I have a very, very tiny folding knife (less than an inch blade) on my keychain, and unless I’m flying somewhere, I always have that, and I suppose that that could cut a seatbelt, though I doubt that it’d be likely for the seatbelt to jam. No glass punch, though.

investigates

Hmm. Apparently, yeah, some Tesla vehicles do and some do not.

reads further

It sounds like autos in general are shifting away from tempered glass side windows to laminated glass, so those window breakers may not be effective on a number of newer cars. Hmm. Well, that’s interesting.

https://info.glass.com/laminated-vs-tempered-car-side-windows/

You may have seen it in the news recently—instances of someone getting stuck in their vehicle after an accident because the car was equipped with laminated side windows. Laminated windows are nearly impossible to break with traditional glass-break tools. These small devices are carried in many driver’s gloveboxes because they easily break car windows so that occupants can escape in emergency situations. Unfortunately, these traditional glass-break tools don’t work with laminated side windows. Even first responder professionals have difficulty breaking through laminated glass windows with specialized tools. It can take minutes to saw through and remove laminated glass. In comparison, tempered glass breaks away in mere seconds.

Setting aside anything specific to the mechanism in that vehicle, I suppose that keeping one of those window-breaker tools in the dash might have been a good idea, for a car of any sort.

That being said, I don’t keep one in my car.

kagis

https://forward.com/fast-forward/675325/pete-hegseth-tattoos-christian-crusades-trump/

One of Hegseth’s most prominent tattoos is a large Jerusalem cross on his chest, a symbol featuring a large cross potent with smaller Greek crosses in each of its four quadrants. The symbol was used in the Crusades and represented the Kingdom of Jerusalem that the Crusaders established.

Hegseth also has “Deus Vult,” Latin for “God wills it,” tattooed on his bicep. The phrase was used as a rallying cry for the First Crusade in 1096. It is also the closing sentence of Hegseth’s 2020 book, titled “American Crusade.”

Hegseth also has a cross and sword tattooed on his arm, which he says represents a New Testament verse. The verse, Matthew 10:34, reads, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

He later added “Yeshua,” or Jesus in Hebrew, under the sword. Hegseth told the site Media Ink in a 2020 interview that the tattoo was Jesus’ Hebrew name, which he mistakenly said was “Yehweh,” a Biblical spelling of God’s name. He told Media Ink that he got the tattoo while in Bethlehem, Jesus’ birthplace, which is located in the present-day West Bank, where he was reporting for Fox Nation.

“Israel, Christianity and my faith are things I care deeply about,” Hegseth told Media Ink.

Hegseth opposes the two-state solution and supports exclusive Israeli sovereignty in the Holy Land. He has also said the idea of rebuilding the biblical Temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount is a “miracle” that could happen in our lifetimes. The First and Second Temples stood on a site where the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine, now stands.

Hegseth expressed these views in a 2018 speech delivered in Jerusalem at a conference organized by the right-wing Israel National News, also known as Arutz Sheva.

The speech laid out a vision of a world beset by a growing darkness that can only be saved by the United States, Israel and fellow “free people” from other countries.

The amusing thing is that OP’s article didn’t even get to him because it was talking about other nominations.

Man, we live in a world which probably has immediate and ready access to nude images of any particular sort one might desire – and we’re getting to the point that computers can synthesize stuff that doesn’t even exist – and you’re committing crimes and risking your job to get a low-quality cell phone picture of a cell phone screen of an amateur nude photo?

EDIT: And randomly checking the first guy, he’s apparently married with four kids:

https://notes.mshp.dps.mo.gov/si01/si01p001.nsf/035631d21d12b3ca8625729800536894/25cc708fab2ad89c8625871e0052e782?OpenDocument

Trooper David L. McKnight, of Sikeston, Missouri, has been assigned to Zone 7, which serves the citizens of Mississippi, New Madrid and Scott counties. Trooper McKnight is a graduate of Scott County Central High School in Sikeston, Missouri. Prior to joining the Patrol, he worked as a patrol officer for the Sikeston Department of Public Safety. He is married to Natalie (Cooper) McKnight and has four children.

