Off-and-on trying out an account over at @[email protected] due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • 57 Posts
  • 1.39K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoWorld News@lemmy.world•Pope Leo calls for Venezuela to remain an independent countryEnglish
    324·
    19 hours ago

    Pope Leo calls for Venezuela to remain an independent country

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

    Romanus Pontifex (from Latin: “The Roman Pontiff”) is the title of at least three papal bulls:

    • Another in 1455 by Nicholas V[3] praising Catholic King Afonso V of Portugal for his battles against the Muslims, endorsing his military expeditions into Western Africa and instructing him to capture and subdue all Saracens, Turks, and other non-Christians to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery. The Church leaders argued that slavery served as a natural deterrent and Christianizing influence to “barbarous” behavior among pagans.[4][5] As a follow-up to the bull Dum Diversas, the church leaders now took positions aside the Crown of Portugal that it was entitled to dominion over all lands south of Cape Bojador in Africa. The bull’s primary purpose was to forbid other Christian kings from infringing the King of Portugal’s practice of trade and colonisation in these regions, particularly amid the Portuguese and Castilian competition for ascendancy over new lands discovered.[6]

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

    Ea quae pro bono pacis (For the promotion of peace) was a bull issued by Pope Julius II on 24 January 1506 by which the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the world unknown to Europeans between Portugal and Spain, but lacked papal approval as it countered previous bulls by Pope Alexander VI, was approved and ratified by the Catholic Church. The request of confirmation came from the king of Portugal; therefore, the bull is addressed to the chief Portuguese bishops. The treaty was confirmed to “foster peace” between the two Catholic monarchies and solve colonial disputes, hence the title of the bull.[1]

    I’m getting mixed messages here from the papacy.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@beehaw.org•France seeks to ban social media for children under 15English
    8·
    4 days ago

    How could Lemmy implement an age verification system?

    I don’t think that it would matter much. Assuming that the legislation applies to the Threadiverse and doesn’t have some sort of exception, it’d still be effectively unenforceable, because most instances don’t operate in France’s legal jurisdiction, and I imagine that most users, even in France, don’t really care whether their instance is in France or not.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoWorld News@lemmy.world•Condom tax and cheaper childcare: China's plan to boost birth ratesEnglish
    91·
    4 days ago

    Chinese people pay a 13% sales tax on contraceptives from 1 January

    I seriously doubt that that’s going to have a major impact.

    Observers appear divided on the aim of the tax overhaul. The idea that a tax hike on condoms will impact birth rates is “overthinking it”, says demographer Yi Fuxian from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

    He believes Beijing is keen to collect taxes “wherever it can” as it battles a housing market slump and growing national debt.

    Consumption taxes are regressive, but sometimes they can be more politically-viable if they can be presented as fighting social ills.

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

    A sin tax (also known as a sumptuary tax, or vice tax) is an excise tax specifically levied on certain goods deemed harmful to society and individuals, such as alcohol, tobacco, drugs, soft drinks, sugar, fast foods, fat, meat, gambling, vaping, cannabis (wherever legal for recreational use) and pornography.[1]

    In contrast to Pigouvian taxes, which are to pay for the damage to society caused by these goods, sin taxes increase the price in an effort to decrease the use of these goods. Increasing a sin tax is often more popular than increasing other taxes. However, these taxes have often been criticized for burdening the poor and disproportionately taxing the physically and mentally dependent.[2]

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoWorld News@lemmy.world•UK nationalist parties sell patriotic merchandise made in... Pakistan and ChinaEnglish
    9·
    4 days ago

    Advance UK became a registered political party in December and claims to have gained more than 30,000 members since launching in early 2025. It positions itself as a burgeoning rival to Reform, setting out on its website how it differs from Nigel Farage’s party.

    Leader Ben Habib has called for the UK to “onshore” all industries “from steel, to food, to energy”. Writing on X, he said: “A way to protect our producers is to impose tariffs on imports… Put first the UK, not producers in China and Germany”.

    Setting aside whether-or-not this would actually be a good idea for the UK, I don’t think that the UK is going to onshore all food production unless it goes vegetarian or makes some other major concessions in desired diet.

