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.

The last part of a Web address is a “TLD”, or “top-level domain”. There used to be relatively few of them, namely .com, .org, .edu, .net, .gov, and .mil. One of the functions of TLDs is to categorise websites so you know what sort of site you’re visiting. The list of valid TLDs is a Web standard and creating a new TLD is not easy.

As time progressed, more and more TLDs were created. You have familiar ones like country-code TLDs which are for each individual country or region, such as .ca for Canada or .es for Spain.

In the past decade, several weirder and more arbitrary TLDs which are just random words with no categorisation purpose whatsoever have popped up, like .party, .xyz, or whatever.

The fact that Google, a private company, can have its own TLD (.google), is an indicator of how supremely influential the company is over the creation of Web standards. Not only does that TLD mean nothing and has no categorisation potential whatsoever (the company largely does not even use it), but based on the original model of only six TLDs, a private company wanting to have its own TLD would have then been considered the pinnacle of hubris.

I read it as “Let’s end anti-consumerism” and thought “Well that’s a brave thing to post on Lemmy of all places”

Now that I think about it, I honestly think that Lemmy has suffered this more than Reddit. Reddit has a lot of various non-politics related content but Lemmy seems to be filled a lot more with political posts. I get that many people find that content interesting, but after a while, one tires of it.

If you have used Reddit for some time, you’ll have noticed an interesting trend: any large space where general content is allowed to be posted and which does not prohibit US politics, will generally become saturated with US politics.

This happens to some degree on Lemmy as well. It’s because Americans are the largest national demographic group on the English-speaking portion of the Internet, and because American politics in general is extreme and garners a lot of attention from others. So if talking about it is allowed, it will usually become all that anyone ever wants to talk about, or at least it will appear that way in a space where popularity determines visibility.

The Venezuelan government might. But according to some DW reporting and footage earlier today, the actual reaction of ordinary Venezuelans is mixed, and mostly concern and confusion rather than anger or fear. Maduro is generally not popular in Venezuela but I doubt many people really wanted the US to come and kidnap him. And understandably those who supported him are in the streets calling for his release.

Major news organisations in general are really scared when it comes to pointing out things which are extreme, because they believe describing those things as extreme will lead to accusations of sensationalism. The reason they think that is because sensationalist outlets are indeed more likely to describe everything as extreme and make unjustified comparisons to extremities, so major media outlets often think that to be “unbiased” is to refuse to acknowledge that an action is extreme.

Vox described this as the “this is fine” bias.

In America, €120 million could buy half of Congress.

I can’t comment on the situation in other countries, but in the US, in the majority of cases, it’s cheaper for businesses to take cash. In the US, the first few thousand dollars of cash deposits are typically free every month. Beyond that, pricing varies. My bank charges 0.35% on cash deposits, which is considered quite high, though it works out to only $42 per week in my example above. The credit union I have my personal accounts with charges 0.15%, which would be $18 a week.

The cost of labour has already been factored in and it still results in savings. The cost of security is comparatively negligible. A $300 safe is a one-off purchase that pays for itself in a fortnight.

A card which is subject to central bank regulations regarding the interchange fees which they are allowed to charge. According to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform & Consumer Protection Act 2011, the Federal Reserve has the power to limit debit card interchange fees for debit cards issued by large banks with over $10 billion in assets. A “regulated debit card” issued by a bank subject to the regulation is therefore tariffed at the maximum rate allowed by the regulation, which is 0.05% plus 22 cents.

If questioned by police they can say “I made it up for Internet clout. I didn’t actually steal anything”.

It is definitely not true that Discover interchange rates are significantly higher than Visa or Mastercard.

I’ve put below a list of the actual interchange rates for various personal Visa, Mastercard, and Discover cards types.

Debit:

• Visa Debit Regulated: 0.05% + 22¢
• Discover Debit Regulated: 0.05% + 22¢
• Mastercard Debit Regulated: 0.05% + 22¢
• Visa Debit: 0.8% + 15¢
• Mastercard Debit: 1.05% + 15¢
• Discover Debit: 1.1% + 16¢
• Visa Debit Prepaid: 1.15% + 15¢
• Mastercard Debit Prepaid: 1.15% + 15¢

Base credit tiers:

• Visa CPS Retail: 1.51% + 10¢
• Discover Consumer: 1.56% +10¢
• Mastercard Consumer: 1.65% + 10¢
• Mastercard Enhanced: 1.8% + 10¢

Rewards cards:

• Visa Rewards Traditional: 1.65% + 10¢
• Visa Rewards Signature: 1.65% + 10¢
• Discover Rewards: 1.71% + 10¢
• Discover Rewards Premium: 1.71% + 10¢
• Mastercard World: 1.9% + 10¢

Premium cards:

• Visa Rewards Signature Preferred: 2.1% + 10¢
• Discover Rewards Premium Plus: 2.15% + 10¢
• Mastercard World Elite: 2.3% + 10¢

You can plainly see that Discover tends to be more expensive than Visa but is cheaper than Mastercard. The only reason I could see that someone might refuse Discover is because Discover cards are all rewards credit cards that go into the higher tiers, whereas many Visa and Mastercard cards are debit cards which go into the lowest tier.

Amex isn’t exclusive at all. Anyone can go apply for one and get one. It’s not special at all

I literally cannot think of any places that don’t take Discover.

Some American states (not mine) have banned surcharging for credit cards in response to consumer backlash. But what’s not banned is marking up everything by 3% and then offering a 3% cash discount.