Paid in yuan, of course, because that's the currency they're allowed to use, because of the US. And then oil companies decide it's annoying to use two different currencies, and they would rather buy the oil with yuan as well...

Trump asks the Oracle at Delphi what will occur if he invades Iran.

"This war will surely bring about regime change," says the Oracle.

"Good," thinks Trump as he heads into the defense meeting.

You can't vote left in the US, there are no left parties and no left politicians.

Rig the election? You could pass a law that makes 1/3 of the country ineligible to vote, but makes sure they won't find out until they're at the polling booth. You could also prepare your allied goons to defend polling stations.

That won't work.

I think it's extremely likely that we'll see ICE assaulting polling station lines in Democrat areas. I also think it won't be enough.

Watch and learn.

Game theory is the most dangerous force in the universe.

A Russian and an American get on a plane in Moscow and get to talking.

The Russian says he works for the Kremlin and he's on his way to go learn American propaganda techniques.

"What American propaganda techniques?" asks the American.

"Exactly," the Russian replies.

This is the best joke I've heard in a long time

The version I know is a little different: A Russian visits America and meets an American at a bar and they get talking about life in Russia. "How is the propaganda?" says the American. "It's everywhere, but it's easy to ignore it" says the Russian. "Yours is much better." "But we don't have propaganda here" says the American. "Exactly" says the Russian.

idk how a person can be forced to pledge allegiance to the flag every morning and not think that's some North Korean style shit.

When I was in kindergarten, I refused to do the pledge one day. My teacher was livid. "Are you American or not?"

Being 5, I didn't know the difference between ethnicity and nationality (I'm Asian but I was born here and didn't know any life outside of America). So I was afraid that my teacher would not let me be American anymore if I didn't say the pledge. So I said it and never refused to say it in school again.

It wasn't til I was well into my adulthood that I realize how absurd that situation sounds.

So you were actually pledging under duress. Contracts and statements made under duress are usually treated as null and void, so you have that going for you.

Still highly unethical of that teacher

I mean I don't think anything we do or say as a 5 year old is considered binding, otherwise I'm on the hook for a lot of nonsense :)

Have you considered, however, how that event shaped your developing and impressionable subconscious and possibly influenced your future behavior as an adult?

It's not something I fully understood as a child. I didn't even fully grasp the concept of "nationality" so when she asked if I was American I just said yes because I didn't know what it meant. I just understood that not saluting meant teacher mad, just like not cleaning up my toys in the classroom meant teacher mad.

... or realize that they are not morally superior to china as long as they don't abolish the death penalty.

The Onion is actually making great money on its print edition. Having a real newspaper is a novelty these days, almost like it's part of the joke, and you should subscribe.

How can you be banned from the fediverse?

I understand your pedantic point but let me give a realistic reply. If your account, or the account of somebody you like corresponding with, happens to be on an instance that falls into disfavour (not uncommon in my time there) then server bans come out and conversations become broken, even between parties who had no knowledge of the overarching drama. Good luck even understanding it if you aren’t a techie.

FYI the activitypub RFC won't actually help you. What you have to do is copy how Mastodon actually communicates with other copies of itself. If you base your work on the RFC, it won't actually communicate with Mastodon or with all the other software that pretends to be Mastodon.

What incompatibilities do you know about?

Actually implementing JSON-LD, or just copying the fixed format JSON that also happens to be valid JSON-LD. If you actually implement JSON-LD, it won't work even though the RFC says you should do that.

It seems you have never tried to prove anything using a proof assistant program. It will demand proofs for things like x<y && y<z => x<z and while it should have that built in for natural numbers, woe fall upon thee who defines a new data type.