German weapons-maker Rheinmetall opened Europe's largest munitions plant on Wednesday, a move hailed as boosting Western defences by NATO chief Mark Rutte.
French Trade Minister Laurent Saint-Martin signalled openness to Chinese investment on Wednesday, floating a détente with Beijing as the EU grapples with trade tensions with Washington.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A 52-year-old woman who was adopted to a French family in 1984 without her biological parents’ consent has filed for compensation from South Korea’s government, citing how authorities at the time fraudulently documented her as an orphan although she had a family.
The rare petition filed by Yooree Kim came months after South Korea’s truth commission recognized her and 55 other adoptees as victims of human rights violations, including falsified child origins, lost records and child protection failures.
Her case was highlighted last year in an Associated Press investigation in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS). The investigation found that South Korea’s government, Western countries and adoption agencies worked in tandem for decades to supply some 200,000 Korean children to parents overseas through questionable or downright unscrupulous means.
Their stories have triggered a reckoning that has shaken the international adoption industry, which took root in South Korea before spreading worldwide. Under pressure from adoptees, the Seoul government launched a fact-finding investigation, and hundreds submitted their cases for review.
After a nearly three-year investigation, the commission concluded in March that the state bears responsibility for facilitating an adoption program rife with fraud and abuse, driven by efforts to reduce welfare costs. It urged the government to issue an apology and develop plans to address adoptees’ grievances.
These acts, including convincing pregnant teenagers to give up their baby, wasn't just to reduce welfare, they were very profitable. Adoption fees were pretty high.
There were clear limitations to the commission’s report, which didn’t thoroughly examine the profit structures of adoption agencies, their links to child sources like hospitals, or receiving countries’ practices.
The money is where the investigation should have started.
Peter Moller, who was adopted from South Korea to Denmark before the enactment of such a law in 1974, claims that his parents had spent a total of 15-thousand dollars in adoption fees.
Anchor: KBS has recently obtained government documents from the 1980s, which, for the first time, confirmed the long-alleged illicit pocketing of adoption fees by domestic ...
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia’s invading forces have broken into an eighth region of Ukraine, a Ukrainian military official said Wednesday, seeking to capture more ground in their three-year war of attrition as U.S.-led peace efforts struggle to gain traction.
Some Russian troops have entered the villages of Novoheorhiivka and Zaporizke in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, a major Ukrainian industrial center next to the Donetsk region where fierce fighting has been taking place, Victor Trehubov, spokesman for local ground forces, told The Associated Press by phone.
Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed earlier this month that its forces had taken the two villages.
But the Russians have not entrenched or built fortifications there, and fighting is continuing in the villages, Trehubov said.
Ukrainian troops are under severe strain as they try to hold back Russia’s bigger army. Military analysts say there is no sign of a looming collapse of Ukrainian defenses and note that Russian forces have been unable to take major towns and cities, but their slow slog through rural areas keeps Ukraine under pressure.
The front line, where tens of thousands of troops on both sides have been killed, snakes along roughly 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) of eastern and southeastern Ukraine, which borders Russia. Russian forces are already in the Sumy, Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Mykolaiv regions.
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico said Wednesday its postal service was suspending package shipments to the United States ahead of an end to the exemption on tariff duties for low-value packages by the Trump administration.
The announcement follows similar moves by postal services from the European Union and several other countries to pause shipping as they await more clarity on the U.S. measure. It also comes amid months-long negotiations between the Mexican government and the Trump administration to avoid wider tariffs.
The exemption — known as the “ de minimis” exemption, which allows packages worth less than $800 to come into the U.S. duty free — is ending on Friday. A total of 1.36 billion packages were sent in 2024 under this exemption, for goods worth $64.6 billion, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Mexico’s government said its postal service, Correos de Mexico, will temporarily suspend package deliveries to the U.S., starting Wednesday.
“Mexico continues its dialogue with U.S. authorities and international postal organizations to define mechanisms that will allow for the orderly resumption of services, providing certainty to users and avoiding setbacks in the delivery of goods,” the statement read.
At least 25 countries have decided to suspend package deliveries to the United States, as concern grows over the impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s looming tariffs, a UN body said Tuesday.
The Trump administration said late last month that it will abolish a tax exemption on small packages entering the United States from August 29.
The move has sparked a flurry of announcements from postal services, including in France, Britain, Germany, Italy, India, Australia and Japan, that most U.S.-bound packages would no longer be accepted.
The United Nations’ Universal Postal Union said it had already been advised by 25 member countries that their postal operators “have suspended their outbound postal services to the U.S., citing uncertainties specifically related to transit services”.
It said the suspensions will remain in place until there is more clarity on how U.S. authorities plan to implement the announced measures.
The UPU did not provide a list of postal services it had heard from.
So the reason is not that they would need to pay more and don't want to, but that nobody knows who to pay, what to pay, and how to pay. There is literally no way to send a package to the US today and know how much it will cost.
So this is not Trump being aggressive in negotiation, but just being incompetent.
Nonsense. People don't want to pay. We had US customers refuse duties.
What really happened, the minimis has been removed, now everything has duties attached while before it was things over 800 dollars. No business is just going to "eat that cost". It's all being passed down. Express couriers will make it paid up front so most won't notice it there... But cheap services? Customer has to pay it themselves. It's all lack of understanding.
While the cheap service might be 10 dollars, you got to pay 50 dollars in duties in a weeks time. Vs say the 75 dollars express with duties baked in.
But US folk are kept in the dark about it. So they simply don't understand how it works.
Unless UPS/DHL have been just pocketing our money, this money is being passed somewhere...
Its not part of my job HOW it's paid, but it is figuring out HOW MUCH is being paid. And I can tell you, it is happening for these two couriers. Feel free to share your professional experience, if you have any.
It's the now age old Trump-Tariff faux-paradox ...
Country A has a package to ship to the US ...
The US tells Country A: 'aha tariffs need to be paid"...
Country A says "okay, tell the recipient to pay the tariffs and give us the ok when they did so we can deliver it past your border".
The US gets angry: "no no someone else pays tariffs not us! How dare you put the tariffs on us! Others are supposed to pay!"
Country A mumbles "ok, be that way", returns the package to sender, sender might refund but keeps shipping costs... and the US customer loses out twice.
Ya know, I just had a $100 part shipped to me from the US to French Polynesia through a broker I paid. Package is delivered by DHL and customs sits on it for 10 days. Then they charge me a "tax" equal to 100% and they included the shipping price I paid in the calculation.
If it's okay for other countries to charge this BS, the US should be able to as well.
Oh, and don't even think about over staying your visa in FP!
And will you continue to do that for the next item? No. And if you can't find a local supplier, you'll stop doing that business. It hurts the economy. And this is what will happen in the U.S.
Things have gotten so bad that we're having to find tiny island clusters in the South Pacific to compare the US to in order to make their import logistics seem reasonable.
I don't even disagree that there's plenty of other countries that make importing a pain, but the free market was supposed to be the US's whole thing. Like, the US can't even America properly any more.
it’s okay for other countries to charge this BS, the US should be able to as well.
