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).

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?

It’s not Jesus that caused people to not listen to science. Humans are just naturally superstitious. Religion has existed in every human civilisation since the beginning of history. Even if Christianity never arose, humans would just be following some other religions.

I don’t live in Seattle, but the Costco locations near me also regularly have long queues. That rarely happens at other filling stations. There isn’t a shortage of gasoline currently; it’s just expensive.

My favourite scene in The Death of Stalin is when the rest of the Poliboro decided that they’ve had enough of Beria’s shit and have him shot after a ten-second “trial”.

It’s not a guarantee, but generally, digital ID systems live on the phone of one person only and require a screen lock to use. You’re right though, that there is nothing preventing someone else from borrowing another’s identity.

A more comparable situation would be if German shopkeepers had a habit of questioning French euro coins and regularly refused them by saying they’re valid only in France (even if that statement is wrong).

They may legally be worth the same, but the shopkeeper can choose to not accept them because they have the right to accept payment in any way they want. Just like a shop can refuse to accept a 500€ note when you’re only trying to buy a 1€ chocolate bar.

There is no such thing as a “Scottish pound” (unless you refer to the pound Scots, which was the currency of Scotland prior to its union with England). The currency of the United Kingdom is called sterling and the banknotes are all denominated in pounds sterling with currency sign GBP.

All banknotes of the pound sterling are issued by banks. By far the largest issuer of banknotes is the Bank of England, which is the central bank of the United Kingdom. It also happens to be the only banknote issuer in England and Wales.

In Scotland, some private banks are permitted to print their own banknotes. These banknotes are fully redeemable at the banks which issued them for Bank of England notes or for coins. This is what “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of £__” means. Within Scotland, notes issued by Scottish banks are generally regarded to be interchangeable with those issued by the Bank of England. It is always up to the merchant, anywhere in the UK, whether they wish to accept Scottish issued banknotes, or only Bank of England notes, or no banknotes at all (card payments only).

Many larger shops in England will recognise and accept Scottish banknotes. English banks will generally accept them for deposit. Smaller merchants may not recognise them and refuse them. Again, merchants are never legally obligated to sell you anything in exchange for your banknotes, regardless of who issued them.

MMP for me. Produces results which are broadly regarded as fair and easily to understand, but does not result in an excessively long ballot paper or confuse voters.

My city recently implemented single transferrable vote for local council elections. It resulted in voters receiving a ballot paper asking them to rank over a dozen candidates and the response to this by voters was quite negative because they felt that the process of intelligently researching and comparing that many candidates was unnecessarily laborious and people found the electoral system confusing.

Many people gave up and just marked a single candidate or got confused and didn’t bother voting at all. This was for an election where each ward returned three councillors. CGP Grey actually criticised implementations if STV where each constituency returns only three representatives, insisting it should be five, or more. In a world of short attention spans, we have to accept that asking people to research potentially 20 candidates and even just pick their top five will result in a large number of people getting frustrated and giving up.

It’s all well and good to have a system which is mathematically optimal in your view, but the problem is that elections also have to retain the confidence of the voters to be effective, and if voters cannot understand a highly-complex system then they will not have confidence in its fairness and will be easily tricked by people with ulterior motives who tell them it’s actually rigged against them.

The My Little Pony world seems idyllic if you are not a protagonist or subordinate of the designated evildoers. Pokémon residents, on the other hand, experience crime, disease, capitalism, and forced cockfights whenever you happen to walk in front of someone.

It is possible to construct a zero-knowledge proof using cryptography and adapting existing digital ID infrastructure. A user can prove that they have knowledge of a private key tied to an adult’s identification card without having to reveal the key, or the associated public key.

But that being said, whether something is possible and whether it is a good idea are two different questions.

It’s possible to construct an age-verification system that allows a user to verify they are over the age of 18 without divulging any other information whatsoever.

But that would defeat the point of “age” verification for these goons.