Riemann sphere has entered the chat

This is a serious suggestion, however blasphemous it may seem: Change your registration to Republican and then vote in the Republican primary for the most respectable person who is running. Changing your registration doesn’t cost anything and doesn’t affect anything. The Republican Party will also send you election material by post which you can simply discard or send back empty donation envelopes to waste their money on postage.

I’m not going to lie and say that this is someone who I would enthusiastically vote for, but based on her campaign website I think that’s still a decent candidate. Personally, I’m ideologically a social democrat and that candidate’s campaign statements smell a bit too liberal for me to get excited over it, but she seems passable. If that’s the best out of this year’s batch, then vote for them and start agitating for people who you think would do a better job to run in 2028.

This is to combat money laundering and tax fraud. I’ll give three examples.

I saw an episode of Border Security Australia where a woman has previously claimed a VAT refund on a pair of earrings worth tens of thousands of dollars. As you may know, many countries allow you to claim a refund of VAT on products intended for export, as VAT is intended to be a tax on consumption. But customs agents caught her wearing the earrings, meaning she had not actually exported them and essentially cheated the tax authority out of thousands of dollars in VAT.

Last year, during a trip to Hong Kong, my mother withdrew 20,000 USD in cash from her American bank and took it with her in person, and then deposited it in her Hong Kong bank account. It was just easier to do it this way since an international wire transfer would have been expensive and slow. She declared it to both US customs and Hong Kong customs, and in both cases they just checked her passport, noted down the transaction, and let her through with minimal questions. It’s intended to be an anti-money-laundering check. If that money has been obtained through crimes, most criminals would not willingly disclose that to customs, and it’s such a large amount of cash that anyone doing so must be trying to move money internationally and not just pay for a holiday. There is literally no penalty or tax and minimal hassle to declare it, so pretty much whoever is trying to sneak large amounts of cash or gold or whatever through customs is either (1) very ignorant or (2) up to no good. Further questioning usually allows customs agents to separate the first category from the second.

On the topic of China, there are strict capital controls in place to prevent wealthier Mainland Chinese individuals from moving all their money abroad. This policy is to encourage domestic spending and investment and it also has the effect of drastically lowering borrowing costs for the Chinese government. Moving large amounts of cash or gold in person is the most obvious way to evade these limits so Chinese customs has to take a strict stance against such behaviour in order to prevent China’s airports from becoming a massive hole in their capital controls. Being caught with undeclared cash provides an easy excuse for customs to confiscate the money in question, where the passenger can’t really argue over their guilt, since, again, anyone carrying such a large amount of cash pretty much has to know what they’re doing.

As leftists in America, we all must realise: This is our party, and we need to fight to win it back.

Your vote in primary election can often be more influential than your vote in the general election. And any campaigning activity you do in the party’s primary will be twice as impactful as activities during the general.

So, if you want change, there are two ways to go about it. You can either play along with the rules of the system and try to win control of it that way, or you can try to overthrow the system entirely.

But before you indicate your preference, let me first ask, though you need not answer: There are many people who say they’ll be a part of the revolution that overthrows the system. But are you actually working on this, or are you just waiting for it to happen? Are you working with the next Vladimir Lenin or Sun Yat-Sen right now, or are you just fantasizing about it?

Everyone wants change. What are you doing to create the future you want?

Conviction in an impeachment trial needs 67 votes. They currently hold 45 seats. In order to get to 67, they’d need a clean sweep of all Senate races.

If a Democrat had posted this, he would be losing his shit about far-left propaganda trying to ruin his reputation with blasphemous imagery.

Pope Leo is weak on crime

Technically, Vatican City has the highest crime rate in the world, fluctuating between 1 and 1.5 crimes per capita. But this is mostly pickpocketing committed by foreigners against other foreigners. Vaticans themselves mostly commit financial crimes and religious crimes. Obviously the solution here is to build a big, beautiful wall along the border and make Italy pay for it, to keep out all those foreign criminals.

Linux Mint is a good choice but it doesn’t come with a GNOME flavour by default. You can install it yourself if you want, though.

I moved to Fedora after leaving Ubuntu. Worked fine for me, but you’ll have to re-train your muscle memory for some terminal commands. sudo apt install becomes sudo dnf install and rpm is a little different from dpkg. Other than that, with the Dash to Dock extension, Fedora feels exactly the same as Ubuntu to me.

He was too young to vote in 2016. He voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024. I asked him a week or so ago whether he plans to vote Republican in the upcoming election. He says he plans to throw his ballot into the bin.

Since there’s not really that many Christians on Lemmy, I took the liberty of showing my former college roommate that image. He is a devout Catholic and also a two-time Trump voter, though I will note he has since soured on Trump since his re-election (for these and other reasons). His reaction was that the image was insulting to the Catholic religion and blasphemous.

Last year, I had also asked his opinion on Trump posting an AI-generated image of himself as pope when Pope Francis died, and he said that post was “not cool”. He said that to imply one could simply become pope without first rising through the ranks of the Catholic Church, especially someone as unpious as Trump, was disrespectful to those who dedicate their careers to the clerical service, and he found the image offensive.

This is not “one country, two systems”. This is “one nation, two countries”. It’s not an irrelevant distinction.

The words are phrased extremely carefully to avoid subjugating Taiwan to Beijing. Perhaps it makes more sense to those who know Chinese. The entire situation is basically a word game at this point. Nobody really seems to want to disturb the status quo, but words have to be said.

Honestly, I don’t know what China has to gain from taking Taiwan by force versus what they can gain much more cheaply by just befriending and trading with it.