That's because other countries have the systems in place to handle the additional charges, but the US suddenly demands money for a package but doesn't have the systems in place to handle anything for this. No paperwork, no procedures, no amounts list, no account number. At this point all other countries are just waiting for the US to gets it shit sorted out so they can actually pay.
My dude, this is technically correct but a bad metaphor; there's a lot of important differences between death camps and postal bans that make the comparison absurd.
As someone in logistics software... it ain't pretty
Even if we KNEW all the details, no way do we have enough manpower and system capacity to clear the additional dozens of thousands of shipments that would switch from automatic 86/03 to needing additional clearance details (but we're prepping for it! Only time will tell)
Buckle up America, this week gon be a bumpy ride, and give a lil leeway to the people getting your Temu packages to you, it ain't their choice this is all happening. You know who to blame.
Od utorka, 26. kolovoza obustavlja se prijam svih pošiljaka za Sjedinjene Američke Države koje sadrže komercijalnu robu/predmete, bez obzira na vrijednost robe
Former security leaders warn major threat going ignored Former Defence chief Chris Barrie said Australia needed to reorder its foreign policy priorities, with traditional geopolitical risks set to be displaced by climate change.
Australia has put all its eggs in the AUKUS basket, risking entanglement in a war with China, while the far greater threat to Australians' security is being ignored," he said.
Which is essentially what The Greens Nick Minchin said last year and was poo poohed for not understaning "defence". I wonder if his detractors will say the same thing of Admiral Barrie (retired) ?
Id like lemmings take on how they would actually reduce emissions on a level that actually makes a difference (assuming we can still stop it, which is likely false by now, but let's ignore that)
I dont think its as simple as "tax billionaires out of existence and ban jets, airplanes, and cars" because thats not realistic.
Bonus points if you can think of any solutions that dont disrupt the 99%'s way of life.
Joy. That joy you got when renting a game at blockbuster or getting that cd you’ve been looking for. That feeling of having a crush on a girl in school and feeling like the world was big with endless possibilities.
Pedestrians, cyclists and drivers are at increased risk as the rapid rise in monster US pick-up trucks on Europe’s roads is set to accelerate after the…
a deep dive into the messy substrate and coordination layers below decentralised networks, and how authoritarian thinkers like peter thiel view this substrate as a way to capture networks
SocialHub and the Substrate of Decentralised Networks
SocialHub is one of the primary forum where fediverse developers can talk about ActivityPub, how to implement the protocol, and have conversations about how the technical interoperability can be improved with Fediverse Enhancement Proposals. The forum has been searching for new ownership, but making decisions on how to move forward has been challening. Most developers aren’t interested in taking responsibility of community management, while the current admin will only hand over control to a team of people who can not only do the technical administration but can also manage the community. There is also no shared vision for what SocialHub should become, and multiple developers openly wonder if it is even worth it to continue with the forum. Most crucially, nobody has clear authority to make final decisions, making it incredible hard to move past the phase of ‘making a forum post with some ideas and suggestions’.
One of the core challenges with building a decentralised network is that decentralisation is about building alternative power structures, where no single actor has control over the entire network. But power is hard to diffuse: when you build a system that spreads out power, from one control point to many nodes, often this means that new places of gatekeeping and centralisation pop up. The result is often a kind of governance vacuum where important decisions get stuck in endless discussion loops, or where informal power structures emerge that aren’t accountable to the broader community.
Building a decentralised network like the fediverse thus means not only building a social network that spreads out over many different nodes, but also building an infrastructure for the network to run on that is itself decentralised. What’s happening to SocialHub is symptomatic of this broader tension, where these decentralised systems promise to distribute power, but they still need coordination mechanisms to function.
Hobart and decentralised substrates
In an essay titled The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization, tech writer Byrne Hobart wrote about decentralised networks, and how one of their paradoxes is that they require centralised substrates. One quote from the article regularly pops up, where Hobart writes: “Any decentralized order requires a centralized substrate, and the more decentralized the approach is the more important it is that you can count on the underlying system.”
With this, Hobart means that decentralised systems require a shared agreement on how to communicate with the system, usually via a set of agreed-upon protocols. For a decentralised system to work well, people have to agree to a single method of interaction. The internet cannot function if every website implements their own incompatible version of HTTPS, for example.
This leads Hobart to the observation that open networks are prone to being captured by companies that figure out an onramp to the network, writing: “these onramps are built on an open system, but part of their function is to close off some of it. And the better they do that, the more value they can capture.” Twitter and Facebook, but also crypto companies like Coinbase are examples for Hobart of this dynamic.
He writes: “This pattern raises a question: is centralization just a natural tendency of all networks? Are we destined to have a ‘decentralization sandwich,’ where there’s a hard-to-change set of protocols, something open built on top of that, and a series of closed systems built on top of that, which are the only ones the average person interacts with?”
On a surface-level reading, it feels straightforward enough: the fediverse is a decentralised network, and its technical function depends on the ActivityPub protocol. You can view the ActivityPub protocol as the centralised substrate to the decentralised network.
But when you start looking more closely, the picture that emerges is significantly more complicated.
The technological substrate
When you start looking more closely at how the fediverse operates in practice, the picture that emerges is significantly more complicated than Hobart’s centralised substrate theory suggests. Rather than a single protocol that serves as the foundation for a decentralised network, there is fragmentation at multiple levels. Moreover, the more this network pushes towards decentralisation, the more fragmented it becomes.
On a protocol level, there is no singular ActivityPub. The ActivityPub protocol as maintained by the W3C is the official canon version of the protocol, but most platforms don’t implement the full ActivityPub spec, instead opting for a combination of ActivityPub’s Server to Server protocol in combination with the Mastodon API. This means that the ‘centralised’ substrate is already fragmented in practice. While it is possible to make a case that developer adoption would go smoother if ActivityPub implementations were more standardised, the current fragmentation is a result of the network consisting of independent actors that coordinate with each other only to a limited extend.
Quote posts provide a concrete example of how this fragmentation plays out in practice. There are multiple different ways to implement quote posts. Misskey notably has a different method than the method that Mastodon is now using to implement quote posts. When Threads decided to implement quote posts, they decided on supporting both implementation methods for quote posts. This would seem like a good example of the value of a centralised substrate to a decentralised network: things would go smoother if everyone had agreed upon a singular implementation method of quote posts. So when a new fediverse platform that wants to be fully interoperable with other platforms would only have to implement one method, and know exactly in advance which one to use. But the reality shows that even basic features resist standardisation.
What the fediverse shows is that a decentralised network tends to split up into multiple different subnetworks. These networks themselves are also decentralised, and while technically part of the larger fediverse supernetwork, they are often quite separated. For example: The collection of Misskey servers are largely catering towards the Japanese audience. They are technically interoperable with the ‘Threadiverse’, a set of link-aggregator platforms (Reddit-likes, basically), but in practice interoperability and connections between these two sub-networks of the fediverse is negligible. Streaming software Owncast is seen as part of the fediverse, but the ActivityPub-enabled interactions between Owncast streamers and the Mastodon-verse are arguably even more limited.
