No love for the French Republican Calendar months?

1. Pluvose
2. Ventose
3. Germinal
4. Floreal
5. Prarial
6. Messidor
7. Thermidor
8. Fructidor
9. Vendemiaire
10. Brumaire
11. Frimaire
12. Nivose

People who know their Latin roots might know what these months are named after, but here’s a guide:

1. “pluviosus”, meaning “rain”
2. “ventosus”, meaning “windy”
3. “germen”, meaning “germination” (of a plant)
4. “flos”, meaning “flower”; or “floreo”, meaning “blossom” (of a flower)
5. “prairie” (field)
6. “messis”, meaning “harvest”
7. “θερμός”, meaning “hot” in Greek
8. “fructus”, meaning “fruit”
9. “vindemia”, meaning “vintage” (harvesting of grapes)
10. “brume”, meaning “fog” in French
11. “frimas”, meaning “frost” in French
12. “nivosus”, meaning “snowy”

Today (2026-03-23 UTC) would be the 23rd of Germinal, 2026 CE.

Monuary, Dotuary, Trituary, Quadtember, Quintober, Sextember, September, October, November, December, Undecember, Dodecember

I feel like the voting culture of Lemmy is not conductive to good conversation or anything more than blind agreement. It’s certainly helped by the fact that Lemmy’s algorithm is more willing to show newer posts and comments (as opposed to merely popular ones), but people on Lemmy seem to be very willing to downvote content that they don’t agree with, or downvote news that they don’t like (regardless of the informative quality of said news), or just downvote anything that may contradict their pre-existing notions of how stuff works. It’s more hostile than Reddit, and it seems like everyone, especially in the political communities, is wanting to start an argument here, sometimes over the dumbest things. Look in your average Reddit comment thread, and you see pages of jokes, memes, people sharing stories, and just generally having a good time. Look in your average Lemmy comment thread, and you see two people arguing over a dumb political point.

Lemmy’s “shower thoughts” community is also just a “share an opinion” community. It’s not really similar to Reddit’s r/showerthoughts. The subreddit contains more of the sort of random mundane revelations while everyone on Lemmy is trying to either make a statement or be overly philosophical with their posts.

It’s not better or worse, just different.

They should make a “Firefox Core” which contains only the browser with basic features, and then make another version which contains all the “fun” stuff.

The collection of texts today known as the Bible were not written at once. There’s actually a lot of interesting history about how it came to be, but the short of it is that there were a multitude of maybe-canon Christian texts floating around during the early period of Christianity. These texts were written decades or even centuries apart, and often falsely attributed to authors who did not write them. There was also the Septuagint, a Greek text which was a translation of various Jewish scriptures, many of which now form the Old Testament.

The early Christian church decided which of these were deemed to be canon and which were non-canon. The canon texts were compiled together to form what is now the Bible. Everything else that was deemed not canon is called the Apocrypha. Many of these texts were also deemed heretical or blasphemous to read, publish, or teach by the various ecumenical councils.

Each Christian denomination has a slightly different version of the Bible depending on which decisions and ecumenical councils they accept.

The most interesting difference would be the Bible of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as the Mormon Church), which has an additional text called the Book of Mormon. That was written in the 19th century by a guy named Joseph Smith, an American religious leader who founded Mormonism. According to Mormon theology, it contains the revalations he received from God about various other unknown saints who lived in America and other holy happenings which took place, making the US a second holy land of sorts. His group travelled to the western United States to find their own promised land and establish a Mormon theocracy (they were successful; it’s now the US state of Utah).

There’s no historical evidence that any of these texts were intended to be read as anything other than religious scripture, but keep in mind that in Biblical times, people seemed to have had a really difficult time differentiating texts written by people having fever dreams versus actual genuine accounts of observed events or legitimate attempts to write scripture. If you want a fun time, you can read some of the Apocrypha, which are often similar in style to the canonical gospels but are slightly… weirder. The line between religion and insanity was not so easily found back then. Regardless of their authors’ original intent, the Apocrypha certainly can be read for entertainment in the 21st century.

