You should trust signal tree the same way you trust a front door lock that has never been broken or picked despite repeated attempts to do both.
.Just remember that police only go through the door when it’s easier than breaking a window or tearing through a wall.
There are all of these stories about signal because it is notable when someone gets around it
That there’s anything approaching secure communication on a cell-phone dominated Internet whose.operating systems are either “snobbish walled garden” or “ad agency living in the corpse of a search engine” is astonishing. In the same way that a gun safety that keeps a toddler from shooting themselves with an otherwise loaded gun is astonishing.
Science is not a search for truth. Science does not give one iota of care as to whether the movement of the stars in the sky is “really” due to phlogiston currents, unaligned permeable crystal spheres, gravitationally distorted spacetime, divine trolling, or faerie bureaucracy. Because science is the search for useful theories that let us predict future states.
This is a philosophical point that’s important to know but often forgotten, but any time someone gets their head turning about weirdness and “reality” it bears repeating.
Contemplating an objective point of view that is irrelevant to the individual observed is entirely consistent with general relativity. But since it’s not a measurable frame of reference, the concept is not scientifically useful and so is disregarded as irrelevant the same way aether and angels are.
(Because if there is an aether it’s a permiable ever present solid indistinguishable from “nothing”, and if angels are moving the planets they are doing so with superhuman profedsionalism that never makes errors.)
Fiat currency always ultimately has its value ultimately set by court judgements and the threat thereof, to pay taxes or restitution or debts in some number of the specified currency.
Depending on what you mean by “viable”, you could assert that your country manages to not deflate its currency by sharply limiting how many notes it issues and preferring foreign currency for banking. Considering how tiny your country is, this is probably a good idea anyway.
(Also, note that the country is VERY small. On the scale of Wyoming, the least populous state in the USA.)
(Also also, since WW2’s start in 1939 inflation has increased the same-value equivalent for US dollars by some 2300%. If their tax coupons were set to 1 us dollar way back then, they’d each be worn about 20 euros now.)
Surgery. The most common gender affirming surgery on minors is cis boy boob reduction.
“Mount Sinai Health System” presumably includes primary care, psychology, and pharmacy services. Meaning that gender questioning girls and boys now have to go somewhere else to recognize if/that they are trans, come to terms with the bundle of other issues, and get or fulfill prescriptions for either puberty blockers or HRT.
Sinai’s cowardice will result in children suffering and possibly dying by suicide.
The most certain thing about humans is that predictions about “humans would never” will inevitably be falsified.
Especially amateur writers without an editor, which is what editorial pages have largely devolved into in the era of social media.
Ah, it’s neither, but instead a screed against “smart” cities.
My aim with this piece is to present a counterargument that smart cities’ sustainability claims are largely mere greenwashing (de Freitas Netto et al., Citation2020) at best and even complicit in contributing to the planetary ecocide, at worst. I argue that we thus need to embrace life-centered design rather than human-centered design to bring about a climate-positive approach to cities if we want to be genuinely “smart” and sustainable
That’s not a useful summary. I have no idea if this is “we should go all cyberpunk and adapt our cities to AI” or “modern cities are inherently unsustainable and should be smaller and greener.”
I’ll click through and report back if the text is any clearer.
Why the fuck did you use a math icon instead of words, then?
The blame for confusion in any communication is always on the person communicating, not the person being communicated to. (If it were the inverse, we’d all just grunt and get mad.)
Needless to say, the presence of markets ≠ capitalism.
I strongly disagree. Capitalism is the primacy of investment over labor in determining ownership and control.
Its trivial to imagine a system with markets but no capitalism. Heck, there are literally people who pay money today so they can play games that qualify. History is rife with examples, including the mercantilist and monarchist systems that immediately preceded the modern capitalist state as well as the organizing principle of most commercial activity done without recourse to civil courts.
Saying capitalism and markets are synonymous is propaganda.
