Well not really @ last part bc the president can declare an emergency for ~any reason and appropriate funds. Yaaay demoncracy
Generally, us presidents fall into the do whatever they want, "move fast and break shit" philosophy. And as the world's arms dealers, the USA has every reason to be involved in every conflict. That's our greatest national industry
Absolutely false, you can store data encrypted on the blockchain, such that it can be read only by a recipient. In this way it functions no differently than sending an encrypted email. But Bitmessage isn't even a cryptocurrency, it just uses the ideas from them
Various schemes to use the cryptography of blockchains to send messages in a decentralized and theoretically secure way. The classic version of this used by early darknets was Bitmessage. There's some more recent takes via Ethereum too
You can collect the data and figure out how to use it later. Just look at the Google leaks lately and what they collect, it's literally everything down to the length of clicks and full walks through the site
Collecting data about user interests is in itself valuable, and it's plausible to use various metrics to analyze it, something as simple as sentiment analysis, which has been broadly done. Sentiment analysis has predated modern ML by a long margin, but you can read the wiki page on that
But yeah just think about stuff like Google trends, tracking interest in topics, as an example of what such data could be used for. And deanonymizing the inputs is probably possible to some degree, aside from the obvious trust we place in DDG as a centralized failure point
These companies absolutely collect the prompt data and user session behavior. Who knows what kinda analytics they can use it for at any time in the future, even if it's just assessing how happy the user was with the answers based on response. But having it detached from your person is good. Unless they can identify you based on metrics like time of day, speech patterns, etc
Super apparent performance on my ancient Chromebook with barely any resources. Beautiful animations that make it look like a modern laptop, well, until ram runs out. It can run about 3x as much stuff compared to stock ChromeOS. Love this with Pipewire, Linux a/v is honestly better than both osx and windows now and I'm so impressed. Can even do pro audio type stuff where you route the a/v from one app to another. It's worth losing all the network ability that X11 has
It's basically just Signal if you want ease of use + good security. Not totally 100% since it is funded almost exclusively by the US govt, and I can't be sure if the encryption is not backdoored, but it's the best bet we got. IRC: not secure, XMPP / Matrix maybe ok but hard to use for most, Telegram wouldn't really trust though in theory has e2e, Whatsapp and Google world stuff even less faith. Honestly none of it is super great, but Signal has the best balance imo. There's also some crypto based messaging stuff that's used on darknets but that's the clunkiest
I think the only fully guaranteed method is having a pre shared one time pad encryption key between two parties & then send the encrypted text however you want (ex post on a far corner of a mostly dead online forum or Reddit). That doesn't have any fancy algos that may be bugged, or private/public key stuff
Old meme, but (1) you don't go to prison for making a mistake on your taxes in America — you have to do a big fraud (2) no, the government doesn't always know how much you owe, they only know stuff like domestic W2s and what banks file. There is a huge amount of ways to make income outside of that
What Bartsbigbugbag meant to say is "the US has been actively inching closer to China for decades and has completed a full military base / trade wall that spans across the entire set of islands - Japan, Taiwan, Philippines - outlining the entire east / south China seas and reducing China's economic/military power"
China has ample reason to be pissed at this. It's actually a very impressive contain if you look at the positions of our military bases and trade routes. But it's also just normal Risk-style territory control that all superpowers play with. Nobody is really the bad guy here, and the island countries like their situation - like Japan, historic enemy of China - gets to enjoy doing nothing while America basically runs their entire military for them
Ok well that's a paywall but I went and read the official guidelines on the website, which is a boring PDF report. My understanding: they talked to other athletes and "stakeholders" and agreed that they will handle it on a case by case / sport by sport basis. Anybody can compete in any gender Olympic sport until clear evidence is presented that shows that they have an unfair advantage. And I do mean anyone, they explain that gender is in the mind, and that a natural man who identifies as a woman can apply for a women's competition
I think that's a good result, better than mine, in the sense that various sports have more of less of a problem, and we don't really have all the data to know what's fair. But I still expect that many sports will disallow it if it becomes problematic. It seems like you'd want to track testosterone, but the q&a explains that it doesn't really work. They also do call out that cisgender men have such a "disproportionate advantage" compared to cisgender women, and so categories are required...
They've managed to tow a really careful balance here, between affirming trans ppl and also being ready to lay down bans in situations that arise
Nah, I'm not with you. Gender also comes with cultural background, and physical characteristics, very much like race. And yes, if you feel deeply aligned with black culture as a white born person, fuckin go for it. Besides, we are all listening to blues and rock n hip hop — all "black music" — so what's the problem? Am I only allowed to listen to Tchaikovsky if I'm Russian? The whole set of mental gymnastics can go fuck itself, all cultures and races influenced each other for all of history. Is anybody mad about Thai people opening cannabis dispensaries and wearing Cookies merch & baseball hats? No, go ahead and "appropriate" whatever you want from me
identify with what you do line up with
Or don't, I don't give a fuck, this doesn't really affect my life. Wanna get surgery to look like a goat with some neat horns? Sweet, good luck
Ok let's do the honest hard questions. Should mtf ppl be allowed to do all female sports? No, probably not, it's generally not fair. Should ftm be allowed to do all male sports? Sure. Should bathrooms just be all gender bathrooms? Yeah, probably fine, maybe add some panic buttons. Should people under 18 be allowed to get a sex change? Only if they parents sign off on it, they are the legal guardians. Maybe it'll feel like a mistake later, maybe not, but the family is in the best position to decide. Are microplasics fucking up hormones in pretty much all living things? EPA says yes, and that's a concern
Cool info, thanks