order to be noticed.

It's not even Jeff Goldblum talking about Macs. He actually talked about features back then. This is just "please notice us", which is something Apple hasn't had to say since the late 90s.

That's... really sad. It's as if we live in an "I'm a Mac" ad but now a carbon copy of the "I'm a PC" guy walks in, declares he's a Mac from the 2020s, and starts gushing about spreadsheets while insisting he's still stylish.

Protip: If you replace the "shorts" in the URI with "watch", the short gets treated like a normal video and gets the usual UI. There are browser extensions that automatically redirect you so you never have to deal with the weird shorts interface.

Well, for Gecko. I'm not sure if Chromium extensions can do that these days.

Picard's true weakness might be counting to five.

My best guess: When they make a smart TV with ads built in they make money off those ads. That makes such TVs more profitable per unit than ad-free TVs. The only way ad-free (and privacy-friendly) TVs would make them more money is if they'd sell much more units. There aren't enough people who deeply care about ads and privacy to drive such increased sales numbers.

While there is a relevant market for relatively dumb displays (companies that need digital signage), that market is willing to pay a significant markup and usually values reliability over picture fidelity. So yes, you can buy a dumb display but it might not have the most impressive picture and will definitely cost a lot more.