They could arrange an on-paper reunification. The key is to choose your words carefully to avoid upsetting anyone and give as much lip service as possible to Beijing while giving many of the “real” benefits to Taipei.

• The Republic of China is dissolved. The government in Taipei will continue and is renamed to just “Taiwan”. All legal documents will be issued under the name “Taiwan”. Former officials of the Republic of China continue in office as officials of Taiwan. The leader of the Taiwanese people is the president of Taiwan (台湾总统) and the administrative organs that govern their portion of Greater China (大中华) is the Government of Taiwan (台湾政府). Other than that, the status quo is acceptable and shall continue indefinitely.
• Taiwan acknowledges it is a part of Greater China (大中华) and that Taiwanese people are members of the Chinese nation (中华民族). Note that the Chinese terms used here refer to the cultural idea of “China” and not the country.
• In international affairs, all instances of “Chinese Taipei” (中华台北) are replaced with “Chinese Taiwan” (中华台湾). Note the use of the cultural “Chinese” rather than “Chinese” referring to that which relates the People’s Republic of China. All mainland publications will adopt the Xinhua News Agency’s style guide recommendation of referring to Taiwan as merely “Taiwan” rather than “Taiwan Province” (台湾省).
• The People’s Republic of China recognises that Taiwanese people have a right to self-government and disclaims all rights of government (政权) to the people of Taiwan. Taiwan does the same to the mainland. Sovereignty (主权) is held collectively by the Chinese cultural nation (中华民族) as a whole and cannot be exercised unilaterally, but the respective governments have the right to defend the Chinese nation’s sovereignty on their respective territories against external threats.
• Taiwan’s right to build up its military for the purposes of deterring external threats is recognised. Taiwan and China agree that their respective militaries will not be used against each other. Each military defends its own side of the strait and neither is obligated to help the other in any conflict whatsoever.
• The Taiwanese people will decide when they would like the adopt the socialist system. There is no deadline for this to occur. The mainland respects the right of the Taiwanese people to choose and will not force the matter nor will it interfere in the internal politics of Taiwan.
• Taiwan agrees to publicly support Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea, agrees that such region belongs to the Chinese nation, and disclaims all interests whatsoever beyond 22 km from its coast (note: equivalent distance to a country’s territorial waters). The portion of the exclusive economic zone of China east of the island Taiwan and west into the centre of the Taiwan Strait is reserved for the sole use and benefit of the Taiwanese people. Anything more than 22 km south of Cape Eluanbi is disclaimed by Taiwan and for the exclusive use and benefit of the mainland. Taiwan is not obligated to use its naval forces to enforce any claims laid to portions of China’s EEZ not reserved for it.
• The People’s Republic of China will respect the Taiwanese government’s ability to interact with foreign nations even if such interacts disagree with the way mainlanders choose to relate with that nation. To that end, the PRC will support Taiwan’s participation in international organisations as a member non-state entity. If such a designation is not allowed by the organisation’s rules then Taiwan will apply as a state but never style itself as such once admitted, always referring to its delegations as representing “Chinese Taiwan” (中华台湾).

Whenever someone posts these ridiculous headlines and doesn’t explain what the actual article is about, I find that around 80% of the time, the opinion presented is actually decently-made or more nuanced than initially assumed, and the title is just phrased that way for clicks.

The Polymarket rules are not laws. “Oops I broke the rules you caught me lol, looks like my crypto wallet’s banned now so I’ll have to make a new one in 5 seconds”

“It’s not gambling and it’s not an unregulated securities market. Think of it as a bribe to encourage political insiders to spill their secrets.”

Ah yeah, that’s a pretty good contender.

In general, we accept that the Government already knows who you are, how old you are, and where you live. That’s already a given. The purpose of a zero-knowledge age verification scheme is to allow a third party (not the Government) to be confident that a person is an adult, without being given any additional information or being able to deduce any additional information from what they’re given. So essentially, they get only 1 bit of information: whether the user is an adult (true/false). In practice, a perfect system is not possible, since the fact that you receive a response also means you get the answer to related questions, like whether the user possesses a Government-issued ID (obviously “true” if they can successfully complete the verification).

So, here’s how such a scheme might work. There are many possible implementations.

In the United States, we have (optional) digital ID cards. These are added to one’s digital wallet in a similar manner to payment cards and can be used for things like buying alcohol, getting through airport security, and driving. This digital infrastructure can be re-used.

1. An organisation which wants to perform digital identity verification generates a cryptographic key pair and registers the public key with a Government server ahead of time. The public key is published to a Government-run public keyserver.
2. A website who wants to verify a user’s age sends a verification request to a Government server, digitally signed with their private key. The server responds with a request ID, which is a random, but unique, string of characters.
3. The website provides this string to the user. The user copies the string.
4. The user opens their digital wallet, selects their ID card, and then opens the age verification feature. The user pastes the request ID into their digital wallet, which fetches information about the request from the Government server. Because the request which the request ID is associated with was signed using the organisation’s private key, the Government can tell the user who initiated the request.
5. The user is asked to confirm/deny the age verification request. If the user confirms the request, then a biometric will be required to access their private key (these are stored in the device’s keystore), sign the approval response, and then sent that response to the Government server. The Government server checks that the signature is valid and tied to the key associated with that ID before marking the verification request as completed.
6. After confirming, the user returns to the website and clicks a button which says “I’ve completed the verification.” The website then queries the request ID with the Government server (again, signing the request with their private key). The Government server responds with “completed” if the user has accepted the request, or “not completed” if the user has either not yet accepted the request or denied it.

What did they do?