On a second reading, this is a really good point for bitcoin that I hadn't seen before.
The State can always use its self-proclaimed "monopoly on use of force" to expropriate resources regardless of the currency used. But that gets really obvious really fast if they don't control the currency and can't print.
Next problem - how do we stop warmonger leaders from borrowing/issuing bonds with maturities that exceed their term of office? I'd like to have all such declared "odious debt", but I feel there might be just a little push back from institutionnal investors...
^ True
I find putting an open source ROM on an older phone makes them run much faster. Especially Samsung's! Even a Galaxy S5 can have up-to-date #Android using https://lineageos.org/
And Amethyst flies on this old Pixel 5 I'm typing on. Flies straight into a segfault sometimes, but that's what "app under active development" actually means :-p
Just adding a few #tags so other people find your post and suggest things
#raspberrypi #rpi #linux #diy #electronics
Bro! Lightning node FTW!
https://brettmorrison.com/running-a-bitcoin-lightning-full-node-on-raspberry-pi
The Pi4 can also make a decent FOSS Chromebook-equivalent
I like it, and I like the way you defend it.
Unfortunately, the USA and its Bill of Rights are way out of step among Western countries. Australia doesn't have any. UK, same. French citizens do, under their Constitution, unless the State says #reasons, then they don't.
Outside the USA, the most important Western principle is that the powerful must not be offended.
The moment you feel the need to add qualifiers like "wanton" to your absolutes, you have started practising moral relativism.
Already a thing.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/pentagon-heartbeat-identification/
Just not as accurate as they'll claim in court.
I'm just a little suspicious of this story.
Compromising two parties endpoints sounds much more likely than hacking a public and long-lived protocol.
Or its an inside job by someone without access to the hot wallet.
You could be right. He certainly has the right (wrong) connections for that...
Oh please! I see this everywhere and I don't believe it.
Norway and Sweden had their "demographic Armageddons" in the early 1800s.
Governments took notice and decided to suck less.
Population rebounded as workers could afford children without emigrating to the USA first.
David Ricardo wrote a good economic analysis of the effect of economic conditions on willingness to marry even earlier.
Now the CCP has a lot of practice in being terrible, but a declining population and economy is just the thing to inspire reexamination
Generally, one does not bomb children's hospitals to improve life expectancy and standard of living.
Generally, terrorists are very afraid of cameras and precision weapons, so armed terrorists don't hide anywhere with lots of eyes and cameras.
(Hamas may or may not have tunneled deep underneath said hospitals; plausible but unproven).
Bombing said childrens' hospitals with anything not a deep-penetration bunker-buster is certain to create many new terrorists, and kill very few existing ones.
But Netanyahu's values and incentives are very different to ours. I don't see any cost to him of destroying an identifiable population in whole or in part. Well, he'd need a new enemy population, but his current trajectory is radicalising quite a few.
The West Bank is geographically fragmented, and run by collaborators.
You can see the exact same pattern in European Jewish resistance during the Shoah. Where rabbis and other community leaders escaped or fought, resistance and evasion happened. Where they went passively to Belsen-Belsen, genocide was swift and complete.
^ So much this.
The problem is, when both sides are talking genocide and one side is observably doing it, the populations are willing to "send in the Triari", as the Romans put it.
A cordon sanitaire and a funding cut for both sides is the only way this conflict can end decently. And I don't see that happening to Israel, barring a Brexit-level unanticipated collapse of the dominant political paradigms in the West.
Fathers are the most dangerous militant recruiting pool - look at Armenia's army in 1992-1994.
They're just much, much harder to recruit - unless they feel their children have no future otherwise.
Elites, always and everywhere, are self-serving backstabbing parasites. If an alternative policy has a hope of working, an elite faction can be tempted to try it.
Israel and Palestine would have a very different dynamic if (terrorist, supremacist - but moderate) Yitzhak Rabin had not been assassinated by a member of a political movement the young Netanyahu was frequently photographed with.
This is sadly true in many conflict zones today, some inside Western countries.
But only profitable for elites, and only so long as externally sponsored.
Absolutely.
And where does Israeli's foreign aid come from? Its the same dynamic.
Both populations are being held hostage by their extremists, who are no longer (domestically) extreme under present circumstances.
Nazi Germany's genocidal behaviour was an unaffordable drain on its economy, and only politically possible under circumstances of total war.
Israel (and Palestine to a small % of the extent) are able to do this because they are externally sponsored.
Most people, always and everywhere, are soft cocks, as long as they are not denied the opportunity to keep lying to themselves. The longer the history of bad government, the higher the rates of excuses and compliance (Egypt, India, China).
Would most Palestinians support a regime that wasn't loudly, outspokenly genocidal and allowed them to worry about normal problems instead?
The (colonialist, but parliamentary and democratic) Mandate of Palestine suggests the answer is in strongly in the affirmative.