Contabo is cheap but has some weird quirks. I pay about five euros a month. My server got mysteriously rolled by two days and they denied anything happened to it. I restored from backups but it was odd.

There are credit cards for people with bad credit who will charge you $200 annual fees and 50% interest.

They will have better luck than you.

Luna is the only moon in the Solar System which is appropriately-sized relative to its planet’s distance from the Sun and its own orbital distance to create impressive total solar eclipses. If a moon is too small, it won’t cover up the Sun fully, and if it is too big, it will cover up all the light and you would see nothing but darkness.

That’s not what people do when they steal your identity. They open credit cards and take out loans under your name.

“Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is just capitalism with extra steps and a red paint job.

If you’re talking about the Mao Zedong era, that was also a disaster but at least they did try to run the country according to communist principles. They were just very bad at it.

My problem with this line of reasoning is that AI makes it very difficult to tell a genuinely good job candidate from a poor candidate using AI as a crutch. This is doubly problematic when the interviewer is also likely using AI to write the questions that they ask the candidates. One could go back to in-person interviews, but there are monetary costs to that. Because improving the hiring process presents immediate tangible costs, employers will not do it even if it is likely to result in savings later on.

I do, however, agree that AI inbreeding is likely to cause newer models to stop getting better and eventually decline in quality as the training data becomes contaminated with other AI-generated content.

Who am I gonna call?

Ghostbusters

leader of a communist party warns against starting a communist revolution

mrw

I initially thought this was Wikipe-tan. The design is quite similar.

Riemann sphere has entered the chat

This is a serious suggestion, however blasphemous it may seem: Change your registration to Republican and then vote in the Republican primary for the most respectable person who is running. Changing your registration doesn’t cost anything and doesn’t affect anything. The Republican Party will also send you election material by post which you can simply discard or send back empty donation envelopes to waste their money on postage.

I’m not going to lie and say that this is someone who I would enthusiastically vote for, but based on her campaign website I think that’s still a decent candidate. Personally, I’m ideologically a social democrat and that candidate’s campaign statements smell a bit too liberal for me to get excited over it, but she seems passable. If that’s the best out of this year’s batch, then vote for them and start agitating for people who you think would do a better job to run in 2028.

This is to combat money laundering and tax fraud. I’ll give three examples.

I saw an episode of Border Security Australia where a woman has previously claimed a VAT refund on a pair of earrings worth tens of thousands of dollars. As you may know, many countries allow you to claim a refund of VAT on products intended for export, as VAT is intended to be a tax on consumption. But customs agents caught her wearing the earrings, meaning she had not actually exported them and essentially cheated the tax authority out of thousands of dollars in VAT.

Last year, during a trip to Hong Kong, my mother withdrew 20,000 USD in cash from her American bank and took it with her in person, and then deposited it in her Hong Kong bank account. It was just easier to do it this way since an international wire transfer would have been expensive and slow. She declared it to both US customs and Hong Kong customs, and in both cases they just checked her passport, noted down the transaction, and let her through with minimal questions. It’s intended to be an anti-money-laundering check. If that money has been obtained through crimes, most criminals would not willingly disclose that to customs, and it’s such a large amount of cash that anyone doing so must be trying to move money internationally and not just pay for a holiday. There is literally no penalty or tax and minimal hassle to declare it, so pretty much whoever is trying to sneak large amounts of cash or gold or whatever through customs is either (1) very ignorant or (2) up to no good. Further questioning usually allows customs agents to separate the first category from the second.

On the topic of China, there are strict capital controls in place to prevent wealthier Mainland Chinese individuals from moving all their money abroad. This policy is to encourage domestic spending and investment and it also has the effect of drastically lowering borrowing costs for the Chinese government. Moving large amounts of cash or gold in person is the most obvious way to evade these limits so Chinese customs has to take a strict stance against such behaviour in order to prevent China’s airports from becoming a massive hole in their capital controls. Being caught with undeclared cash provides an easy excuse for customs to confiscate the money in question, where the passenger can’t really argue over their guilt, since, again, anyone carrying such a large amount of cash pretty much has to know what they’re doing.

As leftists in America, we all must realise: This is our party, and we need to fight to win it back.

Your vote in primary election can often be more influential than your vote in the general election. And any campaigning activity you do in the party’s primary will be twice as impactful as activities during the general.

So, if you want change, there are two ways to go about it. You can either play along with the rules of the system and try to win control of it that way, or you can try to overthrow the system entirely.

But before you indicate your preference, let me first ask, though you need not answer: There are many people who say they’ll be a part of the revolution that overthrows the system. But are you actually working on this, or are you just waiting for it to happen? Are you working with the next Vladimir Lenin or Sun Yat-Sen right now, or are you just fantasizing about it?

Everyone wants change. What are you doing to create the future you want?

I think this is because they’ve already raised prices to the hilt in California. Consumers aren’t willing to pay more for fast food than they’re already charging.

Conviction in an impeachment trial needs 67 votes. They currently hold 45 seats. In order to get to 67, they’d need a clean sweep of all Senate races.

Politics in a nutshell:

Monday: Experts warn that Policy A will destroy the universe and eliminate 8 billion jobs

Tuesday: Government tables bill to enact Policy A

If a Democrat had posted this, he would be losing his shit about far-left propaganda trying to ruin his reputation with blasphemous imagery.

There’s a brief account of their finances on the linked blog post in the OP

https://blog.mastodon.world/