The county lines were likely drawn 100-200 years ago. The method will vary by state, but is usually either in a grid or following some geographical features. Where people live probably wasn’t directly taken into account.

Cities lines are drawn as needed, and as cities expand, it just depends on where the population growth is. For mature towns/cities, they may be butted up against adjacent towns, so expansion is driven by whichever people are otherwise “unclaimed.”

But why do cities expand in the first place? Money, prestige (which brings more money), adding services to under-served residents, etc. The question they’re asking when it comes time to grow the borders is, ‘will this bring in more money than it costs in a reasonable amount of time?’ It can be expensive to add services in some areas if they’re expanding water/sewer/police/fire/electric/etc, but the additional tax revenues may be worth it.

It would arguably take less effort to write a more general ban on apps and companies sharing, selling, and aggregating data on users than one specifically carving out foreign-owned companies.

Not doing that makes it clear this isn’t a “first step.” This is a blanket approval of the practice, but with “election year, China bad” thrown in.

Yes, any government access to user data can, and will, be mis-used, including Tik Tok. Opposing this bill isn’t an approval of Bytedance, it’s an opposition to the process.

Sketchy Chinese data brokers: 👎
Sketchy US data brokers:👍

Signed, Congress.

Because that’s the way they’ve done it since 1987, and the CEO doesn’t like change.

They’d do it in 60 hours if there were oil in Gaza.

Not exactly social media as one would typically define it, but I like Techdirt’s system. Insightful, Funny, or Report (for Troll/Spam), at least as a framework.

More sites should use more granular voting systems so that people can indicate why they like/dislike content. A downvote for “I disagree with this person’s opinion” shouldn’t count the same as “This is a spam account.” And “This content is factually correct information provided by an expert in the field” shouldn’t count the same as “hur hur, he said ‘boobies’.”

Yes, in case it wasn’t clear, that’s what I was trying to say. The “beer and world record publisher” are related. The “tire and restaurant rating” are related. Both unlike the Stanleys which are not.

Or the tire and restaurant rating.

Any given star is constantly emitting an unimaginably large, but finite, number of photons. A tiny few of them travel tens to hundreds of (Earth) years, only to end their journey in your eyeballs.

Stanley, the cup company, didn’t even make the Stanley Cup.

Or nine months after the summer of '79. But start there in great detail.

I still have a couple drives and a bunch of disks. I keep telling myself I’ll resurrect my college homework for a laugh one day. Unfortunately it’s hard to find a reasonably modern motherboard to hook them up (let alone finding drivers), so in the closet they sit.

Procrastinating

Samsung did have a major problem early last year, but it seems to be limited to a run of products with a specific firmware.

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I was a teenager and I thought RadX sounded cool (this was a full year before Fallout 1 came out, so I don’t think it had any other inspiration). A few years later, I wanted a little continuity, but also something not quite so cringe-worthy. A single “i” fixed it.

While perhaps not “the” authoritative source on the matter, I do find it a̶m̶u̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ appropriate that Wikipedia’s page on Fascism in Russia is effectively a disambiguation page because of all the forms it has taken over the years.

You can change the audio balance to 100% one side or the other in accessibility settings.

Does waiting on the phone count? If so, six hours to get someone at the IRS, so they could fix the mistake in 2 minutes.

Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.