lgbtq_plus
LGBTQ+ alyaza 12 hours ago 100%
'I’m the proudest bisexual you’ve ever met, so why do I still doubt that I’m queer enough?' www.gaytimes.com

> I’m a proud bisexual and I adore our queer culture, so why do I still doubt that I’m allowed to take up this space? > > I remember the day I came out to my mum. Standing at the end of her bed one grey and drizzly evening, I used a sudden surge of confidence to tell her that I am bisexual. Initially, she didn’t understand. How could I like more than one gender if at that time I had a boyfriend? I did my best to answer her questions, and fortunately, she accepted me. > But I was still grappling with self-doubt, compounded by casual, maybe even unconscious, bi-erasure from those around me. My friends would joke that the worst thing I could do was end up with a man – I’d be betraying myself, and my attraction to men surely couldn’t be real. > > I laughed too, as a bead of sweat rolled down my face. I was an imposter. I wasn’t queer enough. Quick! Someone play Chappell Roan and cleanse me of my sins! Should I overcompensate and date a woman immediately? The pressure to prove myself at times felt overwhelming. I didn’t feel good enough for my own community.

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science
Science alyaza 1 day ago 100%
Ancient Rapanui genomes reveal resilience and pre-European contact with the Americas www.nature.com

> ## Abstract > Rapa Nui (also known as Easter Island) is one of the most isolated inhabited places in the world. It has captured the imagination of many owing to its archaeological record, which includes iconic megalithic statues called moai1. Two prominent contentions have arisen from the extensive study of Rapa Nui. First, the history of the Rapanui has been presented as a warning tale of resource overexploitation that would have culminated in a major population collapse—the ‘ecocide’ theory2,3,4. Second, the possibility of trans-Pacific voyages to the Americas pre-dating European contact is still debated5,6,7. Here, to address these questions, we reconstructed the genomic history of the Rapanui on the basis of 15 ancient Rapanui individuals that we radiocarbon dated (1670–1950 ce) and whole-genome sequenced (0.4–25.6×). We find that these individuals are Polynesian in origin and most closely related to present-day Rapanui, a finding that will contribute to repatriation efforts. Through effective population size reconstructions and extensive population genetics simulations, we reject a scenario involving a severe population bottleneck during the 1600s, as proposed by the ecocide theory. Furthermore, the ancient and present-day Rapanui carry similar proportions of Native American admixture (about 10%). Using a Bayesian approach integrating genetic and radiocarbon dates, we estimate that this admixture event occurred about 1250–1430 ce.

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politics
Politics alyaza 1 day ago 100%
Ballot Initiatives Activate Voters, Change the Landscape https://convergencemag.com/articles/ballot-initiatives-activate-voters-change-the-landscape/

> Ballot initiatives are the tool we need in this moment to not only block authoritarian rule and ideology, but to build a world where all of us thrive and live with dignity — the world we deserve. > Time and time again, ballot measures have proven to be powerful tools for collaborative governance that transcend party lines and often receive higher vote percentages than candidates. This trend started in 2014 when four states, Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota, raised the minimum wage through ballot measures; another four states, Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and Washington, followed suit in 2016. Florida made headlines across the country in 2018 when nearly 65% of Florida voters approved Amendment 4 to restore voting rights to Floridians with past criminal convictions. > > In 2020, Missouri and Oklahoma expanded Medicaid to low-income adults, which has proven to significantly benefit individuals who gain healthcare coverage as well as their communities as a whole. Since the overturning of Roe, voters have successfully protected reproductive rights every time the issue has been placed on the ballot. In Ohio—a state that Trump won with more than 53% of the vote in 2020—hundreds of thousands of voters mobilized in the 2023 elections to pass Issue 1, enshrining the right to abortion in the state constitution just months after they successfully defeated a ballot measure that would have blocked that victory. These are just a few instances that showcase how voters have used the power of direct democracy to support progressive policies, even in Republican trifecta states. Ballot measures are bypassing partisan politics and turning people-power into policies that transcend divides and improve lives.

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disability
Disability and Accessibility alyaza 1 day ago 100%
A Twitter controversy over Covid-19 led to a culture of distrust and suppression within ACT UP New York disabilityvisibilityproject.com

> The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power New York (ACT UP), the flagship branch of the historic and global AIDS organization, attracted controversy on social media this summer around statements related to the Covid-19 pandemic. On July 19, ACT UP angered disabled and Covid cautious people with a Twitter thread that aligned people who criticize others for not wearing a mask with the historic criminalization of HIV patients. As many pointed out in response, people who wear masks are the vulnerable marginalized group currently being stigmatized and criminalized, not unmasked people who spread airborne disease. The thread also offered the nihilistic and deadly proposition that “people cannot prevent themselves from getting Covid in perpetuity.”

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humanities Humanities & Cultures When It Comes to Banning Smartphones From Schools, What Really Works?
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  • alyaza alyaza 3 days ago 100%

    Lukas Müller, the Würenlos school director, attributes the success of the ban to several factors. For one, the school board agreed way back in 2007 to keep phones out of classrooms. “But it led to students using them incessantly in the breaks or taking bathroom breaks to look at their phones,” remembers Müller, who has been at the school since 2004. “That was just at the start of the iPhone boom.” Studies show that requests to turn off their phones while students are allowed to keep the devices with them during class are rarely successful, and up to 97 percent of students can’t resist the temptation to check their emails or apps. So the board decided the following year to ban phone use in the entire school area. “The students are indeed less distracted,” Müller has observed. And because his K-12 school starts at kindergarten and teaches students all the way through senior year, students get used to being phoneless in school long before they become attached to Instagram or TikTok.


    But the solution isn’t as simple as banning all digital devices. The problem isn’t the use of these devices per se, but excessive use and the kind of content students access. Students who spend one to five hours per day on digital devices for learning at school score significantly higher in their mathematics lessons than those who spend no time on such devices, the OECD concludes: “In contrast, students spending over one hour on digital devices for leisure at school score more than nine points lower in mathematics and report a lower sense of belonging at school than students who spend no time on leisure digital activities.”

