They do have an obligation to serve their own citizens. The US double tax reporting bullshit does apply to dual citizens.

A constitutional amendment requires 2/3 of both houses of the legislature, and ratification by the states. Passing a law with a veto-proof majority requires 2/3 of both houses. So I don’t think a constitutional amendment is any easier.

I agree with this. Ads contaminate your mind, so make sure to use ad blockers. But also help your friends set up ad blockers, because if their minds are contaminated, it will spread to you.

It is. But it’s not enforced. Employees in the US are afraid to ask their employers for anything because they can get fired for no reason.

Why don’t we have schematics and source code for the voting machines?

The peppery taste is what I like most about radishes.

All of January, really.

Corn ethanol isn’t really renewable either. It works better if made from sugarcane, but it’s still a big food-vs-fuel problem.

Renewable liquid fuels have the same energy density.

I believe two reasons: first, political will. Fossil fuel companies are large and entrenched, and have lots of experience lobbying governments. They block things like carbon taxes.

Second, a strange sort of game theory where each player (each country) thinks “My individual contributions to greenhouse gasses are just a small part of the total. They won’t cause global catastrophe. Just an incremental increase in the existing catastrophe. The incremental harm won’t fall directly on me; it will be divided among many countries. If continuing to use fossil fuels provides some small economic advantage, it outweighs the portion of the harms that will land on me. As for the harms I experience from other countries’ carbon emissions, there’s nothing I can do to prevent them.”

The usual way for me is to give certbot write access to a directory in the HTTP root, so the server can keep running.

For internal stuff, it may be easier to set up your own CA.

China’s carbon dioxide emissions are more than a third of the world’s total emissions. Their CO2 emissions are increasing and accelerating.

No matter how much they subsidize solar, unless they implement a carbon emission tax, the emissions will keep increasing.

It would be a more meaningful discussion if the government wasn’t controlled so much by large corporations and oligarchs.

Maybe it was a phishing scheme to identify people’s IP addresses based on where they loaded the image from. In that case, each person would only receive one message. Fortunately I use a proxy, so they got nothing.

I have self hosted my email since 2006. I gave up on self hosting outgoing mail in 2021, but I still keep the server up for incoming mail, and still set up throwaway accounts on there.

The hard part of hosting email is getting Google and Microsoft to accept outgoing mail. Tons of businesses that do not have visibly outlook .com or gmail .com addresses are still hosted by those servers.

I had SPF, DKIM, and a static datacenter IP address with no reputation problems. I still couldn’t get through to Microsoft, not even in people’s junk mail directory, until they manually whitelisted my address. Microsoft didn’t allow them to whitelist a whole domain. Google was a little easier, but they added new demands monthly.

In 2025, I can’t get reliable delivery to gmail .com addresses even sending from a hotmail .com address in the outlook .com web interface.

Yeah, true, but that’s mostly fixed costs, and has a pretty low incremental cost for each video delivered. The fixed costs we have to pay regardless.

Electrical engineer here. There is almost no difference.

The cost of streaming video from a server to your computer is pretty small, basically just transferring the bytes from a hard drive to a network card. This happens in a datacenter on a big server designed to be efficient at it, and serve a ton of people at once. Your own electricity consumption on your viewing device is likely much higher than that. You can calculate your electricity consumption using a Kill-A-Watt or similar device, but here are some averages of measurements I’ve made on my devices:

• PC with 27" LCD monitor: 150W
• 50" TV: 300W
• Laptop with internal 14" screen: 40W
• Phone with 5" screen: 10W roughly, but it’s complicated
• Phone with screen off, speaker only: 2W (guessing here)
• Handheld FM radio: less than 1W

If you look at your computer’s CPU usage while watching video, it’s mostly idle. So most of the power consumption is the screen’s backlight.

Assuming worst-case coal power, releasing 0.4kg of carbon per kWh, and a large TV, and let’s say 10% overhead for the server’s energy cost, that’s 0.13kg of carbon per hour. So don’t worry about it.

I loaded a bunch of articles until it prompted me to pay. I got the screenshot below. In my opinion, this is an intentionally misleading fake 50c/month offer.

Not sure how much you’re paying for your VPN, but a virtual private server can be had for about $5 per month. You’ll get a real IPv4 address just for you, so you won’t have to use non-standard port numbers. (You can also use the VPS as a self-hosted VPN or proxy.)

$5 per month doesn’t get you much processing power, but it gets you plenty of bandwidth. You could self-host your server on your home computer, and reverse-proxy through your NAT using the VPS.