The older I get, the more I realize how much of a failure of imagination all billionaires are.

Like, NOBODY needs a billion dollars. Nobody. There is no life circumstance where amassing that kind of wealth is necessary. So that means if someone has that kind of wealth, they are making an active, deliberate choice not to use their excess to create opportunities for others.

Of course, big part of the problem is that those idiots think they DESERVE their wealth. Like they didn't just get lucky.

Petit graphique sur les versions de @drupal utilisées par les sites gouvernementaux français.

Source: @adullact

Extraites par
@mgifford

La question est: pourquoi les utilisateurs D9 ont-ils presque tous migré alors que tant de D8 restent sur cette version, malgré la simplicité des migrations D8->D9->D10->D11 ?

There are times in our relationship when I feel an interpreter wouldn't come amiss.

— Mel, to the Doctor, in “The Ultimate Foe”

#DoctorWho #quote #quotation

Did you know it used to be illegal for a company to buy back its own stock? It was understood to be stock price manipulation. (Because it is.)

Reagan's "deregulation" changed the rules in 1982.

Like everything else, companies now pay politicians to keep it the way it is.

#deregulation #reagan #corruption

Roger Hallam is one of the founders of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, and a leader in the fight against global climate change. I would like you to read this statement he posted yesterday… 🧵1/4
_______________________

I've just been sentenced to 5 years in prison.

The longest ever for nonviolent action.

The 'crime'?

Giving a talk on civil disobedience as an effective, evidence-based method for stopping the elite from putting enough carbon in the atmosphere to send us to extinction.

I have given hundreds of similar speeches encouraging nonviolent action and have never been arrested for it. This time I was an advisor to the M25 motorway disruption, recommending the action to go ahead to wake up the British public to societal collapse.

I was not part of the planning or action itself.

In the trial, I swore before God to tell the truth. The truth is the science. The science is clear. We're heading for billions of deaths and ecological collapse. To prove this, I presented the jury with a 250-page dossier of leading scientists' research as evidence in my defence. This was denied by the judge as an invalid - climate science is now illegal in the British courtroom.

I then began to speak about the apocalyptic conditions humanity faces - floods, wildfires, mass heat deaths - and was silenced by the judge. He sent out the jury and threatened to arrest me if I didn't stop. Instead, I stayed in the dock and argued that until I was given the right to complete my defence – I would not move. Even the prosecution tried to argue in my defence and the judge let me continue.

When the jury had shuffled in again, I spoke about the legal concept of “equality of arms” – that as the prosecution had had a right to lay facts over a whole week, I also wanted an equal opportunity. I spoke of various cases where juries had acquitted defendants when they had heard the facts, such as the Extinction Rebellion cracking of Shell's windows in 2018 as a reasonable action against criminal destruction. The Dutch Supreme Court has even said that all governments have a legal obligation to prevent the emission of greenhouse gases. Whilst the prosecution accepted that emissions pose an existential threat, for the first time in British history no less, they still tried to convict us for public nuisance rather than praise us for trying to stop those emissions. Given the objectivity of existential threat, there were overwhelming grounds to be involved in a plan to cause some disruption to the M25.

In the British law on public nuisance, there is a ‘reasonable excuse’ clause. Science says there is an overwhelming threat to my life, my children, you and your children. To argue there is not a reasonable excuse directly defies the wish of this legislation. Things are happening that cause harm – people are engaged in physical acts to stop that harm – it doesn’t matter whether it’s a protest or not.

As I began to offer up some case law, the judge kept intervening telling me I was “wasting my time” and ordering the jury to disregard me. To illustrate that I was not talking about my motivations but speaking about real necessity, I referred to a famous case over a decision to operate on conjoined twins with the likelihood that one would die. In this dilemma, I quoted the 19th Century principle that the action was necessary if the threat faced was inevitable and irrevocable, that no more should be done than essential, and that it must be proportionate. I argued that there was a “duress of circumstances” including the objective danger I’ve experienced as a farmer unable to grow food, and the global significance of “food insecurity” – a euphemism for famine and starvation.

There has never been a moment in history where ‘necessity’ has been more supported by objective facts – more than 10,000 scientific and peer-reviewed papers, indicating an outcome of mass starvation and death from man-made climate collapse.

