Nobody claimed that Biden was a perfect president or even a particularly good one. And Harris was certainly deeply flawed in her positions in many ways. But saying that those two are no different from Trump is like saying that a plumber who just stands there and watch your pipes leak is the same as a plumber who bashes them open and floods your house, because neither of them actually fixed the leak. Obviously one is way worse.

Yeah, everyone knows that if a moderate like Kamala Harris or Joe Biden had won the election, they’d still be sending anyone who vaguely looks like an immigrant to a Salvadoran concentration camp, throwing dissidents in jail, crashing the economy by levying tariffs on every other country in the world, letting insurrectionists out of prison, turning federal law enforcement agencies into secret police, persecuting and calling for the extermination of LGBTQ people, accepting bribes to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts from authoritarian regimes, abandoning Ukraine and Gaza by cozying up to strongmen like Netanyahu and Putin, letting organised labour be crushed into oblivion by refusing to enforce federal labour law, appointing unqualified morons into Cabinet, and dismantling every consumer protection agency in the US.

Yeah, these are all things that Harris or Biden would have done.

While you can say that the ship of state, or more Americanly, the car of state, doesn’t tend to move forward when moderates or conservatives are in charge, the reason is because moderates don’t know how to release the handbrake or shift the car out of neutral while conservatives stole the catalytic converter, drained the engine oil, and insist that refueling the car is DEI.

Firstly this is surprisingly high-quality coverage. I’ve never heard of this website but I’m pretty impressed.

Secondly, regarding the lawsuit in general, I think that patent and intellectual property law regarding game mechanics and software processes in general are badly in need of reform. There doesn’t seem to have been significant legislative action to address this in any major economy that I know of. The number of bullshit parents being filed, unclear and vague rules as to how copyright/patent law works with respect to software, AI, and game mechanics, is really leading to a lawsuit culture where the only way to find out what the bounds of the law are is to spend millions of dollars on lawyers to litigate it in court, when really, legislatures should be actively writing new and clearer rules to deal with these issues before people need to sue each other to find out.

The Internet of 2025 is just way too different and complex to operate using the copyright rules of the 1990s.

If I were in writing the rules, there’d be separate categories of intellectual property for software libraries, game mechanics, fictional characters, and so on, with clear definitions on what is and is not considered fair use of these sorts of intellectual property. It should not be possible to copyright the design of a widely-used software API or game mechanic. And any such protection on those things should be comparatively short in duration (not more than a decade) so that others can eventually re-implement the design, and probably do so better than the original inventor.

It must be a coincidence that all of the things on that list would be to the minor detriment of the wealth of billionaires and trillion-dollar companies if they were implemented

Sounds like a good idea though. I feel like there are a good number of crypto bros on here who would gladly donate more if crypto was an option. Plus it gives people from censored countries a way to anonymously donate

Is that an option? I would gladly do a crypto transfer but I didn’t notice it.

Apparently I’m not allowed to do that. Do I have to cancel my existing donation first? I don’t see a way to do that through Open Collective, I’m guessing I just cancel the direct debit through my bank?

I donate one euro a month to lemmy.world. It’s not a lot but I’m not rolling in cash and I feel like the service is worth paying something for, even if I can only contribute a nominal amount. But I feel like they should have an option to take an entire year’s worth of donations at once would be more efficient than a monthly withdrawal.

As it currently stands, a monthly bank transfer of 1 € is taken from my account and I feel like a significant portion of that is going to be taken by bank fees, whereas if they took a single annual transfer of 12 €, they would keep a much larger percentage of the money.

“Classmates warn Heimrich Himmler he risks enabling descent ‘into fascism’”

💪💪Zero Stasi agencies in Oregon

Proud of my state

Average Internet forum experience—saying something true but downvoted because it was said opposition to a popular view

Ever since the untimely death of CentOS I feel like Debian and its spin-off Ubuntu have been pulling double their weight in server applications.