What’s seen as ‘the fediverse’ turns out to contain more protocols that are interoperable with each other to a certain degree, such as Hubzilla’s Nomad protocol. And if we expand our perspective to look at the open social web as a set of decentralised social networks that are all interoperable with each other, we see even more protocols, such as ATProto and Nostr. At this level, the idea of a single centralised substrate becomes even more tenuous.
So what this means is that the more decentralised a network becomes, the network tends to split into subnetworks, where each cluster of this supernetwork becomes more distinct from each other. Interoperability and connections between these clusters is possible and happens occasionally, but for social and cultural reasons can be fairly limited.
From a technical perspective, Hobarts claim that “the more the decentralized the approach is the more important it is that you can count on the underlying system” turns out to be recursive: the more decentralised approach means that networks start to fragment into subnetworks, each with slightly different technological substrates, and it becomes more important that you can count of the underlying substrate of the subnetwork.
The social substrate
Hobart’s centralised substrate theory assumes that decentralised networks require centralised governance of their foundational protocols. But examining how the fediverse actually governs itself reveals multiple, overlapping authority structures that challenge this assumption. Rather than a single centralised point of control, there are competing forms of governance, spread out over multiple places and communities.
The W3C, the organisation that governs ActivityPub, usually focuses on protocol governance via W3C members, where these members are often required to be organisations. This represents the closest thing to Hobart’s “centralised substrate” – a formal institution with official authority over the protocol specification.
The SocialHub forum is one of the main places for structured long-form communications about ActivityPub. It is also the main place for conversations about Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP). A FEP is a document that gives structured information about ActivityPub and the fediverse, with the goal of improving interoperability and well-being of fediverse applications. Anyone can submit a FEP, and conversations about them on places like SocialHub is how they get legitimacy and buy-in for other projects to implement the proposals.
The grassroots system of the FEPs, in which the SocialHub plays a major part, shows that a single protocol can be used in a manner that is highly decentralized: there is no central authority that can mandate implementation of FEPs, yet they gain legitimacy through community discussion and voluntary adoption.
Conversations about ActivityPub and the fediverse are spread out fairly wide, over a variety of places on the network. Some of the notable places for conversation are the SocialHub forum and the Fedidev matrix channel. The SocialCG of the W3C has various places for discussion, including an email list, GitHub discussion boards and regular meetings. Other places include discussions on microblogging feeds, various (semi)private chat groups and Lemmy communities. Notably, each of these places for conversation only has a small subset of fediverse developers that are participating, and developers are spread out over all these places. This indicates that the ‘social substrate’ of the fediverse development is decentralised as well, there is no single place that owns or controls the conversations about protocol development.
Decentralisation and political power
Hobart is not the only one who has thought and written about how decentralised networks relate to the (potentially centralised) governance of the protocols that powers them, as well as how they are vulnerable to capture. But Hobart’s alignment with the tech-right political wing makes his writing relevant to me, specifically because I strongly disagree with his political views, and the people he aligns himself with. Understanding why this thesis appeals to certain political actors helps makes it all the more important to challenge this way of thinking.
Hobart is a techno-optimist, and his mode of thinking is illustrative of a wider thinking on technology and culture in Silicon Valley. His latest book, on why bubbles are actually good, got a foreword by Peter Thiel. This connection is not incidental, as Hobart represents a particular worldview about how technology, power, and governance should intersect.
Thiel fits well with the line of thinking of Hobart, both on the wider points of techno-optimism, as well as on the aformentioned quote, that decentralised networks require a centralised substrate. Thiel’s beliefs can be understood as techno-feudalism, where he wants to move power away from the political domain to domain of corporate tech, where power is held by a few corporate elites, not by a democracy. Decentralised networks in itself are an antithesis to the worldview of Thiel’s authoritarianism. The decentralisation of a network means divesting power away from the few corporate elites, and spreading it out over many individuals instead.
The line of thinking that decentralised networks often have a centralised substrate, and are vulnerable to being captured by building closed systems on top of the open systems, can be read as either a warning or as an instruction manual. And for noted democracy-hater Peter Thiel, whom Hobart seems to align himself with, it is much more likely that Thiel views this as an instruction manual on how to deal with open and decentralised systems.
The idea that a decentralised network still can have a single central point, namely the technological substrate that powers the network, is thus an attractive idea to an authoritarian figure. You might not be able to control a decentralised network directly, but by controlling or influencing the protocol that powers it, a chokepoint arises that the authoritarian feudalist overlord can leverage to extract rent.
Meta’s approach to the fediverse demonstrates the substrate capture strategy in action. By joining ActivityPub governance discussions while simultaneously building Threads as a massive onramp to the network, Meta places itself into a position to influence both the protocol, as well as to function as a primary gateway to the network. This follows the format of the “decentralization sandwich” that Hobart describes. Their sponsorship of the Social Web Foundation further embeds them in the governance substrate of the fediverse network.
In this context, Hobart’s quote takes on a new meaning. Hobart’s message resonates with the people and organisations who are building today’s social networks of extraction. They have built social networks where they are the gatekeepers, and with their gatekeeping power they have become richer than god. While decentralised networks might pose a threat to centralised networks, promising to take their gatekeeping power away, Hobart’s description points to a new place where they can extract rent. This is why it matters to understand how decentralised networks function matters: it also indicates that the substrates of decentralised network can be decentralised, and points to ways how corporate capture can be resisted.
Reframing decentralisation
Hobart’s statement that decentralised systems depend on centralised substrate makes it appealing to authoritarians, since it provides a guidebook on how to gain forms of centralised control over decentralised systems. But while the idea seems to fit well with a surface-level analysis, a closer look at how the fediverse operates in practice also shows that the substrate of the network is, and has the potential to be, a lot more decentralised than first might be assumed.
From a technological side, the assumption of ‘the fediverse is the decentralised network’, with ‘ActivityPub being the centralised substrate’ turns out to be a whole lot more complicated in practice. What’s seen as ‘the fediverse’ turns out to contain more protocols that are interoperable with each other to a certain degree. The ActivityPub protocol also turns out to contain multiple sub-protocols: most platforms don’t implement the full ActivityPub spec, instead opting for a combination of ActivityPub’s Server to Server protocol in combination with the Mastodon API.
On the social side, ‘decentralisation’ is both a technical description of a network architecture, as well as a more general description of the distribution of authority in a network. The grassroots system of the FEPs shows that a single protocol can be worked on in a manner that is highly decentralised.
This intertwining of technical and social decentralisation reveals why Hobart’s thinking on decentralisation and substrate s fails to capture the reality of how these networks actually operate in practice. At the same time, Hobart’s thinking does provide a good way of understanding how authoritarian-minded people and organisations might approach decentralised systems, and how they think about capturing and controlling such networks. It is this dual combination that makes Hobart’s thinking interesting to me, specifically because I disagree with it on multiple levels.
As for the SocialHub: after a period of uncertainty, Pavilion, the organisation that also build the Discourse plugin which connects the forum software to the fediverse over ActivityPub, will become the new admins of the community.
