Skip Navigation
InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)NA
NateNate60 @lemmy.world
Posts 11
Comments 725
All Hail King Biden the First
  • The Supreme Court has handed Biden a loaded gun and dared him to shoot. He won't, of course, but I think he should.

    America is autocratising. That we have no say over. But I would rather have Biden as dictator than Trump. The best case scenario here is that Trump loses and Biden dies or retires after winning, and then maybe a Harris presidency can restore some semblance of normalcy to this godforsaken place.

  • UK: Welsh Government to introduce a law which will make it illegal for politicians to lie
  • Authoritarian laws go both ways. The next right-wing government would use it to imprison their political rivals on trumped-up charges.

    If such a law had existed in the US, for example, Trump would have used it to throw everyone who denied that the 2020 election was rigged in jail

  • Samsung union to strike, company founder once said he would not allow unions "until I have dirt over my eyes"
  • Capitalists don't understand that labour laws exist to protect them. In the "good ol' days" they reminisce about, unions would drag their family into the street and beat them until they conceded or died and shoot the Pinkertons they sent to harass them.

  • Bangkok Post - Myanmar shop owners jailed for raising wages
  • The junta will be in deep shit if or when the National Unity Government decides to issue its own currency to compete with the junta-issued Burmese kyat. Especially if that currency is backed with USD or some other hard currency or resources.

  • America’s big problem is not Joe Biden, it’s the menace to democracy posed by Donald Trump
  • Biden: I'm going to give billions of dollars to Israel to kill Palestinians

    Trump: I'm going to give billions of dollars to Israel to kill Palestinians and I'm going to egg them on while doing that and block other countries from helping

  • Isn't it kinda weird that third parties only make an effort every 4 years?
  • I still think an elected chamber is important. Might be better to create a third chamber filled by sortition. Legislation needs to pass 2 out of 3 chambers of Congress to get to the president. Call it the "House of Jurors" or something. It would consist of 5,000 members divided proportionally to by state or territorial population and selected by sortition among registered voters for a term of two months or until they quit (people can quit immediately if they don't want to serve). There is no formal debate, but members can talk to each other. No legislation can be introduced. Their only job is to show up and vote. The meeting place is a football stadium, once a week. Scantily-clad cheerleaders will be present for halftime and there will be free beer, Coca-Cola, and Costco hot dogs. Participants get $20,000 for their trouble. Accommodation provided free of charge at a hilariously large Motel 6.

    All of this would probably still cost less to the taxpayers than Congressional salaries and expenses. And besides, what are corporate interests going to do, bribe five thousand people? Lol

  • Isn't it kinda weird that third parties only make an effort every 4 years?
  • Localist parties can probably win as well. I think there are some observations that can be made from UK elections, which also use first-past-the-post.

    • Local political parties can win. The Scottish National Party did well in Scotland for several years (until their poll numbers collapsed after their former leader quit and got arrested)
    • It makes more sense for small parties to pour all their resources into contesting a small number of seats than to contest and lose a large number of seats. The UK Green Party spent a lot of effort to get their leader elected to Parliament in the Brighton Pavillion constituency.
    • Local representation matters. When your party controls several seats on a local council or devolved assembly, they have more chances to gain visibility or even govern. US parties should spend a lot more effort on state legislative races than the presidential one.
    • Vote-splitting is less of a concern when one ideology is already overwhelmingly dominant in a region. That is a good region to try to win. For example, the DC Statehood Green Party is the second-largest political party in Washington, D.C. because the DC Republican Party is tiny and terrible (polls in the single digits). That's a good place to try to win some seats.
  • Chinese Brands Will Sell A Third Of The World's Cars By 2030: Study
  • The competition is welcome. We need it to continue to drive innovation. At least in America, traditional American brands haven't put out anything interesting for years. Just the same models being rehashed, but slightly bigger and more fuel efficient.

  • Thoughts on Hong Kong urbanism?

    This image is from Google Maps and depicts Maritime Square on Tsing Yi, the island where my grandmother lives. I chose it because I think it is the embodiment of the new millennium Hong Kong urban development.

    The entire development is built by the MTR Corporation, a Government-owned publicly traded company that is primarily known for running the Hong Kong metro system of the same name.

    The primary attraction of this development is the eponymous Maritime Square Mall, a large five-storey indoor shopping arcade. It is attached to Tsing Yi Station, a metro station on the overground Tung Chung Line and there is a small bus interchange on the ground floor.

    The mall has shops including a grocery store, around a dozen restaurants, a Marks & Spencer, bakeries, clothing retailers, electronics stores, a few banks, and some miscellaneous other stores. Notably NOT in the building is a school, otherwise, you might even be able to spend your whole life without leaving it.