Probably not going to do wonders for your marriage, either.

Hmm.

I’d think that that’d also affect Lemmy instance operators were it to enter into force.

The text and its scope would also be interesting, because I can’t see a practical way for, say, an instance operator in Bakersfield, California, to have any realistic way to evaluate the truth of claims about an election, in, say, Malaysia, if it extends to all elections. I suspect that even in California alone, acting as an arbiter of truth would be tough to do reasonably.

EDIT: Looking at the bill text, it probably does not currently, as it looks like it has a floor on the number of California users, and there aren’t yet enough users on the Threadiverse:

(h) “Large online platform” means a public-facing internet website, web application, or digital application, including a social media platform as defined in Section 22675 of the Business and Professions Code, video sharing platform, advertising network, or search engine that had at least 1,000,000 California users during the preceding 12 months.

It’s also interesting that traditional media apparently is not covered:

The bill would exempt from its provisions a broadcasting station and a regularly published online newspaper, magazine, or other periodical of general circulation that satisfy specified requirements.

It is apparently specific to elections in California.

My guess is that it’ll probably get overturned on some First Amendment challenge, but we shall see…

I don’t think that the military uses much TNT directly, but military explosives may be derived from TNT.

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

Yeah, there’s a list under “Applications”.

Composition B, for example, is a mix of TBT and other stuff.

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

Composition B (Comp B), also known as Hexotol and Hexolite (among others), is a high explosive consisting of castable mixtures of RDX and TNT. It is used as the main explosive filling in artillery projectiles, rockets, land mines, hand grenades, and various other munitions.[1

Susie Wiles as White House Chief of Staff, I believe. She didn’t serve in an office before, but was high-level in his campaign in 2016, 2020, and 2024, so she’s around for a long time.

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

Didn’t just show up with Trump, has done Republican campaigns for a long time.

That’s good, but those are still pretty high levels compared to the historical situation.

Lower-case “L”.

Capital “L” would be, like, the Libertarian Party.

Whether or not he gets the slot, based on Trump’s first term, a lot of the cabinet members aren’t gonna last long anyway.

https://www.statista.com/chart/15071/how-does-trumps-turnover-compare-to-other-presidents/

I wonder what CSIS does? Don’t know what Canada considers threats.

kagis

Man, the US think tank CSIS dominates the Canadian intelligence agency CSIS in search results.

Okay, here’s their jobs page.

https://www.canada.ca/en/security-intelligence-service/corporate/csis-jobs/available-jobs.html

And their language people:

https://www.canada.ca/en/security-intelligence-service/corporate/csis-jobs/available-jobs/foreign-language-communications-analyst.html

CSIS is looking for individuals with the following language proficiency:

• Arabic
• Mandarin
• Russian
• Punjabi
• Urdu
• Hindi

Mmm. So Middle East, China, Russia, and India/Pakistan.

EDIT: Looks like India/Pakistan only made the list recently. Using Archive.org to go back to 2018:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180222080221/https://www.canada.ca/en/security-intelligence-service/corporate/csis-jobs/available-jobs/foreign-language-communications-analyst.html

The Service is looking for individuals with the following language proficiency:

• Arabic
• Somali
• Farsi
• Mandarin
• Kurdish
• Sorani
• Russian

I mean, they’ve done this when places charge them money to index the news articles there.

It hardly seems reasonable to both mandate that they index a given piece of news media and that they pay a fee to do so.

Pretty much any brick-and-mortar office supply store I’ve seen provides copy machine and printing services. Probably faxing too, though I haven’t checked.

I mean, I don’t do much in paper any more, but I’m pretty sure that most people need – even if only very occasionally – to print things.