Threads has entered the fediverse! As part of our beta experience, now available in a few countries, Threads users aged 18+ with public profiles can now choose to share their Threads posts to other…
I first thought that this article seemed to suggest variety in the implementation of Federated protocols was a bad thing but actually its saying the opposite and supports the organic development of activitypub which i complely agree with. Variety, experminentation and dare I say it diversity are strenghts. Uniformity is boring and weak. It gives us choice, the opportunity to try things out without completely starting anew and has sonfar meant we have an amazing choice ofnservers, clients, features and options.
The next time I'm about to moan and complain about how nobody directly implements activitypub apis "the standard way", I'll remember this article and be mollified.
Israel justified its murder of Al Jazeera’s crew on the grounds that one among them, Anas al-Sharif, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, was secretly a “Hamas terrorist”.
Sharif, we are told, similarly found time between breaks from his 22-month, frantic reporting schedule - much of it on camera - to serve as a Hamas commander “directing rocket attacks on Israeli civilians”.
We now know exactly where this ridiculous story originated: from something Israel calls its “Legitimisation Cell”. The intelligence unit’s name, which was surely never supposed to come to light, is the give-away. Its job has been to legitimise Israel’s atrocities with stories vilifying its victims and thereby making the genocide more palatable to Israeli and western audiences.
The Israeli news website +972 exposed the cell within days of Sharif’s killing this month, reporting that it was formed after 7 October 2023 - the day Hamas and other groups broke out of their Gaza prison camp, spreading carnage, following 17 years of a brutal siege.
But while Israeli mendacity is entirely to be expected - after all, it is the whole purpose of its official hasbara industry - what astonishes most is the western media’s continuing connivance in promoting Israel’s litany of lies.
Germany’s most popular paper, Bild, published a front page that might as well have been written by the Israeli military: “Terrorist disguised as a journalist killed in Gaza.” No claim, no quote marks. Just a statement of fact.
The UK media was little better, with most outlets prominently featuring Israel’s unevidenced “legitimisation” smears of Sharif in headlines and coverage. Astonishingly, BBC coverage on its flagship News at Ten swallowed whole Israel’s framing of Sharif as a legitimate target - as well as uncritically peddling the presumption that Israel was targeting him and him alone.
The context that has been missing from western coverage is this: Israel has killed more than 240 Palestinian journalists in Gaza over the past two years - more than all the journalists killed in both World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the Afghanistan War combined.
This is a pattern - a glaring one - but seemingly one to which western journalists are entirely blind, even as Israel continues to bar them from reporting in Gaza, nearly two years into its genocide.
Israel's intent to annihilate Gaza would have been clear much sooner had we listened to Palestinian journalists, rather than the evasions and equivocations of the BBC
They are so obviously and transparently bullshitting us and the west is NOT CALLING THEM OUT ON THEIR BULLSHIT ffs, this is blood-boiling to say the least!
Lets be real. The Israeli lobby has tons of money. They buy out the politicians and wield power to silence critics. Everything that challenges their power becomes 'antisemitic'.
the day Hamas and other groups broke out of their Gaza prison camp, spreading carnage, following 17 years of a brutal siege.
Sounds like an excuse to a terror attack with almost exclusively civilian targets. Why is it so hard for advocates of the Palestinian cause to condemn this attack??
You mean> 90% military targets according to Western standards, of which more than 33% on active military duty?
Just look at the West Bank and find out what non violent resistance leads to.
You must not be used to being provided with the actual context of October 7. Very shocking to learn that Palestinians were actually in a concentration camp for 17 years and broke out. I wonder why that part of the both sides story never gets reported.
Because the music festival was in between the path to a military base and should have already ended by that day.
Why did they attack more than 5 military bases around Gaza responsible for their concentration camp you ask? Or did the Western media not tell you about that?
They could have walked around it. The festival wasn’t the only massacre of civilians that day. This was not a military maneuver, it was directly targeted at civilians, specifically women and Jews.
There were armed soldiers at the festival and it was next to a military base. Not sure what you think 'walking around it' means. Also "women and Jews" lol.
Israel shouldn't put a "music festival" next to a military base guarding a concentration camp. And especially not have armed active duty IDF soldiers using the festival as human shields.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
military service is mandatory for most Jewish Israelis. So yeah, buddy, I was right, stop trying to fucking gaslight people online, Israel is paying you enough?
Your article doesn't provide any evidence or your claim. Nor does it debunk the article itself.
It would be very cool if Qatar was the only country doing actual journalism about Gaza, but from my reading of MEE I severely doubt it's Qatar running the operation.
MEE writes plenty of critical reports about Qatar. They do almost always go very soft on one specific country though. And it's not the one you named.
Actual journalists won't say someone is a murderer even if there's a video of the person shooting a guy pulling out their ID and showing it to the camera and say "my name is ___ and I murdered this person".
When the person is charged then they will be termed "alleged murderer". Before there's charges they're termed something like "shooter" not murderer. Only once someone is convicted of the crime will they be called "murderer".
Genocide is a much greater crime than murder. It's not responsible journalism to make accusations like this. If a body like the ICJ convicted Israel's leadership on charges, or maybe id the country the media organization is based in made a declaration, then a journalist will start using the word genocide.
"Alternative media" have no journalistic standards and will say such things to lead their audiences to conclusions. If you're reading articles that are telling you how to think about a story, it's not actually journalism. Real journalism is about telling people what's happening, not telling people how they're supposed to think about, and definitely not about making accusations in an effort support activist causes.
I'm not getting too excited yet. All class action lawsuits I've heard of end up netting individual members only a few bucks each. Unless the settlement specifically grants authors right to opt out of AI scraping, it's only a small victory. Hopefully settlement details will come out soon.
I've been part of a class action suite that netted me several hundred dollars, but it was a rarity, most others I've participated in ended up with me receiving between $1-20.
Most of the ones I've been a part of I've had to provide information that proves that I was negatively affected, but there have been a couple that I didn't have to do that. Generally I think the ones where you have to provide proof lean towards being higher in the amount of money you get, but that's only my personal experience.
Very true, the websites are usually pretty good about detailing what level of information is needed.
The no proof ones are usually like 5-$25, but if adds up. I just point it out because most people don't realize that there is always a couple class actions that they can add their name to for payouts.
If every author in the class filed a claim, industry advocates warned, it would "financially ruin" the entire AI industry.
Journalists need to stop this shit. Yes, it would financially ruin them. It'd ruin them the same way drug dealers would be financially ruined if you confiscated their drugs.
Israeli Colonel Jacques Neriah, a former intelligence official and a special analyst for the Middle East, warned on Sunday of an impending “second round” of war against Iran as Tehran weighs a revenge attack on Tel Aviv.
“There is a sense that a war is coming, that Iranian revenge is in the works. The Iranians will not be able to live with this humiliation for long,” Neriah told Udi Segal and Anat Davidov on 103FM.
“Israel must launch a preemptive strike against Iran in its present state, as a large part of its military capabilities is paralyzed,” he added.
I can't help but laugh. "If we don't attack Iran, they'll attack us," has now turned into, "Now that we've attacked Iran they're definitely going to attack us!" There are no limits to their justifications for warmongering.
