Promises from an incumbent can hit differently. If Democrats were willing and able, they should have done it in the last 4 years. If not, then why promise?
I have no doubt Harris would have delivered on improving the conditions for the poor. Unfortunately Trumps rhetoric was simply too effective, perhaps because of what you say in the second sentence.
Thanks for the input. I'd imagine there are lots of sites and apps out there that have such an issue. In what ways to modern apps / sites typically address this? Are there browser extensions that help with this? Do some websites have a special mode to assist?
Maté, the self-declared non-expert on Russia or Ukraine[1], still spouting nonsense about Russia.
You'd be foolish to believe anything this mouthpiece of the Syrian government says.
> Bordered by Russia and China, Mongolia describes the United States as its most important “third neighbor.” In 2019, the United States and Mongolia upgraded their bilateral relationship to a Strategic Partnership.
> Mongolia deployed troops to Iraq from 2003 through October 2008. In Afghanistan, Mongolian soldiers supported Coalition operations for 18 years, with withdrawal underway in 2021 in coordination with the planned exit of U.S. forces. Training and equipment provided by the U.S. government support the professionalization of Mongolia’s defense forces and their continued engagement in United Nations peacekeeping operations. The United States military also regularly participates in Mongolia-hosted peacekeeping and humanitarian relief exercises, including the annual Khaan Quest exercise.
> In the years since Kazakhstan’s independence, the two countries have developed a strong and wide-ranging bilateral relationship, jointly referred to as an enhanced strategic partnership since 2018.
> Kazakhstan’s military participates in U.S.-funded military exercises like Steppe Eagle, Viking, Eager Lion, and Shanti Prayas.
---
> North Korea
The Russian border with North Korea is about 20 miles long.
> For 20 years, Iranian officials have said they wanted the U.S. military out of Afghanistan. Iran supplied Afghan insurgents with weapons to use against American soldiers. It sheltered Al Qaeda’s top leaders in Tehran. It courted the Taliban with diplomatic visits, covertly and then publicly.
The best I can find is an "enemy of my enemy" relationship, which has never been considered an alliance.
>For decades, Tehran has supported the Hazara, a Shia minority and the third largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. In the 1990s, the Taliban government repressed the Hazara—excluding them politically, isolating them economically, and killing more than 1,000—during the civil war that erupted after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal. Tensions heightened in 1998, when the Taliban killed nine Iranian diplomats working at a consulate in northern Mazar-i-Sharif. After the 9/11 attacks and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Iran worked closely with the United States and regional powers to establish a new Afghan government free of the Taliban.
> Iran’s relationship with the Taliban shifted, however, as U.S. and NATO forces stayed in Afghanistan. Tehran viewed the Taliban as a useful tool to counter U.S. influence on its borders. It provided Taliban forces with enough military equipment to pressure the United States but not enough to generate American military retaliation. In 2016, the Taliban chief, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, was killed in a U.S. drone strike as he returned from a secret visit in Iran to his sanctuary in Pakistan. By 2017, Russia reportedly used Iran to funnel weapons to the Taliban.
Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are 3 that make up a Pacific encirclement (probably the Philippines and perhaps Australia if you want to go that far). Typically that’s what people refer to when they say “surrounded” but obviously China isn’t completely surrounded. The reason these three are used in this context is because Chinese power projection assumes an outward eastern presence in the Pacific and not westward or northward.
Though ultimately this is of China’s own doing. They broke the “don’t interrupt your enemy while they are making a mistake” rule with respect to the US and very rapidly turned the tide against themselves and now find that they are the ones making the mistake and seemingly unaware.
The mistake being supporting Putin, taking over Hong Kong prematurely, and pissing off the Philippines and Japan for no good reason. This has caused Pacific national to rally around America and has caused an American-skeptic Europe to unite strongly under NATO and turn China-skeptic. The whole “wolf-warrior” diplomacy thing was a massive fuck up.
> and pissing off the Philippines and Japan for no good reason
And Vietnam, and India, and every country that borders the South China Sea. It’s like a kid who goes school and buys everyone gifts to make friends but still treats everyone like crap.
Yea you are correct. I’m not sure what was going through my head with leaving them out. May have been thinking about the “strong American Allies” aspect.
I don't know if I understood you correctly, but I don't think this is true. I have not tried it but as long as you have your data you can always setup your own instance with it. Ideally you have a server backup but if not there is a script that can convert the ordinary Mastodon export (the one you can do as a regular user in the UI of any instance) into a form suitable to import into the database of your instance.
For everyone doing social media (semi-)professionally, followers are pretty much all that matters. That sounds like it gives server operators leverage against journalists and the like that happen to be on their server. They can move server, sure, but they lose their reach, that's ugly especially for smaller publications or individuals who can't easily hire staff to run their own instance.
I haven't thought this through thoroughly yet, but I could not come up with a migration scenario where you could keep your followers. Your handle will change and as long as the old instance is banned I guess a redirect from there to the new handle does not work. So, fair point! I'd be curious what others think, maybe there is a way?
