Inb4 Donald Trump calls for all of them to be sent to Gulagtanimo Bay.

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.

There’s also the possibility of appeals to get the sentence reduced. And the defendant’s family can apply for pardons. Pardons and commutations are usually associated with political grift in the US (and this is a well-deserved reputation), but they can also be applied for and governors occasionally grant them to prisoners who demonstrate they’re reformed even when they’re not otherwise eligible for parole.

Grovelling before the judge and acting like you accept you are guilty for sixty minutes costs nothing on the part of the defendant anyway.

Even though by the time the hearing commences, the judge has already usually decided on the sentence, every competent criminal defence lawyer will advise their client to grovel and beg for mercy at the sentencing for two reasons:

1. Acting recalcitrant could upset the judge and result in a heavier sentence than the judge originally planned because they feel a need to make an example of the defendant.
2. Not being apologetic damages your future chances of parole when the parole board looks at the tape or record of the sentencing.

I’m surprised that Sanders is older than both Trump and Biden but retains about twice as much virility as either of them and about four times as much sanity as Trump

I’m never going to be one to dog on something before I try it. If it’s good and can offer the same or better experience as Firefox then sign me up. The biggest sticking point for me, though, is potentially losing Firefox’s massive add-in library. I really like my uBlock Origin and Restore YouTube Dislike and my VPN extension and Metamask and all the other crap I’ve got there.

I don’t think a BRICS currency will be successful in replacing the dollar unless the governments of the participating countries force their businesses to use it. The reason why transactions are denominated and settled in US dollars is because of the perceived stability of its value and the openness of the US financial system to international trade. People use the US dollar because they trust the American government to not excessively devalue it and for it to be reliably useful later on.

And yes, I recognise that all of these are under attack by the current US government.

I feel like she’s more of a pragmatist while Sanders is firm and staunch in his ideology. AOC will bend the knee to the Party when she realises she needs to in order to get what she wants, but only just enough so that they don’t hate her guts. Sanders had the luxury of being able to raise the middle finger to the Party because they knew they had to suffer him anyway owing to his huge popularity among the left. Sander’s popularity allows him to remain ideologically pure. AOC doesn’t have the power.

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It’s extremely frustrating to see this guy dropping one truth bomb after another just to have nobody listen to him. I wish Sanders was younger.

Edit: It’s really sad, now that I think of it. Here is a man who has devoted his entire life to the betterment of his country. And here he still is, in his eighties, continuing to fight to prevent the rights and liberties that he in his twenties fought to create from being undone. If there was any justice in this world, he should have just now wrapped up his term as President of the United States and be enjoying the few years he has left on this earth in peace after having passed the torch to the next generation of Democratic leaders. Bernie Sanders, a true patriot and devoted warrior for the working class to the very end.

This is basically why Democratic politicians are less popular than Republican ones. A Republican president will be liked by 90%+ of his party and nearly no Democrats. A Democratic president is liked by half of his party and called a genocide supporter by the other half, and supported by nearly no Republicans.

Yeah when the Japanese saw the Americans off in the distance running for their ice cream barge like schoolchildren at the playground and looked down at their shitty dried prune sorrowfully planted in a thin tray of plain white rice, they pretty much knew the war was over.

I feel like every few years, the same thing happens:

1. A new study comes out that essentially says “left-leaning people are smarter than right-leaning people”.
2. All the left-leaning people smugly say that it was obvious
3. Right-leaning people accuse the study of being fake or politically motivated
4. Everyone forgets a week later

During the era of payphones, a quarter was still significant money so it was still worth the time to adjust the machinery. Nowadays, there are typically only four machines that people regularly interact with that accept quarters:

• Laundry machines, which increasingly don’t take coins at all and instead have card readers on them
• Parking meters, which also increasingly get replaced with signs telling you to pay online using a website or app
• Vending machines, which also usually have card readers.
• Self-checkout machines at grocery stores.

These machines take coins, but generally deal in such small-dollar amount terms that replacing the coinage mechanisms just isn’t worth it in 2025. That’s the biggest issue with coinage reform plans. Hell, not even when the UK decimalised their currency did they change the size and weight of the coins, for exactly this reason. An old shilling was the same size, weight, and value as a new 5p coin and no changes had to be made to the machines.

Now, the problem is that while coin usage (and cash usage in general) is on the decline, these systems must still function for the percentage of people who want to use cash. And you definitely have a moral right to use cash and be able to conduct your daily life in cash if you want, either for privacy reasons, or because for small transactions it’s just simpler.

I have no idea how this screenshot illustrates your point but there is an “alt-left”… sort of. This term is not really used though. The term “alt-right” was used to describe far-right elements of the American population whose ideology was regarded to be extreme enough that mainstream centre-right politicians wanted nothing to do with them. “Alt-right” is (was) essentially a polite euphemism for right-wing extremism.

If you want, you could consider the left-wing version of this to be the socialist and communist groups, but they are politically irrelevant in the US, not only because the centre-left absolutely refuses to even acknowledge their existence but because the “alt-left” also hates the centre-left and isn’t willing to co-operate with them to get into power. The “alt-right” holds political sway only because the centre-right realised they were useful in riling up the right-wing voter base and they could be used to get into power. Unfortunately, this really just meant that the centre-right has disappeared in America and been replaced with only alt-right or alt-right-sympathetic politicians. The “alt-left” of America is completely unrepresented in any institution of government. Again, I want to make clear that “alt-left” is not a term that is in widespread use but if you generalise the prefix “alt-”, it’s what it would mean.

I have to agree with the sentiment expressed by the social media posts shown in the article. If your country’s electricity infrastructure is so fragile that a monkey could take it offline then it’s probably time to take a hard look at investing in improving its resilience.

I will edit my original comment. There is no reason that they couldn’t circulate in foreign exchange markets given the correct infrastructure. That infrastructure current doesn’t exist and to my knowledge would be unprofitable to construct.

I want to add a third thing to this list:

3. Feeling left behind by mainstream political parties.

The parties in power surely pay lip service to the issues that concern the young but very rarely do they actually do anything about it.

I wonder if there’s a term in political science for an ideology where the people who create and operate the means of production should also own and enjoy the benefits from it.