https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aroostook_War

If your family has been living in part of that yellow area for a long time, maybe.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/08/20/trump-ended-6-wars/

I mean, yeah, but in practice, the UN is structured the way it is, with the UNSC veto, to avoid creating World War III. That is, it’s aimed at avoiding great power conflict.

Taiwan was functionally removed and replaced by China, but that was really a recognition that Taiwan didn’t really de facto control China, which was who the seat belonged to.

Could Russia one day roll up to the UNSC and discover someone else sitting in their seat? Yeah, theoretically, but in practice, I don’t think that there’s a realistic chance that Russia would be removed from the UNSC seat as long as it’s running around with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, absent some kind of hard counter showing up that renders that arsenal useless.

The Budapest Memorandum committed the signatories not to themselves use force against Ukraine, but it was not a multi-way defensive alliance with all parties which obligated parties to fight against another party who attacked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum

According to the three memoranda,[9] Russia, the U.S., and the U.K. confirmed their recognition of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine becoming parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and effectively removing all Soviet nuclear weapons from their soil, and that they agreed to the following:

• Respect the signatory’s independence and sovereignty in the existing borders (in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act).[10]

• Refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of the signatories to the memorandum, and undertake that none of their weapons will ever be used against these countries, except in cases of self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

• Refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine, the Republic of Belarus, and Kazakhstan of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.

• Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they “should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used”.

• Not to use nuclear weapons against any non–nuclear-weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, except in the case of an attack on themselves, their territories or dependent territories, their armed forces, or their allies, by such a state in association or alliance with a nuclear weapon state.[5]: 169–171 [11][12]

• Consult with one another if questions arise regarding those commitments.[13][14]

France and China were not signatories but apparently had similar agreements, which I have not read.

The UK and the US (and I assume China and France, if their agreements had approximately the same content) have fulfilled the Budapest Memorandum commitments — Russia broke her commitment.

EDIT: Well, okay, I’m not sure what China’s position has been on Ukraine at the Security Council, though de facto the issue is kind of academic for the moment. Russia holds a permanent UNSC seat, and thus has veto power on the UNSC, and regardless of what countries do there, if it’s on defending Ukraine against Russia, I’d bet that Russia will veto it. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union was boycotting the UN and so wasn’t present to veto US initiatives on behalf of South Korea, so the US was able to get through stuff to initiate UN authorization to use force on behalf of South Korea after North Korea invaded. But I think that it’s probably safe to say that Russia isn’t going to let that happen a second time. Also, that dealt with the use of nuclear weapons by an attacker, and that has not happened (and if you recall from earlier in the war, there was a discussion between the US and Russia on what would happen if Russia used nuclear weapons against Ukraine. I don’t believe that the material was ever generally-released, but I did see a Polish official announcing that the response would be “conventional” (i.e. non-nuclear), and some discussion that centered around the US possibly authorizing airstrikes on Russian positions in Ukraine).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_boycott_of_the_United_Nations

During the Soviet boycott, the Security Council adopted a resolution which allowed for the deployment of UN troops to the Korean war in defense of South Korea against the attacking communist North Korean forces (Resolution 83)

That being said, the US has taken a position that providing arms to a country in a conflict doesn’t violate neutrality obligations (which dates back at least to early WW2, where the US was providing arms to the Allies while simultaneously claiming neutrality). Historically, providing preferential access to arms this had not generally been in line with the obligations of neutrality.

The US has also taken the position that providing intelligence to such a party, as it is with Ukraine on Russia, doesn’t violate neutrality obligations. Going back to WW2 again, this was how some of the first shooting between Germany and the US started in World War II:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Greer

At 0840 that morning, Greer, carrying mail and passengers to Iceland, “was informed by a British plane of the presence of a submerged submarine about 10 miles [(16 km)] directly ahead. … Acting on the information from the British plane the Greer proceeded to search for the submarine and at 0920 she located the submarine directly ahead by her underwater sound equipment. The Greer proceeded then to trail the submarine and broadcast the submarine’s position. This action, taken by the Greer, was in accordance with her orders, that is, to give out information but not to attack.” The British plane continued in the vicinity of the submarine until 1032, but prior to her departure the plane dropped four depth charges in the vicinity of the submarine. The Greer maintained [its] contact until about 1248. During this period (three hours 28 minutes), the Greer manoeuvred so as to keep the submarine ahead. At 1240 the submarine changed course and closed the Greer. At 1245 an impulse bubble (indicating the discharge of a torpedo by the submarine) was sighted close aboard the Greer. At 1249 a torpedo track was sighted crossing the wake of the ship from starboard to port, distant about 100 yards [(100 m)] astern. At this time the Greer lost sound contact with the submarine. At 1300 the Greer started searching for the submarine and at 1512 … the Greer made underwater contact with a submarine. The Greer attacked immediately with depth charges.[6]

That is, the US position was that it could provide arms to the UK and could tell the British where German U-boats were without violating neutrality obligations, as long as it wasn’t actually fighting Germany (with the Greer firing back on a self-defense justification after having a torpedo fired at it). Germany wasn’t that enthusiastic about that interpretation at the time.