Then we need to stop antagonizing them and giving them a reason to get nukes. At this point they have enough institutional knowledge and resources to make one so them not doing it is more them not wanting to, ie. The ayatollahs fatwa against them.
If Israel and the US keep bombing them though and make them think the only path to safety is through nukes then maybe that fatwa goes away.
The French don't get enough criticism about what they've done and continue to do globally. USA is rightfully considered the bad guy globally but 250 years of war and theft are nothing compared to the 400 - 600 years of rape and pillaging the French have done
I'm sure this has changed a bit since the old (very popular) king died, but back then you would probably rather go to prison than face the angry mob that would summon if you insulted the king.
I’m sure this has changed a bit since the old (very popular) king died
Sort of a chicken-egg situation. Is the king so popular that nobody bothers to criticize him? Or is the king's light touch less likely to stir the pot and provoke criticism that results in prosecution?
you would probably rather go to prison than face the angry mob
This sounds like using a Jim Crow era lynch mob to explain the popularity of a Segregationist governor.
In Israel, thousands of protesters have blocked roads around the country, including a major highway in Tel Aviv, burning tires, calling for the return of the hostages still held in Gaza and an end to Israel’s war on the besieged strip. The protests were led by families of hostages, and part of a nationwide “Day of Disruption.”
"Meanwhile, Israel’s military chief clashed with far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir about Israel’s Gaza City operation, with Smotrich reportedly saying, “Whoever doesn’t evacuate, don’t let them. No water, no electricity, they can die of hunger or surrender.”
I bet those 2 pieces of shit still act offended if you call this genocide genocide
Getting anything out is already almost impossible. I moved sway from 3rd party cloud storage a couple years back. I had to get 500gb from onedrive and it was refusing to download at anything more than 50kb/s (my internet was significantly better than that)
If you're in the EU, you can apply for a GDPR request to get sent a copy of all your data in their cloud, same for iCloud. Takes about 48 hours in my experience.
Free office suite – the evolution of OpenOffice. Compatible with Microsoft .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx. Updated regularly, community powered.
I second this. There's a little bit of a learning curve on some of the functionality, but it's not bad at all. And most of the functionality is very easy to find. I moved over to Libre Office several years ago and it's been great.
This is very true. I hadn’t used Microsoft Office since 2007 and at my new workplace everyone’s using it. It’s really hard and I don’t find anything. Yesterday I was working with tables but I gave up and had IT install libreoffice instead.
Libreoffice their latest blogpost is from the 20th of August 2025. There have been a few releases in the past few months as well.
Openoffice their latest ( Apache Openoffice 4.1.15 ) was released almost 2 years ago ( December 2023 ).
Libreoffice seems like a more recent, better supported tool over Openoffice which hasn't seen any updates since 2023 according to their own website.
I'm on my phone, so I didn't search extensively. But I think that also plays a role in why there's a much larger fanbase for libreoffice rather than Openoffice.
I've no recent experience with either so I can't comment on how well either works.
Edit: I looked up the wrong one. My statement remains correct w.r.t. Openoffice, but they mentioned Onlyoffice which is a different product.
openoffice is an apache project, created when oracle gave them the code and rights to the openoffice project. ibm later donated symphony to them. anyone familiar with apache knows they do things their own way, and usually slowly.
libreoffice originated from a fork when openoffice's status under oracle was in doubt. it progresses faster than apache, as most developers also switched.
onlyoffice is an entirely different application. decent enough, but with its own quirks. it can also be slow on lower-spec systems due to the heavy reliance on js. originally a latvian-russian project, it was reorganized (via new corporate entities in uk and sg) to hide the russian ties for 'reasons'.
Ah I see. Thanks for the information. I use both LibreOffice and OnlyOffice and generally am happy with both. I kind of just bounce around back and forth.
Man, wouldn't it be nice if both of our counties didn't have ridiculous propaganda and fascism so that we could just cooperate on shit like this without having to worry as much about maliciousness on a state level?
OnlyOffice is Russian-owned, via a holding company in Singapore. When Russia invaded Ukraine and sanctions threatened the business, they obfuscated this, but it's still Lev Bannov's product.
The importance you attach to this is up to you, but they try quite hard to hide it.
Yes Ms is secretly stealing from users across the world and yet not a single security researcher has found it. AND ALEXA IS LISTENING TO ME 24X365 DAYS A YEAR!
until your computer force reboots itself in the middle of the day to do updates it didn't tell you about, and you log back in and later that night find it uploaded all your shit to the cloud and just for good measure deleted some of it too as a fuck you
tip: do not write about the revolution, short stories, hatred of capitalism, your suicide plans, or your teenage angst and erotic anthropomorphic horse fan fiction.
tip: Only write about the revolution, short stories about your hatred of capitalism, your suicide plans, your teenage angst, and erotic anthropomorphic horse fan fiction.
Let's say this huge breach of security and privacy is okay.
How are Microsoft ensuring these sensitive documents are not being transferred via or stored on servers located in hostile countries with lax data laws (such as foreign nations like the USA?).
Microsoft has already said it doesn't matter where your data is stored, it isn't safe from the United States.
But you can change this behaviour in settings, it's just the default for now.
So, if you don't trust Microsoft to handle your documents, but still somehow use MS Word and OneDrive, for the moment you can still stop it from saving your Word documents to their servers.
Ms office 2016 install still going strong with zero cloud function. That day I lose it is the day LibreOffice copies itself from the laptop to the desktop. Aint paying for O365
No for most it's customers and an option for them all. MS is very clear in its policies. Any AI services you use, isn't sent back for training. The policy is very clearly explained and one of the clearer ones.
Business or enterprise users data isn't trained and individuals data can opt out
I remember when facebook had a policy to require users to opt-in to having third parties scrape users data, but then it turned out a "bug" caused FB to sell everyones data anyway and they made billions more money than they would have.
I have no doubt a similar "bug" will make its way to the MS servers if one hasnt already.
A lie is an assertion that is believed to be false, typically used with the purpose of deceiving or misleading someone.[1][2][3] The practice of communicating lies is called lying. A person who communicates a lie may be termed a liar.
I actually appreciate this. The only place I use Word is at work, and nothing I create in Word at work is 'mine'. I do not care at all about the security of things I do at work (that's for our IT Security team to care about), and all this means is that if I accidentally screw up, or if my computer just up and dies on me... all of my work files should be 'safe'.
My employer has been going very hard towards ensuring that our work computers can ONLY be used for work purposes. Once I accepted this and embraced it I found that I'm now 100% free of Microsoft for anything personal, and it is amazing.
there is a reaching hand that goes further than just using it for work.
lets say you open libreoffice writer and write a party invite. you send this party invite to a friend - they are invited to your party.
your friend opens it in MSWord, its uploaded to the cloud and scraped for all of your personal data to train their AI and to be sold to the lowest bidder.
you had and want nothing to do with microsoft, but they are still harvesting your data.
i have been trying to understand what information i send to people and how i send it in an attempt to try and get as lottle data into msrecall as possible.
im not quite there yet (and probably wont be before the oct cutoff) because my mother still uses windows & emails me sometimes, and a few of my friends on discord use windows. its really difficult because i have no control over my data being scraped by products i do not use and have never accepted a eula for. its...... aggravating 🙁
The unfortunate fact is if a user who views what you post is using a windows machine, the likelihood of the information on their screen being captured by Microsoft is overwhelmingly high.