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  • usnews U.S. News Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable.
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  • alyaza alyaza 3 days ago 100%

    Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

    It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

    The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.


    Though Republican lawmakers who voted for state bans on abortion say the laws have exceptions to protect the “life of the mother,” medical experts cautioned that the language is not rooted in science and ignores the fast-moving realities of medicine.

    The most restrictive state laws, experts predicted, would pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing “irreversible” harm when they intervened with procedures like a D&C.

    “They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned lawmakers in 2019 during one of the hearings over Georgia’s ban.

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  • politics
    Politics alyaza 3 days ago 100%
    How to Make Sure Your Disruptive Protest Helps Your Cause https://forgeorganizing.org/article/how-make-sure-your-disruptive-protest-helps-your-cause

    > Rather than fearing polarization, organizers should seek to understand how they can use it most effectively. This involves recognizing that, while collective action undertaken in pursuit of a good cause typically results in positive outcomes, not all protests have identical effects or produce equal benefits. > > Central to harnessing the power of polarization is appreciating that, by its nature, it cuts both ways: the same actions that create positive polarization — drawing more active supporters into movements and convincing previously neutral or undecided observers to at least passively sympathize with the cause — will also have negative effects, turning off some people and firing up the opposition. The goal of movement participants is therefore to make sure that the beneficial results of their actions outweigh the counterproductive ones, and that they are shifting the overall spectrum of support in their favor. > So how, then, can movement participants predict how a given protest will polarize? And how can they work to improve their skills in designing effective actions?

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    chat
    Chat alyaza 3 days ago 100%
    how's your week going Beehaw

    i'm back after an absence; i've been working on a bunch of stuff because Cohost is shutting down at the end of the month. the result: i have a [website now](https://alyaza.neocities.org/), and i'm porting over my essays and running my union blog out of that. i have an RSS feed that works for both, as far as i can tell. things seem like they're calming down now so hopefully i'll be able to be around more for the remainder of this month

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    technology Technology What a 160-year-old theory about coal predicts about our self-driving future
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  • alyaza alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%

    three paragraphs saying you're wrong and that the empirical evidence supports nothing you're saying is not a "long-winded rant" lmao--this uncritical "trust me bro it's actually fine, you just don't get it" stuff is the exact reason i consider autonomous vehicle stuff to 98% worthless techbro hype and autofellatio. cite your sources if you want people to listen--i have, and you've refuted none of it!

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  • technology Technology What a 160-year-old theory about coal predicts about our self-driving future
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  • alyaza alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%

    The whole point of induced demand in highways is that when you add capacity in the form of lanes it induces demand. So if our highways are already full and if that capacity isn’t coming from increased EV efficiency then where is it coming from? If there’s no increase in road capacity then what is inducing demand?

    just for example: "freeing up both parking lot real estate, but more importantly, freeing up on street parking, creating more room for actual traffic to move"--every single one of these posited improvements would induce demand unless you literally demolish the infrastructure (which, if you're just switching people one-to-one from regular cars to automated cars is not going to happen, because the number of cars will remain a constant). the existence of unused parking begets driving and is a predictor for more driving.[^1] the existence of more space to move obviously begets more driving because the "highways" aren't "full" anymore; and again, if it didn't that would actually be worse because it incentivizes less safe driving practices.

    You are describing how humans drive, not AVs. AVs always obey the speed limit and traffic calming signs.

    if by AVs you mean "fully autonomous" ones that literally do not exist currently then sure--they better! but at that point nothing you say is meaningful, because the technology literally doesn't exist. we might as well be talking about mass-adopted hydrogen cars or whatever.

    but, if we mean semi-autonomous ones—the ones that clearly exist, and which companies advertise as autonomous, and which people actually use—no. absolutely not. these things routinely violate even the most obvious traffic laws and necessitate humans to intervene in their ordinary function. Waymo hits pedestrians even now, and it's ostensibly one of the most advanced semi-autonomous programs in the world. Uber literally killed a pedestrian and got into legal trouble over it. Tesla's problems are omnipresent to the point where the NHTSA has said their feature is unsafe in practice and people make it a punchline. you can't no-true-Scotsman this technology. even in the best and least ambiguous traffic circumstances it has obvious problems!

    [^1]: > In 2015, a group of researchers led by Chris McCahill looked at historical trends in parking supply and commuter behavior for nine cities: Albany, New York; Berkeley, California; the Washington, DC, suburbs of Arlington, Virginia, and Silver Spring, Maryland; Cambridge, Lowell, and Somerville, Massachusetts; and Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut. Using historical aerial photography from three dates to identify and approximate the parking supply, McCahill found that parking growth between 1960 and 1980 was a “powerful predictor” of car use in the following two decades. Every ten spaces added per one hundred residents before 1980 were linked to an 8 percent increase in the share of residents driving to work after 1980. Increase in the parking supply in the study’s first two decades was directly correlated with increases in car use in the following two decades. More parking appeared to cause more driving, not the other way around.

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  • technology Technology What a 160-year-old theory about coal predicts about our self-driving future
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  • alyaza alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%

    Yes, I have no doubt there would be induced demand, but that extra demand wouldn’t be at the cost of anything.

    But if AVs add more capacity to our roads, that will be entirely because they are driving more efficiently.

    you are literally doing what i mean when i say you are making assumptions with no evidence. there is, again, no reason to believe that "driving more efficiently" will result from mass-adoption of automated vehicles--and even granting they do, your assumption that this wouldn't be gobbled up by induced demand is intuitively disprovable. even the argumentation here parallels other cases where induced demand happens! "build[ing] new roads or widen[ing] existing ones" is a measure that is almost always justified by an underlying belief that we need to improve efficiency and productivity in existing traffic flows,[^1] and obviously traffic flow does not improve in such cases.

    but granting that you're correct on all of that somehow: more efficiency (and less congestion) would be worse than inducing demand. "efficiency" in the case of traffic means more traffic flow at faster speeds, which is less safe for everyone—not more.[^2] in general: people drive faster, more recklessly, and less attentively when you give them more space to work with (especially on open roadways with no calming measures like freeways, which are the sorts of roads autonomous vehicles seem to do best on). there is no reason to believe they would do this better in an autonomous vehicle, which if anything incentivizes many of those behaviors by giving people a false sense of security (in part because of advertising and overhyping to that end!).

