Strategic reserves are strategic. If your strategy is to crash the price of gold for a short period of time, then sure. It’s hard to see how society benefits from that though.

Also maybe microdots would be more effective. Not exactly pen and paper, but still analog. Hard to crack a code you can’t find.

Maybe something akin to a book code, although machine learning may be able to crack those by that time.

I am not a cryptographer so I have no idea really.

The Navajo did pretty well in WWII

Some people will have this on their phone and be irate when a FOSS app includes a crash report tracker.

Ave Maria. Twice.

What mention of religion should be removed? What is the region?

The article you posted noted that there was freedom of movement before the first Intifada. That was ended by the Oslo Accords, in which both Israel and Palestine agreed to a two-state solution.

Palestinian leadership rejected all agreements for statehood, which led to the talks falling apart. This included a deal that included 91% of the land of the pre-1967 West Bank, and a land trade agreement to compensate for that remaining 9%, and a capital in East Jerusalem. Instead, they initiated the second intifada.

Great, what would that look like? Other than buzz words, what specific policies would you like to see changed?

Presently Israel is about 20% Palestinians, who have passports, study and teach in the same universities, vote, serve in the government, serve in the highest levels of the Judiciary, have guaranteed rights to practice their religion freely, educate children in their family’s language, etc. Please let me know if you would like sources for any of this. I’m happy to provide them.

Just not engaging with foolish arguments.

Who are “the colonists?” Should we boycott Christian Palestinians who were part of the colonization of the crusades? Should we allow companies to do business with Jews in historically Jewish areas like the Old City of Jerusalem or Hebron, even though they are are on the Palestinian side of the Green Line? Do colonists include Palestinians who came to the West Bank from Jordan between 1948 and 1967? Are all Israelis colonists, regardless of whether they are Jewish, Palestinian, Druze, etc?

It seems like the comment was either a cowardly way of avoiding saying “yes, boycott the Jews,” or else it came from a place of astounding historical ignorance. Either way, it’s not worth my time to continue.

Will the reply to this be a thoughtful, informed response, or a zingy one-liner designed to dunk on an unpopular opinion?

Dumb Oligarch Gets Everything

Valid

Reading through their privacy policy, it seems pretty normal stuff to me… Even ensuring that more data stays local than other browsers.

This sounds like bad communication more than bad software.

You might not be using functions that require data to work. Are you using the AI options? Image to text? Translation? Saving passwords? Using search suggestions? Then you don’t need to send any data.

Like it or not, most browsers do most of those things now. FireFox is no exception.

This seems like a lot of smoke and no fire to me.

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with access to my private phone data is a good guy with access to my private phone data. /s

Would you also ask airbnb to delist homes in East Jerusalem owned by Palestinian Israelis? Or is it only Jewish Israelis that should be boycotted?

Not every comparison is whataboutism. This looks like more “Israel Bad” virtue signaling than it does helping Palestinians.

I do think maybe it’s a good idea to think about how we treat similar situations before we decide that a company should not do business with a particular ethnicity in an area.

America is a nation of immigrants and mixed cultures. In the early 1900s, there was great pressure to acculturate to the “American” way of doing things. Immigrants changed their names, clothes, foods, and language to match the “mainstream.” There was a push to build a “colorblind” society.

By the 1960s-70s, younger people began to realize that “acculturation” really meant erasing cultural heritage and acquiescing to white, Anglo, male-dominated culture. So there was a movement to preserve, celebrate, and empower differences between people.

This gave rise to the Black Power movement, creation of the term “Hispanic” and the Latin American ethnicity, Women’s Lib, Gay Pride, and even the rise of pizza delivery chains (which was regarded as a somewhat exotic ethnic food at the time).

That tension continues in the USA between recognizing and celebrating cultural differences, and becoming a melting pot of many cultures becoming one.

If the issue is stolen land, then shouldn’t we be boycotting these platforms until they are out of non-native USA and Canada? Doesn’t that make up thousands of times more of their business?

How about XÆa-12? Asking for a friend.

I once heard a talk by Bill Gates about his charity work through the Gates foundation. He described how he and Melinda had dedicated tens or hundreds of millions to causes. But the best money he could spend was in petitioning the government to join the cause. Because for all the wealth and power and notoriety held by the billionaire class, it was still a drop in the bucket compared to what world states could do. It’s a difference of orders of magnitude. The difference between a thousand dollars and a million dollars? That’s the same as the difference between a million and a billion. World governments operate in the trillions.

This is a coup.

Musk the Billionaire is small potatoes compared to Musk at the levers of government finance. It’s like a leaky faucet compared to a firehose. The one holding that firehose controls where it goes.

This is a coup. It is establishing an unelected oligarchy at the core of the Federal Government with the power to influence and manipulate policy, and execute unofficial policy through financial pressure. It’s not anything new to history, and it’s not 5-D chess. It is just people in power grabbing more power for themselves at the expense of all others including elected officials. In other words, a coup.