413 karma · joined July 25, 2025
No but carrying over $10,000 into the US requires you to declare it and maybe pay taxes if you can't prove its source or risk being sized (which is fine if it's drug money).
If you think 'this is just a normal citizen doing good work' at first and you are breaking privacy here, keep reading.
>They unearthed no contraband. But Beltran arrested Gutierrez Lugo on suspicion of money laundering and engaging in organized criminal activity because he was carrying thousands of dollars in cash — money his supervisor said came directly from customers in local Latino communities, who are accustomed to paying in cash.
carrying thousands of dollars in cash over the US Mexico border is so suspicious that there is likely a lot more happening. The trucking company spent 20,000$ to get him out of it.
The more I think of better call Saul and breaking bad, the more I wonder whether this is one of those situations where the reality is actually much worse than television fiction.
90% of the drugs that enter US come from the south border. At 120 tons of drugs being 'seized' not the ones being distributed, I am assuming the scale of this thing is massive. [1]
[1] https://forumtogether.org/article/illicit-fentanyl-and-drug-...
For example, They will call some device Deco / Archer ABC with a Qualcomm chip that's latest and greatest. They might sell it for 499$ for example and then let reviewers do their thing to review these products everywhere with 5 stars. Great!
Six months or maybe a year down the road when the product starts getting traction as people start buying new WiFi standards like 6/6E/7 etc. they will swap out the chips inside and launch a v2 of that same product with either mediatek chips or a slower Qualcomm SOC. This affects performance and stability and it also drives down the pricing with cheaper hardware.
This has been done a lot with Deco units. Reviews are for original v1 hardware but what's being sold is a different hardware completely. Not only is this a firmware problem but keep in mind such practices really show lack of trust.
Great example of how to lose trust in a brand.
I was so used to this that when I started looking for this setting in UniFi OS I had forgotten the part 'networks are not supposed to be rebooted frequently!'.
The iPhone and services that go with the iPhone (music apps iCloud) together make apple what it is even today. The numbers are huge and the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro are still the gold standard of smartphones. Everything else is probably secondary support hardware and software for the iPhone.
I plan on moving away from macOS (maybe Asahi on my old M1 Air but leaning towards Arch on framework) but every attempt to reconsider the iPhone for me has failed.
The biggest thing I see is how the iPhone helped fuel social media and in turn social media helped iPhone with sales. The phone is a social and secure device and the iPhone excels at that thanks to iCloud services and the ease with which you can manage the phone. Upgrading is so seamless, managing Photos with iCloud is a no-brainer. Everything about it screams social and it does it extremely well.
The personal computer vs Mac war is still ongoing but android vs iPhone war was over years ago. The iPhone won and there is not much anyone can do at this point to compete at that scale unless someone comes up with something truly extraordinary rather than just putting LLMs inside apps.
Apply this to the internet and essentials are FOSS. Linux, DNS and maybe RISCV someday will mean you can build computers and internet on essentials that are free to learn and use.
Weird that case creation uses the same region as the case you'd like to create for.
As someone who's had to do extensive work on myself to survive I can relate to a lot of things said here. I have gone through a lot of material on psychology and spend a lot of time thinking myself when I read or go through the material. This was after 3 years of medication and 20 years of suffering and reaching the point of wanting badly to end my life due to multiple factors growing up.
What I would suggest if you wanted to start working on yourself building healthier relationships with yourself and others:
First is find a suitable therapist. Shop for a therapist like you shop for clothes. Do a session or two and see what you feel. What you need depends on what you are going through. Depression panic anxiety marriage health etc. But don't continue therapy where you don't feel good. There wont be a perfect fit but 'good enough' is someone you can talk to and is compassionate and helps you to do well. They will also assign small homework and that is important. The right therapist will be on your team and slowly nudge you in the right direction (though with your knowledge not sneakily). This builds trust.
Second would be start working on your body. Your body is just as important as your mind. And the two are very interlinked. Yoga, Mindfulness, being more present (ditch your phones and social media accounts), exercise, food, etc. all contribute to your mental wellbeing which will help you create a good relationship with yourself. Once you give the body the love it needs, it will give it back to you.
Third would be to do some reading on mental health and books by psychologists. The thing is you will get lot of insights on your own life reading all that. But be careful too, it might bring up intense memories (like trauma) that can be dangerous. So go slow. Peter Levine, Gabor Mate, Bessel van Der Kolk, Gottman, Richard Shwartz, David Burns, beane Browne etc. Such authors are actively doing work on the cognitive side of things. Some have extreme theories so look for things that apply to you.
I will admit that I was skeptical of the whole 'change your thoughts and things will change' and to some extent I still think that it's not the whole story. But you have to do the self work and your mind is a big part of it. I am very far from building healthy relationships in my life but I think I am having a good relationship with myself lately. I may have gone a few notches down in depression and things have improved.
There is a lot more to share tbh on this but these things are something I did in the last two years that seem to have helped.
If a particular category is considered then yes, phones are the biggest chunk. But virtually every device these days comes with WiFi. So wifi is now the default method of connecting something.
Apps used to use less ram but over the years apps have become big and more complicated. This is probably why iPhones feel sluggish because new iPhones have more memory and apps snap back faster as newer iPhones which also have faster storage and memory bandwidth to reduce latency of reading more data from the flash.
Batteries are also a problem as maintaining voltage is difficult for a 2-3 year old battery. An official battery swap at apple service for a 3 year old iPhone will make it run much better.
I used to believe (and sometimes I still do) that apple intentionally makes everything heavier to make old phones and devices feel slower but I don't think thats the case.
I think that more things are happening on newer phones and devices and that same task feels slower on older device. This happens are lot faster on iPhones and phones in general (a year or two) as opposed to Macs/computers which can show signs of aging in 4-5 years.
My 2018 intel computer feels very slow in 2025 running Gnome. No one slowed it down. It's just that the 2025 world of software is a lot heavier and 2026 will be even more and so on.
All in all, apple is doing some incredible things with hardware.
Software teams at apple really need to get their act together. The M1 itself is so powerful that nobody really needs to upgrade that for most things most people do on their computers. Tahoe however makes my M1 Air feel sluggish doing the exact same tasks ive been last couple of years. I really hope this is not intentional from Apple to make me upgrade. That would be a big let down.
I really like the 15 camera I have and feels really good for a casual photo person. I feel that the 16e is more than enough for 99% of those not into social media. Like the phone without social media is just keeping in touch with close friends and family and occasionally taking pictures and making payments. And once in a while a few apps that help you track something like maps or health apps.
The 16e feels like a really enough phone if you don't want to get into the rat race.