    You’re asking for something that does not exist. How am I supposed to provide you evidence proving what the results of mass adoption of AVs will be when there has never been a mass adoption of AVs.

    you asserted these as "other secondary effects to AVs"--i'm not sure why you would do that and then be surprised when people challenge your assertion. but i'm glad we agree: these don't exist, and they're not benefits of mass adoption nor would they likely occur in a mass adoption scenario.

    For instance, what is your reasoning for believing that AVs could never be fundamentally safer than human drivers who are frequently tired, angry, distracted, impaired, impatient, etc?

    the vast majority of road safety is a product of engineering and not a product of human driving ability, what car you drive or its capabilities, or other variables of that nature. almost all of the problems with, for example, American roadways are design problems that incentivize unsafe behaviors in the first place (and as a result inform everything from the ubiquity of speeding to downstream consumer preferences in cars). to put it bluntly: you cannot and will not fix road safety through automated vehicles, doubly so with your specific touted advantages in this conversation. the road designs that create bad driving behavior don't cease to be an issue because people switch to an automated vehicle.

    [^1]: take for instance “Tackling Traffic Congestion,” Transportation Quarterly 40, no. 2 (1986), which states "growing congestion [in the Bay Area] [...] is the result of development that comes with an improving economy compounded by a lagging expansion of freeway and transit capacity." [^2]: see for instance Leonard Evans, “Future Predictions and Traffic Safety Research,” Transportation Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1993): “although congestion impedes mobility, it increases safety, as measured by serious injuries and fatalities.” and Arnold Vey, “Relationship between Daily Traffic and Accident Rates,” American City 52, no. 9 (1937), who observed that beyond a certain point congestion reduced accident rates. congestion unsurprisingly acts as a calming measure when it becomes severe enough.

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  • technology Technology What a 160-year-old theory about coal predicts about our self-driving future
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  • alyaza alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%

    As long as cars exist, AVs will be better than human drivers,

    this is at obvious odds with the current state of self-driving technology itself--which is (as i noted in the other comment) subject to routine overhyping and also has rather minimal oversight and regulation generally. Tesla is only the most egregious example in both respects; even stuff like Waymo is pretty much entirely reliant on taking their word for it that the technology would be safer than humans (which meshes awkwardly with well publicized problems and efforts to hide robotaxi safety records).

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  • technology Technology What a 160-year-old theory about coal predicts about our self-driving future
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  • alyaza alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%

    Secondly, it’s based on the idea that people even can drive more than they already do.

    they can. induced demand is omnipresent in basically all vehicular infrastructure and vehicular improvements and there's no reason to think this would differ with autonomous vehicles

    Fourthly, it ignores other secondary effects to AVs, like suddenly not needing nearly as much parking, freeing up both parking lot real estate, but more importantly, freeing up on street parking, creating more room for actual traffic to move, and their increased patience not causing constant traffic jams because they tailgated someone and then slammed on the brakes.

    okay but: literally none of this follows from mass-adoption of autonomous vehicles. this is a logical leap you are making with no supporting evidence—there is, and i cannot stress this enough, no evidence that if mass-adoption occurs any of this will follow—and in general the technology is subject to far more fabulism and exaggeration (like this!) than legitimate technological advancement or improvement of society.

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  • technology
    Technology alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%
    What a 160-year-old theory about coal predicts about our self-driving future www.theverge.com

    > Enticing though they are, such arguments conceal a logical flaw. As a classic 19th-century theory known as a Jevons paradox explains, even if autonomous vehicles eventually work perfectly — an enormous “if” — they are likely to increase total emissions and crash deaths, simply because people will use them so much.

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    humanities
    Humanities & Cultures alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%
    Outside the Racist Nostalgia Box: Rethinking Afrikan tähti’s Cultural Depictions gamescriticism.org

    > While in recent years many European businesses have taken steps to alter their previously racist product designs, some games, especially board games like the popular Finnish Afrikan tähti (Star of Africa; Kuvataide, 1951), resist this trend. This raises two questions: First, what are the emotional mechanics which allow openly racist games like Afrikan tähti to remain unchanged and celebrated as ‘classics’ today? Secondly, what can our predominantly white board and role-playing game communities do to let go of emotional attachments to white supremacist games and become invested in a more respectful and welcoming games culture? > [...]we speculate on ways to expedite collective grief to help players reach what we term the ‘white acceptance stage’. We speculate that one useful design intervention to help rethink Afrikan tähti might be to classify it as a PEGI 18 game with the descriptor ‘discrimination’. Seen in this new light, the game might find a new purpose as a cultural educational item complementing lessons on Europe’s colonial past and the self-image of (Northern) Europe for older children. This intervention is inspired by the recent introduction of sensitivity warnings by multinational entertainment corporations such as Disney and broadcasting agencies like YLE (Rytsä, 2007). We argue that adopting such labeling practices for popular board games like Afrikan tähti can be a first step towards confronting racist and colonial ludic heritage.

