fiat_lux

@fiat_lux@kbin.social
8 Post – 756 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

It sounds like Charles Edward Littlejohn is a fucking badass and overall rad dude worth celebrating. Additionally, if he gets the maximum sentence of 5 years, that will be drastically longer than many of the January 6th rioters. I can't change the outcome for him, but I do wish him luck.

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From the linked techcrunch article:

will face fines of up to one million NOK (~$100k) per day.
unless it obtains users’ consent to the processing

From the order itself:

The order applies from 4 August 2023
we may decide to impose a coercive fine of up to NOK 1 000 000 (one million) per day

Misleading title.

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He made very specific defamatory statements accusing fellow citizens / parents of murdered children of participating in a government conspiracy and those people were able to prove they experienced harm as a consequence of his words.

The plaintiffs also had enough financial backing from (understandably horrified) strangers, and a high enough chance of winning for lawyers to want to represent them. Those factors allowed the plaintiffs to survive the legal system long enough to get a ruling, and the severity of the situation maintained their motivation to keep pushing for it instead of accepting settlement so they could somewhat move on with their lives.

Sometimes, the planets align to create the trifecta of enough energy, money, and evidence to force the justice system into enforcing justice. And I am grateful that can sometimes still happen, as rare as it feels.

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He's been calling her that for years, and it's kind of wild nobody really mentions it. Michael Cohen tried to play it off as "oh its probably commentary on how she handles lawsuits" (paraphrased) but it's pretty clear from this list of nicknames that Trump just likes rhyming nicknames for bullying people about things he thinks makes others inferior, including but not limited to racism, ableism and sexism.

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I don't consider a TV producer insulting a (obviously terrible) politician to be news, but I do enjoy this particular insult. It's nicely crafted. It's a pity he continues to use Twitter.

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Ceramic storage, I love it. We've looped all the way back around to reimplementing cuneiform tablets, just on a microscopic level.

I look forward to storing the complaints about the quality of my copper deliveries on them.

Yours faithfully,
Ea-nāṣir.

  • Waste pickers in the clothing canyons of Ghana, or any other landfill/wasteland

  • Volunteer caregivers for people with disabilities, especially in places where there are limited or no social safety nets

  • Street vendors like the children hawking goods in Yemen or Samoa or Zimbabwe...

  • Cleaners, such as the Sewer divers in places like India where there is no protective equipment provided

  • Food services workers.

  • "Domestic" services workers like childcare, housekeeping, etc. I include victims of forced marriages here.

  • All other exploited, outsourced, trafficked, and/or forced labour, such as the cobalt miners in Congo, or the clothing sweatshop workers in Bangladesh, or the Phillipines call centre workers, or the hazelnut pickers in Turkey, or construction labourers in Qatar, or the chaingangs in the US.

Our supply chains for everything are filled with slavery. 49.6 million people were living in modern slavery in 2021, of which 27.6 million were in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage. That's an estimated increase of 10 million people from 2016 to 2021.

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I feel ashamed of how I used to think and act.

Hey friend, I would like to offer you a reframing of this situation. Despite being exposed to some of the strongest cultural indoctrination into warmongering and the military, you made it out and embraced empathy and learning. That's huge. I'm proud of you, that's a positive change most people never make. You should be proud of it.

I just hope that is makes it’s way down the ranks

You have a powerful and important story. Sharing it like you did just now helps more than hopes can. Keep sharing it, you never know who might be reading it and encouraged to question the lessons they were taught.

This is part of due process in doing something about it. Unfortunately it's a lot faster to commit crimes and get "creative" with moving money in not-quite-crimes-but-still-bullshit than it is to weigh up their legality and enforce appropriate penalties.

When a legal system relies heavily on precedent as guidance and technicalities can destroy a decision, and fixing that might take decades and destroy lives, you have to make sure it's good. Especially when this many people are watching.

Unfortunately you're very right that the slow speeds to ensure precision are easily and visibly exploited by scumlickers like Jones.

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Always has been. Here's his drunk on-stage rant from 1976 in Birmingham.

** Content warning: Racism and racist slurs. **

"Do we have any foreigners in the audience tonight? If so, please put up your hands. So where are you? Well wherever you all are, I think you should all just leave. Not just leave the hall, leave our country. I don't want you here, in the room or in my country. Listen to me, man! I think we should vote for Enoch Powell. Enoch's our man. I think Enoch's right, I think we should send them all back. Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white. I used to be into dope, now I'm into racism. It's much heavier, man. Fucking wogs, man. Fucking Saudis taking over London. Bastard wogs. Britain is becoming overcrowded and Enoch will stop it and send them all back. The black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans don't belong here, we don't want them here. This is England, this is a white country, we don't want any black wogs and coons living here. We need to make clear to them they are not welcome. England is for white people, man. This is Great Britain, a white country, what is happening to us, for fuck's sake? Throw the wogs out! Keep Britain white!" - Eric Clapton

Enoch Powell was a conservative party politician running for election, incidentally.

Clapton has always been truly awful and this is completely in character for him.

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This but the pre-2005 version of the logo was also my first thought.

