NateNate60
@NateNate60@lemmy.world
- Comment on Where has the tax money "saved" in uk austerity gone? 1 week ago:
The Sovereign Grant was some £86 million, which certainly sounds like a lot, but the reality is that heads of state are actually just really expensive no matter whether you have a republic or a monarchy. Maybe you could argue that a president could just quietly exist in the background while people expect a monarchy to be lavish and fancy, at least to a degree. There’s a lot of pomp and ceremony associated with the head of state, because they not only represent the government of a country but also serve as a cultural symbol for the nation as a whole.
For comparison, in the US, excluding the policy departments within the Executive Office, the White House Office and Executive Residence and presidential salary budget lines totalled almost $94 million in FY 2025. This does not include the cost of Secret Service protection (paid by the Department for Homeland Security) nor does it include the cost of Air Force One trips (paid by the Department of Defence). And while Brits complain about their monarch not having to pay tax, I think the fact that the American president, or at least the current one, cheats on his taxes is also a somewhat open secret.
I’m American and technically also British despite never having been there (I hold a type of second class citizenship through Hong Kong), and I honestly think £86 million is a bargain for the UK monarchy considering their cultural draw and the fact that they’re not just the head of state of the UK but a dozen other countries as well.
- Comment on Do gangs that collect protection money actually do any protecting? 1 week ago:
Did they (the gangs who asked for protection money) actually ever catch the people responsible or blamed to be responsible?
- Comment on YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States 2 weeks ago:
The idea is to have state-wide races where parties, not individuals, compete. Let’s take Washington State, as an example, because it has a nice and even 10 representatives. Instead of having district campaigns, you would have one big statewide election where each party puts up their best campaign, the people vote, and then the votes are counted on a statewide basis and tallied up. Let’s say the results are in and are as follows:
- Democratic Party: 40%
- Republican Party: 28%
- Libertarian Party: 11%
- Green Party: 8%
- Working Families Party: 6%
- Constitution Party: 4%
- Independents: 3%
For each 10% of the vote, that party gets allocated one seat. So Democrats get 4, Republicans get 2, and Libertarians get 1. The remaining 3 seats are doled out to whichever party has the largest remainder. So the Republicans and Greens with 8% get one more each, and the Working Families Party with 6% gets one. The Constitution Party and the independents will go home with zero seats.
The final distribution:
- Democrats: 4
- Republicans: 3
- Libertarians: 1
- Greens: 1
- Working Families: 1
There are two ways of determining which exact people get to actually go and sit in Congress: open list or closed list. A closed list system means that the party publishes a list of candidates prior to the election, and the top N people on that list are elected, where N is the number of seats won by the party. A simple open list system would be that everyone on that party’s list has their name actually appear on the ballot and a vote for them also counts as a vote for their party, then the top N people of that party with the most votes are elected, where N is the number of seats won by a party. In a closed list system, the party determines the order before the election (they can hold a primary). In an open list system, the voters determine the order on election day.
The main drawback of this system is that with a closed list system, the voters can’t really “vote out” an unpopular politician who has the backing of their party since that party will always put them at the top of the list, and open list systems tend to have extremely long ballot papers (if each party here stood the minimum of 10 candidates and 10 independents also stood, that would be 70 candidates on the ballot). It also forces the election to be statewide which means smaller parties can’t gain regional footholds by concentrating all their efforts on a small number of constituencies. Small parties in the US don’t tend to do this anyway, but it is a fairly successful strategy in other countries, like the Bloc Québécois in Canada or the Scottish National Party in the UK. That being said, a proportional system would still increase the chance that smaller parties have of obtaining representation. Small parties in the US have almost invisible campaigns but if they took it seriously, they’d only need to get 10% of the vote to win a seat, which on some years they almost do anyway even without a campaign.
The other drawback is that it eliminates the concept of a “local” representative (oddly-shaped and extremely large constituencies notwithstanding), so if a representative votes for a policy that is extremely unpopular in their constituency, it is less effective to “punish” them for it within that constituency as long as the candidate or their party is still popular statewide.
- Comment on Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet 2 weeks ago:
You can do that in the US as well, but it will cost more because you wouldn’t be agreeing to a fixed term. For example, my ISP charges $25 a month for 200 mb/s if you agree to a one-year term, but it’s $40 a month if you do not agree to a one-year term. And there’s also the added inconvenience of having to go to one of the ISP’s physical stores every month and put cash into their kiosk.
- Comment on Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet 2 weeks ago:
Not sure about what the norms are where you live, but most people in the US have to sign 1-year agreements for Internet service, and those who don’t typically either pay more or would pay before because they’re on a cheaper, older rate that is grandfathered in and is no longer offered by the Internet service provider.
- Comment on Tesla loses Autopilot wrongful death case in $329 million verdict 3 weeks ago:
Please read the article. I hate when people upvote bullshit just because it says things they like to hear. I dislike Elon Musk as much as anyone else, but the jury’s findings were this:
- The driver is ⅔ responsible for the crash because of his negligent driving.
- The fact that the driver did in fact keep his foot on the accelerator was accepted by the jury.
