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Cake day: June 30th, 2024

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  • senders can only be easily forged if you control the senders mail server or if they don’t use best practices for running a mail server.
    See also:

    there are cryptographic signatures on almost all mails sent by large mail providers these days, which makes it very hard to just forge an email that will hold up to closer examination with the help of the provider. so basically the IT techs of the company would need to be on board with whatever the perpetrator is doing, for them to get away with it.



  • Trying to remember what i learned in history here, i hope i get at least most of it right:

    • the political institutions of the Weimar republic were not as balanced and protected from interference as in other democracies
    • many parties were against the existence of the Weimar Republic
    • they differed a little in what they wanted instead though, ranging from reintroducing the monarchy with a few republican elements, to full fledged socialism
    • the difference between the parties made finding compromises very difficult and often resulted in stalemates in the legislative, because of missing checks this did not affect the executive as much though
    • especially the monarchists liked the idea of heaving a leader that can overrule the parliament if needed and so it was easy for Hitler to get them to agree that they would all be better off with him breaking the stalemate so to speak. So they formed a coalition
    • see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harzburg_Front
    • Those parties also had no qualms with banning other parties just because they disagreed on something, which Hitler was very happy to do, starting with the communists and ending with a complete ban on forming political parties after every serious contender was eliminated










  • So, i read the “Red Mars” trilogy. I also keep up with research into the Martian atmosphere, its soil and geology.

    My take is that all of this is still a pipe dream as much as it was 30 years ago when we did not know many of these things.
    People don’t want to see just how hostile Mars is to life. They pick a couple of the most obvious problems (e.g. radiation, no liquid water, no oxygen) and then they look for the first solution that seems viable and then declare Mars somehow liveable because look we can just implement those things.

    But they are completely ignoring that: none of these proposed solutions have been implemented at scale yet, at least not outside of earth’ atmosphere, there are hundreds of other known problems that often just don’t make it to the head lines because they don’t look that interesting or threatening (example: dust is suuuuper deadly on Mars, probably even worse than moon dust) and many problems will undoubtedly only become obvious once living beings are on the surface of Mars.

    I am glad that there is hard sci-fi dealing with some of these problems in very optimistic ways, because we should try to better our understanding of them and not just give up, but we also should not have any illusions about how hard this task is and that this can take centuries of work.