I think there is a line to be drawn between what is theoretically better and what is meaningfully useful.

It is realistically not useful information for an attacker to know what country you are from by observing your UTC offset. It’s simply much easier to guess this information by observing your other behaviours. For example, the text and time of your post is already leading me to guess UTC+5:30 as the time zone in question. But again, knowing what country you’re from is not really useful information most of the time, as even if my guess is correct, that narrows it down to a whopping one-eighth of the human population.

sanctions evasion? In my drug-buying app?

I’m guessing you or the AI chatbot you may have asked are talking about the total US household wealth as reported in this Reuters article. That’s where I see the $180 trillion number.

What’s your source for this?

How do you define wealth? Physical stuff? Money in your bank account? GDP measures everything that someone pays money for.

This is not even close to being true. Elon Musk’s net worth is $850 billion. In order for that to be 1 in 200 of all wealth in the US, it would mean US wealth would have to be $170 trillion. For comparison, the World Bank estimates the entire world’s GDP in 2024 to be $111 trillion.

He, in fact, owns a much larger share than 1 in 200. Though it’s also obvious to anyone watching that most of this money is fake and comes from the fact that he holds a lot of assets which have extremely inflated valuations (i.e. are a bubble with no underlying economic justification).

America really has a litigation culture, not because people are particularly fond of lawsuits, but because problems which are generally solved by legislative enactments or actions by regulatory bodies in other countries, aren’t in the US, and thus the only way to find out who is right is to go to court.

What replacement services are available? The American service actually works. Making your own would cost an order of magnitude more (as your contractors mysteriously “lose” half the money and bill the defence ministry 10 million roubles for “pens”) and a decade of your time.

Maybe they could hire Chinese firms to do it but I think China has a tendency to keep its military technology to itself.

Did you assume I was defending Putin on this?

Putin’s a piece of shit and I hope all his crap gets plundered and the proceeds transferred to the Ukrainian drone fund.

I’m guessing what you’re suggesting is that Google’s proposal is the same as requiring all packages be signed and accompanied by an Extended Validation or Oragnisation Validation X.509 certificate.

While that would technically work, the problem with using the existing PKI is that it’s still very expensive to get EV/OV certificates. And the most common of these certs (those for TLS purposes) will soon only last 47 days which is, to put it mildly, would be a pain in the ass to use for package-signing.

When the US did this, everyone was quick to call it piracy. Which, to be fair, it practically was, although I can’t say I have any sympathy for Putin.

It really does depend on what you’re looking for. You can “replace” US Treasuries with comparatively safe assets like British gilts or bonds from large, stable EU countries like France or Germany, but these will be denominated in GBP or EUR respectively, not USD, so they’re not a drop-in replacement. The EU itself also plans to issue some joint debt to pay for Ukraine-related expenses, so that might also be available depending on how they do it.

As for stocks and ETFs, there is the Euronext 100, but a cursory web search didn’t reveal any ETFs that track it. I’m sure there probably is one, but I just didn’t find it.

That being said, the Euronext 100 isn’t a replacement for American indexes like the S&P 500 though. The liquidity on the European side is lower (and for EUR securities in general), and because the American stock market in general performs better than the European stock market, you would give up a lot of financial gain. If you invested $1,000 into an S&P 500 index fund on 1 January 2010, that would now be worth $6,111. But if you instead invested 1 000€ into a Euronext 100 index fund on the same date, it would only be worth 2 548€ today. Even if you cut it off before the AI-led growth in the American stock market, the S&P 500 still would have outperformed the Euronext 100 by nearly double.

The power supply is not necessary to use the computer. The computer is still usable without it, albeit only for a few hours.

While AI obviously is not perfect and is flawed in many ways, having AI sift through the torrent of comments and then flag problematic submissions for human review is likely going to be extremely effective with minimal false positives. Though I do say this as a person whose Reddit account is currently banned for 3 days for “inciting violence” because of a knife-based joke.