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    humanities
    Humanities & Cultures alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%
    I Went to Yellowstone National Park to Learn Why it Turns Tourists Into Morons www.outsideonline.com

    [archive.is link](https://archive.ph/hTh7o) > The U.S. has a near-infinite supply of clueless tourists such as myself, much to the dismay of our National Park Service. Yellowstone, our most famous national park thanks to Kevin Costner, welcomes 4.5 million of us each year. Like all of our parks, Yellowstone takes in tourists not only for the revenue but to remind them that the physical country they reside in is a marvel well beyond their comprehension. As such, Yellowstone is set up to accommodate these hordes. And while park officials do their best to keep tourists in line, often literally, my kind still manage to do plenty of tourist shit. We trample plant life. We get shitfaced and pick unwinnable fights with animals ten times our size. And we hurt ourselves. According to NPS data, at least 74 people have died while visiting Yellowstone in the past 15 years. I could have been one of those people. I deserve to be one of those people. > > This is why Outside sent me to the park just a few weeks ago, during one of the busiest times of the year. They wanted me to observe our most basic tourists in the wild. Maybe I’d even get to see one die. Or, even better for my editors, maybe I would die while I was there. Maybe I’d look down my nose at the tourists around me only to end up as wolf food myself. Like most other Yellowstone visitors, I was not trained for the outdoors, I relish doing shit that posted signs yell at me not to do, and I often daydream about fighting bears (and winning!). I find danger tempting, which isn’t a good thing given that I can no longer swim a single pool lap without taking a break. Are people like me responsible enough to visit one of our national treasures without breaking it? Do we, as a population, know how to do national parks?

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    humanities Humanities & Cultures Cars Have Fucked Up This Country Bad
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  • alyaza alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%

    America’s collective decision in the 20th century to make cars and the roads serving them the bedrock of all urban and regional planning will go down in history as just another of our nation’s awful, ruinous ideas that we nevertheless clung to for generations, like slavery or lead paint. Cars, of course, have a way of making themselves very hard to progress away from. Once you build the towns and cities around the road patterns for cars, and allow the interstate highway system to determine development patterns, the entire system gets locked in in a way that is difficult to change. Even as ever-widening highways and air pollution and the immense parking lots destroy ever larger swaths of peace and scenery, they also represent ever larger sunk costs from consumers and governments, which make everyone more reluctant to try to break away from them.

    New cars spawn new roads. New roads spawn new sprawl. It all spawns new debts. To admit that this entire thing was a mistake involves surveying our suburban homes, our paved driveways, our SUVs, our shopping centers, our entire beloved home towns, and saying: Okay, this has all gotten out of control. As all addicts know, this piercing self-criticism can be more difficult than just continuing doing something that is unhealthy, but familiar.

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  • askbeehaw AskBeehaw it's election season, Beehaw, so — what are your thoughts on compulsory (mandatory) voting?
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  • alyaza alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%

    Anti-smoking legislation is evidence of an authoritarian society. Lifestyle control and coercive paternalism appease the whims of fanatics who hold positions of influence. In a free economy, demand dictates supply. Smoking bans and restrictions are only in place because there is currently not enough demand for smoke-free establishments to appease those who claim they speak for all society. The will of a few is being forced on the many.

    wanting to exist in a society where you don't get second-hand lung cancer is not fascism, oh my god. it is perfectly socially acceptable and not even the slightest bit "authoritarian" to regulate actions that can directly harm other people. and this is an absolutely comical free-market-absolutist-brained idea of what freedom is.

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  • usnews
    U.S. News alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%
    Denver's latest e-bike vouchers were all claimed in a minute flat denverite.com

    > Emily Gedeon, a spokesperson for Denver's climate office, said there's no foul play at work here — just enormous demand. About 17,000 people tried to get a voucher on Tuesday, she told us, more than 77 times the amount available [220 vouchers]

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    askbeehaw AskBeehaw it's election season, Beehaw, so — what are your thoughts on compulsory (mandatory) voting?
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  • alyaza alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%

    for people who have passed a morality test

    i don't see how this is even theoretically tenable considering what is "moral" is entirely subjective and largely nonfalsifiable

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  • citylife
    City Life alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%
    Half of Uber, Lyft Trips Replace More Sustainable Options www.ucdavis.edu

    > Published in Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, the study analyzed data collected among riders in three metropolitan regions — the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, and Los Angeles and Orange counties — between Nov. 2018 and Nov. 2019. The data set consisted of 7,333 ride-hailing trips by 2,458 respondents. > > About 47% of the trips replaced a public transit, carpool, walking or cycling trip. An additional 5.8% of trips represented “induced travel,” meaning the person would not have made the trip were an Uber or Lyft unavailable. This suggests ride-hailing often tends to replace most sustainable transportation modes and leads to additional vehicle miles traveled.

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    askbeehaw
    AskBeehaw alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%
    it's election season, Beehaw, so — what are your thoughts on compulsory (mandatory) voting?

    good idea/bad idea, necessary democratic reform or authoritarian imposition? are there better or worse ways to do it?

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    support Beehaw Support September financial update—and Beehaw needs your help rebuilding our donation base
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  • alyaza alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%

    still the case (but the same fediverse); we move at the pace of development and unfortunately that has slowed a bit in the case of Sublinks

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  • politics Politics Muslims Were Reliably Democratic Voters. With US Gaza Policy, That’s Changed.
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  • alyaza alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%

    you're being way too vitriolic here, dial it back by 10.

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  • politics Politics Montana GOP Candidate Tim Sheehy Caught on Audio Talking About “Drunk Indians at 8 a.m.”
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  • alyaza alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%

    It’s not racist when they call him white boy, it’s racist he tells that story.

    if you think calling people "white boy" is racist but the way he talks about indigenous people here isn't you are such a fragile little cracker it's not even funny

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  • support Beehaw Support September financial update—and Beehaw needs your help rebuilding our donation base
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  • alyaza alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%

    i forget the exact reason but i believe it has something to do with OCEF being in Europe, which means taxes, exchange rates, and other annoying variables like that come into play for us which weren't previously contributors on OCF

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  • environment
    Environment alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%
    The Land Remembers: Why Farmers Are Bringing Back 'Prairie Potholes' reasonstobecheerful.world

    > Switchgrass and foxtail provided the perfect camouflage for a heron slowly wading through a prairie pond. Only the squawking of a Canada goose mother scolding her offspring shattered the bucolic stillness of the wetland. It was the summer of 2023, and throughout large areas of the Canadian prairie provinces and the Great Plains of the United States, increasingly dry conditions had made water a precious resource. But not here. The 260-acre Hannotte wetland in east-central Saskatchewan was an oasis in an otherwise arid desert of wheat fields. > > It hadn’t always been this way. The land had been drained for agriculture over a century earlier, and it took 20 years of door-knocking for Kevin Rozdeba to convince farmers in the Yorkton region of Saskatchewan that removing land from crop production and turning it back into a wetland was in their best interests. As a program specialist for Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUCS), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to conserve and manage wetlands, Rozdeba knew a wetland’s unique hydrology could contribute to water availability essential for crop production in times of drought. Getting farmers on board, though, was a tall order.