In response, Judge Hehir called for an early lunch and dismissed the jury. He turned to me and warned that I wasn't a lawyer and that “this is not the Roger Hallam show”.

He then gave me just 15 more minutes to put forward my “beliefs” - a totally fucking incoherent statement. This isn’t belief - it’s the objective threat of destruction of property and livelihoods of billions of people and the secondary effects of famine i.e. war, rape, and torture.
_______________________

That's Part 1 of 4. Read the next below...

#Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateJustice

FYI The patent for the strain gauge based pointing stick (AKA "TrackPoint" from the Thinkpad series) has now expired

patents.google.com/patent/US61…

#HardwareHacking

Horrible hacking cough now, Covid has clearly reenflamed the inflammation of my lungs. Gah.

At least I have spent more than an hour awake today, progress!
I might actually be at work tomorrow!

When I say "the Uber grift" I should be specific:

"Dumping" - the practice of importing state-subsidized manufactured goods far below cost to deliberately crush the local competition - is illegal in the US and has been since the 1930s.

When the US (foolishly) moved to a service economy, part of the argument - beyond fucking over unions and the working class - was that Americans would now _benefit_ from those subsidies. Services were not vulnerable to that risk.

Software plus VC changed that.

Sometimes we're in a hurry, or we didn't think (or even know) about #AltText , for images and videos, to assist visually impaired and describing text for other languages.
PASS THIS AROUND #Boost

Guide on writing Alt Text: identifying who, the expression, the description, color, and interesting features.

Nezapomínat!
A předávat potomkům.

Karel Kryl - Tak Vás tu Máme youtube.com/watch?v=Y2WI9XsXu2…

Karel Kryl - Tak Vás tu Máme

Foto z Liberce 21. srpna 1968 Karel Kryl v Jednom Videu řekl že nesnáší Vykradače Hrobů ale víc jak Vykradače hrobů nesnáší vykradače námětů. ( Společnost OS...

^YouTube

• No, they are *good* (10%, 4 votes)
• No, it's complicated (28%, 11 votes)
• Yes, definitely still evil (47%, 18 votes)
• Not sure / Want to see results (13%, 5 votes)

A concept in economics that doesn't get nearly enough airtime is: the diminishing marginal utility of money. Succinctly: the more units of money you've got, the less adding another such unit does—the added value of any one unit drops very steeply.

Over about $200M (personal orbital tourism? Megayacht? Your own tropical island?) there are no more experiences/luxuries that money can buy you. (And over $50M there are very few—bizjet, luxury mansion.)
mastodo.neoliber.al/@Legit_Spa…

Between 1945 and 2000, the US intervened in 81 consequential elections worldwide, including eight times in Italy, five in Japan, and many more in Latin America. Between 1958 and 1975, military coups, many of them American-sponsored, changed governments in three dozen nations—a quarter of the world’s sovereign states—fostering a distinct “reverse wave” in the global trend toward democracy.

- Alfred W. McCoy, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change

#quote #quotes #usa #america #history #classwar #politics #fascism #oppression #repression #nazis #neonazis #neofascism #society #humans #earth #community #imperialism #capitalism

economist.com/finance-and-econ…

This Economist article very politely points out that Gartner Research are consistently full of shit. But you gotta hand it to them; they carved out a comfortable economic niche that allows them to get paid for just always being wrong--quite an accomplishment!

Artificial intelligence is losing hype

For some, that is proof the tech will in time succeed. Are they right?

^{The Economist}

Since #openssl does not seem to fix any of the remaining #QUIC API problems in their upcoming 3.4 release, it will keep lagging behind.

openssl-library.org/post/2024-…

Since a few weeks, MapComplete has a new thematic map: mapcomplete.org/circular_econo…

This map is for all things free and reuse, such as second hand shops, bicycle repair workshops, repair cafés, public bookcases, ...

The end goal is to have support for all features mentioned on wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Wi…, but that is still a lot of work - for which all help is appreciated! If you know a bit about #OpenStreetMap tagging, create a layer on mapcomplete.org/studio and create a layer!

Circular economy

Various items which help people to share, reuse or recycle

^{mapcomplete.org}

Moooorning.

Buenos días.

Bonan matenon.

Exchanged a full curl #whisky for a #curl t-shirt, and I think I made a pretty sweet deal. Wdyt?

Thanks @bagder!