If a Democrat had posted this, he would be losing his shit about far-left propaganda trying to ruin his reputation with blasphemous imagery.

There’s a brief account of their finances on the linked blog post in the OP

https://blog.mastodon.world/

Their blog has a break-down of their expenses from August 2025. It’s about 1700€ per month, mostly for server-related costs.

https://blog.mastodon.world/

Pope Leo is weak on crime

Technically, Vatican City has the highest crime rate in the world, fluctuating between 1 and 1.5 crimes per capita. But this is mostly pickpocketing committed by foreigners against other foreigners. Vaticans themselves mostly commit financial crimes and religious crimes. Obviously the solution here is to build a big, beautiful wall along the border and make Italy pay for it, to keep out all those foreign criminals.

Linux Mint is a good choice but it doesn’t come with a GNOME flavour by default. You can install it yourself if you want, though.

I moved to Fedora after leaving Ubuntu. Worked fine for me, but you’ll have to re-train your muscle memory for some terminal commands. sudo apt install becomes sudo dnf install and rpm is a little different from dpkg. Other than that, with the Dash to Dock extension, Fedora feels exactly the same as Ubuntu to me.

He was too young to vote in 2016. He voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024. I asked him a week or so ago whether he plans to vote Republican in the upcoming election. He says he plans to throw his ballot into the bin.

Since there’s not really that many Christians on Lemmy, I took the liberty of showing my former college roommate that image. He is a devout Catholic and also a two-time Trump voter, though I will note he has since soured on Trump since his re-election (for these and other reasons). His reaction was that the image was insulting to the Catholic religion and blasphemous.

Last year, I had also asked his opinion on Trump posting an AI-generated image of himself as pope when Pope Francis died, and he said that post was “not cool”. He said that to imply one could simply become pope without first rising through the ranks of the Catholic Church, especially someone as unpious as Trump, was disrespectful to those who dedicate their careers to the clerical service, and he found the image offensive.

Is the foundation’s BUNQ account still active? I have a recurring bank transfer pointed at it and I just want to make sure I’m not throwing money into a black hole. That’s the NL78 BUNQ 2108 3219 85 account.

If it’s still active, maybe consider putting it in the post? I’m sure direct bank transfers could save the foundation on processing fees.

America is always complaining about being broke but always finds the money for war.

We already have that. In many parts of the developed world, you can get a roof over your head at a homeless shelter free of charge, and soup kitchens will give you enough calories to prevent you from starving to death. You’ll just have to accept a much lower standard of living.

This is not “one country, two systems”. This is “one nation, two countries”. It’s not an irrelevant distinction.

The words are phrased extremely carefully to avoid subjugating Taiwan to Beijing. Perhaps it makes more sense to those who know Chinese. The entire situation is basically a word game at this point. Nobody really seems to want to disturb the status quo, but words have to be said.

Honestly, I don’t know what China has to gain from taking Taiwan by force versus what they can gain much more cheaply by just befriending and trading with it.

They could arrange an on-paper reunification. The key is to choose your words carefully to avoid upsetting anyone and give as much lip service as possible to Beijing while giving many of the “real” benefits to Taipei.

• The Republic of China is dissolved. The government in Taipei will continue and is renamed to just “Taiwan”. All legal documents will be issued under the name “Taiwan”. Former officials of the Republic of China continue in office as officials of Taiwan. The leader of the Taiwanese people is the president of Taiwan (台湾总统) and the administrative organs that govern their portion of Greater China (大中华) is the Government of Taiwan (台湾政府). Other than that, the status quo is acceptable and shall continue indefinitely.
• Taiwan acknowledges it is a part of Greater China (大中华) and that Taiwanese people are members of the Chinese nation (中华民族). Note that the Chinese terms used here refer to the cultural idea of “China” and not the country.
• In international affairs, all instances of “Chinese Taipei” (中华台北) are replaced with “Chinese Taiwan” (中华台湾). Note the use of the cultural “Chinese” rather than “Chinese” referring to that which relates the People’s Republic of China. All mainland publications will adopt the Xinhua News Agency’s style guide recommendation of referring to Taiwan as merely “Taiwan” rather than “Taiwan Province” (台湾省).
• The People’s Republic of China recognises that Taiwanese people have a right to self-government and disclaims all rights of government (政权) to the people of Taiwan. Taiwan does the same to the mainland. Sovereignty (主权) is held collectively by the Chinese cultural nation (中华民族) as a whole and cannot be exercised unilaterally, but the respective governments have the right to defend the Chinese nation’s sovereignty on their respective territories against external threats.
• Taiwan’s right to build up its military for the purposes of deterring external threats is recognised. Taiwan and China agree that their respective militaries will not be used against each other. Each military defends its own side of the strait and neither is obligated to help the other in any conflict whatsoever.
• The Taiwanese people will decide when they would like the adopt the socialist system. There is no deadline for this to occur. The mainland respects the right of the Taiwanese people to choose and will not force the matter nor will it interfere in the internal politics of Taiwan.
• Taiwan agrees to publicly support Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea, agrees that such region belongs to the Chinese nation, and disclaims all interests whatsoever beyond 22 km from its coast (note: equivalent distance to a country’s territorial waters). The portion of the exclusive economic zone of China east of the island Taiwan and west into the centre of the Taiwan Strait is reserved for the sole use and benefit of the Taiwanese people. Anything more than 22 km south of Cape Eluanbi is disclaimed by Taiwan and for the exclusive use and benefit of the mainland. Taiwan is not obligated to use its naval forces to enforce any claims laid to portions of China’s EEZ not reserved for it.
• The People’s Republic of China will respect the Taiwanese government’s ability to interact with foreign nations even if such interacts disagree with the way mainlanders choose to relate with that nation. To that end, the PRC will support Taiwan’s participation in international organisations as a member non-state entity. If such a designation is not allowed by the organisation’s rules then Taiwan will apply as a state but never style itself as such once admitted, always referring to its delegations as representing “Chinese Taiwan” (中华台湾).