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    feminism
    Feminism alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%
    Doctors grapple with how to save women's lives amid 'confusion and angst' over new Louisiana law https://lailluminator.com/2024/09/03/louisiana-women/

    > When a woman starts bleeding out after labor, every second matters. But soon, under a new state law, Louisiana doctors might not be able to quickly access one of the most widely used life-saving medications for postpartum hemorrhage. > > The Louisiana Illuminator spoke with several doctors across the state that voiced extreme concern about how the rescheduling of misoprostol as a controlled dangerous substance will impact inpatient care at hospitals. Misoprostol is prescribed in a number of medical scenarios — it’s an essential part of reproductive health care that can be used during emergencies, as well as for miscarriage treatment, labor induction, or intrauterine device (IUD) insertion. > > But because it is used for abortion, misoprostol has been targeted by conservatives in Louisiana — an unprecedented move for a medication that routinely saves lives. A controlled dangerous substance has extra barriers for access, which can delay care.

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    support Beehaw Support September financial update—and Beehaw needs your help rebuilding our donation base
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  • alyaza alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%

    This is presented in a confusing way to me. But I see after reading it twice that monthly recurring contributions are $80.82 per month (I’m assuming this is after fees that OCEF charges).

    yes--this is why all the contribution numbers are weird and non-round. i believe we also lose out something like 5-6% to fees vs. the previous 3-4% fees we had on Open Collective Foundation—smaller donations definitely get punished a bit more heavily now.

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  • science
    Science alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%
    Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions: Global evidence from two decades https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl6547

    see also [Climate Policy Explorer](https://climate-policy-explorer.shinyapps.io/climate-policies-dashboard/explorer/)

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    entertainment
    Entertainment alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%
    You Will Grow Old Waiting for Your Favorite Show to Come Back https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/arts/television/rings-of-power-stranger-things-severance-return.html

    [archive.is link](https://archive.ph/Nhu89) > This is the Ent-like pace at which TV moves these days. The “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon” took nearly as long to come back for its second outing. “Severance,” likewise a member of the debut class of ’22, will return in January, almost three years since we last saw it. The teen drama “Euphoria,” whose second season began in January 2022, will start shooting a third season … sometime in 2025. By the time it airs, one assumes its characters will be eligible for Social Security. > > More and more, rejoining a favorite series is like trying to remember the details of high school trigonometry. Which hobbit did what to whom? What did they do all day in that “Severance” office again? Was “Stranger Things” set in the 1980s, or was it actually made then?

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    support
    Beehaw Support alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%
    September financial update—and Beehaw needs your help rebuilding our donation base

    #### obligatory preface: we're 100%-user funded and everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us. you can [donate here](https://opencollective.com/beehaw-collective/donate). --- after a few months, we're finally stable enough to put another one of these out. to make a long story short: getting our money out of the old collective and into the new one was actually *much* more of a mess than we thought—and very little of the functionality we expected came to fruition—so it's essentially taken us six months to re-establish our financial situation. August's numbers are: ### overall expenses this month: $183.58 **$142.13 for hosting the site** - $112.00 for hosting the site itself - $22.40 for backups - $7.73 for site snapshots **$28.80 for Hive, an internal chat platform we've set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean)** - $24.00 for hosting Hive - $4.80 for backups **~$4.16 for email functionality, which can be further subdivided into** - $0.00 for Mailgun (handles outbound emails, so approval/denial/notifications emails; also lets us not get marked as spam - we currently don't send enough emails to trigger the threshold for payment) - ~$4.16/mo ($50/yr, already paid in full) for Fastmail (handles all inbound emails) **$8.49 for BackBlaze (redundant backup system that's standalone from Digital Ocean)** ### overall contributions this month: $176.28 unsurprisingly, the mess of a switch-over, the several months it's taken to sort everything out, and our minimal encouragement of donations in the interim of sorting things out has resulted in a decrease in funding. for the first time in a long time, we're not breaking even—and without the one-time donation we'd be out about $100 this month. breakdown: - 15 monthly contributions, totaling **$80.82** - 0 yearly contributions, totaling **$0.00** - 1 one-time donation, totaling **$95.46** ### total end of month balance: $6,849.83 #### expense runway, assuming no further donations: about 3 years --- this dovetails into an announcement we need to make: we need your help to gradually rebuild our donation base. **to be clear, we are obviously not in any danger of shutting down right now—but we *have* taken a very material hit in terms of finances[^1] and as a result we're now running off of the financial cushion you've given us.** even though we have a long expense runway, we'd like to proactively return to breaking even and not having to think about how much we're losing per month. **our current monthly contributions are about $100 short of breaking even, so consider that our rough financial goal.** please donate if you are able. unfortunately—and as mentioned at the top—the tools to switch over any previous subscription you may have had on Open Collective Foundation don't appear to exist. this means you will have to manually resubmit your information on Open Collective Europe Foundation if you haven't already. (we may or may not send out a mass-email to our current/previous donors in the future to this effect.) [^1]: The differential between what we *would* have had OCF stayed up and what we *do* have on OCEF now could be as high as $4,600. That is split between the six months of paused donations (likely $3,000-$3,600, averaging our financial reports previously) and the six months of hosting expenses we've covered with our cushion (likely around $1,000-$1,200 given our hosting costs have not changed). We're also now losing a slightly larger cut of what we take in. In sum: we've lost out on a lot of potential runway for the site.

