Domain TLD is the one administratively completely entangled into USA system while playing a major role on the internet working as it does. ICANN should definitely be an international entity, like UNESCO.
I am still baffled.. compare a domain like .party or .parts between porkbun or your major US based providers and a EU based registrar of your choosing.... It's not pretty, at least it wasn't to me.
Porkbun has .party for $21.09 (bar the first year promotion, not sure about VAT) and INWX (DE, VAT included) has it 32.80€ . It is definitely more but not as scary as you made it sound.
It’s not all bad. I hope you don’t mind tooting my own horn. But there are providers who try to keep prices reasonable: https://domain.chief.app/pricing (disclaimer: this is mine)
I must say though that this (at this stage) is mostly only possible because a few (also Dutch) reseller titans that allow me to be affordable.
The cost of entry as registrar into ICANN TLDs is pretty high
I'm on INWX but trying to get out, as pricing is quite expensive for regular TLDs. A .com domain goes for about €18 with taxes and all that stuff.
And the situation for autorenewal is terrible. At least when using their Spanish site (inwx.es) they cannot do autorenewal billed directly to your credit card or Paypal account, you have to previously add credit to your account "balance" and leave it hanging there until your next renewal.
Somebody mentioned openprovider.com and I'm taking a look because it looks interesting.
> whether AI can push to radicalize susceptible individuals
My guess is, not as the single and most prominent factor. Pauperisation, isolation of individual and blatant lake of homogeneous access to justice, health services and other basic of social net safety are far more likely going to weight significantly. Of course any tool that can help with mass propaganda will possibly worsen the likeliness to reach people in weakened situation which are more receptive to radicalization.
There's actually been fascinating discoveries on this. Post the mid 2010 ISIS attacks driven by social media radicalization in Western countries, the big social platforms (Meta, Google, etc) agreed to censor extremist islamist content - anything that promoted hate, violence, etc. By all accounts it worked very well, and homegrown terrorism plummeted. Access and platforms can really help promote radicalism and violence if not checked.
I don’t really find this surprising! If we can expect social networking to allow groups of like minded individuals to find eachother and collaborate on hobbies, businesses and other benign shared interests - it stands to reason that the same would apply to violent and other anti-state interests as well.
The question that then follows is if suppressing that content worked so well, how much (and what kind of) other content was suppressed for being counter to the interests of the investors and administrators of these social networks?
That make wonder, how many fossils there might be at total on earth, and with current trend, how much time would humanity should continue to survive before those remaining will approach zero, if fossil formation as a known rate.
> how many fossils there might be at total on earth
The number is both incalculable and vague - is a shark tooth enough to count as a fossil? How about diatoms and other microfossils?
Diatomaceous earth alone contains around 10^6-10^7 frustules (the shell of a diatom) per gram. If you count them as fossils then the lower bound is 10^18 fossils per year just in diatomaceous earth production (the fossils are ancient but we produce nearly a million tons a year in diatomaceous earth).
What does that mean though? Shark teeth are already mineralized (fluorapatite) so you can find two million year old Megalodon teeth at the Earnst Quarry in Bakersfield that exist just as they did in the mouth of the shark without any extra “fossilization”
Immense numbers. Quarries destroy them by the (enormous) truckload all the time, unexamined, god knows what cool unknown stuff has been ground up. Entire kinds of rock are basically made of fossils, not even always the really tiny kind (note: fossils can be microscopic!)
Then consider what's buried under the sea, totally inaccessible. Or under the ice at the poles.
It's a lot of fossils. And that's without even getting into questions like "what counts as a fossil for these purposes?", just any halfway sensible answer is going to leave you with an unfathomably big number, no need to even dig (ha, ha) into the specifics.
The places scientists go to dig up fossils are mostly where a particular stratum happens to exist (the crust gets recycled, so much of the oldest stuff is simply gone in most of the world) and happens to be exposed near the surface. Those same kinds of (for the more common strata, anyway) exist all over the place, just buried too deep to get at except, sometimes, during commercial excavation for things like mining (and then most of it's just gonna be destroyed without a look).
What are you talking about, if there is one thing on which LLM shine, it’s generating vast amount of bullshit. That’s extreme productivity gains.
Also flame-wars can be autofed ad nauseam now, so there’s going to be less and less interest in engaging into them. In an act of desperation, idle trolls will turn to tasks tracked by KPIs.
Will the gap remain just as big once earlier architectures are fully covered? I would expect some inertia bringing positive feedback in the development loop.
Cut throat competition between nations is usually called war. In war, gathering as much information as possible on everyone is certainly a strategic wanna do. Selling psyops about how much benefits will come for everyone willing to join the one sided industrial dependency also is a thing. Giving significant boost to potentially adversarial actors is not a thing.
That said universe don't obligate us to think the cosmos is all about competition. Cooperation is always possible as a viable path, often with far more long term benefits at scale.
Competition is superfluous self inflict masochism.
> How Many People Would Pay $10k in Bitcoin to Avoid Exposure?
As of 2026, global crypto adoption remains niche. Estimates suggest ~5–10% of adults in developed countries own Bitcoin.
Having $10k accessible (not just in net worth) is rare globally.
After decades of decline, global extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $3.00/day in 2021 PPP) has plateaued due to the compounded effects of COVID-19, climate shocks, inflation, and geopolitical instability.
So chances are good that this class of threat will likely be more and more of a niche, as wealth continue to concentrate. The target pool is tiny.
Of course poorer people are not free of threat classes, on the contrary.
Standards are definitely prescriptive. But just like a medical prescription, it doesn’t ensure that actors in the wild will conform to what’s prescribed. People will not follow prescriptions for whatever reason, willingly or otherwise. It doesn’t mean the document wasn’t prescriptive.
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