I feel like technology tips the scale against a popular uprising pretty hard. You have sophisticated mass surveillance systems to track everyone, fully or semi automated drones and robots to deter or kill us. Automated oppression has already been deployed around the world successfully, and these same companies are behind much of it. There’s no reason to think the default here is that the people win such a conflict and secure a right to live.

Like the implication that having an active sex life and bullying someone to death are basically the same category of thing or strongly related somehow

So then we would tell the alien we use base 21?

Looking at their front page, it seems like it has an anti-Trump bias overall, was it the opposite before the election? The OP article seems to pretty clearly be calling ICE out for hypocrisy for having their own film crew for propaganda purposes while calling others documenting their actions terrorists.

Sounds a lot like “how you feel doesn’t matter, your right to exist depends on being useful to me.”

Which calls for acquiring leverage and using it to set boundaries, more than it calls for a rational rebuttal. Just gotta systematically remove the power such people have over you, and then they won’t be able to talk to you that way anymore.

Mobile phones have caused a dark age of UI design

Not really, I always strongly disliked Twitter and the idea of something that’s basically like Twitter never appealed to me. Might try that stuff eventually though.

I don’t want to make accounts on lots of sites and search all of them every time I buy something, so I think of it like a convenience fee if the way an ebay package is wrapped implies the seller arbitraged it from elsewhere.

I don’t know how much has changed since I was doing it, but the main trick was to get the tasks associated with academic studies that were typically higher paid, by using a sniping bot to grab it before others could. So that way you get paid around minimum wage instead of a small fraction of that (if you also cheat by doing multiple tasks simultaneously and hiding it). Though tbh the situation is probably worse now since there have been all those funding cuts to academia.

Bloat is a valid concern but imo a lesser one compared to the potential for centralized data harvesting.

That’s what you’d think is being implied, but it’s a lawyer so who knows if this is the case

I looked up some stuff about Argentina’s financial crisis since you mentioned it before, and it looks like they actually did something a bit like what I’m talking about, directly appropriating the valuable assets they could in an effort to keep being able to function:

In addition to the corralito, the Ministry of Economy dictated the pesificación; all bank accounts denominated in dollars would be converted to pesos at an official rate. Deposits would be converted at 1.40 ARS per dollar and debt was converted on 1 to 1 basis.[69]

There’s some indication that this also applied to financial products:

As noted above, a number of U.S. investors have filed ICSID arbitration claims against the government of Argentina. Most of these investors consider the January 2002 pesification of dollar-denominated contracts, and/or the ex post facto prohibition on contracts linked to foreign inflation indices, to be an effective expropriation of their investments

I can’t specifically confirm this included gold held on paper, but I think it probably would have.

As for the plausibility of this sort of thing happening in the US, in addition to the actions of Roosevelt mentioned by @diablexical@sh.itjust.works, the main trigger for Nixon abandoning the gold convertibility of US dollars was France attempting to physically withdraw the gold they had stored in US banks, which they didn’t want to allow.

I think what they’re saying is that in a hyperinflation scenario, it is an option for the government to seize the physical gold backing the financial products people hold in order to continue paying to run the government now that fiat is worthless and they are having trouble with that.

Gold you have buried in your basement, they will have to work a little harder to get.

Same, traveling around the holidays is awful

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Not a lot of ambiguity there, if you consider words to mean what they mean.

There’s at least some difference between “have been” and “this is currently likely to happen”, since if it’s known then it would have been fixed. I’ve gotten viruses before from just visiting websites but it was decades ago and there’s no way the same method would work now.

Nice to see someone actually trying it themselves to do their own analysis despite having reservations

Ramble about something for long enough that people should be able to tell is how I do it.

A bundler, a transpiler, a runtime (designed to be a drop-in replacement for Node.js), test runner, and a package manager - all in one.

Bun’s single-file executables turned out to be perfect for distributing CLI tools. You can compile any JavaScript project into a self-contained binary—runs anywhere, even if the user doesn’t have Bun or Node installed. Works with native addons. Fast startup. Easy to distribute.

That kind of painting seems more likely to come alive