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    politics
    Politics alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%
    Montana GOP Candidate Tim Sheehy Caught on Audio Talking About “Drunk Indians at 8 a.m.” www.yahoo.com

    > In an audio clip recorded at a fundraiser on November 6, 2023, Sheehy brags about roping and branding with members of the Crow Nation. He says “it’s a great way to bond with the Indians while they’re drunk at 8:00 a.m.” > Sheehy has a pattern of speaking about the Crow, according to Char-Koosta. At other events, Sheehy mimicked Crow tribal members calling him “white boy” and throwing Coors beer cans at his head when he misses a double-heel shot at their rodeo.

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    chat
    Chat alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%
    how's your week going Beehaw

    finished 40th book for the year (The Displacements - Bruce Holsinger); we move ever onwards

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    news World News South Korea recycles 98% of its food waste. What can it teach the world?
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  • alyaza alyaza 2 weeks ago 100%

    When South Korea started tackling this problem 20 years ago, it threw away 98 percent of its food waste. Today, 98 percent of food waste is turned into feed, compost or energy, according to the South Korean Ministry of Environment. It achieved this by banning food scraps from landfills and mandating that all residents separate their food waste from their trash and recycling — and to pay for the service through fees and fines.

    South Korea is one of the few countries with a nationwide system for food-waste management. While France made composting food mandatory this year — and some cities like New York have imposed similar rules — few places match up with South Korea.

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  • sports Sports Blue Jackets winger Gaudreau dies at age 31
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  • alyaza alyaza 3 weeks ago 100%

    it's just unbelievable how dangerous it is to bike anywhere in America because of how reckless drivers tend to be. (and in this case it's particularly devastating because both were in town for their sister's wedding)

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  • environment Environment How Summer of Heat on Wall Street is using disruption to end fossil fuel financing
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  • alyaza alyaza 3 weeks ago 100%

    Since June 10, the campaign has organized multiple disruptive civil disobedience actions every single week. Convened by Climate Defenders, Planet Over Profit, Stop the Money Pipeline and New York Communities for Change (where I am the senior climate campaigner), and endorsed by over 115 partner groups, the protests have been attended by over 4,000 people, and more than 600 have been arrested. Actions have included sit-ins at the biggest banks and insurance companies backing fossil fuel projects, interruptions of Wall Street executives’ public appearances and visits to those executives’ homes. But most of all, they have consisted of numerous blockades of the entrances to the global headquarters of Citi, preventing employees from entering work multiple times a week.

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  • politics Politics On Native Land, a New Push to Expand Voting Meets the Long Tail of State Violence
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  • alyaza alyaza 3 weeks ago 100%

    Colorado officials are now proposing to go further. In 2023, the state adopted legislation to try something that’s never been done in this country: automatically register tribal members to vote in U.S. elections.

    The program, if implemented, would enable tribes to share their membership lists with Colorado elections officials, who’d then use that information to register every eligible person to vote, while giving them a chance to opt out. Since Colorado already mails ballots to every registered voter, this would necessarily mean getting ballots into the hands of more Native people. “We’ve made real steps forward, and we’re going to continue,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told me recently. “We always try to push the envelope.”


    And yet, Cloud is also keenly concerned that the program could make her community more vulnerable. For U.S. election officials to automatically register tribal members to vote, the tribes would need to share certain vital information about their members, such as full name, address, and date of birth. Cloud is hesitant to hand this data over to a state that has, over a long history that she knows too well, been an agent of violence.

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  • politics Politics The Problem Isn't The US Having The Wrong President, The Problem Is The US Empire's Existence
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  • alyaza alyaza 3 weeks ago 100%

    there are definitely better, more substantive articles that can make all of the points this one is; accordingly, this will be removed. you're free to find another article which makes this point though since it's likely a conversation people want to have on here

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  • neurodivergence Neurodivergence Any good political theory/ reading recommendations about the psych system?
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  • alyaza alyaza 3 weeks ago 100%

    you may also enjoy Thomas Szasz on this subject and concur with some of his analyses about the validity of "mental illness" as a concept/what follows from accepting it as a concept (although i believe he was strongly right-libertarian and this informed some of his opposition to psychiatry as a practice--so you may wish to take or leave some of what he says consequentially)

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  • neurodivergence Neurodivergence Any good political theory/ reading recommendations about the psych system?
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  • alyaza alyaza 3 weeks ago 100%

    you may enjoy sections of Sami Schalk's Black Disability Politics and it may be helpful to your efforts in finding people who write on this subject; here is one excerpt for example that i noted in my recent read-through of it:

    On December 31, 1977, the Black Panther published a guest commentary article titled “Principles of Radical Psychiatry” by Claude Steiner, a white founder and practitioner of radical psychiatry. The article opens with a quote by Malcolm X and then asserts that “psychiatry is a political activity” because “the psychiatrist has an influence in the power arrangements of the relationships in which he intervenes.” Steiner argues that psychiatry and the psychiatrist can never be neutral because “when one person dominates or oppresses another, a neutral participant—especially when he is seen as an authority—becomes a participant in the domination.” Steiner goes on to state that psychiatry’s false and oppressive claim to neutrality makes marginalized people rightfully avoid psychiatric services. He then offers the alternative of radical psychiatry, writing, “A radical psychiatrist will take sides. He will advocate the side of those whom he is helping. The radical psychiatrist will not look for the wrongness within the person seeking psychiatric attention: rather, he will look for the way in which this person is being oppressed.”

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  • literature Literature Are Bookstores Just a Waste of Space?
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  • alyaza alyaza 3 weeks ago 100%

    According to Kristen McLean, an industry analyst, two-thirds of the books released by the top-ten trade publishers sell fewer than a thousand copies, and less than four per cent sell more than twenty thousand. Still, it’s generally agreed that book sales rose after 2019 and that, since the end of the pandemic, there has been a small but significant uptick in the number of independent bookstores. Explaining the first bump seems simple enough. Reading turned out to be a popular way of passing the time in lockdown, more respectable than binge-watching or other diversions one might think of. A slight decline in sales over the past couple of years suggests that people felt freed up to go out and play pickleball instead of staying home and trying to finish “War and Peace.”


