In the olden days, the local lords would marry their children together, to create familial groups and ensure that for the forseeable future the local areas would not have a conflict. Modern democracies don't have such valuable family members, we use valuable objects instead.

This is similar to what the French did last year.

The other thing I noticed, is that as the article chose to mention:

> Gold that is held with the Bank of England must meet modern international trade standards

with implication being that the gold it previously held in the USA was not meeting those standards, but is that just journalistic fluff? what are those standards? (could be exact weights in g rather than purity?)

NB the Netherlands still has >200 tonnes of gold held in the USA & Canada.

> Can you superimpose onto your actual visual field an arbitrary imagined image? Not just imagine what it would look like, but see it

This is your only question. No I cannot is my answer.

I don't know if its because I am aphantasic (which I definitely am) or not or if a phantasic would be able to do that either. Just because they can see something in their minds does not mean that they could superimpose it over the visual world they were seeing. I can only guess at this, but 'minds eye' is like another dimension. You can imagine things there, and your brain can simply focus on them instead of the signals you are getting from your optic nerves, or your auditory sensations, or the feelings from your butt as you sit on the chair.

I do not see things in my minds eye but I can conceptualise them perfectly well. I basically never remember if I have any dreams, perhaps I do not, but I do remember waking as if from a dream and realising that I had had a significant recognition moment, as if I had experienced a thing before. Perhaps I had a non-visual dream.

> This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization

The way that illusion works is simple. You expose your eye to green light without moving your gaze (stare at the dot). The green receptors in your eye become tired in the receptor pattern of the apple. Then, you switch to the white light which is broad spectrum. You fail to see the green, leaving red (blue is almost green, and our colour triangle is not equilateral). So, you see an afterimage of the apple but in red. This fades quickly as your green receptors recover from the overload. It has nothing to with aphantasia and the article does not claim it does.

I found that some of the timeline seemed out for my worldview. I'm not really sure how long the whole AI bubble has been out there, but it just seems so recent that I wasn't sure how they fitted all that in in the current timeline. Perhaps that will mature, in 5 years it won't all seem so new and perhaps more plausible.

To address the GPs point though, I do think that with LLM-assistance even now you can certainly create such sites pretty quickly with a low skill level, and that will only become easier. The big problem with creating things (in that way, or manually) is that you are the architect and artistic director, and in truth many people just don't have the ability to manage the end-result in a way that will work. We see this in websites created by developers for their own software which get posted here. Too many times there are massive assumptions that the viewer knows all about the software, which means it is almost incomprehensible to the incomer who may be interested but leaves before engaging (that is: me). I don't suppose that was a problem for Aarons bot society, but it could have affected the launch.

This scam spam has been arriving since I set the website up (2019 IIRC), well before LLMs became available. Now that I consider it, haven't seen any lately I guess they have a new target.. I'd better brace myself for a new AI generated onslaught.

https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2005/09/

(I use KeePassDX from F-droid it does not have network permissions)

Just search for keepass in the app store (Keepassium, KeePass Touch, Strongbox, ...)

  - Joshua Slocum - Sailing Alone Around The World (1900)
  - H.W.Tilman - Mishief Among The Penguins (1961)
  - Sir Alec Rose - My Lively Lady (1968)
  - Annie Hill - Voyaging on a Small Income (1993)

the new flat tax rate is 42% and the $20k guy takes home $23.6k

I'm not using actual proposed values, just an example. Lets choose $100k as the pivot point.

So person earning that currently pays $30k tax, meaning they get take-home of $70k. The new system means they get $12k UBI and tax needs to leave them $48k so they stay at the same salary level. They now pay $52k tax.

That means 52% tax rate, across the board.

The guy who previously earned $20k and paid $2k tax had a take home of $18k. He gets $12k UBI. Now he pays 52% tax on the $20k, so $10.4k. His take home is now $21.6k.

The closer you get to the floor, the better security there is. You can live on the $12k but you are not rich, and nobody goes without.

The $1m high earner should have paid $400k in tax but actually paid $100k because he pays $20k to an accountant. He now gets $12k UBI and pays $520k in tax because income tax rate is flat and the accountant needs to find another way to earn a crust, though he gets UBI, so..