This article describes the little-reported on success that Brown University had in disbanding student protest… by conceding to let activists present a case for divestment at an upcoming hearing before the university’s investment board....
Well, this is Brown we're talking about. The students probably got too high and just accepted whatever deal was thrown at them without thinking about it.
He is terrible, but he's better than any replacement, he's shown a willingness to work with Dems, and most importantly, if he ever breaks any promises, the Dems can sick him to the wolves.
You don't think about all the ads you get that are unrelated to things you've recently been talking about, while you strongly recall ads that happen to since they suddenly weird you out.
Humans are extremely good at finding patterns in actual noise. There are also some other relevant factors though; for instance, I believe Google does apply ad topics across closely linked accounts, so if your wife had been searching for new shows, Google may apply the ad topic to you as well. Up to you as to how you feel about that, but it's not your phone listening to your conversations.
There's this notion that modern Israelis are essentially just Europeans who invaded after WWII, which is simply not true.
While the Zionist movement largely did originate in Europe in the late 1800s, the majority of Israeli citizens today are not of European ancestry / Ashkenazi. The majority are what's called Mizrahi, coming from Middle Eastern Jewish communities that were forcibly expelled from Arab countries during the 50s and 60s. For instance, Ben Gvir, the current Minister of Defense (and to be clear, a complete little shit), is from an Iraqi family. In 1948, there were roughly 150,000 Jews in Iraq, making up nearly 40% of the population of Baghdad. Today, there are estimated to be less than five. Likewise, in Yemen, there were roughly 50,000 Jews, maintaining a presence that goes back well over 2500 years. Today, there may be one single Jew left in the country. The same situation happened all throughout the Arab world. The departing Jews generally had to flee their homes without any significant belongings, since their property was often confiscated. In Syria, for instance, a 1964 decree prevented Jews from traveling more than 3 miles from their homes, banned them from owning land, banned them from working in the government or in banks, banned them from leaving anything as inheritance - which would instead be seized by the state.
If something is possible, and this simply indeed is, someone is going to develop it regardless of how we feel about it, so it's important for non-malicious actors to make people aware of the potential negative impacts so we can start to develop ways to handle them before actively malicious actors start deploying it.
Critical businesses and governments need to know that identity verification via video and voice is much less trustworthy than it used to be, and so if you're currently doing that, you need to mitigate these risks. There are tools, namely public-private key cryptography, that can be used to verify identity in a much tighter way, and we're probably going to need to start implementing them in more places.
That's what's always a bit maddening about these conversations. It's not like companies are just shredding plastic into the atmosphere because they're cartoon villains who love evil.
They're making cheap plastic shit because we love cheap plastic shit. They're making this stuff in response to explicit consumer prioritization of low costs above all other factors. If consumers broadly demanded soda in glass bottles and expressed a willingness to pay the extra cost that this entails, every soda company would use glass.
I'm not saying that you individually should be blamed for all environmental pollution, but we have to realize that companies are responding to the exact same incentives that we do. They're obviously operating at a much larger scale, but they use cheap plastic shit for the exact same reason we do. If you're looking for policy solutions, a great option would be to introduce an externality tax on plastic so that this environmental cost is actually factored into the production and end price and can fund remediate the damage, similar to carbon taxes. Of course though, the moment you say the word 'tax' people's brains completely shut off, so this is probably a non-starter.
Regulation is fine, but people need to realize that there are always downstream effects that often result in a less efficient version of the same outcome.
For instance, say you just pass a blanket ban on plastic soda bottles and mandate glass. Production costs immediately go up (not to mention transportation and logistics), and those costs are naturally passed onto the consumer, so the prices of all sodas go up.
Has this really improved things? There are real questions about the environment impact of glass, since they're significantly heavier and thus require more carbon emissions to transport. Glass is better if it's reused, but there are situations where it's unlikely to be reused. Soda is now more expensive, just as it would have been under a plastic tax (and because lower income people tend to drink more soda, you've hit them extra hard relatively), but now you've also eliminated the ability for plastic bottles to be used in situations where they truly are called for; for instance, you probably don't want to be selling glass bottles at a music festival, so an organizer will need to instead purchase extra plastic cups instead, resulting in the consumption of extra glass and plastic.
I know people have this idea that the only factor that goes into a price is how greedy the CEO happens to feel that morning, but that's simply not the case. Prices are set by market circumstances, not greed. It's not like NYC landlords suddenly got less greedy in 2020; the market radically changed. They're already charging the most that the market will bear. In terms of regulation, it's almost always more effective to go after the market incentives - that is, price signals - instead of just taking a hammer to the thing you don't like and hoping it doesn't have any bad effects.