AD 30 was the beginning of the papacy of Peter the Apostle, which according to the Catholic Church, was its first pope. Catholic teachings state that Peter’s successors form an unbroken line of Church leaders from AD 30 to the present day, though historic evidence is somewhat incomplete. This is the canonical start date of the Catholic Church as an organisation. “Christianity”, broadly speaking, is just a label affixed to anyone who identifies themselves as a follower of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

The Catholic Church names Jesus Christ as its founder. If you accept this claim, then you could definitely say that it was a political organisation as well as a religious one from the beginning, as Jesus was notoriously put to death by the Roman state for political reasons. The Jewish Sanhedrin which had condemned Jesus for claiming to be the Messiah had no legal authority in Roman Judea; legally speaking, Jesus was put to death on the orders of Pontius Pilate (prefect of Judea) for sedition and for being “King of the Jews”. The legal veracity of this charge is questionable, of course, and Jesus famously preached for his followers to “render unto [the Emperor] the things that are [the Emperor’s]”, i.e. to respect the state and the laws, but the Roman Empire wasn’t known for being an egalitarian state with strong rule of law.

In my experience, Catholics tend to be pretty moderate, since the Catholic Church is strictly hierarchical and all dogma originates from the Vatican. The size of the Church, it seems, has a moderating effect on its dogma since they have to appeal to such a large group of followers, and the views of its members tend to average out with a bias towards conservatism (because the Church is so unbelievably old that the inertia of 15th or 10th century doctrine still holds sway).

Protestants, meanwhile, span the whole political spectrum since the label is pretty broad in general. There are plenty of Protestant churches in my area that espouse very liberal and accepting social views, and probably at least a dozen will even marry same-sex couples, something notoriously disapproved of by the Catholic Church and many other denominations. But there are also many, much louder, Protestant churches that are basically full MAGA.

The Catholic Church has been a political institution for almost its entire existence. It is probably the *oldest * political institution in Europe, having existed since AD 30 according to its own history (though as you get further back in time, history starts turning into legend and mythology; it’s really not clear where that line is).

During the Middle Ages, you could very well be burnt at the stake for heresy or be sent to die in the Crusades, upon the orders of the pope. And for over a millennium, the Church directly ruled over a pretty sizeable piece of territory in central Italy.

I believe I saw someone say on Tumblr that if you enjoy having rights then you should advocate the strongest for criminals enjoying rights as well, because otherwise, the Government can always just take your rights away by labelling you a criminal.

Or, as has been trendy lately, a Salvadoran gang member.

Yeah, I did. No good, unfortunately. Could not get TOR to work at all unless connected to a VPN or using a foreign SIM card.

If you have a foreign SIM card then you can get access to the unfiltered Internet in China. So if you’re planning a trip to China, I recommend doing that. I bought an eSim from SoSim which is a Hong Kong carrier (there is no firewall in Hong Kong—yet) and it was like 20 USD for the 14-day “Greater China region” pass. I think it had like 10 GB of data which was enough for my purposes. Extra data is pretty cheap anyway and they take foreign credit cards. No 5G or even 4G LTE though (you have to pay extra for that which sucks). You only get plain old 4G which is passable but disappointing. China throttles traffic to foreign IPs (even unblocked ones) so I don’t think 5G would be a huge benefit anyway.

While connected to WiFi, I was able to set up my own OpenVPN server and that worked as well. Their blocking seems to be DNS based. If you keep it to yourself and don’t share your server publicly, I think you should be good.

Since China is mostly cashless, all digital transactions are tracked and monitored, and selling access to an illegal VPN server will result in severe consequences. The Government doesn’t actually care about individual people getting around the Great Firewall.

But like I said, the idea is not to be perfect but to make it annoying enough to get around that ordinary people don’t bother.

The only experience I have with countries that have censored Internet access is China, but I can say that all ordinary methods for connecting to Tor will not work and using commercial VPNs is really a game of whack-a-mole with the Chinese government.

The idea is not to be 100% effective, it’s to make evading the censorship hard enough that most people don’t really care to do so. Everyone in China knows how to evade the Great Firewall but most people just don’t care about the fact that their Internet access is censored.

True, true.

The midterms are still 18 months away. 18 months before the last election, Republicans were still bickering over who they wanted their speaker to be and obviously they won that last one so anything is possible.