This is a serious suggestion, however blasphemous it may seem: Change your registration to Republican and then vote in the Republican primary for the most respectable person who is running. Changing your registration doesn’t cost anything and doesn’t affect anything. The Republican Party will also send you election material by post which you can simply discard or send back empty donation envelopes to waste their money on postage.
I’m not going to lie and say that this is someone who I would enthusiastically vote for, but based on her campaign website I think that’s still a decent candidate. Personally, I’m ideologically a social democrat and that candidate’s campaign statements smell a bit too liberal for me to get excited over it, but she seems passable. If that’s the best out of this year’s batch, then vote for them and start agitating for people who you think would do a better job to run in 2028.
This is to combat money laundering and tax fraud. I’ll give three examples.
I saw an episode of Border Security Australia where a woman has previously claimed a VAT refund on a pair of earrings worth tens of thousands of dollars. As you may know, many countries allow you to claim a refund of VAT on products intended for export, as VAT is intended to be a tax on consumption. But customs agents caught her wearing the earrings, meaning she had not actually exported them and essentially cheated the tax authority out of thousands of dollars in VAT.
Last year, during a trip to Hong Kong, my mother withdrew 20,000 USD in cash from her American bank and took it with her in person, and then deposited it in her Hong Kong bank account. It was just easier to do it this way since an international wire transfer would have been expensive and slow. She declared it to both US customs and Hong Kong customs, and in both cases they just checked her passport, noted down the transaction, and let her through with minimal questions. It’s intended to be an anti-money-laundering check. If that money has been obtained through crimes, most criminals would not willingly disclose that to customs, and it’s such a large amount of cash that anyone doing so must be trying to move money internationally and not just pay for a holiday. There is literally no penalty or tax and minimal hassle to declare it, so pretty much whoever is trying to sneak large amounts of cash or gold or whatever through customs is either (1) very ignorant or (2) up to no good. Further questioning usually allows customs agents to separate the first category from the second.
On the topic of China, there are strict capital controls in place to prevent wealthier Mainland Chinese individuals from moving all their money abroad. This policy is to encourage domestic spending and investment and it also has the effect of drastically lowering borrowing costs for the Chinese government. Moving large amounts of cash or gold in person is the most obvious way to evade these limits so Chinese customs has to take a strict stance against such behaviour in order to prevent China’s airports from becoming a massive hole in their capital controls. Being caught with undeclared cash provides an easy excuse for customs to confiscate the money in question, where the passenger can’t really argue over their guilt, since, again, anyone carrying such a large amount of cash pretty much has to know what they’re doing.
As leftists in America, we all must realise: This is our party, and we need to fight to win it back.
Your vote in primary election can often be more influential than your vote in the general election. And any campaigning activity you do in the party’s primary will be twice as impactful as activities during the general.
So, if you want change, there are two ways to go about it. You can either play along with the rules of the system and try to win control of it that way, or you can try to overthrow the system entirely.
But before you indicate your preference, let me first ask, though you need not answer: There are many people who say they’ll be a part of the revolution that overthrows the system. But are you actually working on this, or are you just waiting for it to happen? Are you working with the next Vladimir Lenin or Sun Yat-Sen right now, or are you just fantasizing about it?
Everyone wants change. What are you doing to create the future you want?
I think this is because they’ve already raised prices to the hilt in California. Consumers aren’t willing to pay more for fast food than they’re already charging.
Conviction in an impeachment trial needs 67 votes. They currently hold 45 seats. In order to get to 67, they’d need a clean sweep of all Senate races.
Politics in a nutshell:
Monday: Experts warn that Policy A will destroy the universe and eliminate 8 billion jobs
Tuesday: Government tables bill to enact Policy A
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
Their blog has a break-down of their expenses from August 2025. It’s about 1700€ per month, mostly for server-related costs.
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.
It would have made more sense if it was some random non-whole number because I’m pretty sure all popular floating-point systems can represent integers of that magnitude exactly.
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.
Riemann sphere has entered the chat