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  • A more comparable situation would be if German shopkeepers had a habit of questioning French euro coins and regularly refused them by saying they're valid only in France (even if that statement is wrong).

    They may legally be worth the same, but the shopkeeper can choose to not accept them because they have the right to accept payment in any way they want. Just like a shop can refuse to accept a 500€ note when you're only trying to buy a 1€ chocolate bar.

  • There is no such thing as a "Scottish pound" (unless you refer to the pound Scots, which was the currency of Scotland prior to its union with England). The currency of the United Kingdom is called sterling and the banknotes are all denominated in pounds sterling with currency sign GBP.

    All banknotes of the pound sterling are issued by banks. By far the largest issuer of banknotes is the Bank of England, which is the central bank of the United Kingdom. It also happens to be the only banknote issuer in England and Wales.

    In Scotland, some private banks are permitted to print their own banknotes. These banknotes are fully redeemable at the banks which issued them for Bank of England notes or for coins. This is what "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of £" means. Within Scotland, notes issued by Scottish banks are generally regarded to be interchangeable with those issued by the Bank of England. It is always up to the merchant, anywhere in the UK, whether they wish to accept Scottish issued banknotes, or only Bank of England notes, or no banknotes at all (card payments only).

    Many larger shops in England will recognise and accept Scottish banknotes. English banks will generally accept them for deposit. Smaller merchants may not recognise them and refuse them. Again, merchants are never legally obligated to sell you anything in exchange for your banknotes, regardless of who issued them.

  • MMP for me. Produces results which are broadly regarded as fair and easily to understand, but does not result in an excessively long ballot paper or confuse voters.

    My city recently implemented single transferrable vote for local council elections. It resulted in voters receiving a ballot paper asking them to rank over a dozen candidates and the response to this by voters was quite negative because they felt that the process of intelligently researching and comparing that many candidates was unnecessarily laborious and people found the electoral system confusing.

    Many people gave up and just marked a single candidate or got confused and didn't bother voting at all. This was for an election where each ward returned three councillors. CGP Grey actually criticised implementations if STV where each constituency returns only three representatives, insisting it should be five, or more. In a world of short attention spans, we have to accept that asking people to research potentially 20 candidates and even just pick their top five will result in a large number of people getting frustrated and giving up.

    It's all well and good to have a system which is mathematically optimal in your view, but the problem is that elections also have to retain the confidence of the voters to be effective, and if voters cannot understand a highly-complex system then they will not have confidence in its fairness and will be easily tricked by people with ulterior motives who tell them it's actually rigged against them.

  • The My Little Pony world seems idyllic if you are not a protagonist or subordinate of the designated evildoers. Pokémon residents, on the other hand, experience crime, disease, capitalism, and forced cockfights whenever you happen to walk in front of someone.

  • It is possible to construct a zero-knowledge proof using cryptography and adapting existing digital ID infrastructure. A user can prove that they have knowledge of a private key tied to an adult's identification card without having to reveal the key, or the associated public key.

    But that being said, whether something is possible and whether it is a good idea are two different questions.

  • It's possible to construct an age-verification system that allows a user to verify they are over the age of 18 without divulging any other information whatsoever.

    But that would defeat the point of "age" verification for these goons.

  • The titles are each missing a colon.

    The new Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche[:] We’re not going to prosecute the predators in the Epstein files or release their names to the public

    Acting AG[:] We’re not going to prosecute the predators in the Epstein files or release their names to the public

  • No love for the French Republican Calendar months?

    1. Pluvose
    2. Ventose
    3. Germinal
    4. Floreal
    5. Prarial
    6. Messidor
    7. Thermidor
    8. Fructidor
    9. Vendemiaire
    10. Brumaire
    11. Frimaire
    12. Nivose

    People who know their Latin roots might know what these months are named after, but here's a guide:

    1. "pluviosus", meaning "rain"
    2. "ventosus", meaning "windy"
    3. "germen", meaning "germination" (of a plant)
    4. "flos", meaning "flower"; or "floreo", meaning "blossom" (of a flower)
    5. "prairie" (field)
    6. "messis", meaning "harvest"
    7. "θερμός", meaning "hot" in Greek
    8. "fructus", meaning "fruit"
    9. "vindemia", meaning "vintage" (harvesting of grapes)
    10. "brume", meaning "fog" in French
    11. "frimas", meaning "frost" in French
    12. "nivosus", meaning "snowy"

    Today (2026-03-23 UTC) would be the 23rd of Germinal, 2026 CE.

  • Monuary, Dotuary, Trituary, Quadtember, Quintober, Sextember, September, October, November, December, Undecember, Dodecember

  • I feel like the voting culture of Lemmy is not conductive to good conversation or anything more than blind agreement. It's certainly helped by the fact that Lemmy's algorithm is more willing to show newer posts and comments (as opposed to merely popular ones), but people on Lemmy seem to be very willing to downvote content that they don't agree with, or downvote news that they don't like (regardless of the informative quality of said news), or just downvote anything that may contradict their pre-existing notions of how stuff works. It's more hostile than Reddit, and it seems like everyone, especially in the political communities, is wanting to start an argument here, sometimes over the dumbest things. Look in your average Reddit comment thread, and you see pages of jokes, memes, people sharing stories, and just generally having a good time. Look in your average Lemmy comment thread, and you see two people arguing over a dumb political point.

