It really depends on who your friend is, and who they are trying to defenf against.

If the US ( or Russian / Chinese) government really wants to access an internet-connected device, they can do it; what app you are using doesn’t even matter. For example, most people use the default Google keyboard, which could be compromised.

If the concern is about local goons / employers / coworkers, then both Telegram and Signal are more than enough to stop them prying.

As for whether to use Signal or Telegram, Signal has end to end encryption enabled by default, while in Telegram you have to switch it on for each chat. On the other hand, Telegram has the best UI among messaging apps hands down.

When modern-day Ukraine was formed in 1990, it was majority Ukrainian, but with a sizable Russian (and smaller Romanian and Polish) minority. Over the next twenty or so years, this minority voted for parties and politicians that favoured stronger ties with Russia. In contrast, ethnic Ukrainians supported joining (or at least aligning with) the EU. This conflict came to a head in 2014, when the pro-Russian government was overthrown by pro-EU protestors. Relations between the two groups have worsened since then, leading to pro-Russian militants seizing power in the (Russian majority) Donbass and Crimea, and joining Russia.

Have they considered spending less on war and more on education / R&D?

Bangladesh is a very populous country that lies almost entirely at sea level, and the Ganga and Brahmaputra flood at least once a year. The problem isn’t not being able to swim in calm water. The best swimmer in the world would still die if he got caught in one of those currents.

The admins seem to not crack down on misogyny, transphobia and so on. If they’re doing it on principle - refusing to censor and letting the bigots make fools of themselves in public - then I guess I can respect that. But on the other hand, sometimes silence can be seen as approval.

I wonder if it will be somewhat better here.

If you host your own instance, you have complete control over what gets posted. If not, you have to follow your instance’s rules.

one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism” which I thought was very odd for a site to do.

That’s just basic bot detection, like a captcha. Karl Marx’s works are out of copyright, and Lemmy’s lead developer is a communist, hence the choice.

it’s part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.

In general, instances don’t expect you to agree with their mods on politics or religion, but the content hosted on that instance would be somewhat biased towards the mods’ tastes. So you go from lemmygrad (far-left) to lemmy.ml (centre-left) to lemm.ee (centrist) to shitjustworks (centre-right) to lemmy.world (right-wing). Personally I’d avoid the first and last, but it’s up to each person to decide what’s right for them.

The smallest Indian city that (almost) all Indians would know would be the hill resort of Shimla (pop 170,000). However, this is because a place is expected to have a population of about 100,000 to be declared a ‘city’, so for example New Delhi is only a town.

Arabic and Chinese then.

Because (1) lithium contamination is a much, much, smaller problem than climate change and (2) we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Of course, if the EU is combining taxes on EV import with an equivalent investment in public transport or cycling / walking infrastructure, I wouldn’t be complaining.

Subsidizing production does not … from China anyways (eg. batteries).

I’m asking why the EU isn’t subsudising their domestic EV industry and starting a competition in electric propulsion technology. That would benefit everyone, except maybe the oil lobby.

one should disincentivize internal combustion vehicles by adding taxes to them

Why not both? And preferrably better subsidies for public transport / cycles / footpaths, etc.

avoid misusing words like “terrorist” because, when misused this way

If killing a handful of people is terrorism, what would you call trying to kill the entire human race (along with thousands of random other species)? ‘Terrorist’ is, if anything, too mild a word to describe such filth.

China heavily subsidizes EV manufacturers (and production in general)

And that’s a bad thing? Any sensible government is going to subsidise renewable energy and electric vehicles. It makes both economic and environmental sense. Anyone not doing this is an idiot and a climate terrorist.

better yet how about they take enough for donation and decanter a portion out an do blood testing both to make sure the blood is clean but alsoso the individual is aware of they are free of X

This is already how they do it here (India). They’ll test all donations for a number of infections, and you can give them your mobile number / e-mail / postal address to inform you if they find something.

I’m using data from StatCounter, as mentioned in the figure. See Belarus and Russia. They could be wrong; their figures are based on website hits.

Fixed. Thanks!

LibreOffice + me trying to fix things and making it worse + svg to png conversion

You overestimate my artistic abilities. I took the default colour palette LibreOffice gave, and replaced a few with ones that clash less.

I asked how much corn or sorghum they eat. None,the children don’t like either.

Isn’t niacin found in meat and fish? What do corn and sorghum have to do with it?

Look at the bar chart below. Apple has almost a two-third marketshare in Japan, but only about 20% in China. But China has a variety of Android manufacturers, so that Apple is the single biggest vendor.

Sorry, but I couldn’t find 12 distinct colours that all lie on the blue - yellow spectrum.

In addition to what philpo said, they also provide good language support for many African languages, something no other vendor does.