Whenever someone posts these ridiculous headlines and doesn’t explain what the actual article is about, I find that around 80% of the time, the opinion presented is actually decently-made or more nuanced than initially assumed, and the title is just phrased that way for clicks.

I agree with you on that. Intelligence isn’t a stat point that someone is assigned at character creation. It’s the result of the educational opportunities and support that they had access to growing up.

I don’t think anyone has ever argued that nobody would ever be productive without pay. The concern is that not enough people would choose to be productive if they didn’t have to.

There seems to be a correlation between doing productive things for fun and higher intelligence and education. There is also a strong correlation between higher intelligence and holding left-wing views. Hence, the people posting these types of memes think that everyone would do what they would (be productive for fun). But ask some more… average intelligence people, and you will find that they’ll tend to say if they could just chill and play video games or scroll TikTok all day, that’s all they would do.

Could we continue to feed people even if work was made optional? At our level of the tech tree, probably. But people don’t just want to be fed, they like having computers and video games and houses and running water, all of which take a stupendous amount of labour to create and maintain, and I’m just not convinced that we could subside off volunteer labour for any society bigger than a few hundred people (which, not coincidentally, also tends to be about the maximum size of a left-wing commune)

The Polymarket rules are not laws. “Oops I broke the rules you caught me lol, looks like my crypto wallet’s banned now so I’ll have to make a new one in 5 seconds”

“It’s not gambling and it’s not an unregulated securities market. Think of it as a bribe to encourage political insiders to spill their secrets.”

Ah yeah, that’s a pretty good contender.

In general, we accept that the Government already knows who you are, how old you are, and where you live. That’s already a given. The purpose of a zero-knowledge age verification scheme is to allow a third party (not the Government) to be confident that a person is an adult, without being given any additional information or being able to deduce any additional information from what they’re given. So essentially, they get only 1 bit of information: whether the user is an adult (true/false). In practice, a perfect system is not possible, since the fact that you receive a response also means you get the answer to related questions, like whether the user possesses a Government-issued ID (obviously “true” if they can successfully complete the verification).

So, here’s how such a scheme might work. There are many possible implementations.

In the United States, we have (optional) digital ID cards. These are added to one’s digital wallet in a similar manner to payment cards and can be used for things like buying alcohol, getting through airport security, and driving. This digital infrastructure can be re-used.

1. An organisation which wants to perform digital identity verification generates a cryptographic key pair and registers the public key with a Government server ahead of time. The public key is published to a Government-run public keyserver.
2. A website who wants to verify a user’s age sends a verification request to a Government server, digitally signed with their private key. The server responds with a request ID, which is a random, but unique, string of characters.
3. The website provides this string to the user. The user copies the string.
4. The user opens their digital wallet, selects their ID card, and then opens the age verification feature. The user pastes the request ID into their digital wallet, which fetches information about the request from the Government server. Because the request which the request ID is associated with was signed using the organisation’s private key, the Government can tell the user who initiated the request.
5. The user is asked to confirm/deny the age verification request. If the user confirms the request, then a biometric will be required to access their private key (these are stored in the device’s keystore), sign the approval response, and then sent that response to the Government server. The Government server checks that the signature is valid and tied to the key associated with that ID before marking the verification request as completed.
6. After confirming, the user returns to the website and clicks a button which says “I’ve completed the verification.” The website then queries the request ID with the Government server (again, signing the request with their private key). The Government server responds with “completed” if the user has accepted the request, or “not completed” if the user has either not yet accepted the request or denied it.

What did they do?