    There are several towers extending out of the main mall complex which contain hundreds of units of (unaffordable) housing. I think there is a botanical garden on the roof, too. The entrance to these towers is inside the mall, where there's just a lift lobby where you'd expect a shop to be. The lift lobby is closed to the public; a keycard or code is required to enter.

    I think it's a similar concept to a 15-minute city, but more like a 15-minute building.

    7

    U.S. sends Ukraine seized Iranian-made weapons

    The Pentagon has provided Ukraine with thousands of Iranian-made weapons seized before they could reach Houthi militants in Yemen, U.S. officials said Tuesday. It’s the Biden administration’s latest infusion of emergency military support for Kyiv while a multibillion-dollar aid package remains stalled in the Republican-led House.

    The weapons include 5,000 Kalashnikov rifles, machine guns, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, along with a half-million rounds of ammunition. They were seized from four “stateless vessels” between 2021 and 2023 and made available for transfer to Ukraine through a Justice Department civil forfeiture program targeting Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East.

    Officials said Iran intended to supply the weapons to the Houthis, who have staged a months-long assault on commercial and military vessels transiting off the Arabian Peninsula. Central Command said the cache is enough to supply rifles to an entire Ukrainian brigade, which vary in size but typically include a few thousand soldiers.

    4

    U.S. sends Ukraine seized Iranian-made weapons

    The Pentagon has provided Ukraine with thousands of Iranian-made weapons seized before they could reach Houthi militants in Yemen, U.S. officials said Tuesday. It’s the Biden administration’s latest infusion of emergency military support for Kyiv while a multibillion-dollar aid package remains stalled in the Republican-led House.

    The weapons include 5,000 Kalashnikov rifles, machine guns, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, along with a half-million rounds of ammunition. They were seized from four “stateless vessels” between 2021 and 2023 and made available for transfer to Ukraine through a Justice Department civil forfeiture program targeting Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East.

    Officials said Iran intended to supply the weapons to the Houthis, who have staged a months-long assault on commercial and military vessels transiting off the Arabian Peninsula. Central Command said the cache is enough to supply rifles to an entire Ukrainian brigade, which vary in size but typically include a few thousand soldiers.

    2

    Is there a way to donate outside of Google Play?

    Google eats 30% of in-app purchases so I'd like to donate directly if possible.

    If there is a way to do this, perhaps add it to the community's sidebar?

    3
    abc7news.com Tesla repays San Jose pie shop owner after last-minute cancellation

    "I'm so super grateful": More than an hour after Rasetarinera's Monday interview with ABC7 News, she confirmed that Tesla had officially repaid the $2,000 that she was out for the purchase of the ingredients.

    Tesla repays San Jose pie shop owner after last-minute cancellation

    tl;dr After local news aired the story, Tesla has paid the pie shop $2,000, the cost of ingredients for the cancelled order.

    44

    It is a huge failure in communication to pretend that distro upgrades are entirely different versions of the operating system. It does nothing but make Linux seem more complex than it actually is.

    The jump in distro versions, say, from Fedora 38 to Fedora 39, is not the same as the jump from Windows 10 to Windows 11. It's more like the jump from version 23H2 to 24H2.

    Now, I'm sure even most Windows users among those reading will ask "wtf are 23H2 and 24H2"? The answer is that those version numbers are the Windows analogue to the "23.10" at the end of "Ubuntu 23.10". But the difference is that this distinction is invisible to Windows users.

    Why?

    Linux distros present these as "operating system upgrades", which makes it seem like you're moving from two different and incompatible operating systems. Windows calls them "feature updates". They're presented as a big deal in Linux, whereas on Windows, it's just an unusually large update.

    This has the effect of making it seem like Linux is constantly breaking software and that you need to move to a completely different OS every six to nine months, which is completely false. While that might've been true in the past, it is increasingly true today that anything that will run on, say, Ubuntu 22.04 can also run without modification (except maybe for hardcoded version checks/repository names) on Ubuntu 23.10, and will still probably work on Ubuntu 24.04. It's not guaranteed, but neither is it on Windows, and the odds are very good either way.

    I will end on the remark that for many distros, a version upgrade is implemented as nothing more than changing the repositories and then downloading the new versions of all the packages present and running a few scripts. The only relevant changes (from the user's perspective) is usually the implementation of new features and maybe a few changes to the UI. In other words, "feature update" describes it perfectly.

    41

    Banks in Hong Kong can print their own money. There are 8 different designs in circulation.

    Before someone asks why there isn't insane inflation from banks printing an infinite amount of money for themselves, the Hong Kong dollar is pegged to the US dollar. In order to be allowed to print HKD, banks must have an equivalent amount of USD on deposit.

    11