Mastodon supports user migrations that keeps your followers. It's pretty new and not supported everywhere yet, but it does work (I've used it) with the caveat that some followers on older software will still follow the old account at the moment.
It works by the old and new server "cooperating", so it won't let you move between two servers which won't federate with each other - in that specific scenario you'll need to go via a third server which both speak to.
The move appears to you as if your followers unfollows your old account and follows the new account, so they're all "redirected" to your new handle. E.g. you can see that here: https://mastodon.social/@vidarh
You indicate to the old server where you want to move to, and then to the new server where you're moving from, and the fact the old server will specify your new handle in your profile is used as proof when informing your followers instances of the new address.
If you do this, you can see mastodon.social returns a "movedTo" attribute for my old account:
Not when the instance you are on is banned or otherwise disappears and you use your exported data to "revive" your account on a different instance (with a different handle), which is the scenario I proposed above.
The only way to avoid that is to stand up your own instance. And that is the great thing about decentralized systems. Because you as a user have no visibility into the systems, finances, nor management of any of these platforms.
I still blog on a server I rent but the backup is hosted in a server in my closet. I’m fully aware that rental can go away any time. And that’s been the case for decades.
Maybe it’s a generational thing but it appears people assume these platforms owe them something. The TOS makes it clear they owe them very little. So you can be muted, banned or deleted at any moment.
I’ve watched many social networks disappear and end up in the footnotes of a Wikipedia article. Nothing about the internet is guaranteed nor permanent. Twitter nor Mastodon owe you anything.
I'm on my own Mastodon instance but should it get banned I'd pretty much lose my followers. I think that was the original point. Otherwise agreed, neither Twitter nor Mastodon owe me anything.
If you get banned on Twitter or any other centralized service, you lose all your followers. If you get banned on Mastodon, you lose your followers on the instance(s) that banned you.
But generally it takes a lot to get banned by most fediverse instances. You basically either need to be a nazi or consort with nazis.
There are, of course, instances that would ban you for less than that, but these tend to be much smaller and trying to foster a very specific type of community. If they'd ban you, they probably wouldn't follow you either.
If it disappears, you're right. If it's "banned" (not a thing, assuming you mean defederated) then you can't move to one of the instances which have defederated it. Any followers from an instance which has defederated yours will also be lost, not because you can't move them but because the block on their instance will automatically cause them to unfollow you.
The solution to this is to move to an instance which hasn't defederated from the one you're on. Worst case, setting up your own.
There is no "global ban" for servers. You won't be able to move to a server that has defederated the server you're moving to or been defederated by it.
But you can still move to a third party server. If you desperately want to move from A to B and A and B are defederated from each other, you can even do that by moving from A to C and C to A as long as both A and B are willing to talk to C.
Why would your server get banned though? It's not going to happen to moderated servers. If you pick some small, weird, or insurrection aligned server, that might be an issue. Otherwise, you're just stressing out about something that won't happen.
Nonsense. The point is that he is putting PoW and all other types of blockchain systems on the same bag.
If his criticism was specific to Bitcoin (or other popular PoW-based systems), then it would hold. But when he acknowledges alternatives and make it sound that they don't exist yet, then it is dishonest.
I mean, as he says in his next line, "I’ll care once the total energy consumption of all cryptocurrencies drops to a non-bullshit level.", it's clear he cares about it all on only one axis: "total energy consumption".
PoS's mere existence doesn't affect that axis. I can complaign[1] about how polluting power plants are, knowing full well there exist nuclear power plants, and it wouldn't make me a hypocrite. Sth else might, but not this.
Which is a bullshit criteria. It is like saying that you are not going to support electric cars until there exists no combustion engine and you are concern about emissions. If you are against cars as a whole, then state so, but don't use one subclass of them as prejudice against all of them.
Cars are a useful form of transportation. Hundreds of millions of people use one every day.
Crypto has been around almost as long as the smartphone and so far the only applications which have emerged are crime and wild speculation. After fourteen years, any rational person should be pretty skeptical that any application that isn't "evading regulations" or speculation will ever appear.
> only applications which have emerged are crime and wild speculation.
Every. Fucking. Thread.
I was using Bitcoin in 2012 as a means to transfer money between US and Brazil, using perfectly legal exchanges, and that was costing me less than any bank or remittance service would charge me. Was that "crime" or "wild speculation"?
When someone in Argentina can receive payments in USD-equivalent crypto without having to deal with the bullshit manipulated exchange rate from the government, is that "crime" or "wild speculation"?
When someone wants to use crypto to accept payments because PayPal cut them off without reasonable explanation, is that "crime" or "wild speculation"?
There is always someone who is going to throw this "there is no use case" line, and you can be sure that is someone who has no clue what they are talking about.
Use cases already exist. It's not just because your privileged bubble never saw it that it doesn't mean they are not valid. And what I am saying is just the tip of the iceberg. As the UX around scaling solutions improve and transaction fees come down, more use cases will be possible (micropayments, streaming subscriptions, NFTs as authz/authn for services), and I can bet that you will still be talking like "no use cases exist".
There are plenty of things to criticize, but this shit you are doing is tiring, man. Can you please at least find something where you have a chance of being right?
