Shall we make predictions? I predict that Judge Merchan will sentence him to prison, and after only a few days in prison he will have "committed suicide" when the cameras were strangely not working.
The US has been the dominant empire for along time, the power center of the world. If power indeed attracts corruption, then we should see corruption in the United States. But we don't. Everything is normal and fair. Audits of the Pentagon add up properly, right to the last dollar. Weapons sent to allies are used strictly for war and not sold on black markets. Justice is equally apportioned and justice is blind. The media reports only the facts. The government just wants what is best for you. The Trump conviction was just normal justice playing out, a criminal getting his just treatment. Joe Biden was never charged because he is a sweet and completely innocent dear old man.
.... do you see how ridiculous that sounds? It's hard for me not to just roll on the floor laughing that there are still people that believe such tripe.
When I first read 1984, the idea of the "memory hole" seemed so ridiculous I thought it was George Orwell's biggest screw up. That couldn't happen because people's memories would remember, you can't change the memory in their brains! So why would the official stories change? It wouldn't work to change people's perceptions.
But alas it was his most prescient and accurate prediction.
I haven't heard Trump say anything in years (I'm in NZ) and yet I totally get where Jeff is coming from. So I don't think this is coming out of Trump's rhetoric. You might want to revisit that assumption.
Voting for the candidate that ends the corrupt system sooner isn't a bad strategy at this point in the downward spiral. Although he'll probably just get assassinated by the CIA (nostr will remember this prediction).
Ok after this Trump conviction, nobody in the Untied States ever gets to say Russia and/or China are corrupt (compared to the USA) without me laughing in their face. The series of corrupt, immoral, war criminal, and unjust moves made by the US is beyond staggering at this point and people seriously cannot be so dumb as to still believe in American exceptionalism or America as the steward of the principles of the enlightenment. People who still think America is great are delusional, clinging on to familiarity and hope and memories.
Who, Americans? Just be aware of it.. Don't expect your government to treat you according to the law. Use self-defense tactics like anonymity, encryption, bitcoin, etc. Hide everything. Privacy. Just because you aren't doing anything wrong, that means nothing. They will convict you for things you weren't doing wrong if they don't like the cut of your jib.
Or exit like I did.
I agree. I've thought so for two decades now. At first I thought it would be revolution, a civil war. Now I think it will probably be rebuilt after WW3, but it remains to be seen by who and how corrupt they will be. Probably every country was always corrupt, and my younger self was only naive.
I also have hope for a distributed and voluntary form of partial government, starting as a society (maybe a secret society) that evolves over time. But that seems so far off and intractable that the hope isn't very great.
Lawyers I trust (who aren't Trump fans) say that he didn't, and that the case was ridiculous on multiple fronts. Lawyers like Glenn Greenwald, Jonathan Turley, Alan Dershowitz (not that I don't think he is an asshole in other regards). Dershowitz said this case will change the justice system forever, that now it will be used as a political tool to bring suits where no crime was committed as a way to punish political dissidents. The weaponization of the legal system is complete.
I don't think there is a mechanism to undo this damage other than amending the constitution, which won't happen for many good reasons.
Beyond this story of an administration wrongfully prosecuting their political opposition in show trials (we had a few earlier, remember the two impeachements)? ..I'm just now reminded of the suspicious deaths of two whistleblowers who blew the whistle on America's manufacturing giant Boeing whose planes keep breaking. Reminds me of stories in the 80's that invariably only came out of "shit hole" countries.
If those were the only two pieces of information I knew, I would use Occam's razor to presume Trump was guilty of a crime.
But if those are the only two pieces of information you know, then you are massively out of touch and ignorant, and you probably shouldn't opine about an issue when you are so ignorant about it.
That was rhetorical too.
a Relay Test Suite is in the works...
I've already got ideas for 94 tests and as I write these tests they expand out into even more tests.
I hoping that exposing relay behavior will drive relay software towards consistently supporting the same way of doing certain things, and that this will help nostr compatibility.
Tests include things like:
* Can the public write events?
* Can an authenticated person write somebody else's events?
* Does the relay respond to minimally constrained filters?
* Does limit 0 give an EOSE?
* When you write an event and get OK-true, can you read it directly back?
* Does limit behave properly when a filter has multiple pubkeys and multiple kinds?
* Does it require AUTH to read DMs and giftwraps?
* When submitting a replaceable event, are the prior events replaced?