Under the UN Charter, countries are not supposed to engage in war unless (a) they’re defending themselves, (b) they’re defending a country with which they have a collective security agreement (a military alliance, think NATO or something like that), or (c) the UNSC has given authorization. That being said, there has been somewhat creative interpretation of (c), as with the US arguing that U.N. Resolution 1441 qualified and constituted such an authorization to intervene in Iraq in 2003, which is certainly not a universally-accepted take.

Another key missing fact is the supremacy clause of the constitution, which says that federal laws are presumed to overrule state laws when they conflict. This is why a lot of ‘blue’ states had terrible abortion laws still on the books when Dobbs happened, because they were nullified by the Roe v Wade ruling in the 70s and they never got around to actually removing the defunct laws.

That doesn’t relate to the supremacy clause. There wasn’t a federal law involved; that ruling was that the state law was unconstitutional, not in conflict with a federal law.

For the great bulk of legislation, there is no potential for state-federal overlap, since generally either the federal legislature can write law or the state legislature can, not both; that’s why you have the enumerated powers clause.

In the limited areas where both federal and state governments can legislate, then federal law does take precedence.

Now, you could argue that maybe there’s some Constitutional authority that permits the federal government to do so.

kagis

It looks like the CRS has a document up on this point:

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10787

They list three potential routes of relevance that would permit a federal law relating to abortion to be passed:

One is that there might be a dormant Commerce Clause argument (the federal government has authority over interstate trade) Their take is that while it’s possible that the Commerce Clause might permit regulation of some provision of abortion-related services across state lines (like an abortion clinic doing business across state lines), it most-likely doesn’t cover abortion legality in general.

The second is that Congress might be able to use the power of the purse — basically, to withhold or extend funds to coerce the states to pass laws at the state level that they want. This was done at one point in the past to force states to raise their drinking age if they wanted highway funds. This can’t be a general “just make states do whatever you want” club, because otherwise you don’t have a federal system. There hasn’t been much case law on this, so the precise line drawn isn’t terribly clear. At one point, the Supreme Court permitted use of it to deny interstate highway funding to states that didn’t raise their drinking age (with the idea that teens would be drunk-driving on the interstate). The other major ruling was on the ACA individual coverage mandate, where the Supreme Court shot down its use. I think that it’s probably a pretty good bet that one couldn’t use it to across-the-board restrict state abortion law, though it might be possible to specifically provide federal funds for abortions (though right now, federal law runs the other way and has a restriction on use of federal funds for abortions).

The third area they cover is that they maybe, despite the fact that SCOTUS ruled in Dobbs that there’s no general right to abortion in the Constitution, there might still be some sort of argument that the Fourteenth Amendment could in some way affect some peripheral area.

But, in general, the federal government can’t just say “I don’t like state law, so I’ll pass federal law in the same area.”

Now, you could say that maybe there should be no higher bar for amending the Constitution. Like, maybe the bar for changing the “high law” of the Constitution and the “low law” that makes up federal law should be the same. Like, we could have a less-federal or non-federal system where much more power is centralized.

That’s basically the way the UK works – Parliament doesn’t really have any restrictions on it. There’s no process of judicial review on laws it passes; laws cannot be unconstitutional, and all you need is a simple majority in the House of Commons. Any power that is extended the regions in the UK via devolution is simply granted at the pleasure of Parliament and can be overridden or taken back as they choose. But speaking as someone in California with a Republican federal trifecta right now, I’m awfully glad for that federal structure, since it’s the only thing that keeps the Republican Party, which presently has a trifecta, from having carte blanche to rewrite the rules in California. It does mean that those of us in liberal states like California have less control over the lives of people in conservative states…but it also means that people in conservative states have less power over the lives of people in liberal states. With more-centralized power, you’d tend toward more homogenous, centralized rules. That will, in general, make a smaller portion of people happy with the rules they live under — the smaller the size of the block for which laws are written, the higher the average percentage of people who are happy with those laws, since it will more closely map to average preference.

The downside of passing laws for smaller blocks — state instead of federal, local instead of state — is that having “patchworks” of laws does have drawbacks in that it can create more complexity, can make it harder to have businesses that operate across multiple states. Or can create complexity for people traveling across states. But since people are generslly mostly impacted by the laws where they live…shrugs

The point was there is no federal law allowing abortion either.

Things are legal by default.

If you want to have a law that restricts states from passing law against something, then it goes in the Constitution. The Senate doesn’t amend the Constitution – a three-quarters supermajority of states do.

EDIT: Well, okay, the Senate can be part of the process of amendment, can be part of Congress proposing the amendment, but the amendment still has to get the three-quarters supermajority of states supermajority to be passed, and (a) that has an independent, higher supermajority bar of two-thirds in thr Senate, not the 60-vote fillibuster-breaking bar that OP is referring to, and (b) it cannot block a three-quarters supermajority of states from passing an amendment, because the states can propose the amendment themselves with a two-thirds supermajority of states, which they can already attain if they have three quarters in favor.