If you are 20 years old, expect to live to 100, and can imagine maybe spending $1 million per year, your maximum lifetime expenses are only $80,000,000. Once you have a large enough share of this that investment returns can earn the rest, you do not ever need to work again
The threshold for “no need to work” is way lower than $1,000,000,000. More than 12 times lower, in fact.
That’s so absurdly dumb I somehow feel smarter about never going there.
It’s really hard to discuss your percieved faults in either android phones writ large, google-connected Android phones in general, or Samsung in particular if you don’t ennumerate said faults.
That being said : yes, I vastly prefer Android to iPhone. The latter comes with vendor lock-in and user infantilization that made the platform untenable for me more than a decade ago, and nothing I’ve heard since has given me reason to reconsider.
If you’re all-in with an iPhone, Mac, apple watch, and the rest, I’m sure that swapping out the iPhone for a Samsung had any number of aggrivations. But faulting Samsung for that lock-in would be like blaming Valve when the LibreOffice on your steam-cube doesnt seamless connect to iCloud.
They don’t care about having a list of non-citizens to harass – they just do that based on skin color.
What they care about is having a mechanism to force an undercount in blue states, so they can get red states further disproportionate power in the House and electoral college.
The POTUS has no power to levy taxes without an act of congress.
There are a bunch of acts of.congress that give discretionary power to the POTUS for certain specific taxes in response to certain international actions.
Here’s a plausible sounding website found from a quick web search.
https://legalunitedstates.com/can-trump-still-impose-tariffs/
Wasn’t it a bajoran building a farm on a to-be-flooded valley (or metaphor thereof?)
Star Trek humans seems to have internalized angst from post-first-contact jerkiness, and effectively have three levels of interaction :
Terrorism is a problematic word. Some adults use it to mean “violence I dont like”, but that’s just a kind of lying.
I dont like discarding words, however, so here are two workable definitions for you:
(Broadly covers most mainstream reporting and legal criminal enhancements)
(Very specifically targets the action without regard for the actor.)
Also, while this may be obbious, my dislike for any definition of terrorism as just “bad violence” means I need to acknowledge that sometimes terrorism is a morally right action. Guy Fawkes, John Brown, and intentional riots would be plausible examples of the same.
Our models do not specify a shape for the universe, because we have not seen any evidence for a spatial (as opposed to temporal) limit to how big the universe is.
In fact, we infer that since what we can see becomes homogenous on a surprisingly small scale, the whole infinite universe is similarly filled with galactic clusters, and thus there is an (unreachable) infinite number of galaxies.
This quickly gets into the weeds of “can we even say trees fall in the forests of planets no humans will ever observe”, possibly followed by an argument over if infinites are equal or comparable.
The whole universe? Absolutely. Even the smallwst infinity is larger than any countable sum.
The visible universe, meaning those close enough that a photon could have passed from there to here since the “big bang” faded enough to allow such transmissal? I don’t know offhand.
A simple web search suggest that our galaxy has less than 1011 stars – 400,000,000,000 or so. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way )
Finding our other figure is a bit harder, since trusty Wikipedia doesn’t include a direct figure and the first few articles I could find was from the BBC and used number names instead of scientific notation, which is ambiguous at this scale. ( in the long scale we only have milliardaires, and Elon Musk’s brief paper fortune was a billion rather than trillion.)
Thankfully a NASA articke linked to what appears to be the underlying research paper, and gives us a helpful number of 2x1012. (2,000,000,000,000)
So, if the paper is right then, yes, there are more galaxies in the observable universe than stars in the Milky Way. But, the paper was an indirect measurement that increased the galaxy count by a whole order of magnitude, so there may be only 2x1011 galaxies. Except, of course, that the estimate of stars in the miky way was an estimate and could be as little as 1/4 of the number I cited above…
And if the paper is wrong and the truth of the estimate is in the middle, both of our numbers could be 2x1011, with approximately one star in our galaxy for every galaxy in the observable universe.
breaking the encryption is hard , but getting around the encryption is entirely doable without physical access if you allow SMS or on-device sharing.