"Whether for fuel breaks, salvage logging, or private land logging, native forest logging hasn’t stopped in Victoria. It will continue for many years, and the logs cut from these operations will be sold commercially."
"Fire management in Victoria amounts to de facto native logging industry, conservationists say. On Thursday conservationists and the Victorian National Parks Association expressed shock after discovering a dead greater glider in an area where trees had been felled by FFMV."
"Logging in Victoria’s native forests ended at the beginning of this year but Prof David Lindenmayer, a forest ecologist at Australian National University, said: “There’s a de facto logging industry now emerging under the guise of fire suppression.“To me, when you cut down big trees and put them on a truck and take them to a sawmill … that is logging.”"
Almost feels like news worth celebrating until you remember the track record of child protection regulations in the UK, a country where the economy is being propped up by pushing junk food and nicotine onto children.
here's the ever interesting David Allen Green on why regulating the press/media may be easy to demand but is (now) much more difficult to achieve.
For this of us who see the control of the media & what its owners do with that control as a key problem for the UK's democracy, this is what one can call a 'sobering read'!
How willing are public institutions to respond to Subject Access Requests, allowing you to find out what personal information is held by that organisation.
Incomplete returns & delays in even getting the information requested can have significant impact on those needing such information.
Open Democracy's investigation suggests there is a massive problem of a lack of proper oversight & a weakness of enforcement by the Information Commissioner Office.
'#Sharing with minimal #regulation? Evidence from neighborhood book exchange' by Anouk Schippers and Adriaan Soetevent is April's #OpenAccess publication in the spotlight.
Their study shows that peer-to-peer book exchanges, like little free #libraries, experience minimal free riding due to strong #SocialNorms among users, with a return rate of 9 #books for every 10 taken.
Fun drinking game for the next 9-12 months: take a shot every time a news article uses the phrase "Section 230" or "chilling effect on free speech" -- that way you'll be in the hospital with liver poisoning instead of having to keep up with all the TikTok news and court challenges
#Oil Companies Must Set Aside More Money to Plug Wells, a New Rule Says. But It Won’t Be Enough.
The new Bureau of Land Management #regulation, which applies to nearly 90,000 wells on federal public land, is hampered by math errors and overly optimistic cost projections.
Social regulation may be becoming more acceptable; in support of that let me relate this anecdote.
Watching a documentary some years ago about the illegal rave scene, a while after the ban on smoking in public buildings had come into force, I was amused to see that even at an illegal rave (they were already breaking the law!), smokers for the most part came out of the building to smoke... laws can & do shift social norms (for the better).
"The early results come after the EU's sweeping Digital Markets Act, which aims to remove unfair competition, took effect on March 7, forcing #bigtech companies to offer mobile users the ability to select from a list of available web #browsers from a #choicescreen."
Do you know what the acronym AILDI stands for? It's the AI Labor Disclosure Initiative, which asks a simple question: What would happen if tech companies were legally required to report the number of human workers concealed behind their automated solutions? On April 23, 2024, I'll be addressing this topic at the ILO in Geneva.
The risks around artificial intelligence might be better understood by following the money not the technology....
This suggests we need to be regulating (better) the economic & market uses of AI, rather than focussing on its technical capabilities.
Indeed, states have a long history of regulating markets, and whatever some economists seem to think, regulation is what has most often saved capitalism from eating itself!
This is one of the weirdest and most pathetic music related regulations I've ever heard of. Only music between 80-116 BPM is allowed. Sometimes conservatives really are the saddest bunch of pathetic losers in existence. #music#regulation#musicproducion
After high levels of lead was found in baby food last fall, sickening dozens of children, officials last month warned they are still finding the heavy metal in some powdered cinnamon products and urged the public to avoid certain brands. Most of the world moved to eradicate lead from nearly all products by the 1990s, so why do we keep finding the toxic element? Vox takes a deep dive into the issue, exploring why it remains a problem and who is most at risk.
Fmr #Trump treas sec #Mnuchin is telling investors he has a plan to buy #TikTok
Mnuchin told potential backers he aims to maneuver around its price of >$100B & #China’s ban of the export of recommendation #algorithms.
He indicated he could overcome those hurdles by offering to buy the #app w/o the export-blocked #code, essentially forcing his consortium to remake a service built on billions of lines of code.
We're simplifying this week's show. Apple is in regulator crosshairs, and a landmark case has been filed by the DOJ. Facebook and Google are facing scrutiny in the EU. Everyone on social media has suddenly become a legal scholar.
And I got to play with a new chip for laptops that might seriously disrupt how we use Windows.
#SGGQA 341: DOJ Sues Apple, EU Investigating Apple for DMA Non-Compliance, Qualcomm's X Elite Chip is a SCREAMER
' ProPublica reviewed thousands of pages of emails and memos by U.S. officials, letters to foreign ministries, correspondence from industry groups and academic research [and] interviewed health experts and government leaders in nearly two dozen countries ...
[Our] reporting shows the U.S. government repeatedly used its muscle to advance the interests of multinational baby formula companies ... '