As a result, the effective bar on amendment is the three-quarters-of-states bar.

Americans simply don’t have 60 votes in the Senate to legalize abortion.

There is no federal law against abortion in the US. There are some states that have laws at the state level against abortion, but the federal legislature isn’t relevant to that.

deleted by creator

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Republican_group_chat_leaks

Hitler was a real nigga

Now there’s a phrase you don’t hear every day.

The SLA guarantees here appear to be monthly, rather than annual, though.

https://downdetector.com/status/imdb/

Based on the failure reports there, it looks like there was some initial outage, and then three hours later another, though I guess it might also be just people waking up and trying to use it.

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/live/amazon-outage-october-2025

It sounds like there are multiple ongoing problems, based on the timeline in the above article. Maybe cascading issues from the initial failure. Maybe someone managed to get into their systems and are trying to disrupt things. shrugs

EDIT:

https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

EDIT2: Sounds like their us-east-1 customers aren’t gonna be paying for EC2 this month.

https://aws.amazon.com/compute/sla/

Region-Level SLA

For Amazon EC2 with all running instances deployed concurrently across two or more AZs in the same region (or at least two regions if there is only one AZ in a given region), AWS will use commercially reasonable efforts to make Amazon EC2 available for each AWS region with a Monthly Uptime Percentage of at least 99.99%, in each case during any monthly billing cycle (the “Region-Level SLA”). In the event Amazon EC2 does not meet the Region-Level SLA, you will be eligible to receive a Service Credit as described below.

I certainly don’t object to it. Made me realize that I wasn’t being clear.

Oh…sorry, maybe I wasn’t clear (or did a bad job of myself, in the first few sentences, summarizing what I was trying to say).

I wasn’t asking people to comment and give a description of all of their their (tens of thousands of) Threadiverse communities. I was just asking them to make sure that the existing description that they do have attached to their communities (or on ones that they create new) are clear and easy-to-understand for new users.

!Tenfingers@lemmy.world already does a good job of that with its description:

Tenfingers sharing protocol is a decentralized file system.

EDIT: Went to update my own post to try to make it a bit clearer up front what I was trying to say.

The only way is it be absolutely private by not interacting…

I don’t know if this is news to you but this is not a lemmy specific problem and basically applies to the entire internet…

Hyphanet’s Frost can provide pretty solid forum pseudonymity.

But that comes with its own performance, usability, and functionality tradeoffs.

What could be done to limit the amount of information associated with a username is to switch to a new account periodically.

That’s somewhat unfortunate in that it clashes with reputation, which is also important for making the Threadiverse work.

identity is reviled [I assume revealed]

The fact that most instances permit external image hosting permits obtaining user IP addresses by posting inline images hosted on a server created by an attacker, then harvesting IPs there. I noticed when going through the code that Lemmy, as of 0.19.4, has an option to protect users of a home instance by proxying images viewed there. However, it requires bandwidth and disk space, and I don’t think that many home instances have it on. It is definitely not on on my own home instance, lemmy.today.

0.19.4 release announcement:

Image Proxying

There is a new config option called image_mode which provides a way to proxy external image links through the local instance. This prevents deanonymization attacks where an attacker uploads an image to his own server, embeds it in a Lemmy post and watches the IPs which load the image.

Instead if image_mode is set to ProxyAllImages, image urls are rewritten to be proxied through /api/v3/image_proxy. This can also improve performance and avoid overloading other websites. The setting works by rewriting links in new posts, comments and other places when they are inserted in the database. This means the setting has no effect on posts created before the setting was activated. And after disabling the setting, existing images will continue to be proxied. It should also be considered experimental.

Many thanks to @asonix for adding this functionality to pict-rs v0.5.

I don’t know whether PieFed and Mbin presently have comparable functionality.

One major issue is that proxying the images will create more bandwidth usage on a home node, since they’re serving up all the images viewed by users of that home node, as well as disk space to store the proxied images — it’s more-expensive to run a node in that mode.

Unless your home instance has this option enabled, you should probably consider your IP address to be globally-visible. Note that using a VPN will mean that only the VPN’s exit node IP will be visible.

Frankly, if I were getting a new logo made for anything serious, I’d want it in vector format. We don’t presently have any models trained to create vector art that I’m aware of, just raster images of vector art, and vectorization of raster images isn’t really good enough today to use that as a path to vector output.

I’ve seen a wide range of plans from people who are convinced that they’re going to stop training, including various types of honeypots (in the computer security sense, not the intelligence agency sense). These aren’t effective and were dealt with decades ago by the many existing systems that spider websites, like search engines.

I mean, I’m not going to go try to argue with each person. If it makes them happy, whatever. But it’s just a waste of their time.

Based on a pass with Google Translate from “The bishop is a chesspiece in chess”, I think that Occitan is l’evesque and Breton eskob.