Exactly my point!

Well, it is technically “piracy” but it’s amateur piracy. No need to get fancy with torrents and VPNs or whatnot. Just download the software and… not pay.

I’ll add your snap if you can recite the full rules of Magic the Gathering

A reminder for context: it’s not summer yet in Antarctica. Summer doesn’t start until December. It’s still supposed to be cold.

This is a tragedy of history. That is all I will say on the matter.

I hope you realise that countries recognise the People’s Republic of China because it’s politically expedient. It’s lip service since the PRC government is easily offended. So for many countries, it’s easier to just play along, shut up, and let’s get to negotiating some lucrative trade deals instead. Public support among Western nations and their allies for Taiwan’s continued autonomous existence remains high despite their governments recognising it as a province of China. You don’t seem to understand how useful doublespeak is in international geopolitics. To pretend countries say what they mean and mean what they say is incredibly naïve.

Your behaviour is exactly why I filtered out Hexbear in my feed. There don’t seem to be any actual socialists on Hexbear, just people knee-jerkingly defending any country that claims to be socialist without any regard to whether they practice what they preach. Social democracies like the Nordic countries are way closer to socialism than modern China is, but all you have to do is point your finger and say “liberal” and Hexbear users start foaming at the mouth. I say this as a citizen of the People’s Republic of China and a socialist.

This conversation has reached its productive end.

I will cut to the chase here and say that the only reason for calling it “Taiwan Province” is if you are (1) a Chinese nationalist, (2) a Chinese propagandist, or (3) a person who got absorbed by (2). Nobody else in ordinary English discourse will refer to it as such. The typical usage is to call the Republic of China “Taiwan”. Its government calls itself the “Republic of China (Taiwan)”. Normal people call it “Taiwan”. Taiwanese people call it “Taiwan”. Don’t forget; the “free area” of the Republic of China has two nominal provinces—Taiwan and Fuchien.

ISO standards are dry and mechanical, and most importantly, not designed to supplant everyday usage by humans. That is unless you also tend to write the date as 2023-10-03 and not the far more common “3 October 2023” or “October 3, 2023”. The ISO standard refers to Taiwan Province, which is a province of the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China, however, neither province has a government and neither makes decisions on its own.

The common name for the area controlled by the Republic of China is “Taiwan”. “Taiwan Province” is a Chinese nationalist dog whistle and there is nothing you can say to get around this fact.

I would like to remind you that there does not exist any political entity called “Taiwan Province”. The Republic of China abolished its provincial governments and the People’s Republic of China doesn’t even bother to maintain a shadow government.

Taiwan’s (the Republic of China’s) alliance with the United States and general defence strategy has a few key factors:

• Taiwan is counting on maintaining a key role in the United States’ high-tech economy. One where, if the island of Taiwan were to fall under the control of the mainland, American economic interests would be severely damaged. The existence of semiconductor factories in America doesn’t affect this calculus too much as long as a critical mass of manufacturing stays in Taiwan. In fact, tying Taiwan’s economy to the United States is beneficial because it means the pain of separating it will be greater, and hopefully the fear of such pain will make the Americans want to protect them.
• Taiwan believes that its location is of strategic importance to the United States’ South Asian military interests. If the island falls under mainland control, it would mean that the US military can no longer access the large amount of airspace surrounding the island and would lose access to the island’s naval facilities.
• Taiwan thinks that it can make a war with the mainland so costly for the latter that it would not make economic sense to invade. This is unrelated to the US; ideology takes a backseat to making money almost anywhere in the world and the Taiwanese know this.
• Taiwan thinks it can rely on popular and government support in America to defend it in the event of an invasion. Public support for Taiwan’s continued autonomous existence is quite high in the US and even Joe Biden’s sometimes erratic comments about the topic are enough to make leaders in Beijing think twice before invading. The Americans are unpredictable and they don’t want to leave it up to a roll of the dice.

The Google front page is no longer plain HTML but apparently, they spent a lot of time optimising the logo so it could load in less than a second on a dial-up connection. It’s still remarkably plain when compared to other search engines though.

I like using email client software instead. It just uses Gmail as a backend and the inbox looks however I want it to look.

Plus, it works while offline on the train or with Amtrak’s shitty WiFi

Raw HTTP with no protection is as dangerous as the activity implied by this innuendo.

Hey, they even have an old-school tracker-free static advertisement image on that page. Now that’s a classic.

This is a straight-up national security issue for Taiwan. Its chip factories are an integral part of its defence strategy and it needs to be able to use them as leverage to survive.

If you think studying literature is to teach you literature, you’re sorely mistaken. Similar to if you think you study mathematics to learn mathematics.

You are taught literature so you can better communicate with other people. What is the author’s intention with this passage? What are they trying to say? What might their motivations be? Now apply this to a letter from a potential business partner or a politician’s tweet and you might begin to see how what you were taught becomes relevant.

Why are you taught grammar? Who cares whether you use the Oxford comma or not? Who has the need to know what mood, theme, and figurative language are? Apply this in the context of trying to write a professional email to your boss or trying to tell a story to engage other people, and maybe you’ll start to see that it wasn’t worthless.

Why do we need to know the way to prove that the angles of a triangle add up to 180? Who needs to know the Quadratic formula and how to apply it? It’s so you know how to think rationally and apply logic rigourously, so you don’t fall into familiar logical traps that we see on the evening news and the Internet every day.

Why do you need to know how cells reproduce? Why do we need to know how the pH scale works? It’s so when people on Facebook claim that vaccines erase your DNA or that alkaline water prevents cancer, you’ll know better.

I think the balance between “sovereign communities”, benevolent (?) dictatorships with one super-admin, or democratic collectives needs to be found. Ultimately this is something that needs to be hammered out, but any solution would be better than none.

Three possible solutions (just spitballing, not much thought put into them):

• What I described before as “federated collectives”. New communities can join a collective by asking the others. Maybe there will be a user-weighted vote on this or some other governance mechanism, or maybe it will be consensus-based. Communities can be kicked out of collectives by the same mechanisms or leave on their own. The collective can decide whether mutual mod actions are allowed or not.
• “Colonial-style” relationships. One “empire” community has powers over other “colony” communities. The empire’s mods can (maybe) perform mod actions on colony communities but not vice versa. Colonies can declare independence or the empire can kick them out. Colonies can join only by asking the empire to accept them.
• “Roman Republic collectives”: Mods (or active users?) of communities elect a board of prefects for the collective. Prefects (maybe) get mod powers on all communities. The prefects can vote to accept new communities or kick others out. Maybe they can get other management powers too. The “benevolent dictatorship” case is just a special case of Roman Republic where the number of prefects is 1

Of course, in all cases, an instance refusing to honour the powers of governance authorities would be interpreted as the instance admins withdrawing the community from the collective. Sort of like automatic defederation.

Make it like a collective: mods can remove their community from a federated collective if they want. Mods can only moderate stuff posted on their community, not in other communities in the collective. But unified rules or just some space for text in a collective will make it seem much nicer and coherent even if it is still a bunch of different communities behind the scenes.

They are not. I do not refer to the package called “LibreOffice”. If you search for “office” on the Windows Store, you’ll see a bunch of LibreOffice clones that are not branded as such and are not free of charge or contain advertisements.