All you Americans need to start (or join and operate from) a Church organisation so you can be exempt from taxes.

I am more convinced than ever that representative democracy cannot work, ever. All representatives can be captured, even ones I thought couldn't be. We need a new form of government, preferably based on nostr keys.

We all should learn Mandarin. When Jim Rogers moved to Singapore in 2007 so his daughters would grow up able to speak Mandarin, I knew this. I was 37 and thought "I'm too old." Now I'm 54 and I think "I can do this!" View quoted note →

#politics Nothing terribly contentious below... just a clarification. Within the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine groups of people, sometimes I find that they are both wrong. I hear from pro-Israel people that "there is no state of Palestine. There never was." to which I hear from pro-Palestine people that the state of Palestine existed for thousands of years and Israel stole it. There is a region called Palestine that has existed for thousands of years and been called Palestine (Palestina) since at least the Roman times. But the people of that region have either never, or almost never, been under self-administration. Rather, other larger powers controlled them: Currently Israel, before that Britain, before that the Ottoman empire (Turkey), before that the Mamluk Sultanate (of Egypt), and various empires before that (Ayyubit, Fatimid, Abbasid, Roman, etc). And so a case can be made that there never was a sovereign state of Palestine, but rather that Palestine is a region that was always under the control of some other sovereign state. But it is also true that despite who controlled Palestine, the region was locally populated primarily by ethnic native Palestinians without much displacement or dilution, and the local regions (Haifa, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Gaza, Nablus, and Beersheba) were controlled locally by these Palestinians, under the authority of a higher sovereign power. But since 1988 Palestine has declared independence, and right now 147 out of 193 member states of the UN (over 75%) recognize the State of Palestine as the combined region of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, as well as East Jerusalem. It is a NEW thing, recognized for the purpose of resolving the conflict. Israel and the US do not recognize it -- from their perspective Israel is an aparteid state. From the perspective of countries taht do recognize the State of Palestine there is a war between Israel and Palestine. These very different perspectives confuse dialogue about the issue, even though none of these facts is really very contentious.

Secret tariff: enact the tariff, but don't tell the country you are doing it to.

I trend towards de agua. Water is good for you.

For many of you, the Apple iPhone changed the world. For me, the TPS-L2 changed the world.

For a long time I've been disappointed that gossip does not act as a NIP-46 (bunker) client. Just about every other client supports it (

GitHub

nostrability/nostrability

Left curve nostr broken stuff and interoperability tracker + json schema validation - nostrability/nostrability

and without support gossip users can't use bunkers! I tried and tried and tried again and kept hitting esoteric rust bugs around async and closures and type erasure. But as of today, with the newest stable compiler, I've gotten past the sticking point. I still have to do the work of adding the feature, but I believe that I am no longer blocked from progressing on this. 🥂

According to Michael Shellenberger, https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1909755511182180796, time spent on BlueSky is a significant predictor of Left Wing Authoritarianism (which justifies the murder of Trump and Elon Musk, and the destruction of Tesla automobiles)

Remember when writing your code" do not over stress the language's type system or the compiler. Use simpler constructs, and more of them. Give it a break from time to time. Keep your work surface clean. It helps to feed it some syntax sugar to keep it energized. The last thing you want is for your compiler to give up and throw an angry fit.

Every single one of you is running a massive trade defecit with the company that supplies electricity to your house. You buy electricity from them over and over and over, and they have bought NOTHING from you. That trade defecit is just skyrocketing.