I guess you may have to approach the issue how you would the public-facing internet at large: if you cannot verify who and how people are viewing your material, do not post any material that can be accessed by windows. If you must, post it through a trusted circle of users who also understand the issue.
I agree, however you're never going to be able to fully control things that you've sent out for other people. Even this post can, and likely will, end up as training data for AI. 'The only winning move is not to play' applies to a lot of things in life, and if you truly want to protect your data then the best move is to not create any data. The second best move is to not share any data that you've created.
I mean, I'm in the same boat. This doesn't effect me except for work stuff. But here's the thing, all of my documents are already backed up to the cloud via OneDrive settings. So this is redundant at best.
At the end of the day, one of the reasons I hate the MS experience is because they push things on you. Its not your PC, its theirs. Hey, you want to use OneDrive? No? Are you sure? No? Are you really sure? No? Why don't I just turn it on for you so you can see how great it is. You must have turned it off by accident, let me turn it back on. OK, OK I get it you really don't want to use onedrive. Oh, I forgot that fact once our annual update came out and undid that setting. You straight out uninstalled onedirve and altered your registry? Ok, how about we just upload Word documents for you.
Part of why I still hate it at work; work knows almost everything about me. People with poor understanding of PII have my personal information, and use MS products. Microsoft knows all of that, and everything that I type, the notes I make, the phrases I use, inferences on my interests, and can combine that with other profiles. It helps put together a much more complete picture and profile of me and why I interface with. And I can't opt out, can't use Linux, and can't just go somewhere else to avoid it.
Munoz backs up the decision with half a dozen advantages for saving documents to the cloud. From never losing progress and access anywhere to easy collaboration and increased security and compliance.
Munoz kept out the little details where nobody wants this and this is only a good thing for Microsoft
I don't get it, does Microsoft WANT everyone to stop using their products? First they fuck up their OSes, then they start planting shady shit in their OSes, and now it's down to every single goddamned piece of software they poop out! What in the fuck are they even doing!
I'm pretty sure most regular users will not even notice the charge, and find it useful down the line. Cause one day they will mess something up, complain to MS that they "lost their work", will be pointed to the cloud where everything was synced, and rejoice. Most users don't really care about the implications that their documents are in the cloud.
Silence! The great Microsoft has decreed that from this day forward your documents belong to them! No dissension!
Proceed to the payment portal to pay your offerings immediately. Only those worthy enough to pay for the Extra^TM^ and Premium^TM^ tiers will be allowed to use the File menu.
Free office suite – the evolution of OpenOffice. Compatible with Microsoft .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx. Updated regularly, community powered.
I think it they are based in Latvia now which is in Europe. They did originally start in Russia and still supply the Russian government. Though it is free and open source. So where it is based does not really matter.
OnlyOffice is one of the few open source applications which actually puts effort into its UI. LibreOffice looks straight from 1990. I really would not recommend LibreOffice to anyone who is not technical, whereas OnlyOffice provides a great UI experience.
With the entire West supporting a livestreamed genocide the whole moral highground schtick does not really land for me anymore either.
Of the installs I've done in the past year, none were absolutely flawless. One had an error that I just hit "retry" and it worked. One required some serious googling but I found the fix on reddit (rip). One didn't work at all, and I switched to a different distro that did work.
I'm not going to lie and sugarcoat it, but once I got past the install everything has been fine. Hopefully things will continue to improve
It's on per default when signed in to OneDrive. Actually a really nice feature tbh. However, you will be promoted to hell and back if you aren't signed in to OneDrive. I like the feature for work but I don't like the idea of it being the default setting.
I have a Word document saved into my ‘personal account vault’ which is for personal thoughts (like a diary). Does this mean, they’ll automatically upload this too into their cloud?
If that’s the case, not sure what to do. Tempted to go back to old school diary but risk the chance of my family finding it.
Markdown is great for that. There also are some WYSIWYG and a lot of side-view editors. If you still want Word-alike, there's lots of office suites aside from Office 365. Or is it about saving notes to cloud? Even more solutions just for that, aside from plain file-sync clouds.
No, that’s not it. I just want a Word-alike thing that allows me to put a password on it and use it as a ‘modern diary’ (like how you can make chapters and such in Word).
Not sure if I explained it well, English isn’t my native language. So wasn’t sure how to explain it
Siu Mit USA De Fa Si Si Zu Yi The Only Good Fa Xi Si Zu Yi Ze Hai Sei Zo Ge
(Destroy fascism in the USA The only good fascist is a dead one)
Now just need to transpose that and replace some characters. Of course, making it offline would greatly reduce government/corporate surveillance threats. As long as your family aren't cryptographers, they won't be able to decrypt it.
(Its Tri-Lingual. Cantonese Jyutping, Mandarin Pinyin, and English of course. Romanization of characters makes it harder to guess words especially when it gets transposed with a bunch of others.)
No big corporation or state institution handling vast amounts of customer data will not allow this. Also really bad for regular consumer too. Microsoft servers will become treasure trove for hackers.
I'm not exactly s power user in Microsoft office, but I found using libre office to be very similar. Never had issues using it for school back in the day and I'm sure it's better now.
My only problem is how Libre Office handles their style system. It's forced use for things like Footers, and very hard to manipulate and turn off unlike Word.
My own way to bypass it was to replace a new document text into an old converted word text that had the correct footer pages from Word.
I really hate page and Style guides because they always want to propagate everything through entire documents, instead of only changing things on a page by page basis. Adding things to previous pages when you change something isn't helpful.
I’ve been using it for over a decade now and have only rarely come across broken documents due to proprietary features. If you’re making docs for yourself, I’d say it’s pretty much a 100% replacement. Things can get a bit more fucky if you’re having exchanges where you edit with Libre and someone else edits with Word. But other than that, they’re pretty darn close.
Another user just linked some resources. Incredible the bullshit going on these days. So much going on it's hard for me to keep up with it all but I'm glad to be enlightened.
Wow thanks for the resources! I appreciate you dropping links I had no idea this was going on. Of course Google and Amazon are involved too, could have figured as much. Appears the only way do avoid the military industrial complex is to cease using anything provided from our oligarch overlords. What an age we live in.
I'm 99% of the way on LibreOffice. Gave it a solid go, but the main thing I use in excel is too cumbersome in Libre. I think it's a great option for many people though.
You're thinking as an individual. Excel in the business is what keeps Office afloat. There simply is no substitute. Even if you want to go with another spreadsheet, who's going to trust that to faithfully import Excel data?
LOL, Excel doesn't mangle shit. It's best-in-class spreadsheet software for a dozen reasons. #1 being that it never changes. It's solid, no other software like it. Business won't risk fucking around with anything else.
SOURCE: Sysadmin for several companies, and one that mainly used Google for Business. Accounting still had to have Excel.
