Obviously there are regional differences, e.g. US vs Canada vs EU. I think the tendencies are the same but the degree is different at any point in time.

I will point out that in Canada, there’s not much money in politics. We don’t have a Citizens United equivalent. Pretty sure European countries are more like us, although each one has a distinct system.

It’s an essay format, not a deductive argument so the thesis is stated, then it’s given support. Not saying you should be convinced, just explaining why it seems like this.

Alright, I guess I’ve delivered as much rebuttal as is appropriate, then.

It’s also a light year away from an exhaustive analysis. I can’t do that here and now. It takes books to do this.

You know, too much length on each analysis itself actually reduces strength, in my experience. If one’s idea is that complicated, they need to put it in a modular, structured form (so not prose), or are guaranteed to have made logical errors somewhere inside.

Post the next paragraph too.

Moreover, the algorithm had been shown to be insecure in 2007 by Microsoft cryptographers Niels Ferguson and Dan Shumow, added Mr Clayton.

“Because the vulnerability was found some time ago, I’m not sure if anybody is using it,” he said.

But your comment implied that because it is open source it automatically means that it is safe and trustworthy and that isn’t true.

Well, your comment implied that OP shouldn’t trust Tor. OP should trust Tor at least as much as they trust their own device, which almost certainly has closed-source components I’d rather target if I was the NSA. (Or the Chinese, or…)

Since this user wanted an in depth conversation on the topic I don’t feel like its “ritualistic purity” to disclose all that I said above.

Except in-depth isn’t what was offered. This reply appears all the time in regards to Tor, and it never comes with alternative suggestions. So yeah, I suspect something irrational is motivating it.

Democracy was pushed by the bourgeoisie.

Sure, because it weakened the aristocracy over top of them, not because it was a better way to keep the proles down. Marx, who you probably respect, held that, and it has strong support from modern scholarship as well.

A king may care about his subjects, the rich barely care about the poor.

So, again, that’s not real history. Now most people of a given high class start in a slightly lower class and get lucky, while monarchs are raised in a system of open extreme violence and either knew they were an almighty heir from the start, or were willing to kill and betray friends and family to usurp power. A look through history books will confirm they tend to be more brutal than guys like Paul Fireman (who’s boring enough you’ve never heard of him) or Amancio Ortega (who you also probably haven’t despite being number 9), on average.

I doubt it was driven by competition, since the USSR was never close to lifestyle parity, and the US was never at any real risk of pro-communist unrest. You can’t really make the policies of the period (good or bad) have nothing to do with American voters.

But most people who looked at the NSA’s backdoored encryption noticed it was sus and didn’t use it (as I remember it, that was a decade ago). Per your link, at the time of publishing it was unclear if anyone was using the effected version.

Okay, sure. Open source doesn’t mean completely safe, but if it’s a well-known package it does mean much, much safer. Public public affiliations don’t even say much about who authored whatever thing; here’s a another near-miss that illustrates that - which is why this can feel more like ritual purity than an actual security argument.

So what should OP use?

Like, every service by law being available in both seems like overkill. It’s good to have services available in other languages than English, so there’s no reason to shut it down proactively, but native languages, Mandarin and Punjabi seem like equally major priorities without Quebec.

I suppose French on every label would also be overdoing it, by that logic, although without that it would feel less like home.

Wait, it does?

See, that just seems like “it’s ideology, but also billionaires are there”. European businesses don’t want tariffs, but there’s still European tariffs. The simplest explanation would just be that it wasn’t their call.

It feels like you’re starting with your conclusion and then building a story about it to end at whichever facts are appropriate for the instance. It’d be more convincing if you could put it in a form agnostic of where and when it’s being applied. Like, when do billionaires want tariffs, and when don’t they? Then, does it actually predict policy decision?

Yeah, there’s estimates going both ways for conditions of ordinary people in the European Medieval period. There’s probably more than one truth - it was non-uniform and lasted a millennium. It was also a pretty poor region after the collapse of Rome, so even the rich could only be so rich. Stone age hunter-gatherers would have a pretty much perfect Gini for the same reason.

