I guess the merit economy needed some emergency repo operations.

My head is going to explode, but I have to get through these... I thought an art contest would be nice and simple...

Merit sources are free to reveal their source amounts, though I think it may be a bit unwise. While it will eventually become obvious roughly what the source amounts are from the stats, there's a huge difference between showing up in a "list of probable merit sources" and having a quote out there of you basically saying "I'm a merit source, come beg me for merit, complain about every merit I send, and accuse me of being part of the anti-X/pro-Y conspiracy."

Agreed. Trump clearly got out of the deal almost entirely for political reasons, and he'd probably accept even a slightly better deal. But if Iran went along with this -- allowing a counterparty to break a deal on a whim -- it'd make them look really weak. Meanwhile, there's nothing really pressing the US to back down.

I suppose that Iran's strategy is to pick at the US and its allies with small strikes, but make it small-scale/ambiguous enough, and set things up politically (eg. pointing to the broken nuclear deal) that the US couldn't rely on many allies if it wanted to invade Iran fully. The US doesn't have the political will to sustain a real war against Iran for long. The US could do a lot of airstrikes etc., though, and I'm not convinced that small strikes by Iran will ever get them anywhere.

No, what I mean by "socialism" is "a lot of central economic planning and redistribution": pretty far left on the 2-axis political compass. I'm aware of Marx's definition, but that's not really what people tend to mean nowadays. Words change, especially in politics; for example, leftists stole "liberal" from libertarians, and we stole "libertarian" from them (at least in the US).

It won't be.

I'm far from an expert, but AFAIK, Iran is a very socialist and authoritarian country, similar to China but with an Islamic flavor and much less competent leaders. Combined with this economic mismanagement, you have US sanctions designed to destroy the Iranian economy, and probably constant CIA activity fomenting unrest. Also, many powerful players in the US and elsewhere would love any excuse to escalate militarily with Iran. This seems like a pretty much impossible situation. I'm surprised that a little bank-burning is all Iran's experiencing. What is Iran's path forward? Can it actually continue on as-is?

The major forks for the BTC previously held by OgNasty will be liquidated sometime before the end of the year. When this is done, you'll see a bunch of BTC sent to 17RTT[...]. The forkcoins for the other BTC will not be liquidated soon.

Right, I should've mentioned that in the PM. After you received my PM but before you sent any merit, the source amount displayed was your total allocation.

Fixed, thanks.

A couple of people requested that I provide some stats on the poll voters here. I am generally willing to provide poll stats that are general enough not to identify individual voters. If you want actual voter lists published, then you have to warn people about this in advance.

One person specifically requested that I provide counts of voters who had at least 10 merit. 10 voters for DarkStar_ had at least 10 merit, while 8 voters for legendster had at least 10 merit. An additional stat which I came up with: Consider the amount of merit that each voter earned over the last year. The median of that stat was 82 for DarkStar_ voters, and 3 for legendster voters.

I am only providing stats; do not interpret this as me supporting anyone. I barely even know what you're voting on here.

Prison is a huge waste of both the government's money and the inmates' time, and it probably increases the chance of inmates committing more crimes.

First of all, victimless crimes are not real crimes and should not exist.

For most crimes, the sentence should be based entirely on the premise of getting the person not to commit the crimes anymore, based on a case-by-case analysis of the person. Often, prison shouldn't be necessary at all. For example, serial shoplifters could be sentenced to a period of having to wear a bodycam whenever in public so that they could be surveiled and prevented from stealing anything. This would be a huge invasion of privacy for them, of course, but it's better than prison. Psychological treatment may be appropriate in a lot of cases. Maybe in some cases it'd be appropriate to apply some corporal punishment (eg. "100 lashes"). Having someone languish in prison for years is pretty much the worst thing for everyone, including the prisoner; I'd definitely prefer 100 excruciatingly-painful lashes than a year in prison.

The above works in a state, but it's also in-line with my anarcho-capitalist ideal. In an ancap society, prison would be a service of your protection agency, operating a bit like insurance. Typically, such prisons would have the goal of protecting you from retaliation from the people you harmed, convincing society that you are no longer a risk after you get out, and preventing you and the protection agency from bearing costs of further crimes. So typical ancap prisons would be rehabilitation-oriented, not "lock up for x years"-oriented.

I don't actually think that this would be good in any way, and I'm not advocating for it, but I've thought that it'd be rational from the US's perspective to offer inmates convicted of certain non-violent crimes the option of reducing their sentence by serving it in the military. The military is already set up as something of a brainwashing machine, and having some less-precious troops would give the military more flexibility. The US faces a problem now in that they're only ever willing to dedicate handfuls of troops to most places because they're terrified that there'll be a massacre of hundreds of troops, which would be a PR disaster. "US penal brigade wiped out" sounds bad, but it's quite a bit better than "thousands of brave US servicemen massacred."

I'm reading a lot of mixed predictions regarding Bloomberg. Some predict that he's just going to throw so much money at it that he'll replace & beat Biden, therefore winning the primary. The media certainly loves him. But I don't see it. He's apparently going to try running as a "better Biden", but he actually has a weird mixed record containing right-wing, ultra-left-wing, and ultra-authoritarian elements. He can be attacked a lot from both the right and left. I tend to think he'll go nowhere, like Steyer, but my uncertainty on this is high at this point.

You need at least 100 activity or 10 merit.

This isn't a Meta issue... DoH is unrelated to Cloudflare's DDoS protection service.

I can understand why Firefox etc. are doing it. ISPs have a history of screwing up / tampering with DNS; networks & operating systems often have DNS misconfigured; and Microsoft isn't going to fix anything at the OS level. So for the average user it's going to improve the experience.

But it's giving Cloudflare (ie. a probable NSA honeypot) an unprecedented level of data on users and websites, and also an unprecedented level of control. Cloudflare will be able to take down or redirect sites unilaterally now, only having to fear getting removed by Firefox as a result. Everyone uses ICANN's root servers because everyone else uses ICANN's root servers. If everyone starts to use Cloudflare, then Cloudflare becomes the new ICANN in practice.

Hopefully Tor isn't stupid enough to enable this in Tor Browser, since that'd allow for pretty trivial traffic analysis by Cloudflare, and you wouldn't be able to disable it without highlighting yourself as one of a few people behaving oddly.

It's really a demonstration of the failure of the Internet on a technical level. The Internet is decades of dirty hack on top of dirty hack, and now we're ending up with a world where the only easy way to get things working decently is "just put literally everything on Cloudflare". Very dangerous. The whole structure of the Internet needs to be rethought.

I agree with the idea of moving away from ISP resolvers and traditional port-53 DNS. It sucks. Though ideally it'd be done at the OS level, and in any case you can do a lot better than DoH, yet another dirty hack. For example, it probably wouldn't slow things down much for Firefox to just act as a recursive DNS resolver. That'd be maximally decentralized. Or you could at least use a private information retrieval protocol in order to rely on a single resolver like Cloudflare without actually giving them any information, and have the resolver also provide the full chain of DNSSEC authentication for every query answer.

Right. Paid ads will come back late in the month, around the 28^th, I think.

Yes, though they do eventually expire (after many months), so you shouldn't write it down and use it in a year or something crazy like that.

I found it, it was a bug in the random rotation. Rarely (5-10% of the time before I fixed it, though growing with an increasing set of captions+votes), it would assign the wrong link to a caption during random rotation.

Thanks!

Does anyone else see this? I can't reproduce it. I don't know how it could be a client-side issue either, though.

That is what the link is. I don't understand what issue you're seeing.