  • They should make a "Firefox Core" which contains only the browser with basic features, and then make another version which contains all the "fun" stuff.

  • Yeah, most decisions by SCOTUS nowadays feel like they are justified with "We don't like X, so now it's Y" and attached to it is a dissent that says "The majority only says Y because X is not politically expedient for them"

  • I posted this comment four months before Trump's election and I feel it is appropriate to post it again:

    Left-wing voters: [Conservative politician] will do [bad thing]

    Right-wing voters: [Conservative politician] will not do [bad thing], quit fear-mongering

    Conservative politician (newly-elected): As part of our agenda, we will do [bad thing]

    Left-wing voters: See! They will do [bad thing]!

    Right-wing voters: No, they will not actually do [bad thing], it’s just banter

    Conservative politician (having done [bad thing]): I am pleased to announce we have just done [bad thing]

    Left-wing voters: See! They just did [bad thing]!

    Right-wing voters: [Bad thing] is good, actually

    (2 years after [bad thing] was done)

    Right-wing voters: It’s [other party]'s fault that [bad thing] happened, I need to vote for [conservative politician] so that they can fix [problem caused by bad thing].

  • Neither of those are what I interpret the meme to be. I'm not going to argue with you over this because honestly, I don't think it's worth my time.

  • I promise as someone extensively familiar with MediaWiki who even administrates an indie wiki that this comparison makes absolutely perfect sense, hence why I posted it. And I think you're reaching to make the OP's meme seem to not make sense when it clearly does under the correct interpretation.

  • I think OP is trying to say that you should host your own wiki using MediaWiki instead of using Fandom. Your comment is like if someone said "You should use a Linux phone to get away from Google and Apple" and you responded with "Android uses Linux".

  • I remember the League of Legends wiki moved away from Fandom to another wiki farm called Weird Gloop (run by the Runescape Wiki people) and the publisher of League of Legends sponsored the move. Fandom's rules say that you are not allowed to destroy the old wiki when you move, so the admins changed the font to Comic Sans on the Fandom wiki.

  • America really has a litigation culture, not because people are particularly fond of lawsuits, but because problems which are generally solved by legislative enactments or actions by regulatory bodies in other countries, aren't in the US, and thus the only way to find out who is right is to go to court.

  • Copyright infringement is not suitable as an analogous case because the law specifies statutory damages for it, so proving damages is not typically necessary for the types of works which you are thinking of.

    Let me give a detailed analysis with some concrete, but arbitrarily-chosen numbers, and then I'll show you what a lawyer representing Amazon would say to attack the argument you've presented.

    Suppose you notice that 5 per cent of people whom you ask to subscribe to your mailing list actually subscribe (it is almost certain a real number would be much lower). Then, of those who subscribe to your mailing list, 10 per cent of them make a purchase when you send an advertisement to them through that mailing list. And then, of those who make a purchase, the average sale is $50, of which $20 is profit. Therefore, you argue damages of 5% × 10% × $20 = $0.10 per customer. Suppose Amazon placed 1,000 orders this way. You therefore plead damages of $100 (the fact that this is a trivial amount is not relevant to the legal analysis).

    The legal method for the calculation of damages is to compare what your financial situation would have been had Amazon not done the thing they were not supposed to. Amazon will argue that had they complied with your terms of service, 0 orders would have been placed as you forbade AI agents from placing orders, and therefore the profit can be calculated as 5% × 10% × $20 × 0 = $0. After this argument is made, it then becomes your burden as the claimant to rebut it. You will have to prove what percentage of people ordered through Amazon, who would have otherwise ordered from you directly (and thus you would have the opportunity to advertise to). This is a fundamentally very difficult task. Amazon would probably propose to the court that you ask all of the customers to testify that they would have otherwise ordered from you directly, and then you can count it as ten cents per witness.

    All of that notwithstanding, Amazon will still argue your damages are zero, because you have not actually lost the ability to connect with the customers they have given you, because you still have the ability to ask them to subscribe to your mailing list by including a card to that effect in the package you send them. The fact that both of us very well know that nobody will do that is not legally relevant: the action is possible and the law does not particularly care about whether it is easy or effective.

    I know it's tempting to call me a bootlicker or whatever, but the fact of the matter really is that the law is not favourable to the claimant in this case. This is just a bad argument to make with no sufficient legal justification to claim anything more than a nominal amount of damages. Yes, Amazon are a bunch of assholes, but sometimes, being an asshole really is legal. The law is not a proxy for morality and the courts are not infallible guardians of justice. They are institutions that interpret fallible, imperfect, human-made rules.

  • No, the burden of proof is on the claimant. If you sue Amazon, you have to prove your claims to a perponderance of the evidence.