The Donbass was basically invaded by Ukrainian troops in 1918, and Crimea was literally gifted to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, so why should those territories even be under Ukrainian control in the first place, if the majority of their population is culturally Russian?

if we’re using historical population to litigate arguments like this, then one might be obliged to ask why Russia would have any claim on Crimea either. it was the homeland of the Turkic Crimean Tatars long before Russians came there in large numbers, and only ceased to be majority-Tatar through a long-term project of settler-colonialism there which ultimately culminated in the mass deportation of Tatars and the Russification of the region. surely this history of habitation counts far more than Russians settling there in a process analogous than to the colonization of the New World, no?

fascinatingly, this bill is a line too far for Ted Cruz, who is otherwise a stalwart anti-LGBTQ+ candidate: This Uganda law is horrific & wrong. Any law criminalizing homosexuality or imposing the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” is grotesque & an abomination. ALL civilized nations should join together in condemning this human rights abuse.

naturally, this has his base absolutely frothing at the mouth for how he could betray their desire of wanting to murder queer people. incredible!

On April 24, however, [oil companies] lost one of their most powerful arguments.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear challenges in the Hawaii case and four others involving the seemingly technical question of which court should hear these cases: state or federal.

The oil companies had “removed” the cases from state court to federal court, arguing that damage lawsuits for climate change go beyond the limits of state law and are governed by federal law.

That theory would have derailed all five cases – because there is no federal common law for greenhouse gases.

i know for a fact that MIT does at least some similar stuff via OpenCourseWare so it’s not impossible for this to catch on, at least

yes, psilocybin is that chemical

yeah i sympathize with game devs here but i hardly think the backlash is unreasonable. at the end of the publisher is asking $60 for a fundamentally broken game that they had to know wasn’t in a workable state and people aren’t generally being refunded their purchase here

it’s glaringly obvious union busting and they’re litigating it, but afaik NEDA is pushing forward anyways. this is despite the fact that even the chatbot’s creators don’t think it’s suited for what they want it to do!

What they did was unilaterally declare the creation of a new marine protected area (MPA). In June 2022, the nation set aside 33.5 sq km near Laredo Sound as the new Gitdisdzu Lugyeks (Kitasu Bay) MPA – closing the waters of the bay to commercial and sport fishing.

It is a largely unprecedented move. While other marine protected areas in Canada fall under the protection of the federal government through the Oceans Act, Kitasu Bay is the first to be declared under Indigenous law, under the jurisdiction and authority of the Kitasoo/Xai’xais First Nation.

Anyway, I don’t want to act like this fact makes it not a problem; I simply can’t imagine all of lower manhatten wanting to raze every skyscraper and start over either. I’m pretty sure most of these city-on-a-city situations are after major fires kinda force everyone’s hand, so it really is a huge catastrophe!

hence, the levee solution. in the future future even that’s probably not going to work (at least not for NYC) and it’s pretty likely then people will just have to abandon levels of buildings to rising sea level if they want to continue using them, but for right now most cities just want to buy their populations time to adapt further. (and for residential structures it’s probable people will move or be forced to move)

100 years ago the sea level was a full 9 inches lower and a lot of NYC’s waterfront had just been reclaimed from the water to begin with, because most of it is unnatural. huge portions of the modern end of Manhattan and adjacent territory used to be water and were made into port infrastructure that isn’t exactly ideal for keeping out water (and that has subsequently been redeveloped into other stuff). if we didn’t artificially impose land there, a lot of NYC’s coast wouldn’t exist at all–and since we have and sea level rise is accelerating, those areas are extremely and increasingly prone to flooding.

it’s pretty likely most of NYC will need to actively be placed behind levees or other structures mid-century because just the “expected” sea level rise by 2050 is another 8 inches–not accounting for sinking–and anywhere from 15 to 75 inches (2 entire meters) by the end of the century. (and the most doomer estimates place potential rise at up to 5 meters!)

it definitely is when accounting for sea level rise, which is accelerating and a huge problem for NYC in the future. across the next hundred years (and assuming that isn’t understating the scope of the sinking), that’ll cause the city to sink by at least 8 inches on top of however much rise occurs. that might be the entire difference between some parts of the city flooding or not

it’s glaringly obvious that this was a dumb idea, and it doesn’t help that RDS has the charisma of a can of paint and sounds so prepared and terminally online an AI might as well be running his campaign

this is a good move and–as the article notes–was suggested by a sortition-based climate commission France did a few years back. they suggested a higher limit of 4 hours, but 2.5 is still pretty good:

France’s Citizens’ Convention on Climate, which was created by President Emmanuel Macron in 2019 and included 150 members of the public, had proposed scrapping plane journeys where train journeys of under four hours existed.

all i can say here is… what. why are they doing this lol

any “work” or “antiwork” community would likely be heavily duplicated in scope by the proposed socialism community we might gain in the near future, so i’d defer at least until we know whether those users will be interested in joining the site

i can still make twitter work with tweetdeck and heavily curated lists but i fully anticipate this will eventually be axed and i’ll have to manually check news sites a lot more frequently than i currently do

i’m pretty sure Parler recently folded, actually, because it had been entirely crowded out by the others

if people are curious this bill does a lot of other things, including:

• making virtually all of Minnesota’s employees now being eligible for “paid sick or safe” days
• making non-compete and non-poach agreements legally unenforceable in the state
• introducing near-section-wide bargaining in the nursing industry

just in general, i think we need to strongly consider reductions to copyright term lengths and the scope of what even can be copyrighted. artists being paid shouldn’t come with the downside of “basically all of the human cultural work you grow up with being unable to be substantially remixed or adapted in a new way during your lifetime”. there’s stuff which is older than any living human which is still under copyright, which is absurdist

looks like it, yes:

Conclusions  The SIF’s opening was associated independently with a 30% increase in detoxification service use, and this behaviour was associated with increased rates of long-term addiction treatment initiation and reduced injecting at the SIF.

i would imagine they also reduce overdoses substantially, which is usually considered the major benefit of safe-injection sites

currently reading The World As We Knew It: Dispatches From a Changing Climate, which should be book #19 for the year. currently 5 books ahead of my pace for the year (35 books), so 40 is definitely looking possible already

the website eating a hundred or so posts over the weekend was an unfortunate start to the week but the vibes are definitely good today

it’s kind of funny a .gif service is even worth enough that you could lose 260 million on selling it. shutterstock is also an interesting company to be acquiring it

yeah it’s pretty disastrous for the comics space, there’s not really anything like the nib in the game besides literally being syndicated by a newspaper or outlet (and even then a lot of comics they put out wouldn’t be good fits for syndication)

if there are articles that got eaten by the past 7 days that you think are worth reposting yeah, i’d repost them

lol: Musk doubles down on his claims that there’s no evidence the Allen, Texas mall shooter had white supremacist beliefs, and that bellingcat “does psy-ops” professionally.

Elon Musk, when asked if he thinks about the impact of his engaging with conspiracy theories about George Soros and the Allen, Texas shooter: “If the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.”

this is a fun little story; they’ll be the only current union of this sort in the US although hopefully they won’t be the last. they’re also the first since 2013.

I hope this gets lots of publicity and further aggravate these editor’s reputation.

it’s been quite a rallying cry for IA, although unfortunately i’m not sure how much individual people can do besides donate to them

of note: Erdoğan lost both Ankara and Istanbul to Kılıçdaroğlu despite outpolling him; that’s pretty significant and speaks to the erosion of the AKP in urban areas. (it wasn’t that long ago that Erdoğan’s base of success was Istanbul, even!) we’ll see if Kılıçdaroğlu can maintain that success in the runoff

it remains to be seen how the Thai military reacts to this one—probably poorly, if the past is any indication. the progressive and anti-junta parties didn’t perform well enough to overrule the military, but they’re still in a really strong position to challenge its hegemony.

it’s that way on purpose so y’all can ban whoever you want

it is that way on purpose, and it is so we can ban people on an as-needed basis (which i guess in a sense is “whoever [we] want”) but excluding obvious trolls i think we’ve banned literally three people ever on the instance and it’s been extant for a year. using intuition on what’s acceptable and what’s not–and nudging them when they break a boundary–appears to work quite well for our users, so we’re not liable to start writing explicit rules any time soon

Still I wonder if a generic “Videos” community would be a good or bad thing.

possibly; nobody’s really asked for it though and we seem to do fine without one for now. i have a suspicion that it’d be pretty inactive (both in terms of posts but especially in terms of comments) on our current size also, so it might be a community for later on in the instance’s life

i’d put this one in music, but generally you can just use best judgement on wherever you think it fits best

i use it as my primary drawing software, although i don’t draw that much and don’t know my way around it very well. it’s very good, and i’m glad FOSS has a credible alternative in the space these days–previously i tried to use GIMP for this but to put it politely: i hate GIMP, and it has so many deficiencies it’s not even funny. (even GIMP defenders will admit this)

you can really feel the desire to preserve life here by committing a violent, criminal act that kills another human being for doing something you don’t agree with

it’s just laughable this guy is taken seriously or considered principled by anybody. beyond obviously being anti-“free speech” this is literally less principled than and a regression from previous Twitter policy, which was generally to take the throttling even if it meant people lost access to the website. i cannot believe there is a world in which i am defending Twitter Jack, but he was at least better on this front than Elon

one might ask whether a pipeline this mismanaged and carrying planet-destroying fossil fuels needs to exist at all, but i guess i’m not Canada

the dropping of sex- or gender-specific restrictions has been a broader trend recently in blood donation, yea; it doesn’t really make sense anymore (and never really made much sense to begin with) to single out groups when, for example, we can effectively screen potential blood contaminants and a significant plurality of people who contract HIV/AIDS are heterosexual

hardly surprising given elon’s descent into far-right and reactionary politics—bellingcat in particular is a magnet for this sort of selective targeting because its reporting is inconvenient to a lot of political dogmatists.

(ironically, this also means elon has some common cause with a subset of Twitter’s “far-left” and “anticolonialist” cranks, some of whom are vehement defenders of Bashar al-Assad and think bellingcat is some sort of CIA-backed, pro-regime change front for believing chemical weapons were used on Syrian civilians)

I mean that plane could have caused a lot of damage. He’s lucky it didn’t kill anyone or seriously damage the environment.

a big concern here would be fire since it’s a plane. even though he pulled this stunt in December, fire concerns are year round at this point in CA and the area he crashed in is vulnerable to out-of-control wildfires; some of it hasn’t ever burned in recorded CA history, from what i can tell–and that would obviously make any fire particularly bad.