Me too. I first assumced it was an OCR error, then remembered they were emails and wouldn't need to go through OCR. Then I thought that the US Government is exactly the kind of place to print out millions of emails only to scan them back in again.
I love this fact. If you're a fish with no neck, the route it takes is the most direct and obvious. But as evolution gradually lengthened necks the route remained the same!
Once you start noticing how often you see content that references e.g. anything that's happening in the US right now (I'm in the UK), you realise how 'news' is everywhere.
If you go on reddit, unless you've curated your subreddits and never touch /all or /popular, it's very heavy with 'news'. The Google app, a left-swipe by default on your Android phone is all 'news'. Twxtter/Bluesky/etc. are full of news. Avoiding news entirely is almost impossible on today's internet.
I have had success with this approach too, but key to all this is being careful about where you go online to minimise exposure. These days I don't use any 'social media' platforms, but I do visit HN and BBC news (both of which are of higher quality than most places, and crucially only have a few stories on a typical day - the rate of new content is low). This way I stay informed without falling down rabbit holes about every twist and turn of every (mostly awful/depressing) thing happening in the World.
Yes, laws only matter if they are collectively believed in. International law just the same. This has always been the case, but largely speaking in the West, for the last century or so, the rule of law has been broadly believed in, including international law.
The story here is that the US seems to not currently believe international law is an effective tool for projecting its power. Whether correctly or otherwise, it has believed that up until now.
The Yoto system actively encourages you to buy 'blank' cards to fill with your own content, and the process is relatively simple. Simply remove the DRM from the borrowed media, (convert to an appropriate format if required), then upload to the card. Wipe your card whenever you borrow a new audio book from the libarary for a clear conscience. yt-dlp is also a great source of content.
This is true - we've taken advantage of it somewhat (my wife ripped Harry Potter this way, and we recorded ourselves narrating some favorites).
Mainly (shamefully) "Simply remove the DRM" is doing some work in your sentence. We just, uh, haven't gotten together the executive function to figure out how to do it with the Libby app on the iPhone. As a Hacker News poster I want to be the type of person who figures this out. But, I have not.
That's fair, library systems can be very variable, where we are we can access audiobooks on a desktop, so there's access to the raw files, I can see how if you're doing it with an iPhone app it's considerably harder!
For Christmas, we got several members of our extended family to read their favourite story book into a voice memo on our phone(s). We set up a blank Yoto card with all those stories, and with custom icons.
It was a great stocking stuffer for our toddler, and very cute to hear him call out who is reading :)
I'm glad to know the real reason!
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