* When submitting a replaceable event with newer ones already present, is it rejected or ignored?
* Does deletion of a replaceable event preserve the events that are newer than the deletion event?
* Does it prompt for auth initially?
* How large of an event can it handle?
* Does it verify signatures?
* How does it react to invalid UTF8?
* Does it handle all JSON escape codes? What about surrogate pairs?
* Does it preserve field order in events?
* Does it preserve fields in events not defined by the nostr spec?
* How many subscriptions does it allow simultaneously?
* Do events with negative created_at values work? What about exponential notation? What about numbers that won't fit in a u64?
... that kind of thing.
If you want to help contribute, even if you just have an idea of what to test, come on over to https://github.com/mikedilger/relay-tester and give feedback, open an issue, or better yet submit a PR.
What about the other things I'm working on?
* Gossip is on pause while we wait for the UI developer to handle some personal affairs, then we will have annotations and NIP-17 DMs.
* Chorus is stable and upgraded to use Pocket
* Pocket has been completed and is stable too, but I haven't tried to make it useful outside of the scope of a relay yet.
Very cool. I might use you then. I haven't tried setting up the other relays besides nostr-rs-relay and chorus.
FYI The tester is designed to test a relay software implementation, not a live running relay, because:
1. It might crash a live relay,
2. It will put a lot of junk events into the relay, and
3. it might get false results if it ends up finding events it didn't inject
But I'm sure someone will ignore that recommendation.
This "will be" amazing.
Those tests aren't written yet. It only does 18 tests so far, the rest are placeholders, and I'm still doing major refactors which are much easier with less tests.
I waited about a year for somebody else to do it and eventually got tired of waiting. Then when I started thinking about tests I couldn't stop. I couldn't sleep I kept getting up and writing down more test ideas.
@Иван do you feel mobilized? Are you working as if you are on the frontlines? Only this way will we achieve the goals we have set in front of us. Any other way to work in this modern conditions are prohibited. 🙄
Back a few generations ago people had lots of kids. My grandmother was pregnant 18 times and had 16 kids (one stillborn, one died before being named). To the Catholics, every sperm is sacred I guess.
Israel never accepted the native people going way back to 1948. They refuse to recognize their rights, lest they vote against the Jews. They just keep them in walled areas with no rights, and militarily (and economically) enforce that they cannot establish a government for themselves. This didn't start on October 7, it has been going on for 70 years. As the natives outnumber the immigrant Jews, they "mow the lawn" to protect against any possible future where the Palestinians might happen to acquire voting rights. What is going on in Rafah is more lawn mowing. They probably won't wipe them all out, but they apparently gleefully wipe some of them out, and giggle about making them pick up their tents and move to another "safe area". Sick.
“How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin." - The Lord (Genesis 18:20)
When I say "Immigrant Jews" I mean all the descendants of the Jews that immigrated there. The definition of a "Palestinian" is anybody ethnically native to the region.
If you add up all the people whose ancestors came from that region, the Palestinians, you get 7,031,698. If you add up all the people calling themselves Jews you get 7,181,000. That's my point. The Jews maintain the population of non-Jews to be strictly less than 50% via bombs.
In 20 years people won't even have signs like this. These will morph into "Follow us on nostr" and then "Follow us on the Internet", and after that it will be just obvious and not need a sign.
The protocol handles this already. It's up to clients if they want to expose that information to the users. Amethyst does it. I plan to add it to gossip eventually.
Taking out 2 of 10 of Russia's nuclear early warning defense systems (especially ones very deep in Russia) doesn't sound like the right targets for Ukraine to be hitting. I'm aware of what Ukraine is "claiming" but I don't buy it. Article here: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-drone-targets-russian-early-warning-radar-record-distance-kyiv-source-2024-05-27/
Are we sure the West isn't attempting to achieve nuclear first strike capability?
... and are you sure that you don't want to move to New Zealand or somewhere else outside of the beligerant countries, maybe just for the next 4 years or so until we see how this is going to play out?
Ukraine striking back inside of Russia makes perfect sense to me. And normally I wouldn't differentiate or comment as long as the targets were military targets. I just expect them to take out the forces that are attacking them -- the weapons depots, air bases, launchers, that kind of thing. Even if it was civilian infrastructure that was critical to the military operation like roads or bridges it would make sense to me as a normal part of war.
And radar normally counts as fair targets too.