You frame this as a ‘there is no solution i can see that’s worth it so why bother’ and this tells me you are not interested in a solution.
That is the exact opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying that an externality tax to capture the actual cost of single-use plastics would do a lot to reduce their use without distorting markets and causing unintended side effects while likely being more effective than blanket bans.
The spot where you charge it really doesn't matter much except to the accountants; it'll always just be factored into the price of the product. There's no real difference between the company increasing the price by ten cents or a ten cent tax being levied at the register.
I really wouldn't call it an indulgence tax though. There are plenty of uses for single-use plastics that aren't sodas or indulgences.
Okay, so imagine you just ban plastic soda bottles. Now plastic bottles cannot be used in any circumstances, no matter how genuinely warranted, even if a user is willing to pay all costs to ensure its environmental impacts are offset. Also, all soda is now significantly more expensive, so "the poors" still have less access to it.
And by definition the amount you would have to tax to achieve this has to be so much that it destabilizes the market.
Potentially, yes. The entire point is that these artificial low prices are only possible because the negative externalities are being inflicted on other people in the form of pollution. By actually factoring this impact into the cost of the good, its true cost emerges and the market will settle into whatever the equilibrium is. If the only thing enabling mass access to cheap soda is a ton of pollution, then you either accept mass pollution or you lose the mass access to cheap soda. There's not really any way around that fundamental trade-off.
Dozens of Google workers who were fired after internal protests surrounding a lucrative contract that the technology company has with the Israeli government have filed a complaint with labor regulators in an attempt to get their jobs back....
Workers have essentially zero right to protest on company time on company property and disrupting work.
It would be another thing if, to address your counter-example, an employer went through everyone's social media and systematically fired everyone who made the "wrong" public stance in an avenue that has nothing to do with the job (still legal probably, but much shittier), but using your own work time to interrupt business operations isn't going to be tolerated pretty much anywhere.
Again, if these employees had been protesting outside the company offices on their own time and were fired for that, I'd be more sympathetic, but that's not what happened here.
Especially at the level of working for Google, employment is a voluntary agreement, not a right. If the employees find it unconscionable to work for Google, the correct thing to do is to, you know, not work for Google.
This is quite exciting in that it removes plastic waste. I see no reason why different companies can’t make different shape ones to maintain their lock-in. I expect a knock-off market to pop-up, but that exists with plastic pods too. It’s a step in the right direction at least.
A huge post about how to create a Facebook business account without a personal account. The whole thing was filler text and ambiguous sentences like this...
This feels more like a poor non-native English speaker than an AI. LLMs do happily lie, but they don't usually have significant grammar mistakes like the missing articles here.
EU citizens are not doing well when it comes to financial literacy. Nearly half lack an understanding of basic financial concepts, including inflation....
This isn't even true though. The vast majority will agree that a little bit of inflation is good, deflation is very bad, and hyperinflation is essentially cataclysmic.
Essa Al-Nassr, a member of the Qatari legislative Shura council, spoke on Monday at an Arab League session, received ovation making bigoted accusations against Jews and promising the end of Israel.
That's the infuriating thing about this whole mess that feels impossible to solve.
Rhetoric like this directly radicalizes Israelis and pushes them towards violent escalation, which then radicalizes Palestinians into violence as well, further inspiring more Israeli violence, and on and on the cycle goes.
And then anyone who advocates for any amount of moderation will simultaneously get called a terrorist sympathizer for not wanting to nuke Gaza and a genocide accomplice for not wanting to forcibly remove or kill every Israeli.
It is also a Club founded to keep the LGBTQ community free of anointed gatekeepers and machine politics
This is comically hypocritical given that you'll be gatekept out of any group like this the moment you express any opinion they disagree with, speaking as a gay guy myself.
In this particular context, "I believe Joe Biden should be the elected to another term" in apparently objectionable.
Similarly, "I believe that the murder of 1000 Israeli citizens on October 7th was bad, and also that the Netanyahu government is atrocious and its military response has been grossly disproportionate and involved multiple war crimes" is enough to get you ejected from plenty of leftist spaces that insist that the October 7th attacks must be celebrated as an act of radical resistance.
A top Hamas political official told The Associated Press the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders.
I certainly hope you're not an American and have never been to the United States, because I've got some unfortunate news about who that land properly belongs to.
Speaking strictly legally, Yale and any other private university have a non-trivial amount of authority to regulate the use of their own private spaces, and even ignoring that, the right to protest is not unlimited, particularly when it starts to impede the ability of others to conduct their own legal activities. Yale claims that the trespassing decision was made due to the protests blocking the ability of faculty and staff to access their facilities.