While I wish this research well, very well in fact...

In 8 of 16 patients studied, the vaccines activated T cells that recognize the patient’s own pancreatic cancers. These patients also showed delayed recurrence of their pancreatic cancers, suggesting the T cells activated by the vaccines may be having the desired effect to keep pancreatic cancers in check.

This is a far cry from "stops pancreatic cancer". An article about research science by the research scientist leading it is a call for funding. It is very probably a good thing to fund. But misleading headlines set society up for disappointment when the science doesn't deliver on the headline claims. This weakens public trust in science. A huge part of this problem is the need for science to beg for grants and funding in the first place.

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I no longer describe anything as 'lame' or 'retarded' or 'spaz' or their variants. It makes me sad ableism is so ingrained in even the most inclusive spaces even though the same argument has removed the use of 'gay' for the same reasons.

I also avoid dark or dry humour unless I'm confident the people I am talking to know it's absurdist and not a serious opinion. I don't always succeed at this.

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Grifters, con-artists and fascists all use the truth to sell a lie. The truth is that we have been steadily raised on a diet of mass produced garbage, optimised purely for profit while disregarding all public and environmental welfare in its construction and delivery. The lie is that the grifters, con-artists and fascists are not just doing the exact same thing to the extreme.

They offer what they call good, wholesome and honest solutions to contrast with the big globalist elitist fat-cats selling expensive unnatural poisons. But natural or synthetic, poisons can kill you the same type of dead.

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Napoleon's invasion of Russia. It led what might be the first great infographic ever though. Charles Minard’s Infographic of Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia from 1869 (Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Armée française dans la campagne de Russie en 1812-1813)

Tan colour line from left to right is the trip from France to Moscow, 1mm line weight = 6000 soldiers, black colour line from right to left is the trip back to France. The line slowly thins and diverges like a tree branch until 422k soldiers are whittled down to 10k returning. Not quite the outcome Napoleon had intended.

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It almost definitely is. This happened with the last big Australian fires too. Here's a an actual satellite photo of the Australian fires with overlaid red dots from NASA data for comparison.

Note the complete lack of smoke or cloud obscuring anything in the OP image.

Edited to add: NASA photo + overlaid data from Sicily's 2017 fires. Fewer fires, visible wind smoke trails.

If we are, we're emergent behavior, not the topic of study.

Frankly, simulation theory feels a lot like other previous "humans are super special!" ontologies. We're not, we're just organic bags of complex chemical processes like every other lifeform on Earth, with all the cool potential and shitty vulnerabilities that such a thing entails. I've yet to see anything which truly sets us apart as a species beyond the need to ascribe a meaning to our mortality.

Also, phys.org is (yet again) trash and have just reposted this piece as "news" from a book advertisement by the author on theconversation.com but altered the title in a small but meaningful way that conceals the disclosure

Phys.org title:

Do we live in a computer simulation like in The Matrix? Proposed new law of physics backs up the idea

Original title:

Do we live in a computer simulation like in The Matrix? My proposed new law of physics backs up the idea

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Read as: Taylor Swift has enough money to defend herself by threatening Musk legally.

The law is a weapon wielded by the rich, and brandishing it can convince other rulers to yield. Anyone else it helps is an unintended side effect.

Alex Gleason, for anyone wondering he's said he's going to work full time on...

open-source technology for “decentralized” social media platforms that operate on independently-run servers and provide an alternative to Twitter and Facebook. ... developing technology for connecting multiple decentralized platforms

Reinventing the fediverse? Watch out for that, I guess.

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This is the social network’s second update rollout for the logged-out experience this year. In March, it made the pages screen reader friendly along with making the webpages cleaner.

First, no it didn't. Second, how much if this is copied and pasted from their PR team? Lastly, what is this 80 Accessibility score on the new homepage.

Both Reddit and Techcrunch need to do better.

Also >4s LCP, lol performance

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They’re just keeping him locked up

He's free to move around the country, he hasn't even been on house arrest since August. Save your concern for the actual locked up people on shitty minor drug possession charges in the US.

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Why have you chosen to attack me so personally on this fine day? Give me some warning before you completely demolish me like that. Even just a countdown from 3 or something.

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Poor bastard must have been itchy as fuck. Sadly the article on a shitty ad infested site is also padded out for word count. So here is the important parts. Hand-summarised, unlike the AI-assisted article:

  • A 72-year-old man presented with a 2-day history of an itchy, linear rash across his back. Two days before symptom onset, he had prepared and eaten a meal containing shiitake mushrooms. - Paywalled report from New England Journal of Medicine
  • Caused by the carbohydrate lentinan which triggers the release of interleukin-1 (and other chemicals), which causes cause inflammation.
  • The rash develops usually 2-3 days after eating undercooked shiitake.
  • Lentinan is broken down when thoroughly cooked at temperatures over 145° C / 293° F

Because fuck shitty pop-science padded journalism and their marketing strategies and hostile UX, and fuck the NEJM too for paywalling medical research.

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American government to businesses after loaning them money during covid: Oh, don't worry about paying it back even though you just bought new cars with it instead of anything you were supposed to do with it, we forgive you.

