Vance really fucked the couch on this one.

The meme is incomprehensible, but it badmouths JD Vance so fine by me.

Similarly, the United States goes to war against the fundamentalist theocracy in Iran. And who do I find myself kinda sorta rooting for?

There's been a spate of Discord-based hacking attempts lately, two of my friends have had to do this. They can't get their old accounts back, Discord is basically just ignoring them. Starting new accounts is easy.

The hard part is that they also lost their gmail accounts, that's a lot more important for most people to be able to recover. I recommend everyone with a gmail account do the "create an emergency recovery code" thing, print it out and store it somewhere safely off anything digital.

I've pondered my own lack of interest and I think it comes down to the Artemis program's design being such a shitshow. Sure, if you throw enough brute force budget and a long enough time you can get astronauts back to the Moon. But they're doing it in such a poor manner that I doubt anything will come of it long-term. It's going to be another unsustainable flags-and-foot-prints stunt.

Some of the recent changes hint at NASA maybe finally getting their act together, but I'll believe it when I see it - NASA doesn't actually call the shots here. It's a political program.

The Democrats never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

I'm sure this isn't really about saving money. It's about destroying the US Forest Service. That's the direct goal.

If NATO were to be killed, the non-US members would most likely want to create a new alliance just like NATO but without the US in it. So if the US leaves it may be simplest to just tweak the existing one.

The goal of prediction markets is to try to surface an "expert" opinion. People who are betting there are presumably deciding their position based on polling data, along with other factors such as how likely they think Orban or others are to cheat the results and how likely events that could change the polling numbers are to occur.

People who decry the "insider trading" that happens in prediction markets are missing that insider trading is exactly the point of something like this. If there's someone inside Orban's inner circle who knows something nobody else does that makes them more certain of a particular outcome here, they would be rewarded by making their knowledge "public" by placing bets on the prediction and as a result pushing the odds in some direction based on that knowledge.

There are people who gamble on these markets without any special research or inside knowledge to guide them, just going by their guts, and the goal of prediction markets is that over time these people will lose their money and stop gambling like this. They're not contributing information and are "punished" for their interference.

That makes things worse for America, not better.

There are several that are indeed designed for anonymity, such as Monero or Zcash. And others that have mechanisms for anonymity within them, such as Ethereum's Tornado Cash mixer or Aztec rollup.

In the specific case of Iran and Bitcoin, using a currency that requires expenditure is actually a benefit. It increases demand for the very thing that they're selling.

More generally, though, there are plenty of cryptocurrencies that don't burn significant quantities of energy. Anything running on Ethereum has been validated using proof-of-stake since 2022.