    The chief rationale offered for brick-and-mortar bookstores today is that they are community-building spaces. That is how Friss describes the Three Lives bookstore—forgive me, shop—and it’s how almost all the store owners in “The Secret Lives” (and many of the librarians) explain what they do and why it gives them satisfaction. They are practitioners of bibliotherapy. They introduce people to books that will help them overcome grief or minister to confusions about life choices or personal identity.

    And the stores are fashioned to be neighborhood gathering places, like park playgrounds. They welcome everyone—toddlers, oddballs, and professors. They schedule author appearances and other events, often hundreds of them a year. Regulars drop in to chat about books. With any luck, there is a café. Nowadays, this is as true of Barnes & Noble chain stores as it is of Three Lives. That is what it means to run a bookstore. The rewards are not just material. The bookstore survives by redefining itself.

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  • humanities Humanities & Cultures How ‘Inside Out’ and Its Sequel Changed Therapy
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  • alyaza alyaza 4 weeks ago 100%

    “As therapeutic practice, it has become a go-to,” said David A. Langer, president of the American Board of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. In his household, too: “I have 9-year-old twins — we speak about it regularly,” said Langer, who’s also a professor of psychology at Suffolk University. “Inside Out” finger puppets were in frequent rotation when his children were younger, a playful way to examine the family dynamic. “The art of ‘Inside Out’ is explicitly helping us understand our internal worlds,” Langer said.

    And it’s not just schoolchildren that it applies to. “I’ve been stealing lines from the movie and quoting them to adults, not telling them that I’m quoting,” said Regine Galanti, a psychologist and author in private practice on Long Island, speaking of the new film.

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  • usnews U.S. News Chicago Police Made Nearly 200,000 Secret Traffic Stops Last Year
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  • alyaza alyaza 4 weeks ago 100%

    The rate of stops conducted off-the-books has increased under Superintendent Larry Snelling, even as he has positioned himself as an agent of reform who is moving the Chicago Police Department away from its longstanding strategy of using traffic stops to find illegal guns and tamp down on crime. In June, Snelling reported traffic stops were down by about 87,000 over the same time last year. But behind that reduction is a pattern of thousands of unreported police encounters, which accounted for one-third of all traffic stops over the first seven months of Snelling’s tenure.

    Records obtained by Bolts and Injustice Watch show police department officials know the traffic stop data they report to state regulators are an undercount. Internally, the department tracks stops using police radio data that doesn’t rely on officers filling out the state-mandated forms.

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  • usnews U.S. News Mayoral candidate vows to let VIC, an AI bot, run Wyoming’s capital city
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  • alyaza alyaza 4 weeks ago 100%

    Mayoral candidate Victor Miller, a bespectacled librarian with an AI obsession, stood between an American flag and a Wyoming flag, preaching what he sees as the untapped potential of artificial intelligence in government.

    Miller made this pitch at a county library in Wyoming’s capital on a recent summer Friday, with a few friends and family filling otherwise empty rows of chairs. Before the sparse audience, he vowed to run the city of Cheyenne exclusively with an AI bot he calls “VIC” for “Virtual Integrated Citizen.”

    AI experts say the pledge is a first for U.S. campaigns and marks a new front in the rapid emergence of the technology. Its implications have stoked alarm among officials and even tech companies.

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  • lgbtq_plus LGBTQ+ video on how "biological sex" is a social construct
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  • alyaza alyaza 1 month ago 100%

    stepping in here to say: you are not making a very good impression in this thread. people are trying in good faith to explain why you are mistaken here—and how even biological sex is better understood as bimodal rather than binary—and you keep going to somewhat eyebrow-raising, contrarian places and not really engaging with their arguments. we are permissive to a degree of ignorance/lack of knowledge/genuine curiosity that might be prickly for some people, but your current conduct in this thread is pushing the line and likely to get you removed from at least this section if you continue.

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  • feminism Feminism Misogyny to be treated as extremism by UK government
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  • alyaza alyaza 1 month ago 100%

    Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has ordered a review of the UK's counter-extremism strategy to determine how best to tackle threats posed by harmful ideologies.

    The analysis will look at hatred of women as one of the ideological trends that the government says is gaining traction.

    Ms Cooper said there has been a rise in extremism "both online and on our streets" that "frays the very fabric of our communities and our democracy".

    The review will look at the rise of Islamist and far-right extremism in the UK, as well as wider ideological trends, including extreme misogyny or beliefs which fit into broader categories, such as violence.

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  • humanities Humanities & Cultures Organizing in and out of the State: Radical movements can force state policy
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  • alyaza alyaza 1 month ago 100%

    [...]government policies and movement tactics could work in tandem. Ending subsidies cuts into profits, as does blockading, occupying, or sabotaging physical plants; in the face of compounding action, desperation might weaken fossil fuel’s resistance to state takeover—and would certainly lower the price tag of compensation, should policymakers decide to soften the blow. (Or they could go Salvador Allende’s bold route: when the democratically elected socialist leader nationalized U.S.-owned copper mines in 1971, he deducted “excess” profits from their valuation, effectively canceling out any expected compensation.)

    Such coordination between radical movements and their allies in the state might seem far-fetched at this moment. But the same could be said about all transformative processes before they took hold. Six months ago, I would not have predicted that an unprecedented, months long mobilization in solidarity with the cause of Palestinian freedom would bring well over a million Americans into the streets, including most recently nearly 400 demonstrations on college campuses. While the protests have not yet secured their immediate goal of a permanent ceasefire, they have certainly had an impact. Relentless organizing has finally pushed Biden to threaten to withhold U.S. weapon shipments, helped shift public opinion, pressured some institutions to divest, forced politicians to choose sides, and, most dramatically, called into question the president’s reelection in November.

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  • chat Chat Why I think people should consider using different pronouns in different spaces
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  • alyaza alyaza 1 month ago 100%

    I am not understanding what you want from me

    i think the basic confusion people are having is that, when you phrase it like "I use it/its in spaces where I do not plan on engaging with people as individuals" and "This space is not a chat room and there is no reason to treat it as such. It is a forum.", how that comes off to some people is you are kind of treating this place like a dumping ground for what you want to talk about and then ignoring other people jumping off of your posts. that may or may not be what you intend to do; so that's why people are trying to clarify the intent of your posts.