Finally, the documents claim, White admitted that he had injured JW himself because he was angry that he was two points down in the videogame NBA2K.

I’d hate to see this guy lose a game by eight points.

Fucking, Austria eventually gave in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria

Despite a population of only 106 in 2020, the village has drawn attention in the English-speaking world for its former name, which was spelled the same as an inflected form of the vulgar English-language word “fuck”.[1][2] Its road signs were a popular visitor attraction and were often stolen by souvenir-hunting vandals until 2005, when they were modified to be theft-resistant. A campaign to change the village’s name to Fugging was rejected in 2004 but succeeded in late 2020.[3][4]

The downside of building the phone/tablet into the car, though, is that phones change more quickly than cars.

A 20 year old car can be perfectly functional. A 20 year old smarphone is insanely outdated. If the phone is built into the car, you’re stuck with it.

Relative to a built-in system, I’d kind of rather just have a standard mounting point with security attachments and have the car computer be upgraded. 3DIN maybe.

I get the “phone is small” argument, but the phone is upgradeable.

And I’d definitely rather have physical controls for a lot of things.

Plus, even if you manage to never, ever have a drive fail, accidentally delete something that you wanted to keep, inadvertently screw up a filesystem, crash into a corruption bug, have malware destroy stuff, make an error in writing it a script causing it to wipe data, just realize that an old version of something you overwrote was still something you wanted, or run into any of the other ways in which you could lose data…

You gain the peace of mind of knowing that your data isn’t a single point of failure away from being gone. I remember some pucker-inducing moments before I ran backups. Even aside from not losing data on a number of occasions, I could sleep a lot more comfortably on the times that weren’t those occasions.

I think that Trump Term 2 is likely to look a lot like Trump Term 1.

Whether-or-not one calls that “that bad”, of course, involves some matter of perspective. The article here is about a Term 1 guy coming back for Term 2, which is pretty much in line with things being like Term 1. I expect a lot of the same stuff that I didn’t like the first time. I expect him to make outrageous statements, violate a lot of Presidential norms, probably do some questionable things legally to try to benefit himself. I expect him to play into conspiracy theory where he thinks it might benefit him. I expect him to make a lot of self-contradictory statements. I expect him to bluster and make crude statements. I expect him to be constantly in the news for doing something outrageous.

I expect that a lot of his outrageous statements are going to just be political theater, the same way they were the first time around. A lot of very firey talk about immigration and free trade agreements, making sure that he’s seen by supporters saying things, not a lot of dramatic actual effective change in most policy.

I don’t expect some of the predictions that are often thrown around here about the end of democracy or the free press or a long list of other things to come true.

One of the points that I want to see is what happens on Ukraine policy. This isn’t a major popular issue for Republican voters the way policy on Israel is. Vance has been pretty vocal about opposing support for Ukraine, but I also don’t know (1) the degree to which that is an actual concern for Vance, (2) the degree of influence that Vance will have, as the VP’s power is usually almost entirely dependent on what the President wants to delegate to them and listen to them, and (3) the degree to which the bureaucracy will affect this, as politicians don’t simply go craft foreign policy on their lonesome, and there are going to be a lot of the same domain experts that were present under Biden. It’s possible that there could be very material impact for Ukraine, but I could also believe that the impact is muted.

My guess is that four years from now, I’m probably going to be pretty happy to see the last of him. But that was pretty much the case in 2020, and I remember no shortage of dire predictions in the opposing press and social media all through his first time through that didn’t pan out.

I think that the age data there is the most interesting bit.

There’s very little difference in perception for the 18-29-year-old demographic, with 16% of Republican/lean-Republican voters saying that the economy is excellent/good, and 21% of Democratic/lean-Democratic voters.

But every time the age cohort rises, so does the separation in perception of the economy. For 65+ year-olds, it’s down to 7% for Republican/lean-Republican voters, and up to 55% of Democratic/lean-Democratic voters.