As I remember, Kagi's index isn't entirely its own. They do some crawling themselves, but they still rely heavily on purchasing search results from Microsoft and Google to complement their own.
Are gated free speech zones a thing, and do Americans obey that? If no, what are the news talking about when they show those? If yes, why do Americans submit to this?
And is carrying guns into protests allowed? If not, why aren't all gun carriers arrested on the spot? If yes, how does it make sense to allow them, but not fireworks, and how are fireworks more dangerous than loaded guns, and worthy of jailing, prosecution and imprisonment, while guns aren't?
I'm not American and don't know much about how protests are done in the US. From my perspective what you describe sounds extremely weird, in a cultural shock kind of way. I mean, how is it that, in the US, one can carry actual guns, including military-grade weapons, to protests, but carrying fireworks, whose core purpose is to make loud noise to force people to pay attention to the protest, is forbidden?
This sounds to me _exactly_ as weird as when I watch on TV those little gated "free speech zones" American cities have been implementing and, even worse, protesters obediently limiting their protest to within he gated area, "conveniently" placed several blocks away from where the protest would be effective.
What the sentencing calls attempted murder, the defendants are describing as one of the protesters watching a police officer preparing to shoot another protester who was running away on their back, and thus shooting in the direction of the would-be cold blood murderer to prevent the assassination attempt. If this description is correct (a big if, but it seems the judge didn't care for examining the evidence), then it's something that wouldn't have happened at all weren't for actions of the officer himself.
As for explosives, the defendants say it was fireworks. Carrying fireworks at protests is common.
Many countries don't use SMS, they use WhatsApp, for almost everything, from chatting with family and friends, to business contacts, to talking with your bank manager, to medical appointments, to 2FA, and even to transfer money.
That's what prevents most people on those countries from having a dumb phone, and forces even the most illiterate of 90yo great-grandmothers to learn how to navigate around Android or iOS, all the while placing uncountable many calls to their great-grandchildren because they opened up some random app by accident and don't remember how to get back to the only thing that matters: WhatsApp (talking from experience here).
A WhatsApp-capable quasi-dumb-phone would be a godsend for such places, provided it's cheap enough. At $500 this one definitely isn't, not when an ultra-cheap Android smartphone capable of running WhatsApp costs $90. But if this one sells well, cheaper ones may become viable down the line due to economies of scale. I surely hope that happens.
You also need society to have local cultures, as well as the culture at large, that actively oppose such behavior as immoral and/or shameful, with enforcement by peers. This I say based on two well-proven models, the sociological typology of societies as guilt, shame, or fear-based, and the psychological model of the six stages (level of complexity) of moral reasoning, that shows that up to 85% of the adult population worldwide derive their values from group-affiliation.
Atop that, individuals themselves need hope in the future, meaning the perspective of improving upon the baseline that those pre-requisites provide, since a baseline is emotionally neutral. The perspective of remaining at exactly that same baseline year after year after decade isn't sufficient.
With all of the above provided, petty crime is minimized to the point only people with severe personality disorders commit them. There's no way to fix this, but it becomes so low we're now talking of Japan levels of per-capita crimes, if not less.
I noticed it as LLM-written by the middle of the second paragraph. The text is filled with classic rhetorical structures LLMs love making, especially the "it isn't X, it's Y" and "not A, not B, not C, but D" patterns.
I'd suggest cheap Android-based Chinese e-Ink e-readers if you want flexibility. My current one is a Bigme B6, which was for sale in my country a few months ago.
Their main advantage is providing access to all e-reading apps available on the Google Play Store, including Amazon's own Kindle app, as well as sideloaded ones such as KOReader.
On the downside, the battery life on those isn't as good as that of dedicated Kindles, Kobos, or other lightweight e-readers, but they still hold a charge for four or five days if one turns off their antennas, which is plenty of time to recharge them.
As for the ebooks themselves, I switched to purchasing from Kobo and other ebook stores. Some sell DRM-less ePubs, which is nice, while those that come with DRM can be easily liberated. And for the occasional Kindle-exclusive that is struck with (temporarily) unbreakable DRM, the Kindle app, although annoying, works well enough.
I checked the numbers. OpenOffice reports about 230,000 downloads a week. LibreOffice, in contrast, reports about 1,000,000 downloads a week. Those are both direct downloads from their respective websites, thus not counting Linux distributions, in which the default office suite is LibreOffice. AFAIK, no distribution comes with OpenOffice as its default; it's always LibreOffice.
I also checked Google Trends for the last 3 months, comparing LibreOffice vs OpenOffice. The first is searched on average 4.7 times more than the latter, which tracks with weekly download numbers.
From those numbers, I'd say it's pretty clear the name "LibreOffice" won quite decisively over "OpenOffice". OpenOffice is still used a lot, but nowhere close to LibreOffice, especially when we add Linux distributions counts.
That didn't use to be the case. In the US many laws were approved in the 1930s that forced businesses to keep stakeholders in mind, not just shareholders. That led the US to become the global powerhouse it became, and its middle class to boom. Then in the late 1970s came deregulation, and those laws were all reversed, resulting in the new two-class system Americans are learning to hate, a new robber barons era very reminiscent of the previous one.
Too bad most everyone is lost in the artificially engineered "culture war" to notice they have a common enemy, one who benefits from the proles fighting each other rather than uniting against them.
This is an interesting point. Supposing this sudden shock happens, wouldn't American towns, counties, and the like, run to buy buses and start providing emergency bus services all around to all those suburban areas where people couldn't afford gas anymore? Or at least, this is how I imagine a sane response would be.
There'd be a shortage of buses at first, but I also suppose it'd relatively easy to adapt current North American car manufacturing plants to start manufacturing buses.
But that's just an uninformed guess. Am I too much off base in this?
Oil demand is mostly inelastic. No matter how much or how little is produced, those who need it NEED it, so they'll compete with all others who similarly need it. The richest ones from among them get the oil first, and the poorest get nothing. The end price ends up being a function of how much oil is available versus how much the richest countries' absolutely irreducibly need for oil is versus how much wealth those countries can throw at the problem not to be left without before someone else with deeper pockets gets it.
Chinese planning revolves around mastering a technology no matter the cost, then monopolozing the global market no matter the cost, then bankrupting existing foreigner competitors or entirely preventing them from arising in the first place no matter the cost, to only then caring about costs and to start profiting from it all.
Does that apply to websites full of CSAM, or that sell for-hire animal torture real-time streaming services, or that provide hitman hiring services, or...
No, you're in the companion of anti-vaxxers, an all-American conspiracy theory spreading globally that denies hard evidence in favor of vague feelings of maybe this and maybe that and maybe the other thing and OMG we're so afraid and what if...
It seems US citizens are quite divided on this, which suggests there's intense dissatisfaction with the law as is, and therefore the need to re-legislate the topic following the current will of the majority.
That's incorrect. There have been studies on this. In a few cases seeing depictions of violence causes an urge to act violently, but in the majority of people predisposed to violence it causes a reduction in that impulse, so on average there's a reduction.
The same has been shown to be the case with depictions of sexual abuse. For some it leads the person to go out and do it. For the majority of those predisposed to be sexual predators it "satisfies" them, and they end up causing less harm.
Presumably the same applies to pedophiles. I remember reading a study on this that suggested this to be the case, but the sample size was small so the statistical significance was weak.