- The jury accepted that the driver was reaching for his cell phone at the time of the crash.
- Evidence in court showed that the speed of the car was about 100 km/h. Keep in mind that this incident occurred in the Florida Keys where there are no high-speed expressways. I couldn’t find info on where exactly this happened, but the main road in the area is US Route 1, which close to the mainland is a large four-lane road with occasional intersections, but narrows into a two-lane road for most of the distance.
- The jury found Tesla ⅓ liable because it deemed that it had sold a faulty product. For international readers, in the US, a company that sells a product which is defective during normal use is strictly liable for resulting damages.
- Obviously Tesla plans to appeal but it is normal for everyone to appeal in these sorts of cases. Many appeals get shot down by the appellate court.
- Comment on UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill 3 weeks ago:
Wireshark can’t but there are other methods, such as checking for the known OpenVPN protocol opcodes in the headers:
- Comment on UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill 3 weeks ago:
I don’t know how they update their IP list. My university is an American university which I believe has no ties to China, but I can’t say for sure. According to friends who use the clandestine OpenVPN services, they pay about 20 CNY a month and every month they are issued a new OVPN configuration file. Only occasionally do their servers get blocked before this, and then they have to issue new config files to everyone.
As for myself, I have been to China two times using the OpenVPN server that I deployed on a US-based VPS I rented from a German hosting provider. Each trip lasted about one month. So far, the IP has not been blocked. The government’s philosophy regarding the firewall and VPNs seems to be “make it as annoying as possible for the average uninformed layperson to bypass and go after people selling illegal VPNs, but otherwise, we don’t give a shit”.
Both times I was there, the firewall didn’t apply to cellular data because they do not apply the firewall to holders of foreign SIM cards using their cellular service. I purchased a SIM from a Hong Kong carrier (SoSim) with a few gigabytes of data in both Hong Kong and mainland China for 100 HKD. It worked fine, though I do note that surveillance laws meant that I had to upload my passport to activate the service. I’m not a big fan of that, so I kept the VPN connected at all times, though normally-blocked websites did indeed work on cellular data even without the VPN. I checked on my cell phone’s settings, and I know it connects to China Mobile towers when in mainland China. Note that China Mobile is owned by the Chinese state.
- Comment on UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill 3 weeks ago:
Attached below is a Wireshark trace I obtained by sniffing my own network traffic.
I want to draw your attention to this part in particular:
Underneath “User Datagram Protocol”, you can see the words “OpenVPN Protocol”. So anyone who sniffs my traffic on the wire can see exactly the same thing that I can. While they can’t read the contents of the payload, they can tell that it’s OpenVPN traffic because the headers are not encrypted. So if a router wanted to block OpenVPN traffic, all they would have to do is drop this packet. It’s a similar story for Wireguard packets. An attacker can read the unencrypted headers and learn
- The size of the transmission
- The source and destination IP addresses by reading the IP header
- The source and destination ports numbers by reading the TCP or UDP headers
- The underlying layers, up until the point it hits an encrypted protocol (such as OpenVPN, TLS, or SSH)
- Comment on UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill 3 weeks ago:
Take China for example. There is a common misconception that all VPNs are illegal in China. That’s not fully true. In China, VPNs are legal and must obtain a licence from the Ministry of Public Security, like all other online businesses. This also means that they have to agree to monitoring and censorship from the Government, so you can’t use legal VPN services to bypass the firewall in China.
- Comment on UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill 3 weeks ago:
The Great Firewall doesn’t block by protocol. If you set up your own OpenVPN server, you can still connect to it. I’ve done this many times in my trips to China, and it’s worked fine. That being said, they still do seem to throttle connections to international servers, though this happens to all servers, even those that are not blocked. There are many clandestine VPN operators in China who spin up their own VPN servers and sell the service. They are mostly OpenVPN-based.
My university used Cisco AnyConnect, and I was able to successfully connect to the university VPN servers as well.
The limited experimentation I have conducted seems to indicate that the Great Firewall blocks by IP and not by protocol.
- Comment on Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors 4 weeks ago:
Most of the large ones only take bank transfers and cryptocurrency now.
- Comment on Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors 4 weeks ago:
How’s this confusing? They’re a Puritanical group. They do Puritanical things. Literally nothing deep about it.
- Comment on Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share In USA 5 weeks ago:
Agreed. Gamers are probably one of the demographics which are most likely to care about the enshittification of their operating system, while most other users who only want Microsoft Office and their Web browser could not care less. The former can be swayed to endure a small amount of temporary inconvenience to switch while the latter will not.
- Comment on Uber Eats or something idk 1 month ago:
So what did you mean when you began your comment with “actually it’s the inverse”? Inverse of what?
- Comment on Uber Eats or something idk 1 month ago:
I’m a bit confused by what you’re trying to say here. It seems non sequitur if you are trying to say “borrowers of higher interest rate benefit less from inflation”.
- Comment on Uber Eats or something idk 1 month ago:
Your maths is not right. Inflation, in absolute terms, is a larger benefit to people with higher interest rates.
