$0. Because first and foremost, he is a goodie-two-shoes who wouldn’t charge for it. And even if he was willing to charge, doing so would mean compromising his secret identity.

Cartel McCartelface

Even on Lemmy (and also PieFed), they’re officially called communities.

I use mbin and we call them magazines fir some reason.

How do you know this isn’t a dream?

I would make it illegal to buy a house if the buyer already owns a house which is unoccupied for at least half the year.

Patents expire if six months pass during which the patent holder does not make any products which use that patent. The countdown dies not reset if the patent is sold or traded away.

Companies must publicly post everybody’s wages once a year.

All job ads must include wages offered and all benefits. Candidates can try to negotiate higher wages if they wish, but they at least know where the floor is.

Any digital product sold or “licenced” with DRM must be patched to remove the DRM if the verification server goes down (Stop Killing Games is actually making some solid progress on making this into EU law).

Sex workers sharing a home out of which they both work shall not be considered a brothel.

Living off the proceeds of a prostitute will be legal as long as there is no coërcion. The existing law mostly makes it illegal for sex workers to rent homes or support disabled friends and family members, while pimps simply ignore the law.

You’re thinking of Caster Semenya. She’s XX, she just happens to have unusually high testosterone levels.

If you aren’t taking testosterone… I have no idea, but I would imagine you could compete as whichever gender you wish.

I’m currently reading The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs by Marc David Baer. It traces the history of Ottoman Türkiye through the sultans, with a particular focus on the European character of pre-WWI Türkiye and how much European history and culture was shaped and influenced by the Turkish. Indeed, Baer states in the introduction that he wrote the book to push back on the idea that Türkiye isn’t “Western” and that their history was peripheral to overall European history.

In particular, the centralisation of power in kings which is emblematic of Early Modern European history was driven to a large extent by non-Turkish kingdoms copying what was clearly working for Türkiye. Türkiye did take part in the Age of Discovery, establishing trading ports and colonies all along southwest Asia and as far as India, long before Portugal got there. Turkish nobles and artists were as much a part of the 15th-century Renaissance as those of France and England. And a big part of why Protestantism was able to establish itself in Germany was that the Holy Roman Emperor had to grant heretics considerable concessions in exchange for them joining the war against the Sultan.

Baer doesn’t say Suleiman the Magnificent was bisexual, but he also very specifically doesn’t nor say it.

Choosing the university near my home village.

If you’re still in secondary school, only apply to units far enough away that your parents will have no choice but to let you move out.

Workin’ 8 to 5 What a way to make a livin’

Where do you work and are they hiring?

You have it backwards. Analogue clocks are the way they are because of the 12-hour convention.

In ancient times, people did not have the concept of a “civil day”; they viewed day and night as separate things which alternated.

The Assyrians divided the day into six equal parts, and the night into six equal parts, called ush. But because sunrise and sunset move around over the course of the year, the lengths of day and night vary, and thus one ush during the day would not be the same length as an ush at night except around the equinoxes.

The Babylonians divided ushes in two to make hours, because it was easier to do astronomy in 12s than 6es. This resulted in 12 hours in a day and 12 hours at night, but daytime hours were still different lengths to nighttime hours, and the lengths of hours still varied over the course of the year.

The Greeks partially adopted the Babylonian system; they divided the day into 12 hours but the night was divided into four watches. The Romans copied the Greek system, but later went full Babylonian with 12 hours at night as well. (I feel like this coïncided with the rise of Christianity, but I have no evidence). The Romans introduced the concept of the civil day beginning at midnight (which the Chinese independently came up with), and over time, this led to the idea of 12 hours from midnight to noon, and 12 hours from noon to midnight. That idea postdates Rome, however; Roman hours were reckoned from sunrise to sunset and sunset to sunrise.

Assyrian astronomical knowledge seems to have reached China via India, as traditional Chinese timekeeping divides the civil day into 12 shi. Ancient shi were like Assyrian ushes; they were either 1/6 of a day or 1/6 of a night. Originally, midnight and noon fell in the middle of a shi, but this was changed to shi starting at midnight to make administration and astronomy easier. This system of variable-length shi continued to be used in Japan until about the Meiji Restoration.

Fixed-length hours are the result of analogue clocks, which are impractical to design to change the lengths of hours with the seasons (but not impossible; the wskusei clock is an ingenious Japanese clock from the 17th century that does exactly that). China had reliable, accurate water clocks by the Tang dynasty, while Europeans developed circular mechsnical clocks in the late Middle Ages. In neither case was it practical to make something as clever as the wakusei clock, so analogue clocks were marked the mean length of a shi or an hour as a reasonable approximation. Since there are 12 hours from midnight to noon and 12 from noon to midnight, that led to the 12-hour time system we know today.

Relevant Mini Fantasy Theater

It’s well-known that TS Eliot is an anagram of toilets.

More fun s that his full name, Thomas Stearns Eliot, is an anagram of I am a lesson to the arts (and also loathsome train sets)

I’m an emacs -nw kind of guy.

But if I have to pick one of your options, nano

… yes. Why in Earth shouldn’t they be?

Attila is a pretty common name in Hungary and Türkiye.

The terms themselves are somewhat vague and slippery. Marx and Engels used them interchangeably. The USSR and China really tainted the word communism, which is why socialism is much more common nowadays.

As I understand it, communism is a form of socialism. Socialism is ultimately about worker control over the means of production, rather than private capital. As such, socialists inherently support strong unions, and the sensible ones also support social welfare, minimum wage, and basic income so that business owners have less leverage to exploit their workers.

If you just take workers’ rights to it logical conclusio, you get market socialism. This is an economic system in which all privately-owned (including publicly-traded) companies are replaced with worker-owned coöperatives, which still compete in a market.

Communism goes further. Self-identified communists will tell you that communism is a moneyless. classless, stateless society where the means of production are held in common by those who use them. If this sounds like anarchism, it basically is.

However, communists in the 20th century were mostly vamguardists. This idea, pioneered by Lenin, advocates for a vanguard of smarties who understand communism to overthrow the government and impose communism from the top down, fixing the system on behalf of those workers too stupid to join the revolution. Workers who did not support the revolution would see that everything was much better with the communist vanguard in charge, and would embrace communism. If a few insisted on being counterrevolutionary, they would just need to be reëducated.

The Russian Revolution was heavily criticised by anarchists at the time, on the grounds that if the revolution does not rise from below, it is simply a coup that makes Lenin an uncrowned tsar. They were correct, and thus the word communism was utterly tainted in the capitalist world to refer to oppressive dictatotships that are (nominally) anticapitalist.

For what it’s worth, Lenin himself described the USSR as state capitalist, whereby the state ran all industry on behalf of the workers until the workers came around to the glorious revolutionaries’ perspective. Because those in.power never want to relinquish it, the ruling soviet aggressively cracked down on and suppressed trade unions, because organised workers were a threat not only to capitalists, but also to the nominally communist government. To maintain a veneer of being about the workers, farms and factories were administered by soviets vetted and approved by the government, who could be guaranteed to operate as the government wanted.

It’s not a number and yet you can still do maths with it

I remember back in secondary school in the early 2000s, this was the literal textbook example of how the media frames things. The teachers’ union was up to some industrial action at the time, which made it all the more relevant.

“The union firmly insisted on their original position” “The union stubbornly insisted on their original position”

Consider also confidence vs arrogance.

“The minister confidently stated the dispute will be over soon” “The minister arrogantly stated the dispute will be over soon”