Right, emulators aren't illegal but a bunch of adjacent things can be - for example system BIOS/FW/encryption keys/ROMs if you don't dump them yourself from your own personal hardware.

What got Yuzu in the crosshairs was announcing support for Tears of the Kingdom before it released, meaning they were testing their emulator on an unreleased game and the odds that every dev and tester had legitimately gotten a copy of the game before official release is so low that they weren't about to fight it and go through discovery (which might have identified significant additional piracy on their part). It was easier to fold and settle, and probably saved them from an immense amount of fines for piracy used for testing.

Iron rust. Can be used with the aluminum you included to produce thermite.

I know we have citizens united but corporations are not people lol

Citizens United didn't make corporations people. Corporate personhood had been a thing for a very long time, largely about whether or not forming a business means you lose legal rights operating under it (Does a business entity have freedom of speech? What does freedom of the press even mean in an 18th century context if it doesn't apply to a business [aka a newspaper]?) and whether or not regular old laws prohibiting a person from doing a thing can be applied to businesses.

Talking about being able to ride a bus in the US is comical.

Depends where you live. It's much more doable in the densest urban areas than it is somewhere rural. I have a friend who lives in Boston for example and he doesn't have a car, at all. Because Boston's mass transit is good enough for his routine needs. I can't do that here, however.

he’ll also be strongly encouraged to buy some merch.

Eh, they usually don't see merch as much as ask you to subscribe to their crowdfunding (ideally for 10% of your total income) for performative Jesusing done bi-weekly.

Dishwashers have the same issue.

Newer dishwashers cycle the same water through repeatedly during the wash cycle, only bringing in fresh a few times during the process. Old ones from before they were concerned about water efficiency would just pull in fresh water and drain out dirty water instead of cycling the same water through repeatedly during each phase of the process.

Because they only run clean water it takes less runtime on the older dishwashers but they're also constantly pulling in fresh water. It's also why newer dishwashers require more cleaning out filters - they don't just drain to the drain, so they need to care that the water draining won't gum up the sprayers and such because it's going to go back through. The point is that they use much less total water to get the job done.

CFC’s are great at coolimg things as long as you do not care about having an ozone layer.

They're even fine if you care about the ozone layer so long as you never ever let any leak. Until the coolant leaks the CFCs are cycling in a closed system in which they can't do any damage. The problem is that "not letting any leak" is harder than it sounds, and the newer coolants just don't do the job as well.

It's like how asbestos tiles are fine until they get damaged, and then they fuck the lungs of anyone unfortunate enough to breathe in a tiny bit of it.

Got banned off redit for using an alt to comment on publicfreakout which I was supposedly banned from

If you were banned from a Reddit sub you've never posted or commented on, you won't receive a message informing you you've been banned. Mostly likely cause for being banned from a sub you've never used is the sub using a bot to preemptively ban people it sees as "problematic" - usually but not always these bots are configured to ban anyone who has ever commented on a list of "bad" subs determined by the mod setting up the bot, regardless of content or context. There are some others, like certain porn subs will preemptively ban any account they detect that has an OnlyFans link.

The net result is if you comment on any remotely controversial sub in any context you've likely been banned from one or more unrelated subs, possibly without your knowledge.

This is hypothetically against the mod rules, but not enforced in any way. Mostly because of which subs tend to do it and which subs tend to be targeted.

The TikTok ban law doesn't actually specifically target TikTok in that way, instead it targets applications owned or controlled by a foreign adversary, of which TikTok is the first one enforcement has been turned against. RedNote or RedBook or whatever it's called almost certainly is also banned under it, and it's just a matter of the law being enforced.

TikTok could have gotten out of it by selling or splitting in such a way that US TikTok was not under Chinese control.

No, no, no. Just like a tax on unrealized gains is a bad idea because of how much it would royally fuck up the stock market, including every 401(k). What they need to do instead is tax the ways used by the extremely wealthy to utilize their gains without technically realizing them, even if that sometimes means taxing debt (aka treating it as income when they borrow against it and taxing accordingly).

As a Quebecois

You may not like it, but as a Quebecois you unfortunately remain part of Canada and thus are part of the set of Canadians and the creations and practices of Quebec are Canadian as a consequence.

To change that, you'll need to double down on that Free Quebec stuff and cut yourselves away from your English neighbors. Though I don't think that's even won an opinion poll in the last twenty years, and I don't think it's ever been closer than the failed resolution in 1995.

...and then over the coming years, decades, or centuries adjust those things either for differences in practical use or cultural tastes and that's where a lot of things in most cultures come from. Some things tend to independently evolve in lots of different places though because the idea is simple and the need it fills practically universal (like spears or fermented foods).

But don't be shocked by the sheer amount of our people modified this thing that those people we traded with used who modified this other thing that some other people used, etc, etc and that's why our cultural thing is really some ancient Babylonian thing repeatedly stolen, rebranded and iterated upon over centuries. You know, like how we measure time. Or for anyone of European ancestry, writing.