> We have been hearing these same predictions about the national debt for almost 100 years ... the argument is fundamentally flawed. Mostly because it ignores things like economic growth, inflation and the value created by whatever the debt buys.

The fiat system has collapsed a few times, do you know anything about Brazil or Zimbabwe?

I don't think gold is a magic solution here, or returning to that standard would fix everything, but you do need some level of balance between the amount of currency and the things there are to buy with it and we damn near broke it during Covid with the mass inflation there. So I wouldn't be too cavalier that this could never happen, even as I don't think it's in any immediate danger.

But remember: there won't be a US dollar to peg the US dollar to if we screw it up and that's the only way Brazil got out of its mess in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, you can get $100 trillion Zimbabwe dollars for $3 USD.

> It's a useless technology anyway

I hope this quote someday goes on to be as infamous as "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." but Slashdot probably isn't relevant enough for that any longer.

Yeah, because the customers don't want anything else. Itch.io is great ... if you want random indie stuff. GOG seems to have no idea what to recommend and you either get games from 1992 or hentai VNs with a porn patch so they're not technically selling the porn, with little that's actually interesting.

If they ever want to do that, they should hire Kitboga. He made a digital maze where a bunch of scammers are still looking for some bitcoin that doesn't exist by solving captchas, waiting on hold in ridiculous phone trees, etc.

This is what I did. They're basically indestructible and once I learned how they worked, I haven't needed anything else. They also seem to be easier to clean than the old nonstick pans. Oh, and they give you a little extra iron in your food.

> "Art" that is created by a non-scient, non-sapient entity, that has neither an idea what it is doing nor an artist's intention is by definition not art.

This is how I feel about the banana duck taped to the wall.

We should ask it what the fox says.

You can see this process at work right now in Moldova or Georgia. And of course, the Crimean operation was such a success, with such a feeble response from the west, that Putin just decided to take the whole country.

Utter nonsense. When the Soviet Union broke up, the west gave Russia a complete do-over, wiping the slate clean, with an invitation to join the community of nations as a full partner. But they went with corrupt oligarchs and decided to appoint a new Czar for life, who then apparently decided he wanted their old territories back. No one wanted Russia as an enemy, until they started down the path of rebuilding their old Russian empire again by violent means.

They had a chance at redemption, and they decided to throw away their future on an old man's dream of reforming a long-dead empire. NATO is a absolutely a defensive alliance, however much Russian shills want to deny it. There is zero danger to Russia from NATO member states, and they damn well know it too, or their wouldn't have stripped their defenses along their borders to toss still more troops into the fires of the Ukraine war.

All Russia has done recently is to convince the world that they will never change their imperialistic spots. They're still stuck in an 18th century mindset of believing they deserve their old empire back - that "Russia has no borders."

> Even if the hardware is already firewalled away from the public internet.

Then just use an internal CA that signs the certs for as long as you want? Why even get a public CA cert for that, if you control everyone talking to it?

This is completely true, we have a lot of people now saying the first amendment needs modifications so they can censor people they think are wrong, including Hillary Clinton who said "we lose total control" if they don't do this. Problem is a lot of people only ever supported the first amendment because it was helpful to them at the time.

> my addon was blocked just because of a "trigger word" inside a comment. When I removed the problematic word, it was accepted, without any functional change. (No, it was not a racist slur or anything similar ;-)).

What was the word, "master"?

> I'm still waiting to see any evidence of such a secret order.

They're up on the AlexandreFiles along with English translations if you want to read them. I linked to an archive so that people censored can read them, but the originals are at https://x.com/AlexandreFiles though I note that X seems to require login to see anything.

> But Brazil has also criminalized reading X. If a Brazilian citizen is caught accessing X, they can be arrested or fined $9k per day, about half the median household income.

It's twice the minimum wage, per day, at R$50,000, which is a little under $9k USD. That said, they've at least backed off the fines for individuals.

The part that's really crazy is the original order was a secret order giving X just two hours to remove a list of accounts that includes a sitting Brazilian senator. So they were going to censor and make X take the blame for the STF's censorship.

That really doesn't sit well with me.