There's also reports of one student being stabbed in the eye with a flag pole, and fundamentally, the Constitution does not give anyone the right to camp and protest on private land. Students were warned multiple times before police were finally moved in. Part of civil disobedience is accepting the consequences of said disobedience. Those arrested knew what would happen and chose accordingly. I won't fault them for that.
“Google issued a stern warning to its employees, with the company’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, saying, “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC.”
I mean, that's precisely the point. Growth isn't really the priority right now, because that also tends to increase inflation. The loose aim of Milei's plan is to return things to an actually accurate economic baseline by cutting extremely distortionary government spending and subsidies and allowing the peso to fall to its true actual value, and only then pivoting to focus on real and sustainable growth that's actually backed by legitimate increases in efficiency and production rather than government money printers and IMF loans that only make the problem worse.
I won't pretend that this approach doesn't have some harsh consequences on people that will be disproportionately born by the poor or that there aren't any other options, but there is a legitimate economic basis for the idea. Whether it's worth it or is fair and just is another question.
I am a Palestinian American in Pennsylvania, a contested state. I plan to write in “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary on 23 April and in November, I will vote for a third-party candidate....
Trump would gladly support turning Gaza into a parking lot, and quite likely would have US troops engaged in a war with Iran right now. So, the actual choice is Biden, who's attempting but largely failing to restrain Israeli military actions, and Trump, who would actively support them and undoubtedly support subsequent Jewish settlement of Gaza once the Palestinian "problem" has been solved.
It's an unfortunate choice, sure, but it's not a hard one.
‘Huge win’: Brown University protesters reach an agreement to dismantle encampment (forward.com)
This article describes the little-reported on success that Brown University had in disbanding student protest… by conceding to let activists present a case for divestment at an upcoming hearing before the university’s investment board....
Republican Congresswoman Greene launches effort to oust Johnson following passage of Ukraine aid (kyivindependent.com)
Any allegations that Greene is transparently working as a Russian agent are entirely unsubstantiated.
People left seriously creeped out after woman shares how to find out everything Google knows about you (www.uniladtech.com)
White House considers welcoming some Palestinians from war-torn Gaza as refugees (www.cbsnews.com)
Microsoft’s VASA-1 can deepfake a person with one photo and one audio track (arstechnica.com)
Survey finds that 60 firms are responsible for half of world’s plastic pollution (www.theguardian.com)
Fired Google workers ousted over Israeli contract protests file complaint with labor regulators (apnews.com)
Dozens of Google workers who were fired after internal protests surrounding a lucrative contract that the technology company has with the Israeli government have filed a complaint with labor regulators in an attempt to get their jobs back....
Keurig's new K-Rounds coffee pods are plastic-free and could finally make single-serve coffee-making sustainable (www.techradar.com)
This is quite exciting in that it removes plastic waste. I see no reason why different companies can’t make different shape ones to maintain their lock-in. I expect a knock-off market to pop-up, but that exists with plastic pods too. It’s a step in the right direction at least.
Yes, you cannot, so to do it do like this (lemmy.world)
A huge post about how to create a Facebook business account without a personal account. The whole thing was filler text and ambiguous sentences like this...
How financially literate are Europeans? Not very - but who knows most? (www.euronews.com)
EU citizens are not doing well when it comes to financial literacy. Nearly half lack an understanding of basic financial concepts, including inflation....
Qatari official: Jews are murderers of prophets; October7 is only a 'prelude' (m.jpost.com)
Essa Al-Nassr, a member of the Qatari legislative Shura council, spoke on Monday at an Arab League session, received ovation making bigoted accusations against Jews and promising the end of Israel.
Influential LGBTQ+ group pulls Biden endorsement over 'perilous' handling of Israel-Hamas war (www.advocate.com)
Hamas official says group would lay down its arms if an independent Palestinian state is established (apnews.com)
A top Hamas political official told The Associated Press the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders.
Yale University: Dozens arrested during US Gaza campus protests (www.bbc.com)
Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract (www.nbcnews.com)
“Google issued a stern warning to its employees, with the company’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, saying, “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC.”
Argentina Monthly Inflation Slowed More Than Expected in March (www.bloomberg.com)
Argentina keeps dropping the inflation numbers, good news for the country!
As a Palestinian American, I can’t vote for Joe Biden any more. And I am not alone (www.theguardian.com)
I am a Palestinian American in Pennsylvania, a contested state. I plan to write in “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary on 23 April and in November, I will vote for a third-party candidate....