People were sarcastically making the comment about sharing their data with the Chinese government. AFAIK there has been zero evidence that this had been happening in the first place.

Frankly, if you were on TikTok at all, I don’t think you were following who I was following. It’s like YouTube. You can post stupid meme dance videos, you can post lectures by historians. I don’t appreciate the condescension. When you are seeing things on there - primary source evidence, not any kind of propaganda - that directly contradict what you hear from conventional media, you’re forced to develop skills to account for the disparity. Otherwise, without that info, you just stay in a bubble - which was precisely the intention of the ban.

Not sure what you mean. We see the problem with FOX viewers. You look at the people using TikTok for news (myself included), there’s actually strong media literacy because they’re learning about what deceit looks like.

Yup, that was wrong.

I had to go back and re-read the history of dimensional lumber. 2x4 was an actual 2x4 cut until recommendations by the Forest Products Laboratory (American Lumber Congress?) in 1919 to balance functional and economic requirements (1 5/8 x 3 5/8). It’s neither the shrinkage nor just milling after drying, they literally just cut it smaller. And if my last 20 trips to big box stores with lumber are any indication, they don’t care about cupping or warpage either.

Who, the people selling the Mandarin translator pens? Are they behind the Tiktok ban too?

Oh no, hypothetical biased information. How will our brains process it in the event that it appears.

Remember that time that China bombed a US ship in the Mediterranean though, to try to trick us into a war with Egypt?

Wait, that was “Israel”.

It’s because the actual cut is 2x4, and the wood shrinks. The typical shrinkage is known and accounted for. It is a treat when a house has an actual 2x though, i.e., it was cut divided by the shrinkage ratio, or cut dry. Related to why framing is done “on center”, i.e., “16 on center”.