I believe it.

I worked with an Englishman who has lived in the Netherlands for more than 20 years without learning Dutch.

We had a work trip to Madrid, and he went the weekend beforehand for a short vacation. I ran into him on Sunday night and asked him how it went. He said it was terrible, because he’s a vegetarian and couldn’t eat anything because nobody spoke English. He didn’t know what to order or how to ask if something was vegetarian. He was outraged that nobody spoke English. In Madrid. The capital of Spain. 🙈

All I do:

• Run updates daily
• Disable password logins
• Run sshguard
• Daily backups to a cloud and off-site host

I think that’s it. I have my host exposed to the Internet. As far as I know, it’s fine.

BTW, sshguard is for the IMAP and SMTP that run on the host, which do allow password logins. But it helps reduce load from brute force attacks on port 22 (which are pointless anyway).

I’m much more worried about my son installing dodgy Minecraft mods, or my wife installing another app that she saw on TikTok. I really should put them each on a separate VLAN…

The 17th Amendement requires the direct election of Senators. Blue state accept red states’ votes for those.

If you’re going to make an argument based on bad faith of states, then the US basically ceases to exist as a republic, regardless of whether you have the compact.

I think maybe you misunderstood the compact.

I’m your example, the states who signed the compact would all put their votes to candidate Y, assuming they had more popular votes in all states.

It’s not “join us or be punished”, it’s “we will implement the will of the majority, not matter what”.

That’s like eliminating private property with extra steps.

I mean, I’m basically okay with that, but none of this “a third of your wealth per year” nonsense.

Supreme Court: “Not like that.”

Nobody gets disenfranchised. Rather this compact enables the radical idea of “one person, one vote”.

https://youtu.be/6pDH66X3ClA right?

It’s not completely pseudo-science, as there are a lot of correlations with things like academic success or job performance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_correlations

Political revolutions usually involve a wealthy class being kept away from political power, combined with a particularly unpopular and stupid absolute ruler.

In the US, the wealthy are the political class, and while Trump is stupid and unpopular he has only been in power a year. Most people think he will be gone in 3 more years, and even if he jettisons the Constitution and stays in as President, he is old and unhealthy.

Just to be clear, you probably don’t want to take it during the flight.

That… seems good, right?

According to that site meat consumption in Europe has dropped by 19% but grown by 10% in the US.

I’m old school, and would set up Fetchmail. It can pull down either POP or IMAP (I haven’t used POP in 25+ years, but I guess it works fine still). Then I’d run Dovecot or some other IMAP server on my host to read mail from there.

I have a friend who is also a foot anti-fetishist. I find being revolted by feet equally inexplicable to being aroused by them, but both are fine I guess.

Increases in productivity go to the owners, not the workers. Even imaginary increases in productivity.

Except war.

In a somewhat related prime number incident, we have the term “baker’s dozen”, meaning 13. This is because bakers were found to be reducing the size of loaves of bread, and the government required that they include 13 when they sold 12 to make up for the discrepancy. So shrinkflation has been going on basically forever…

Any prime number is divisible by itself though? So you can split a box of 3 amongst 3 people. Remember that 2 is also prime, and you can’t split a box of 2 or 4 between 3 people.

Anyway, I think the bigger issue is the 25% reduction from 4 in a box to 3 in a box, and we can be plenty annoyed and/or outraged at that. 😆

I don’t necessarily think that’s a problem. A revolution wouldn’t end up with a new Obama or Clinton. Ideally it would end up destroying capitalism and saving humanity.