But taking out Russia's early warning nuclear defense radar.... that's where my spider senses start tingling. Are those the military assets that threaten Ukraine the most? I don't think so. Those are the ones that protect Russia and that maintain the nuclear stalemate that is keeping all of us alive. This bodes far worse than anything I've ever heard before.
Yes I've heard it many times, but listening to this performance it felt like the first time. I actually leaned forward several times and thought OMG I never heard it that way before (like the lead violin at 8:02). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuMtEof9MWs
Heard this one from a comedy show online:
The UK has had Boris, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, they're talking about getting Penny Mordaunt in, then she'll lose and it will be Kiar Starmer... it will be 5 prime ministers in 2 years. Downing Street is the political equivalent of snapchat now: a sequence of rapidly disappearing dicks.
It appears though that if your activity benefits the general public like open source software, and all funds are used to pay running costs and not distributed as profits, then you are engaged in a "not-for-profit" activity, you don't need to file Schedule S or Schecule SE and you don't need to pay self-employment tax. That's how I'm reading it (so much reading! I hate taxes).
Generally I claim the foreign earned income exclusion and pay $0 to the US. But IF I am self-employed and owe self-employment tax (and I haven't determined that yet), then I owe that and I can't exclude it, not even via the double-tax treaty (US-NZ doesn't have a social security treaty). But if I am engaged in a not-for-profit activity (even without being a US 501(c)(3) this can still apply) then the income is treated differently.... and I think it applies since open source software benefits everybody, not just me, and the grant covers my living expenses and was even paid by a 501(c)(3) as living expenses to a grantee. So now I'm going down this instruction at the top of Schedule C: "For example, a sporadic activity, a not-for-profit activity, or a hobby does not qualify as a business. To report income from a nonbusiness activity, see the instructions for Schedule 1 (Form 1040), line 8j"
Did I mention yet that I hate doing my taxes?
Digging into this again to get you a reference and it looks like I am wrong. There is a mark-to-market regime, but (1) I don't qualify under the 3 tests, and (2) even if I did there is a $600,000 reduction and an $821,000 exclusion.... looks really complicated to work out though... but worth it to stop filing US taxes.
Yes Russia invaded and is occuping Ukraine. But if people really took the moral high ground seriously as implied by this statement, and applied this principle uniformly, then all the occupations should be resisted including supporting...
Funding for Moldova in order to expel Russia
Funding for Georgia in order to expel Russia
Funding for Syria, in order to expel the United States, Israel and Turkey,
Funding for Palestine in order to expel Israel
Funding for Cyprus in order to expel Turkey
Funding for Azerbaijan and Armenia in order to expel each other
Funding for Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in order to expel Morocco
This day at sunset after having built a fire I poured a small alcoholic beverage and looking out the window at the sky I toasted the day. I thanked God that I could live for one more day and thought back over what I had done today. And it makes me think "Were those good choices? Do I feel great about this day because I .... finished NIP-17 DMs? Yes. Sorted my food storage? Yes. Watched YouTube videos? Not so much."
Anyhow, I think it might be a good idea to do this every sunset.
Gruel was the staple food of the ancient Greeks, for whom roasted meats were the extraordinary feast that followed sacrifice, even among heroes, and "In practice, bread was a luxury eaten only in towns".
Roman plebeians "ate the staple gruel of classical times, supplemented by oil, the humbler vegetables and salt fish", for gruel could be prepared without access to the communal ovens in which bread was baked.
In the Middle Ages, the peasant could avoid the tithe exacted by paying in grain ground by the miller of the landowner's mill. When eaten by the peasant, the process was to roast the grains to make them digestible, and grind small portions in a mortar at home. In lieu of cooking the resulting paste on the hearthstone, it could be simmered in a cauldron with water or, luxuriously, with milk.
I've implemented "annotations" which mark a reply. Any reply by the same author as the parent with the tag "annotation" gets rendered inside the note.
It's not live because I'm waiting on the UI team. But IMHO this is the solution, eventually, when everybody else does it too.
I miss green chiles in a can. No such thing in NZ. Carl's Jr used to make a Sante Fe chicken sandwich but they don't make them here in NZ anymore.
But I think @BTC_P2P is plant free
Yeah, the image only goes up to 2022. I think the RMB usage shot up a lot in 2023 as you are saying. I wonder how that effects the totals, given that China is most countries largest trading partner.
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