America government to vulnerable people after overpaying them: WHERE'S THE MONEY, LEBOWSKI?!

I'm glad she has finally been acquitted but I am so sorry that she ever had to go through any of this

I prefer more drag, less death and suffering.

But not more fascists either, which presents a dilemma.

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I was excited to see squirrels, lightning bugs and a racoon in the US.

When people come to Australia they obviously want to see kangaroos, koalas and platypus and quokka. Koalas are very rare to see in the wild, and a visit to a zoo will score you a sleeping ball on a branch. Kangaroos are frequently roadkill if you go outside the city. Quokka require a long trip to a really remote location. You'll also almost never see a platypus, even the ones at the zoo you might catch a water ripple at best.

But if you're headed to Sydney city, guaranteed you'll spot the almighty and much maligned "bin chicken", our Australian white ibis. Often not quite white from the bins. At night they serenade you with their collective honking from their tree, which can be easily spotted by the masses of white poop underneath. And you'll see fruit bats in the evening. Hopefully not the daytime corpses hanging from electrical cables while they slowly rot, but that's not altogether unlikely either, unfortunately.

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I'm not sure if this says more about the minimisation of the immorality of slavery or more about how standard modern employment practices are degrading to the point they fit the definition of slavery.

Either way, it's not saying good things. Florida needs help badly.

People with disabilities exist, and these products are extremely helpful to them living independently. Not all home cutting devices are great for all disability types, eg. Slapchops are bad for people with hand arthritis, people with only one operational arm, etc.

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Can we now start pronouncing X as 'errrr' when referring to the company? It would be good not to taint the good name of the letter entirely.

And it does say 'er' on the side of not-his-building.

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Elon Musk’s alleged penchant for not paying bills is catching up with him.

Citation required. It's not having any effect on him personally, the businesses are the ones which are affected. And when you're not depending on your businesses to eat and live, there are zero consequences.

They're all his shitty decisions, but as usual, he doesn't pay for it. The profits are privatised while the losses are socialised. And I'm pretty sick of the media counting eggs before they hatch, because they usually don't hatch at all.

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I see he went with the "try to still look powerful and in charge" strategy for the mugshot. Unfortunately it just reads as "comic book villain".

It makes me a little disappointed it's not set against the height chart backdrop holding a written sign like 50 cent's mugshot, to really complete the look.

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It annoyed me that I couldn't see the whole statue. It's just a statue of the local general but another part of the inscription was also interesting:

THE CONFEDERATE SOLDIER WON AND IS ENTITLED TO THE ADMIRATION OF ALL WHO LOVE HONOR, AND LIBERTY.

Uh huh. From a monument built 50 years after the war ended. Physical copium.

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Aboriginals didn’t even have a way to make fire, write, make wheels, or farm.

Incorrect, indigenous Australians used fire extensively for land management. They were the first society in the world that we have evidence of milling seed for flour (36k years ago), they had yam plantations, built stone weirs for fish farming, and a bunch of other things. The reason people believe they didn't is because their way of life was systematically erased and dismissed as 'primitive' by the colonialists.

They didn't use wheels, because many groups used waterways for transport instead. Other groups were on land where the environment wasn't really conducive to wheeled transport.

They also didn't have writing, instead relying on an extensive oral history, as many cultures have.

Please don't spread misinformation.

Australians want to burn coal and spread hateful lies in the international media.

Largely incorrect as well, even if Australians are having issues with their government and the mining/energy industries.

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Initial reaction: "Huh, Tennessee? That's unusual"

On further reading: "oh, Nashville Metro Council. It's a city-county council that represents under 20k people."*

The title makes it read like a state representative to my foreign eyes.

* Edit: my mistake, each council member represents 15-17k people. Thanks @analwound for the correction.

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Almost any community named "cat" or "dog". People should post more pictures of their happy non-human family.

Please. I need a way to break up the solid pages of awful global news in my feed, and I haven't got any of my own to hug.

edited to add: here's a list of cat communities , if there are other lists for other animals let me know.

Some other animal communities I subscribe to (not exhaustive):

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Nobody cares so long as it's not something like "edgelord69@pussydestroyer.io"

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This is genuinely huge and is negligent homicide at the very least. We need multinational lawsuits to deal with multinational crimes like this.

Knowingly using a material that degrades with heat and humidity and can cause cancer in the manufacture of a heating humidifying healthcare device, and then ignoring all reports for years is diabolical stuff.

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People working together to solve problems without personal profit as the main incentive.

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You can't just cover things back up. Archaeological digs have been slowly buried over time in environmental conditions that allowed for their preservation, or in Pompeii's case, initially very quickly and then slowly. Covering it back up would not only ruin the discovery potential of future investigation that relies on identification by context (for example, dating a pot by the chemical composition of the surrounding and previously contained materials, but it would also endanger anything we've found by introducing an uncontrolled and entirely new environment. It's not like we can layer on the ash and other stuff in the same order it was deposited and in the exact same location with the same chemical composition.

Conservation is a necessary and very active effort as soon as something is found, because the act of studying it aleays causes at least some initial destruction.