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

    Agriculture in the United Kingdom uses 70% of the country’s land area, employs 1% of its workforce (462,000 people) and contributes 0.5% of its gross value added (£13.7 billion). The UK currently produces about 54% of its domestic food consumption.[1]

    If you’re producing 54% of your consumption using 70% of your land area, even disregarding what land area is actually suitable for agriculture and evicting all other users from the land, converting all land to agricultural use still probably isn’t going to get you to domestic production of 100% of domestic consumption.

    Maybe you could grow more wheat and less strawberries or something, maximize the land allocation to crops that produce the highest caloric output. But the biggest gains are probably going to be ending consumption of meat, since that’s costly in terms of land.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoWorld News@lemmy.world•Xi Jinping vows to reunify China and Taiwan in New Year’s Eve speechEnglish
    9·
    5 days ago

    two difficult an invasion target for this to happen.

    From what I’ve read, generally-speaking, the US expectation is that the US would win a conflict with China over Taiwan, but that the US would take serious naval losses in doing so.

    I suppose that China could have a different view of the matter, though.

    I think that a more-compelling argument is that if you, in fact, intend to invade Taiwan at any point in the remotely near future, you’re probably better off just invading it, not loudly announcing that you will do so at some unspecified point in the future and then sitting around while the potential invadee fortifies itself.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoWorld News@lemmy.world•India overtakes Japan as 4th-largest economy, report saysEnglish
    2·
    5 days ago

    The Japanese public are definitely not willing to lend to the government at such low interest rates. The majority holder of Japanese bonds is the Bank of Japan, who needs to purchase large amounts of bonds to conduct its monetary policy.

    But that capital that the bank is providing the government with is from the Japanese public, yes, who are lending it to the bank for a low return?

    searches

    https://www.ft.com/content/23b560a4-f0f1-44a9-94af-88d4807211f4

    Even after 30 lean, post-bubble years, Japanese households hold ¥2.1 quadrillion ($14.7tn) of financial assets, of which more than half ($7.7tn) is held in cash and deposits.

    By contrast, households in the US and UK respectively hold 13 and 31 per cent in deposits.

    In national terms, Japan’s cash savings alone are equivalent to the combined annual gross domestic product of Germany and India. In corporate terms, Mrs Watanabe could buy Apple, Microsoft and Saudi Aramco with what she has sitting (earning almost zero interest) in the bank.

    When prices in Japan were stagnant or falling, as they were for most of the past 25 years, Mrs Watanabe’s preference for holding the majority of savings in cash was reasonable, especially so after the government guaranteed bank deposits in 1995.

    The central bank’s long experiment with ultra-low interest rates, which began in the late 1990s, meant she was not making any returns, but nor was her wealth being significantly eroded as long as Japanese companies held back from raising prices.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoWorld News@lemmy.world•India overtakes Japan as 4th-largest economy, report saysEnglish
    7·
    5 days ago

    Japan’s government debt climbs to record ¥1.32 quadrillion

    My understanding from past reading is that Japan has an unusual situation where the Japanese public basically lends the government a lot of money at fairly unfavorable-to-the-public rates.

    searches

    https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/apr/what-is-behind-japan-high-government-debt

    Based on a skim of this, it sounds like a lot of the Japanese public basically lends their assets to the government, while getting fairly unrewarding returns for them.

    Then the government takes those assets and goes and invests the assets in riskier things abroad and makes a bunch of money by doing so.

    • First, as of the second quarter of 2024, Japan’s net public liabilities on the consolidated balance sheet amounted to only 78% of GDP. While gross liabilities stood at 270% of GDP, the government also held substantial assets totaling 192% of GDP.

    • Second, a significant portion of these assets were invested in high-return, riskier assets such as domestic equities, foreign equities and foreign bonds. Liabilities primarily consisted of low-return instruments like bank reserves and government bonds. This resulted in a return spread between government assets and liabilities. Despite having a net liability position, the high returns on riskier assets exceeded the government’s funding costs, generating a substantial positive return on Japan’s balance sheet.

    So, I don’t know why the Japanese public is so willing to lend to the government at poor rates of return. Maybe cultural, maybe driven by tax law or other policy.

    But from the standpoint of looking at the country in aggregate, it doesn’t sound so bad. Basically, the Japanese government has a lot of public debt because it’s chosen to take out debt from the public, who is willing to lwnd to it and makes a return by investing those assets. It’s not because it’s just spending beyond its means. High debts but also high assets and those assets have made a solid return.

    There’s also some other material in the article about how another part of it is due to some unusual financing structure, but I haven’t read about that before, and don’t have familiarity with it.