For richer premodern regions like the India and China estimates are much higher (here’s a really recent analysis on some of them). Ditto for societies before the Medieval period, although usually they just go off of house sizes for that and the results can be so high they seem impossible. It’s also worth mentioning Gini has some problems for this kind of thing - the paper I link emphasises other metrics more as a result.

Looking at modern dictatorships, Russia is said to have most of the world’s billionaires, and their official 2021 value is up at 0.880. Unofficially it’s probably worse. Other dictatorships report lower values, but anyone connected to the third world knows they’re bullshit and the elites own absolutely everything. The US is also an outlier; Canada is 0.726, Iceland is down at 0.649.

There was only more inequality after the renaissance. Much of that time was democratic.

No? The first modern thing that people will even claim as democracy is the US at the the end of the 18th century, and it was very rich, male and whites-only. Before that you had the age of absolutism, and before that you had various republics like Florence or classical Athens, but imagine voting bodies at least as exclusive as the early US and pretty unstable, with periods of effective dictatorship. Ordinary male citizens gradually got rights over the 19th century, and the first unrestricted, universal suffrage appeared in New Zealand in 1893.

TBF inequality kept increasing in the democratic US, but then it went down in the postwar era, which is unprecedented in history. Being equal before the law doesn’t mean equal in practice, but it’s just kind of common sense that it would be closer.

Hmm, no, you’re right. XFCE had it’s first release in 1997 vs. 1999 for GNOME. I guess I just didn’t hear about it until GNOME started having controversy.

neither was resource hogging sugar coated unconfigurable GNOME as we know today.

Yeah, that might be the real thing. Tails had it’s first release in 2009, and it’s possible they just haven’t moved over yet.

I’d guess the reason they didn’t go the Castle Bravo route is probably just that it’s hard to work deep in the arctic, where you as the USSR can test with minimal (but not zero, RIP Severny) impact. There was also the official justification that the extremely clean burn was the point of the test, which would be defeated by contact with and activation of the ground. It seems SHRIMP from Castle Bravo weighed 10 tonnes, so picture adding a nose and tailfins and maybe some electronics to it and you’d still have a more practical weapon.

Here’s the aerodynamic casing for the Tsar Bomba (empty, which is how it can sit on that dolly):

Well, yes, if it loses a ton of water it will get cold and freeze. OP suggested water loss would be fairly manageable, though. I guess the question is just how much it would lose, exactly.

I guess it’s also worth noting we’re assuming deep space here. OP didn’t specify, if you’re right next to a star you have the opposite problem.

For one thing, inequality is still way lower than it was before democracy.

Wouldn’t the US working in ever deeper cooperation with both China and the EU be better for business? Billionaires move pretty easily between all three anyway.

By all appearances they’ve never fully committed with China because of the ideological gap, and are cutting out the EU now do to new, emerging ideological differences.

Taking in Africans is political poison right now in Europe, and outsourcing local industries has never been super popular even if it makes sense.

I’m sure it will happen, Africa will develop and start taking on lots of low-end manufacturing and similar, and Europe will probably be a very good customer. But, in terms of a strategic alliance for the EU, most African nations are not a contender. South Africa maybe.

It’s a nitpick, but boiling causes cooling. If you dump water into space you actually do get a mix of ice and steam/vapour.

Otherwise, yes. If we assume most of the water is still inside the plant it will take some time to cool.

TIL it’s called the “systems reply”. Looks like there’s a few named replies I never came across.

Ah, okay.

IIRC only for a tiny, non-selective subset of users unlucky enough to pick your two bad nodes. Otherwise Tor would basically be dead.

Was XFCE a thing when the project started?

If you don’t trust your own hardware or are worried about a session being compromised it also offers some protection - especially if you have a physical read-only switch on your media.

Tor isn’t on postquantum encryption yet, which is less than great.

Besides that, about as good as it gets, and at the cost of being less usable.