The exchange rate is basically frozen as the Russian central bank won’t allow it to be freely traded on the open market.

I don’t even know what the US gets in return for supporting Israel. There’s not even any oil to be had.

They get accused of war crimes every single day but nobody ever does anything about it

75 million people decided they wanted this, a bit less than that decided they didn’t, and the remainder decided they did not care enough about their country to give their opinion either way

Taking wagers on how long it will last before Trump’s FTC revokes it

(Bets are only accepted in the form of biscuits 🍪)

An xkcd becomes a classic when people use it a lot.

In most cases, destroying evidence will result in an adverse inference being drawn against the accused. It means that the court will assume that the evidence was incriminating which is why you destroyed it.

I don’t think anyone has been able to recreate his experiment. He’s accused of manipulating it to fit his narrative. He denies these accusations, of course.

Did he do anything besides the Stanford Prison Experiment that I just don’t know of? Because if that’s all, I’d be more inclined to say that he’s just stubbornly wrong rather than evil. But maybe you know something I don’t

I remember some popular YouTuber ran an experiment trying to re-create the conclusions that Zimbardo had come to. The results contradicted his conclusions and they confronted him. He continued to defend his experiment. He seemed like a rather stubborn man.

The police can engage in rubber-hose cryptanalysis. In many countries, it’s legal to keep a suspect in prison indefinitely until they comply with a warrant requiring them to divulge encryption keys. And that’s not to mention the countries where they’ll do more than keep you in a decently-clean cell with three meals a day to, ahem, encourage you to divulge the password.

Law enforcement shouldn’t be able to get into someone’s mobile phone without a warrant anyway. All this change does is frustrate attempts by police to evade going through the proper legal procedures and abridging the rights of the accused.

The UK is a small country that doesn’t have nearly the geopolitical sway that the US does. If the UK withdraws to itself, that sucks for Britons but the rest of the world will carry on. If the US withdraws to itself, it will suck for the rest of the world but the Americans will carry on.

I want to be clear here that this is dangerous messaging. While any individual vote likely has little effect on the outcome of an election, it’s people’s collective vote that does ultimately decide the outcome. And when the electorate is disengaged, disinterested, and apathetic, that is the environment in which fascism and authoritarianism thrives. Voting is not and should not be the end of a citizen’s political participation, but it is still vitally important. Voting should only be the foundation of citizen political participation. It’s also important to campaign, to discuss important political issues with others, and to protest and take direct action against the injustice of the political class. But if you don’t vote and spread the idea that voting is meaningless, your efforts will change nothing.

This line in particular comes a lot of young people, and it is an absolutely understandable and reasonable conclusion for them to come from seeing as they are the most politically neglected group, and politicians almost never pay more than lip service to the concerns of the young. Youth turnout in elections is historically rubbish, so why would any rational politician pay heed to the demands of a voting bloc that won’t influence the outcome of an election? Politicians who pander to youth voters will lose to politicians who pander to old voters simply because youth voters will stay home while old voters will show up at the polls and vote their guy into office.

It costs almost nothing to vote and to encourage others to vote as well. So do it. It is irresponsible to spread the idea that voting is meaningless without also attaching the context that if you don’t vote, you have no power at all.

This is a proceeding in federal court, but the president’s pardon power doesn’t extend to civil cases anyway. Or at least until the Supreme Court rules that it does.

I have to agree with you there. I think the Democratic Party was scared of inviting infighting with a primary contest which Harris would probably win anyway, but you’re right—Harris had no mandate from the party membership and even a lightning-round primary conducted online would have been better.

I think I phrased my comment wrong on this. It doesn’t ban the act of gerrymandering, it bans the results of gerrymandering. Gerrymandered maps would need to be redrawn had the bill been enacted.

This bill was no slouch. It directly abridged several states’ voter suppression laws. Had the bill passed, the next phase would have been people being able to use the federal courts to strike back against these incompatible laws.

That being said, if you were the leader of the Democratic Party, what would you have done? Not intended as rhetorical snark, I’m just curious as to what other ideas there are.

The first bill filed in the House of Representatives and Senate after the 2020 election which resulted in the Democratic Party gaining nominal control of Congress and the White House was a bill to ban partisan gerrymandering, require independent redistricting committees, forbid states from imposing onerous voter registration or identification regulations, limit the influence of rich donors and wealthy PACs in federal elections, and generally just make the process of voting better for Americans.

This bill was called the Freedom to Vote Bill and was numbered H.R. 1 and S. 1 for the House and Senate versions, respectively. It passed the House of Representatives in 3 March 2021 and received unanimous support among the 50 Democratic senators when the Senate held its vote on 22 June 2021. The bill was blocked from advancing due to a Republican filibuster.

On 3 January 2022, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York announced plans to abolish the filibuster for legislation in order to allow this bill to advance. President Joe Biden had previously indicated he would sign the bill. Schumer made his move on 19 January 2022, moving to change the filibuster rule to require continuous talking, i.e. in order to filibuster a bill, someone must make a speech and keep talking for the duration of the filibuster, with the filibuster ending when they finish talking. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, members of the Democratic Party representing Arizona and West Virginia, respectively, got squeamish and voted against the change. All Republican senators voted against the change. This doomed the bill’s passage through Congress as the filibuster could be maintained indefinitely by the Republicans.

The bill died when Congress was dissolved pending the November 2022 general election, in which Republicans won a narrow majority in the House of Representatives.

Manchin and Sinema’s terms with both expire when the new Congress is convened on 3 January 2025 following the November 2024 general election. Manchin did not seek re-election in yesterday’s election and will retire at the expiration of his term. Sinema was forced out of the Democratic Party and originally planned to stand as an independent before deciding against it. She will retire at the end of her term.

Due to the innate malapportionment of the Senate, it is exceedingly unlikely that the Democratic Party will ever regain majority control of the Senate.

So I point my finger at these two idiots for sinking American democracy as we know it.

Did any distro give concrete reasons for why they have actively chosen not to package it, or perhaps they just haven’t given it much thought yet?

This is not what I would consider a “political reason”. A political reason would be something like refusing to package it because of what political party Howard supports.

There is plenty of software you’ll find in these repositories that aren’t under the GPL. CMake uses BSD, the Apache web server uses the eponymous Apache license, LibreOffice and Firefox use MPL, Godot and Bitcoin Core use the MIT license, and I’m sure there are plenty of other software licenses that I haven’t thought of yet.