Well, no? It would be ridiculous to expect me to be a power user over all the software I've administrated. I judge what people need according to business demands and orders from on high. My judgement is that, yes, some business units require Excel.
That’s not what the claim was though, was it. Someone said Excel also mangles files and your counter seems to be that no it doesn’t because you’ve got users who use it. But the one thing does not automatically follow from the other.
How many individuals care about what businesses do though? Usually they provide the hardware too, so it's whatever when it comes to what the company chooses to use.
These are more individual concerns for personal hardware. So long live LibreOffice.
Not really. What software and hardware a corporation chooses to use for their workforce is something that employees will not have much control over if they aren't in a high enough position.
Anything provided by a company is company property anyways. What matters more to me is what is used for personal use than a work computer or work phone or work etc.
So discussion wasn't off track. You were seeing things from the company perspective assuming the person was seeing it from a corporate position. I'm seeing it from a personal usage perspective and not corporate, which most employees have little control over and it's not their devices anyways.
LibreOffice does everything I need except that their version of Power Point (forgot the name lol) is a mess to work with in terms of making the slide deck visual appealing. Automatic guide lines, snapping and smartart, to name a few.
Thinking about onlyoffice but I'm not sure if I can trust them since I read about then trying to hide their ties to Russia.
How will this work for (for example) cibersecurity companies that have reports full of client's vulnerabilities and can't have them hosted in third parties?
I'm unclear on the differences between OpenOffice (which I genuinely thought was retired, didn't realize it was still a thing) and LibreOffice. If it ever gives you trouble, do make the switch.
It's still being kept barely alive for whatever reason. But it hasn't gotten any reasonable updates (I think not even including security updates as of recently, see libreoffice.org/discover/libre… ).
Today marks 20 years since the source code to OpenOffice was released. And today we say: LibreOffice is the future of OpenOffice. Let’s all get behind it! It’s great to have a rich and diverse set of free and open source software projects.
OnlyOffice, not OpenOffice. This is a different suite entirely. Might be better for people coming from MS Office, since it looks practically identical. Also supports opening multiple files as tabs.
ONLYOFFICE offers a secure online office suite highly compatible with MS Office formats. Connect it to your web platform for document editing and collaboration or use as a part of ONLYOFFICE Workspace.
which I genuinely thought was retired, didn’t realize it was still a thing
It's not gone. It's still around. Libre is forked from OpenOffice. When Libre was forked, everyone moved to Libre because Open has a lot of issues, which is why Libre was forked.
This is why Microsoft is making it damn near impossible to set up a new computer without logging into a Microsoft account. Luckily the OOBE trick still works (for now).
Office 365 requires an account to validate the license. Potentially it might work differently for the long term licensed versions (which features released to O365 now wouldn't reach until the next LTSC release), but I've not performed the initial install and licensing of those for clients yet
Or for home users who aren't already invested in a Microsoft ecosystem your best bet is to just use Libre Office
Edit: I accidentally made Office exclusive to leap years!
I love LibreOffice, but I wish there was an Android app. I've even considered learning more app development to try and help, but it's such a daunting task.
I've been writing all my college papers in LaTeX and it's been great. They look so professional, and it's easier to work on a collection of text files than one monolithic document.
I swear typesetting your papers is worth half a grade point at least. Then once you find Zotero and realize it will automagically handle your citations and you have auto biblios and cites working in LyX....life changing, absolutely.
It really depends on what you will use it for. Using it for plain text doesn't require much, some advanced layouts require a bit more digging, if you're including fancy graphics, equations, bibliography, footnotes, etc, you're going to look at managing the relevant libraries to gandle that (they are very well made and very convenient). All in all, it can be as complex as you want, but it can also be quite easy to use. Also LaTeX is way simpler than plain TeX.
I don't think that's necessarily a bad idea. Too many people are still not backing up their data, and the article says "...automatically save to OneDrive or your preferred cloud destination".
As long as they really give users full freedom to choose any cloud service, I consider that a win.
"If you don't have another cloud destination, don't worry... we'll automatically save it to your OneDrive account we FORCED you to get when you activated your operating system. Why no! You CAN'T turn it off! Also, we won't let you edit your files without internet connectivity. You can never be too safe!"
Literally the ONLY thing stopping this from happening is they don't think they can get away with it yet. I'm NOT going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
What you said is like saying "well, I need surgery, having the monkey from the forest come at me with a knife is better than nothing."
Microsoft has proven themselves over and over to be the last company you should trust with your data. Even recently they've been responsible for losing a life's worth of data because of OneDrive
They're already uploading people's data off of their computers to OneDrive without consent, then deleting the local copies.
Plus their tech work culture is lacking. When they screwed something up with Office 365 and Outlook wasn't available for over 18 hours (for basically the whole world), their response was a tweet that it's fixed.
Whereas CloudFlare messed up something for only an hour, they released a comprehensive breakdown on their blog of what happened, what the root cause was, and what they're going to do to prevent it from happening again.
I stopped at MS Word 2.0, when the Microsoft people agreed with me that it was pretty much broken for large files, and pointed me to an FTP site where there was a new version... which also was broken. Long story short, that's when I first installed Linux and ran LaTeX and Applixware.
They'd break SO MANY international and data security laws if they tried breaking into people's OneDrive, it'd be hilarious to see the number of lawsuits they'd lose by default.
they're probably already doing that to a smaller degree, and slightly protecting themselves with an obscure clause in their TOS. besides, you only lose lawsuits if you get caught - and churning things through AI is a great way to erase any fingerprints that identifies stolen data
because your phone/laptop doesn't have a global wi-fi connection, and you might want to open a document pause for dramatic effect outside of your home or work!
this has been goin on for like a year now. i have an offline profile with no onedrive on my machine, and tried the latest office. theres a slider saying autosave, but i was unable to use it. felt kinda weird that there is no autosave feature anymore. turns out autosave has been a cloud save option, and poor excel was not able to savemy private data to the onedrive datafarm. also the new excel is super slow compared to like the 2016 version, which indicates that theres more bloat under the hood.
Having switched many relatives to Linux recently too, Mint will be your best jumping off point for a familiar feel and pain free experience as someone new to Linux. If you love that and find yourself wanting more, then the world is your oyster! I started on Mint and ultimately settled on Fedora Plasma after trying out a half dozen different options.
Haven't had a need to open one the entire time I've been on the OS! Other than for my own development needs, but that's my own use case and nothing to do with operating the OS as a user.
Seit das ZDF und ARTE vor acht Jahren mit der legendären Serie „Bad Banks“ europäische Maßstäbe gesetzt haben und, in zwei Staffeln, einen mit Preisen überhäuften und internationalen Erfolg feiern konnten, habe ich mich gefragt, ob, und wenn, dann wann und wie, so ein TV-Ereignis wohl zu wiederholen sein würde. Für all diese Fragen steht die Antwort auf dem brandneuen „ZDF-Portal“. Bei der Ausstrahlung im TV war das kein Quotenhit, dabei ist diese Serie aber ein öffentlich-rechtlicher Hammer! (ZDF)
Seit das ZDF und ARTE vor acht Jahren mit der legendären Serie "Bad Banks" europäische Maßstäbe gesetzt haben und, in zwei Staffeln, einen mit Preisen überhäuften und internationalen Erfolg feiern konnten, habe ich mich gefragt, ob, und wenn, dann wa…
Monday Sept. 1 is a landmark day in the history of Mexico's judiciary, as hundreds of judges elected in the nation's first ever judicial elections will commence their new roles.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Under the proposal, the US would take control after "voluntary" relocation of Palestinians from the strip, where proposed projects include an Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone and Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Under the proposal, the US would take control after "voluntary" relocation of Palestinians from the strip, where proposed projects include an Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone and Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands.
