NateNate60 @ NateNate60 @lemmy.world

Posts

19

Comments

1,115

Joined

2 yr. ago

Machiavelli wrote about this. People don't need to love you for your power to be secure, and in fact, it's far preferable to be respected because people fear you than to be respected because people love you.

I've heard it said before that most of China's geopolitical strategies can be explained with two statements:

1. War is bad for business.
2. China is big on business.

So it seems everyone's rushing to bribe the new president

Technically, most smartphones in the world already run Linux because Android uses the Linux kernel

(I know that's not really what you mean, I'm just being cheeky here)

It took the NYPD's top detectives five whole days to arrest a suspect, and if he hadn't been stupid enough to keep the gun then he'd probably have even gotten away with it.

There's probably a good chance he'll still get away with it via jury nullification, and I'm kinda hoping that happens.

Literally my first thought

The social security number can really be retired altogether. There already exists a form of national identity card in the US, and it's called the passport card. It contains all the information found on a passport except the visa pages, contained in the form of a smart card. It already has RFID capabilities. The only thing is that passport cards are not universal, but they can be if they are made free and the Government phases out social security numbers for passport card numbers in all contexts.

I point my finger at Joe Manchin and Kristen Synema for sinking the DC Admission Act back in 2021. We were this close to a 51st state! The bill had already passed the House of Representatives and had the support of every other Democrat. Biden said he'd sign it.

Pardonu, me estis komencanto. Dankon pro la korekto

Mi komencis lerni Esperanto naŭ tagoj antaŭ. Mia gramatiko estas ankoraŭ malbona kaj mi vortprovizo estas malgranda, sed ĝi estas tre facile lernebla.

That was a typographical error. I fixed it

Lot of derision but not much explanation as to how this strange system came to be.

Many state constitutions in the US were written in the 18th and 19th centuries. The key differences relevant here to this discussion were that during these times, suffrage was far more restricted, and communities were far more sparsely populated and isolated.

Prior to the 20th century, suffrage was not universal and generally was restricted to wealthy white men of status, who, as a consequence of their socioeconomic standing, also tended to be more educated and thus better suited to rationally judge the qualifications of office-seekers. A consequence of universal suffrage is that the education level of the average voter goes down.

Most Europeans severely underestimate how few people lived in these states and across how much land they occupied. The US typically granted statehood to its territories when they reached the mid to high five digits in population. The majority of Western states are the same size as the largest European countries. Let me use California as an illustrative example. Its statehood was granted in 1850 and it had a population of 92,597. So just imagine essentially a group of people fewer in number than a single small European city trying to run a piece of territory the size of Germany (California is actually bigger than Germany by 69,000 km²).

What happens in such a scenario is that communities become very isolated and insular. They get used to running their own affairs since basically any model of centralised government is going to fail when your population density is 0.2 people per km².

Understand that aside from tightly-knit indigenous communities (who were branded as "savages" and categorically excluded from participation in so-called "civilised" society) this was literally unsettled land. Empty plains, dry desert, and wild forest for hundreds of kilometres around where there was no law but those of physics.

In these isolated communities, you still need to fill the required leadership roles, but you run into the issue where nobody is particularly qualified to these offices and further still, the townsfolk don't really want to just elect a single person to fill all the other offices by appointments. Rather the best way to fill these offices is by election where the community can get together and decide collectively who is best qualified for office. So how it would go is that everyone entitled to suffrage would, every other year, ride their horses into the county seat, which could take hours, and then listen to the candidates' campaign pitches, vote for whomever they thought was the most qualified for sheriff and county judge, and then go home and never hear from those people again for months on end.

As a result, when these territories were granted statehood, most delegates to the conventions that wrote the state constitutions saw no reason to deviate from these established methods for picking local office-holders.

Edit: I realise this also doesn't explain why these constitutions haven't been amended to allow for appointed judges in the modern US. The reason is because politics in the US is extremely cutthroat and anyone who proposes such an amendment is taking a rather unnecessary risk with their political career because their political opponents can then attack them for taking away power from the voters in favour of "unelected bureaucrats".