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  • technology Technology FTC bans fake online reviews, inflated social media influence; rule takes effect in October
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  • alyaza alyaza 1 month ago 100%

    i'm honestly not sure Trump knows anything about the FTC, and if his campaign was smart these are the kinds of things they'd propose instead of "IVF should be illegal but also you're a degenerate for not having children"

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  • technology Technology FTC bans fake online reviews, inflated social media influence; rule takes effect in October
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  • alyaza alyaza 1 month ago 100%

    unclear (they don't tend to announce enforcement mechanisms in these and it's not a final rule until it's a final rule), but it's not like the FTC is lacking in power as an agency

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  • technology Technology FTC bans fake online reviews, inflated social media influence; rule takes effect in October
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  • alyaza alyaza 1 month ago 100%

    Along with prohibiting reviews written by nonhumans, the FTC’s rule also forbids companies from paying for either positive or negative reviews to falsely boost or denigrate a product. It also forbids marketers from exaggerating their own influence by, for example, paying for bots to inflate their follower count.

    Violations of the rule could result in fines being issued for each violation, according to the rule. This means that for an e-commerce site with hundreds of thousands of reviews, penalties for fake or manipulated reviews could quickly add up.

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  • chat Chat how's your week going, Beehaw
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  • alyaza alyaza 1 month ago 100%

    i've been a little busy and by the time i noticed i'd missed the date again i was like "it just makes more sense to wait until Monday to keep the thread on schedule and useful"--not much sense in having one up for three days tbh

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  • politics Politics In secretly recorded video, Project 2025 co-author says he’s drafted hundreds of executive orders for Trump
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  • alyaza alyaza 1 month ago 100%

    In discussing Trump’s plan to carry out the largest deportation in US history – which the former president has called for publicly – Vought said the expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants could help “save the country.”

    Once deportations begin, “you’re really going to be winning a debate along the way about what that looks like,” Vought said. “And so that’s going to cause us to get us off of multiculturalism, just to be able to sustain and defend the deportation, right?”


    In preparation for Trump’s potential return to the White House, Vought said in the meeting that he had a team of staffers working to draft regulations and executive orders that would translate Trump’s campaign speeches into government policy.

    “We’ve got about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature that are, we’re planning for the next administration,” he said.

    For example, “you may say, ‘OK, all right, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation,’” Vought said. “What are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it? Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos. Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not, you’re not having to scramble or do that later on.”

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  • news World News The Communal Kitchens Fighting Famine in Sudan
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  • alyaza alyaza 1 month ago 100%

    Mutual aid groups established themselves across Sudan after the war erupted. They drew members from a vibrant pro-democracy movement and brought ideas rooted in a rich heritage of social solidarity, best represented in the tradition of nafeer (“a call to mobilize”).

    The Greater Khartoum kitchens follow two different models. Under the takaya system, religious and community leaders feed people on the streets, in houses, or under trees; however, more structured kitchens are run in defined spaces by the emergency response rooms.

    Hassan, who helps coordinate assistance across Greater Khartoum, said over 350 communal kitchens have been set up, assisting 500,000 families with at least one meal a day. “We aim to save people’s dignity,” he said. “Everybody should be able to eat and not feel shame. We, as Sudanese, are still helping each other. We survive together.”

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  • politics Politics There is no reason to support the “lesser evil”
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  • alyaza alyaza 1 month ago 100%

    The only thing that makes an evil “lesser” is that there is less energy going towards supporting it. By putting it into power you make it the greater evil.

    this just seems categorically untrue, unless you think that there are no meaningful differences in outcomes even between "lesser evils" and "greater evils" (in which case i would argue your distinction does not exist here and therefore is not useful for the purposes of this argument). the idea that energy and power alone/even primarily determine "evil" in this context also seems deeply reductive--just because Nick Fuentes, for example, is not at serious risk of running the country does not mean his ideas are a lesser evil to the regular liberalism currently in power and only become a greater evil once he is.

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  • politics Politics Black Lives Matter calls on the DNC to host a virtual snap primary
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  • alyaza alyaza 1 month ago 100%

    Again, this may not be that, but I think it’s a mistake to pretend that Beehaw is somehow immune to this technique that the right is demonstrably using on other platforms.

    nobody here is pretending that it is, the issue is this is clearly not an example of this so you are functionally asserting the OP is an asset for any number of foreign disinformation and division campaigns. also the framing of "derail the Democratic party" presumes it's not correct to do this, but that's also a thing people can disagree on. for example: i'm a socialist--so yes, i support doing that in the long term.

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  • politics Politics Black Lives Matter calls on the DNC to host a virtual snap primary
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  • alyaza alyaza 1 month ago 100%

    This may not be that, but it’s not appropriate to scold users for calling out dead obvious political manipulation.

    you can find it cringe--and i certainly don't agree with most of the people here proposing third-party voting (which i think is total dead-enderism and morally pointless)--but people disagreeing with you is not political manipulation and it devalues the term to use it in such a cavalier manner

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  • technology Technology 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)
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  • alyaza alyaza 1 month ago 100%

    there’s certainly other things we can do to tackle racism, but tackling ground level stuff like inherently painting black as bad and/or negative is part of that.

    i simply do not think that this is racist or worth caring about unless you make it (at which point i would argue yet again the problem is internalized, not with the phrasing used), and i think this is reflected in how the overwhelming majority of people who care about this are white people who want to feel good about themselves without doing anything that would actually tackle racism at the source or challenge their whiteness and how they might benefit from it. to me "whitelist/blacklist" is extremely representative of contemporary slacktivism--stuff that feels good but is functionally a red herring toward material progress on these issues. (notice, for instance, how much time we're wasting on even debating if this is valuable when we could be doing anything else. and how we're doing this in a thread where some people are just unambiguously being racist.)

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