psycotica0

Hmmm... for reasons I cannot justify my brain is telling me the equivalent for "my man, you really blah blah blah" should be "madame, you really blah blah blah"

Though I agree you can't correct someone by being like "ahem, it's madame actually" 😛

To be fair, as a native English speaker from Canada, I don't know what the heck is going on with the South African accent.

Half the time I can't even recognize it (likely just due to lack of exposure), so when I hear someone speaking with an accent that's kinda like Australia and New Zealand, but isn't quite right for either of those, I think "must be South African"... 😅

This is also why taking about a country's debt is often more complicated than people think. Because when I go into debt on my credit card or whatever, that's bad because the credit card company starts feeding on me.

But when a properly functioning government goes into debt, it's to me! What I get out of it is a bridge or train or something now, greater economic opportunities associated with that, and then also I get my money back later with interest, so it gives me a reliable way to grow my own money. Or, like I said, for banks or investment firms on my behalf to use these tools as some of the tools in the box to grow both my and their money.

It's only a problem when the debt gets to the point that it doesn't seem like the country will be able to pay it. Or, similarly, when the investment in infrastructure doesn't produce enough extra value to fund this repayment.

But again, when a government is in debt, it's in debt to investors who are using that debt to grow their money while the (well-functioning) government is using the money to grow the country.

This is the problem any time the news talks about countries' debts.

The answer is others of us. The government wants to build a canal or something, but they don't have room in their budget. So, they make some bonds that say we give them $100 today, they give us $105 in 5 years, and a bunch of people buy them and now they can finance their project.

And who are they in debt to? Us, the people who bought the bonds and who they have to pay back later.

And if some of the buyers if that investment was China, then you could say the government is in debt to China. Sometimes if just normal Chinese people buy it, the news will report the government is in debt to China, or "owned by China", even though it just got some money and owes some money to normal Chinese citizens who just took a solid-looking investment.

And if one person buys such investments from two countries, or is part of a mutual fund that does, then perhaps they may own hundreds in dollars of debt from two countries.

So I assume in this case they took the debts of various countries and added them up. But the answer of who the governments are all in debt to is us, normal people, and also banks and investors and other governments, etc.

There's an app I've never used but heard of: https://adresilo.com/

I think the way it works is that it queries Google's API for locations, proxies through them, but it can't show them on a map due to Terms of Service, but it can provide links that will then open in any map app of your choice.

The app is open source, but the DB is obviously Google. So it's trying to blur that line of providing Open Source functionality, and using Open Source maps, with the practicality of "Google has all the stuff" UX problem.

At least I think...

XMPP/Jabber via a web client like movim.eu sounds like it ought to work!

You can also look into Snikket as a host for small groups like friends or family, but can continue to use the Movim web client even if you're hosting with Snikket rather than Movim itself.

I'm not 100% deep on the crypto, but my understanding is they use blind signatures (which have been around for a long time) to do their issuing. If you're unfamiliar, these are kinda like an envelope with a hole cut in it, so you can put a document in it with a hidden unique key, and they can see some info through the hole, and can stamp their signature through the hole to validate that it's legit without knowing the hidden info.

Then the user can remove it from the envelope (unblind) and now have a certified valid coin without the issuer knowing which coin is theirs.

So in the context of an ATM, the ATM wouldn't "issue" coins, it would be given a request for coins from your wallet, it would certify the validity of that request, and then give your wallet back that certification in such a way that the wallet could unblind it and have the anonymous secret. So ultimately your wallet is the one that's in charge of producing the unique parts.

It seems there's also a system for making sure you don't produce bad transactions by asking you to generate N, promping you to unwrap a bunch of them to prove there's nothing weird about them, and then signing one of the remaining ones under the assumption it's also legit. At least it sounds like it, but I'm even less familiar with that part. But even if you did spoof someone else's secrets... it doesn't allow you to steal their money I don't think... because in order to have your transaction validated in the first place you had to truly give the ATM your money... so you could I guess pay $10 to screw over your friend for $10 because it'll look like they spent money they didn't... but you still spent $10... so it's less like stealing their money and more like paying to throw their wallet off a bridge? You don't gain anything, but they lose something? Maybe there's another exploit I don't know about in the like "renewal" or "refund" or "transfer" protocols that make that more important.

Anyway, I'm still not a Taler fan, but in this case I think it's possible to do what they claim. Now, if the bank or ATM or whatever asks for ID or an account to use their services, they could track that you withdrew money, and how much. That's data they can collect. The anonymous buyer part just means they can't tie the coin they issued you to a spent deposit they receive later. So they know you got $10 out, and they can assume you probably spent it, but they can't know what you spent it on.

If I could momentarily be a douchebag for a good cause: I've been to Japan and visited gardens there, and when I saw this photo I thought it was a photo from a place I've been in Japan, so this garden seems pretty legit to me! Beautiful!

You might actually like Taler, it's fundamentally different from blockchain based systems, to the point of being a cryptocurrency only in the technical sense, but not having any of the properties people associate with that word culturally.

Taler doesn't use any kind of proof of work, and so doesn't consume excess power or other resources, at least not more than, like, visiting any normal webpage. It's also not decentralized, and only partially anonymous, so I can acquire money anonymously and no one can trace the money I got to a particular spend, but the only place I can reasonably spend it has to be registered to the centralized issuer and is firmly not anonymous. And the only things they can do with the tokens they receive is redeem them, which means there's no place for tax evasion because the issuing authority can track every dollar the registered vendors redeem with them. And you can't really transfer money from random person to person, so there's no black market opportunity, etc.

So basically the only thing Taler "protects" is that the buyer's identity can be anonymous, but any vendor accepting Taler must not be and are highly trackable.

These are things I actually don't like about Taler, but we may be on opposite sides of a few issues, which is fair.

Who? Vivian's dad?

OpenOffice for all intents and purposes has been dead for a decade, but LibreOffice (included in the graphic) is a fork which remains active and has community and is the de facto successor.

There are things about it that are like Factorio, but also some philosophical differences.

Most obvious difference is that it's 3D and "pretty", whereas Factorio is 2D and brown. Which is fine! But this game gives you opportunities to stand on a cliff and look out over some plains and visit some non-hostile animals. You can also build upwards to create tall stacked factories.

On the flip side, what that first person perspective costs is that it's a lot harder to manage things as a guy running around inside and amongst the buildings compared to a zoomed out, top down, view. So the scale is never the same simply because it's unmanageable.

Also, unlike Factorio, there's a pretty sharp divide between the things you can assemble and the things you make in hand. Like, IIRC you never end up with factories that build buildings in Satisfactory. You have drills that collect resources, and factories that turn those resources into components, but all of the construction you do yourself. At least that's my recollection.