Absolutely love it here. Kbin is awesome, and I love the fediverse. I'm way more about content creation here than I was on reddit because I want to be part of this. @ernest keeps making it better too.
I love interacting with all the instances and also I love the access to Mastodon content. I was never on Twitter or Mastodon before but now I follow these cool people I found from my community microblogs.
I never run out of internet, the fediverse has all I need. Yet, I feel more productive irl than I used to be.
A search result took me to reddit last week and was shocked by how many bots, shills, and just how much general anger and fighting is over there. Also they seem to have more dumb or trolling people than I remember.
That reddit blackout did me a huge favour. Never going back. The future is federated.
With drastic action now needed to limit global warming to the Paris Agreement target of 1.5°C, the scientists warn that recent extremes in Antarctica may be the tip of the iceberg.
The study reviews evidence of extreme events in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, including weather, sea ice, ocean temperatures, glacier and ice shelf systems, and biodiversity on land and sea.
It concludes that Antarctica's fragile environments "may well be subject to considerable stress and damage in future years and decades"—and calls for urgent policy action to protect it.
"Antarctic change has global implications," said lead author Professor Martin Siegert, from the University of Exeter. "Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero is our best hope of preserving Antarctica, and this must matter to every country—and individual—on the planet." ...
The researchers considered the vulnerability of Antarctica to a range of extreme events, to understand the causes and likely future changes—following a series of recent extremes.
For example, the world's largest recorded heat wave (38.5°C above the mean) occurred in East Antarctica in 2022 and, at present, winter sea ice formation is the lowest on record.
Extreme events can also affect biodiversity. For example, high temperatures have been linked to years with lower krill numbers, leading to breeding failures of krill-reliant predators—evidenced by many dead fur seal pups on beaches.
Co-author Professor Anna Hogg, from the University of Leeds, said, "Our results show that while extreme events are known to impact the globe through heavy rainfall and flooding, heat waves and wildfires, such as those seen in Europe this summer, they also impact the remote polar regions."
"Antarctic glaciers, sea ice and natural ecosystems are all impacted by extreme events. Therefore, it is essential that international treaties and policy are implemented in order to protect these beautiful but delicate regions."
Not only did Facebook allow incitement to genocide to be circulated on it for years while people begged it to stop, but after the genocide Facebook also actively impeded the international investigation into that genocide.
@FfaerieOxide me too. I like it, I love the platform, I don't have an issue with the outages, and I like the way Ernest understands the fediverse.
If there's an outage fine, I just go to another fediverse account til kbin.social comes back. We all have other things in our life, sometimes projects have to take a back seat.
Also I have a lot of sympathy for Ernest wanting to retain control. It's his vision, let's let him do it his way.
Edit: the spam seems to be on mags that have Ernest as sole mod, so that might be an easy fix.
Military operations in Rafah could lead to a slaughter in Gaza. They could also leave an already fragile humanitarian operation at death's door," said U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths. "We lack the safety guarantees, the aid supplies and the staff capacity to keep this operation afloat.
"The international community has been warning against the dangerous consequences of any ground invasion in Rafah. The Government of Israel cannot continue to ignore these calls," he said in a statement.
Talks involving the U.S., Egypt, Israel and Qatar on a Gaza truce ended without a breakthrough on Tuesday as calls grew for Israel to hold back on its planned Rafah assault.
"My sincere hope is that negotiations for the release of hostages and some form of cessation of hostilities to be successful to avoid an all-out offensive over Rafah," U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told reporters on Tuesday.
"That would have devastating consequences," he said.
The war in Hamas-run Gaza began when Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and capturing 253 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. In retaliation, Israel launched a military assault on Gaza that health authorities say has killed more than 28,000 Palestinians with thousands more bodies feared lost amid the ruins.
More than half Gaza's 2.3 million people are sheltering in Rafah, many of them penned up against the border fence with Egypt and living in makeshift tents. Griffiths said they are "staring death in the face."
"They have little to eat, hardly any access to medical care, nowhere to sleep, nowhere safe to go," he said. "I have said for weeks now that our humanitarian response is in tatters."
Yeah the article ends up pretty much making this point too:
We’re at the dawn of a platform shift. As Google tunes its algorithms and incorporates more AI content into its search results, the business model of the entire internet is undergoing an unpredictable change. Over the long term, Reddit’s scrambling efforts at financial security may prove just as futile as the moderators’ attempts to fight back.
I'm really glad to be out from under all that corporate social media bs.
One of the world's most common artificial sweeteners is set to be declared a possible carcinogen next month by a leading global health body, according to two sources with knowledge of the process, pitting it against the food industry and regulators.
