The noun doesn’t matter after an adjective like ‘multiple.’ Nothing good ever follows ‘multiple.’

-Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

Yes, she said that. But what she said there just doesn’t make any sense.

I thought she made some very good points, but the quote in the title makes no sense to me.

It always comes down to transubstantiation versus consubstantiation.

-Lisa Simpson

I don’t think that the whole transubstantiation issue is big for Catholics, in practice. But they are supposed to believe that during mass, bread and wine literally turn into the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. Protestants have a slightly different take. Maybe it only becomes an issue in the context of the British domination of Ireland. I’m not sure, but at least in some Protestant/Anglican circles the Catholic belief was/is considered barbaric. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation#Anglicanism

Maybe it’s derived from 19th century Anglicanism, when there were poor houses and Famine Roads?

Side note: As a neutral person (ie atheist), I find the retelling of the “feeding of the multitude” rather dubious. The anti-welfare message isn’t there. It’s a common conservative talking point in the US, that government welfare makes people dependent. The thing about eating Jesus is from elsewhere. It doesn’t belong in that story. The author adapted these pieces from the bible and made inserted their own teachings.

It’s funny how little connection there is between scripture and actual teachings. For abortion, they bothered to change the text.

Interesting take. There’s the standard conservative anti-welfare message, but also very old-fashioned anti-catholicism. I guess this is from a conservative US version of Protestantism. But which denomination exactly? Or is that standard fare for evangelicals these days?

Link to bill (SB-1047):

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB1047

But it’s not “from each according to his ability”. FOSS is what people feel like contributing. And it’s not “to each according to their need”. It’s take it or leave it, unless someone feels like fulfilling requests.

Traditionally, the slogan meant a duty to work. Contributing what you feel like is just charity.

Capitalism, at its core, is private control of the capital. Copyright law turns code into intellectual property/capital. I’ve read the argument that copyleft requires strong copyrights. That argument implicitly makes copyleft a feature of capitalism. You know how rich people or corporations sometimes donate large sums to get their name on something, EG a hospital wing? That’s not so different from a FOSS license that requires attribution.

Oh! Look how happy those little girls are! Probably because they just learned that Stay-At-Home-Mom isn’t the only acceptable career for a woman.

Der Ursprung der Farben ist unklar, soweit ich weiß. Diese Interpretation ist von Ferdinand Freiligrath, der diese Zeilen anlässlich der Revolution 1848 schrieb. Wurde auch beim Reichsbanner gesungen.

*Pfosten

Pulver ist schwarz, Blut ist rot, golden flackert die Flamme.

I used to be horrified and outraged. Now I just think it’s hilarious. No problem, cause you got the 2nd amendment, right? You can get all the health care you need by just holding up a hospital. Haha.

I have learned that whenever something doesn’t make sense about the US, it is racism. When segregation was declared unconstitutional, the southern states vowed “massive resistance”. The baddies can also riot and mobilize civil society. They privatized what they could to thwart the overreach of the tyrannical government. People are naturally selfless, in that they are willing to suffer to hurt the right people. I fear this insanity is also spreading in Europe, as people are becoming aware of immigration. People do not vote in their own interest if it might benefit “the other”, but they do vote against it if it might hurt “the other”.

Of course, rational self-interest is also a factor. The US spends ~17% of its GDP on health care, compared to ~13% in Germany on second place. This is despite the fact that it has a younger population and does not cover everyone. So, yeah, those evil corporations again. But, maybe not just “them”. That’s also a lot of white collar jobs and you can see in AI threads how people feel when those are threatened.

You don’t have to be a Hugh Hefner to reject fascism.

True. Freedom of speech and of the press is a peculiarly American thing. In virtually all other countries… No, wait. That’s the 2nd amendment. What were we talking about?

Good one. You want to lock people up but people who believe in the first amendment are creepy. Nice spoof of moral panic populism.

Yeah, fraud used to be such a fun pastime for the whole family. Now we need to regulate it. Technology ruins everything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_regulation_in_the_United_States

What I don’t want in charge, is a shadowy cabal of a few rich people only bound to the maximization of their own profit.

I’m not paying extra to remove what little democratic control there is in the existing system.

It cannot be cheaper, other than by avoiding taxes and regulation.

Consider sending money from US Dollar to Euro:

Sane way: An intermediary (IE a bank) handles this. You give them USD and they give the receiver Euros. This involves some service costs and 2 bank transfers.

Because people exchange money in both ways, the banks need not run out of either Euro or USD. In the background there is the currency market, on which the proper exchange rate is haggled out, which takes care of imbalances in cash flow.

Crypto way: You give a crypto exchange (an intermediary) USD and they give you crypto. This already involves 2 transfers and service costs. One of those 2 transfers is a crypto transfer, which is much more expensive (IE uses more resources) than a bank transfer.

This is already more expensive and then you have to do the same thing again to cash out.

And then we are still not done. Say there is an imbalance in that more people transfer money from USD to Euro than vice versa. That means that crypto becomes more expensive in USD and cheaper in Euro. There’s more demand in terms of USD and more supply for Euro, right?.

That creates an arbitrage opportunity. You can exchange USD for Euro, and then buy crypto for Euro to sell for USD. This closes the circle and puts everything back to the initial state. But to do that, we still have to exchange the real currencies. So now the markets bake the cost of exchanging currency into the crypto prices. At a guess, for some currencies (probably not so much Euro/USD), that would have a significant effect. I’m thinking smaller, poorer countries that send many migrant workers, who send money back home. These workers would not only end up paying the insane overhead of the crypto system, but also, still, most of the normal, direct exchange costs (if they relied on crypto).

The point in OP is that “blockchain” was not a new thing. The Merkle Tree was patented in 1979, meaning that it has been free for decades. Most programmers might never have a use for it but they still encounter it every time they use git (which is older than bitcoin).

So, if you’re not aware of this, that’s because it is very technical and nothing to do with cryptocurrencies.