Let’s consider the scenario where inflation is 10% for simplicity, and two borrowers who each borrow $100, but Borrower A at 5% annual simple interest and Borrower B at 25% annual simple interest. Both borrowers borrow the money at the beginning of Year 0.
Borrower A owes $105 in Year 1 dollars at the beginning of Year 1. This is equivalent to $95.45 in Year 0 dollars.
Borrower B owes $125 in Year 1 dollars at the beginning of Year 1. This is equivalent to $113.64 in Year 0 dollars.
Compared to a 0% inflation rate, Borrower A saved 9.55 Year 0 dollars and Borrower B saved 11.36 Year 0 dollars. Borrower B saved 1.81 more Year 0 dollars than Borrower B due to inflation (but paid 17.55 Year 0 dollars more overall because of interest).
- Comment on Uber Eats or something idk 1 month ago:
Inflation reduces the real buying power of the money used to repay the loan by the inflation rate each year, regardless of your loan interest.
In absolute terms, inflation is better the higher your interest rate is, because the number of dollars it saves you goes up.
- Comment on ChatGPT 'got absolutely wrecked' by Atari 2600 in beginner's chess match — OpenAI's newest model bamboozled by 1970s logic 2 months ago:
One of my mates generated an entire website using Gemini. It was a React web app that tracks inventory for trading card dealers. It actually did come out functional and well-polished. That being said, the AI really struggled with several aspects of the project that humans would not:
- It left database secrets in the code
- The design of the website meant that it was impossible to operate securely
- The quality of the code itself was hot garbage—unreadable and undocumented nonsense that somehow still worked
- It did not break the code into multiple files. It piled everything into a single file
- Comment on TIL a single 25kg bag of flour now costs $1000 in Gaza. 2 months ago:
This seems strange to me. If everyone has accounts with the Bank of Palestine, then why did it turn into everyone demanding cash versus just paying each other with bank transfers through the Bank of Palestine?
But seeing that the Israelis are now trying to just starve the Palestinians out of Gaza, this just sounds like inflation with extra steps.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
I think one other factor that people have not considered is the monitor. To run all games at 4K maximum settings, yes, this type of PC might be required. But at lower resolutions, such as 1080p or 1440p, this is overkill and one would be able to run any game as maximum settings even with a computer costing a third as much.
- Comment on TIL a single 25kg bag of flour now costs $1000 in Gaza. 2 months ago:
What is “the app” that they are talking about?
- Comment on YSK that after leaving power, Margaret Thatcher became a lobbyist for tobacco companies 2 months ago:
Let me put it this way. Lemmy infamously only has four topics that people post about:
- Politics
- Linux
- Star Trek
- Porn
Any community that isn’t about topics 2 to 4 will eventually become one about topic 1.
- Comment on YSK that after leaving power, Margaret Thatcher became a lobbyist for tobacco companies 2 months ago:
I’m not speaking for anyone but myself. I view this post as an example of a very persistent problem with Lemmy as a platform. Namely, that it seems only have four topics that people ever post about:
- Politics
- Linux
- Star Trek
- Porn
There’s nothing inherently wrong with posting about these topics but it really seems like whenever there exists a community isn’t about topics 2-4, people will make it about topic 1.
- Comment on YSK that after leaving power, Margaret Thatcher became a lobbyist for tobacco companies 2 months ago:
Yeah, okay. But anger doesn’t make my life better. If I’m browsing this community I expect tips that can potentially improve the quality of my life, not just finding out about more mud on a dead 20th century dirt bag politician to be angry about.
- Comment on YSK that after leaving power, Margaret Thatcher became a lobbyist for tobacco companies 2 months ago:
Why are you posting this in YSK? How does this information improve anyone’s life in any way?
There is literally no-one here who doesn’t already think Thatcher was a piece of shit.
- Comment on Catbox.moe got screwed 😿 2 months ago:
You’re being downvoted because your assertion that hosts are responsible for what users upload is generally false.
(1) Treatment of Publisher or Speaker.—No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2) Civil Liability.—No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in [subparagraph (A)].
47 USC § 230c, a.k.a. Communications Decency Act 1996 § 230
- Comment on Catbox.moe got screwed 😿 2 months ago:
Hash matching is really easy to get around. Literally modify 1 bit of the image or just re-encode the video and you’ve gotten around it.
- Comment on Speak American 2 months ago:
I think you’re overthinking it slightly.
- French flag represents the language called "French"
- Spanish flag represents the language called "Spanish"
- Russian flag represents the language called "Russian"
- German flag represents the language called "German"
- Portuguese flag represents the language called "Portuguese"
- Japanese flag represents the language called "Japanese"
- Korean flag represents the language called "Korean"
- Chinese flag represents the language called "Chinese"
- Italian flag represents the language called "Italian"
- But somehow, the British flag doesn’t represent a language called “British”, but rather, one called “English”, despite there existing an English flag
- Comment on Speak American 2 months ago:
Scottish people having to click on a British flag knowing it will display English (there is a perfectly good flag for England that people refuse to use 🏴)
