Explain Like I'm 5 (ELI5)

I get and agree that more progressive candidates are a good thing, but how much unilateral power does the mayor of one city really have, even if it's NYC? Why is everyone, up to the top of the US government, chiming in on it?

I've had a couple of articles come up for me like Darwin award winners walking into helium balloons while they're still being filled at ground level, or people walking into buildings (is it far underground?) and just asphyxiating before they realise.

How do these conditions come about? What about cave diving? Where do you get areas open to the environment where oxygen doesn't reach? I get with helium balloons the gas is being forcefully displaced. How else do you encounter oxygen absent scenarios?

I'm not talking about the process of how undersea cables are laid but the actual planning process

For example who owns the cables, how do they get permission from each country to lay the cable, are their border conflicts, how do they connect to the local countries Internet, etc.

This is something I haven't given all that much thought about until recently, but it is quite infuriating. If you leave a steam deck or switch unplugged, the battery will drain pretty quickly. However, I remember the game boy and more particularly, my 3ds never dying if I had to step away for awhile. I knew I would have to charge it shortly after gaming once again, but it was never a big deal in the end. Looking it up and talking with friends, they came to the conclusion it has to do with the Lithium ion, but neither of us could explain well the why.

Some people describe it as a network, some people describe it as a forum, yet somehow we have providers, and at the same time Usenet is seen as anonymous despite having a proxy in the form of a provider...for someone grown way after the Usenet prime, this all doesn't make sense.

What is Usenet, actually? Is it a separate network? Is it layered on top of the Internet? If it's the latter, why do I need some Usenet provider and why does it need to retain information (and why doing it for as long as possible is desirable?). Please help me connect the dots here.

So my understanding is, you have a wallet, that wallet has a hash ID and thus is basically anonymous. But if someone connects that ID to you, you aren't anonymous anymore.

I heard you should use a new wallet for every transaction. But if I send money to the new wallet from my personal wallet, won't that be on blockchain forever? Thus making it identifiable? Or if I send euros/dolars to my new wallet, won't that connect me to the new wallet?

Why is it that no matter where in the world, what country or what the apparent topic is, literally every geographically specific community on Lemmy , just like every geographic specific sub on Reddit, is negative. Literally every story is about something horrible, awful, sad or enraging, never anything positive for anything geographic beyond a national level and rarely even then?

Why is this with geographic communities and not others?

We have transistors in the nanometer scale, why couldn't we create really tiny 8086s?

EDIT: thanks guys I just reinvented the GPU albeit crappier

I mean, there is a variety of intriguing political parties, but it's still always "Republicans or Democrats". Why?

(Disclosure: I'm German, never been to the US.)

I'd expect the state to have a list of all its citizens and their basic personal info (age) which could be used to determine their eligibility for voting. In my country, we get a "invitation" to the vote, with your voter station and info on how to change it.

Instead, I'm seeing posts about USA's "voter rolls", which are sometimes purged, which prevents people from voting. Isn't this an attack on the voting system and democracy itself?

So why doesn't USA have a list of voters? Are they stupid?

If brown is actually a darker shade of orange (Wikipedia), then how do we get light brown and not orange?

How is it possible to be light and a "darker shade" at the same time?

When I was in school we were taught genocide is a crime against humanity, now the USA and other countries act like Israel has blackmail material on all their leaders. What causes so many countries to be supporting them like this?

I’ve properly missed out with this one and haven’t got a clue what is going on, beyond Sony aren’t letting some countries residents create accounts.