Esperanto, however is explicitly prescriptive. This is because early speakers believed that allowing it to evolve naturally would hinder its ability to be used as an international and universal method of communication, since past writings could end up unintelligible to future readers. For that reason, Esperanto grammar and most of its vocabulary is set in stone. The Declaration of Boulogne states that the definitive reference work for Esperanto is the Fundamento de Esperanto written by L. L. Zamenhof.

Step 1: Go to station ticket office

Step 2: Tell ticket agent where you want to go

Step 3: Give cash to ticket agent

Step 4: Receive ticket

I can't comment on the practices of Italian transit agencies, but in the US, when you buy a train or bus ticket, the email just contains a QR code which you give to the train conductor or bus driver to scan. It also typically includes your name as well (tickets are not transferrable to prevent resale) but I don't see a reason that you couldn't design a system with simple bearer tickets.

So this system could just take your payment (which is not anonymous anyway since a name is required to process card payments) and then show you a QR code and tell you to take a screenshot of it.

Digital signatures are enough to transact millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. It's not that they are "not ready", it's that there isn't enough surrounding infrastructure for it. If everyone was issued a digital signature key embedded into the smart chips of their ID cards and every phone and computer came with the hardware and software needed to read and sign things, paper signatures would be the ones regarded with suspicion for not being digital and not the other way around.

The technology to embed digital signatures into smart chips on cards is already used on payment cards. We're just not making full use of the technology available to us.

The ideal set-up would be that everyone's ID card comes with a smart chip containing a private key issued by the Government. Everyone has a phone app that can sign and request signatures for messages. The public keys associated with any given identity can be freely accessed on some public database.

To sign a message, the card can be tapped against an NFC reader or inserted into a chip reader. This will cause the hardware inside the card to sign the message and return a signature to the requesting device. The requesting device must send the signature to a Government server in order to timestamp the signature and verify that the person who signed is the person they claim to be. The message itself does not need to be sent, just the signature and the hash of the message.

When your card is used to sign a message, you'll get a notification through the app on your phone. Allow for some short timeframe (perhaps 24 hours) when the signer can cancel their signature without excuse, so that unauthorised signatures can be quickly caught and cancelled and the damage limited. If your card is lost or stolen, reporting it as such will revoke the corresponding key on the database and any messages purportedly signed after the revocation date will be invalid.

This set-up would also allow for 2FA to be implemented easily by using a simple PIN scheme where users configure a PIN in advance and this PIN must also be reported to the server in order for the signature to be regarded as valid.

The fastest way to get one minute on a microwave is to press the "add 30 seconds" button twice

Cannot say why decimal time didn't stick, but a similarly-proposed semi-decimal calendar with 12 months of 3 weeks each of 10 days was abandoned in France solely because Napoleon didn't like it.

It was also designed to frustrate Sunday church attendance because Sundays being every seven days would usually fall on a weekday on a workweek based on a ten-day week. While Revolutionary France experimented with state atheism and then deism, it eventually returned to Catholicism.

France spread its decimal measurements (the metre, gram, and litre) to the countries that Napoleon conquered or tried to conquer, but by that time, France was well beyond the "stamp out all semblance of religion" phase of its revolution, so a calendar designed with the intent to stifle religious attendance in mind was never going to stick very long once the French had left those territories. Besides, doing maths on length, volume, and mass is something that people do far more often than performing those calculations on dates. Sure, it would have made some things more convenient, but I'm guessing that for most people, the ten-day weeks just stuck out like a sore thumb.

Well, the Popeis the absolute sovereign dictator of Church dogma, so if he says tomorrow that Luigi is a saint, then all 1 billion Catholics worldwide must listen

I think he will see that very few people give a shit what the mountain is officially called. People who want to call it "Mount McKinley" will continue to call it "Mount McKinley" and people who want to call it "Denali" will continue to call it "Denali".