I agree that fax machines belong into the past, but cash? I'd like to be able to pay even if the internet/power goes down, thank you very much.

Cash will have relevance as long as internet and cloud failures are still an ongoing thing .. both for lovers of privacy and viable fallbacks as required.

Of interest, today in Australian media:

Why cash has made an unexpected comeback in Australia: new study - https://theconversation.com/why-cash-has-made-an-unexpected-...

which includes figures that show while only 8% of Australian transactions are cash (by some metric, see article) 33% (a third) of the population fully supports keeping cash on.

And that is fine and I do the same.

In Germany in many places you can only pay with cash.

> There's no mechanism for pressing politicians except threatening not to vote for them again...

That mechanism seems uniquely weak due to the american voting system.

Can you really shrug of responsibility that easily?

Homeopathy is not a "folk" tradition, it is simply an insane concept.

I once sat next to a mint plant and it cured my cold, the farther I sat the better I felt. Obviously diluted mint particles in the air cured me.

How was your chakra alignment? That may have contributed to your recovery.

My aura turned purple

That's great news! I think that means your chakras are in a lotus formation.

We must eradicate mint plants. Over time the dilution of mint particles in the air will become so small that all diseases will go extinct

We need to research what the distance from mint plants on earth did to the Artemis crew.

Correlation != Causation. Sitting this close to a mint plant gives you a dose that is way to undiluted to have any effect. Now if you were to sit roughly two kilometres away with a gentle breeze going from the plant towards you... (but make sure that there is not anothe mint plant on the path of the wind.)

and yet it moves :^)

Does it though?

The US is a sovreign state. As such it is alone responsible for its actions. The conflict with Iran wouldn't be as hot without the US.

Was it worth it?

Absolutely.

I just want to check from my phone how my home server is doing. Maybe someone else gets a perverse pleasure out of catting /proc/meminfo but I don't understand the need to make things more complicated than necessary.

this exactly, is something alot of people on hackernews don't understand. Yes when you want to have the power you go in by ssh. But unlike some people I am not terminally on my thinkpad from 2010. And sometimes Its enough to just get a quick monitoring glance.

Are you blaming Israel for american troops in Iran? Is the US not a sovreign nation anymore?

This is a valid question, and the answer is unfortunately no. There's a lot to unpack there but basically the president is acting unilaterally and in a manner which advance the interests of foreign nations.

Minus 2? If anyone has an explanation as to how war with Iran is to the benefit if the U.S. I'd genuinely like to hear it.

Why does it matter if it is for the benefit of the US? Doing something irrational does not absolve of responsibility.

War? Time will tell, but I'm not hopeful. I have no clue what Trump could have done instead that would work out, but war isn't looking like a good answer (no surprise to me - though I didn't expect it to get this bad so fast)

Iran has been funding a lot of the "attack Israel" groups in the area. When your income depends on hating Israel it is hard to see a more moderate view. In turn this gives the extremists in Israel a better line of why elect them over someone more moderate. (Lets me clear I'm not trying to clear Israel of their crimes here, only suggesting that Iran bares some blame for those crimes).

The above, but applied to other countries and not as extreem. Iran is funding many anti-democracy groups in the region.

Iran has a lot of smart, well educated people - who can't get enough water to drink. If Iran had a better government those people could develop things of use to improve the world, but instead many are stuck as poor despite having the ability to not be.

Changing Iran would not solve all the problems, but it would ease a large share and maybe leave room for a better world. The only question is how to do this - world history doesn't have a good record for changing evil governments.

There is a stark difference between planning something and actually doing it.

Every figurehead plays their part.

The Syria part was quietly executed under Biden, whose administration deserves full credit. "Destabilizing" means fragmenting, I'm not saying that Assad was any good of course.

Syria was in a civil war since 2015. The US (and Israel and Russia) failed to control their intelligence assets on the ground. Sadly we don't have Hillary's emails like for Lybia, so I can't mock France DGSE for loosing their asset, and control over the rebels, within two weeks.

In Syria it might have taken years, but considering the reaction of the US, Israel and Russia to the sudden Syria push, I guarantee the admin in power wasn't informed. What is more likely is that they lost actionable assets during COVID. At best the CIA was aware but didn't inform Mossad not the US, but that would be giving them a lot of credit.

Yeah, fuck those non-english-speaking peasants /s.

I'm a non-english-speaking peasant. I code in English, because it's the lingua franca of coding, and because they form the only characters that you can reliably use everywhere.

Besides, that's why the ban only extends to syntax and string literals (use escapes instead), and not comments.

From my experience, the only two nationalities that insist on mixing their native languages with the mostly English syntax of programming languages are the French and the Japanese. And they can just suck it up for the other 8 billion of us.