Aspartame, used in products from Coca-Cola diet sodas to Mars' Extra chewing gum and some Snapple drinks, will be listed in July as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" for the first time by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the World Health Organisation's (WHO) cancer research arm, the sources said.
The IARC ruling, finalised earlier this month after a meeting of the group's external experts, is intended to assess whether something is a potential hazard or not, based on all the published evidence.
It does not take into account how much of a product a person can safely consume. This advice for individuals comes from a separate WHO expert committee on food additives, known as JECFA (the Joint WHO and Food and Agriculture Organization's Expert Committee on Food Additives), alongside determinations from national regulators.
However, similar IARC rulings in the past for different substances have raised concerns among consumers about their use, led to lawsuits, and pressured manufacturers to recreate recipes and swap to alternatives. That has led to criticism that the IARC's assessments can be confusing to the public.
JECFA, the WHO committee on additives, is also reviewing aspartame use this year. Its meeting began at the end of June and it is due to announce its findings on the same day that the IARC makes its decision public - on 14 July.
A weird, super-hot celestial body is breaking records and challenging astronomers' understanding of the boundary between stars and planets.
The object, called WD0032-317B, is a brown dwarf — a type of bright, gaseous "protostar". Brown dwarves typically have a similar atmospheric composition to Jupiter but are 13 to 80 times larger. At that mass, these objects begin to fuse hydrogen isotopes in their cores. However, they aren't quite massive enough to spark the kind of full self-sustaining stellar fusion that powers stars like our sun — think of smoldering charcoal rather than a lit wood-fired oven.
Brown dwarfs usually burn at around 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,200 degrees Celsius). That's fairly cool compared with most stars, whose surface temperatures reach about 6,700 F (3,700 C).
But WD0032-317B, which is 1,400 light-years from Earth, is not like most brown dwarfs. In a paper published to the preprint database arXiv and accepted by the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers measured the object's surface temperature and found it was a blistering 13,900 F (7,700 C). That's hot enough for the molecules in its atmosphere to fall apart into their component atoms. It's also several thousand degrees hotter than the surface of our sun.
@ahornsirup definitely. In some cases the perpetrators continued to extract throughout their lives. (And beyond, in Haiti: the former slaves had to pay reparations to France for freeing themselves for generations).
But, reparations are not about punishment of perpetrators.
Reparations are normally about stopping the people who are currently having to pay for the past, from paying for it.
This is done by redistributing some of the profit from those who are currently profiting from the past.
Castro kept her promise to repeal the ZEDE laws that allowed Honduras Próspera to establish its private libertarian city-state on the island of Roatán. Congress unanimously agreed that the ZEDEs represented a breach of Honduras’s sovereignty.
Thiel and his band of libertarian ideologues weren’t going to go down without a fight. Honduras Próspera launched an $11 billion ISDS case against the government of Honduras, claiming that its repeal of the ZEDE laws violated the terms of existing international treaties. That amount, $11 billion, represents about two-thirds of the government’s annual budget.
Honduras Próspera’s case has been roundly condemned all over the world. Elizabeth Warren and thirty-three other Democratic representatives wrote a letter denouncing the proceedings and calling for the elimination of ISDSs. The US magazine the Atlantic described the case as “neocolonial.”
Despite this condemnation, the case has not made international headlines. With the ISDS system so riggedly in favor of wealthy nations and powerful corporations, Castro’s government faces a difficult road ahead.
Nearly 80% of the controversial floating barrier Texas state officials assembled in the middle of the Rio Grande to deter migrant crossings is technically on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a federal government survey released on Tuesday.
The revelation was made public in a federal court filing by the Biden administration in its lawsuit against the barrier, which Texas set up in July as part of an initiative directed by Gov. Greg Abbott to repel migrants and repudiate President Biden's border policies.
The river barrier, assembled near the Texas border town of Eagle Pass, has come under national and international scrutiny, including from the Mexican government, which has strongly voiced its objections to the buoys. Advocates, Democratic lawmakers and a Texas state medic have also expressed concerns about the structures diverting migrants to deeper parts of the river where they are more likely to drown.
Earlier this month Mexican officials recovered two bodies from the Rio Grande, including one that was found floating along the barrier, but the circumstances of the deaths are still under investigation. Mexican officials condemned the barrier in announcing the discovery of the bodies. But Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said preliminary information indicated that the first person found dead had "drowned upstream from the marine barrier and floated into the buoys."
Abbott and other Texas officials have insisted the buoys are necessary to stop migrants from entering the U.S. illegally, and the state has refuted claims it violated federal law and international treaties when it set up the floating barriers without permission from the Biden administration or Mexico. (Article continues)