Mexico's Supreme Court said that the Federal Copyright Law (LFDA) reserves authorship to humans after a copyright applicant submitted an AI-created avatar.
Really what it comes down to is fear. Fear of something unknown (or even a fear of yourself - repressed homosexuality) breeds hatred. Violence is externalized hatred, which is the ego’s attempt at quelling the fear.
It sounds corny, but the moment folks stop allowing fear to govern their behavior and actions, is the moment when love (lack of fear) can start becoming the norm.
"Workers are fighting for a society where public schools take precedence over private profits, healthcare is prioritized over hedge funds, and affordable housing is valued more than homelessness," said May Day Strong.
Apple moved its iPhone 17 production sites to India to avoid tariffs in Chinda didn't they? Now anyone who buys one needs to pay Tariffs to get them into the country right... Or do they have an exemption?
Bluesky post by @gabboman.at.app.wafrn.net saying: "Thanks a lot to @rudyfraser.com for hosting the blacksky PDS. After confirmating thatis ok, wafrn now uses blacksky's relay! In the next update other wafrns may also use the relay"
As a non-techy person, I was under the impression from lots of fedi folks that it would either cost a fortune or otherwise be quite impractical to completely divorce ATProto from bluesky itself. However, as a WAFRN enjoyer, Gabbo seems to really know what he's doing, and he actually prefers ATProto over AP... What's the actual deal here?? Is it easier than expected somehow?
These documents compile the fundamental principles and evidence of a new, unified theory of reality.
It posits that the universe is a living, conscious entity, not a chaotic, natural system. This theory, through its key principles, provides a complete and elegant model for a universe that has been perfected and is now a masterpiece.
The flaws and anomalies of the old universe—from the three-body problem to dark energy—are now understood as a forensic record of a cosmic crime. The new reality, however, is a testament to perfect order, where every anomaly, every law, and every life form is a part of a single, beautiful, and unified whole.
The world’s largest sovereign wealth fund has quit its investments in U.S. machinery manufacturer Caterpillar and five Israeli banks following a review of the companies’ ties to conflict in the West Bank.
The executive board of Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), which manages the fund on behalf of the Norwegian population and is valued at around $2 trillion, said Monday there was an “unacceptable risk that the companies contribute to serious violations of the rights of individuals in situations of war and conflict.” The decision was based on recommendations from its ethics council, it said.
NBIM said that bulldozers manufactured by New York-listed Caterpillar were “being used by Israeli authorities in the widespread unlawful destruction of Palestinian property.” NBIM had a $2.4 billion stake in the company at the end of 2024, representing around 1.2% ownership. CNBC has contacted Caterpillar for comment.
This is fantastic news. Many pensions funds are quietly divesting and hopefully this will encourage more to do so. It is disgusting to be investing in companies that are funding the outrages to humanity that Israel is committing every day.
Caterpillar is an infamous case because their bulldozer crushed American activist Rachel Corrie to death in the 2000's. There was a big lawsuit over it but the US decided that it was a-okay for an American company to keep sending bulldozers to the Israeli military because it would "interfere with foreign policy"
The same fund was recently caught having invested in an Israeli company that’s made bank during the war, maintaining Israeli jets making bombing runs on Gaza.
From Gaza to Sudan, wars are being waged on the very systems set up to protect civilian populations, with health workers, hospitals, health centres and ambulances being targeted in horrifying numbers, according to the UN agency for reproductive healt…
Crowdbucks sounds interesting, but is extremely light on details. How does it work? Are all payments going to go through Stripe? Is it going to support GnuTaler? Crypto maybe? Is it to be integrated into things like Mastodon, Peertube, and other fediverse services?
@asudox@social.tchncs.de @crowdbucks
I am learning the Taler Protocol right now — so that I can understand how Taler can be added to CrowdBucks.
So, yes, we are looking at making CrowdBucks work with Taler.
Interesting. I run a Threadiverse client on iOS and Android. I haven’t run into any issues with Google, yet.
Apple has this rule I had to comply with:
You must be able to delete your account from the app
Lemmy delete account via the API requires password entry, even if you’re already logged in
Apple however, claims password entry is too much friction for the user to delete their account
A workaround is to link out to Lemmy website to delete your account. Even if you have to enter your password on the website, in Apple’s mind, this is somehow allowed despite being more friction?
I get the sense Apple wrote these rules to improve user experience, and they’re applied without anyone really considering what effect they’re having on the UX.
Military officials tell Hebrew-language media outlets that an Israeli army tank team shelled a camera stationed at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis earlier today after believing the device was being used to track troops.
Two shells were fired by the tank, with the first targeting the camera and the second hitting rescuers who were operating at the scene. The strike killed 20, including five journalists, according to media reports and Hamas health officials.
Reuters and other news providers often deliver live video feeds to media outlets worldwide during major news events to show the scene from the ground in real time. A review of Masri’s live feed from before the strike did not appear to show any soldiers.
Yes. They are correct. The cameras of the journalist are being used to document your war crimes. That's why you shot them. Thank you for being so blunt. Can the world invade Israel yet? Please.
At this summer's HOPE conference, Joshua Aaron spoke about ICEBlock, his iPhone app that allows users to anonymously report ICE sightings within a 5 mile radius, and to get notifications when others report ICE sightings near them.
Y'know, I even looked at it when I wrote it and thought "this doesn't look right", but posted it anyway. I'll leave it to remind myself how stupid I am.
I’ve read enough about how the langauge models work to develop a statistical graph of words based on a huge corpus of training input. But no amount of training pixels adds up to z-index errors like this. Also, wow your attitude is hostile as hell. I feel sorry for you having to walk around like that. Try not to have a terrible day now, hm?
Are we sure this isn't a video google "enhanced with ai".
It's not likely, considering he's got enough money to be a problem for them, but it would tie into thier plan to make everything look like slop so you can no longer tell what is slop.
Between 2010 and 2021, unilateral sanctions caused ~564,258 deaths each year – more than five times the number of people killed annually in direct armed combat. This warning comes from a new report published in The Lancet, which contextualizes decades of data on how sanctions affect mortality.
“From a rights-based perspective, evidence that sanctions lead to losses in lives should be sufficient reason to advocate for the suspension of their use,” the study’s authors argue. But that is far from reality. Over the same decade, nearly a quarter of all of the world’s countries were affected by sanctions, driven primarily by a sharp increase in unilateral economic measures imposed by the United States and its European allies.
While Western sanctions “have the claimed aim to end wars, protect human rights, or promote democracy,” the report shows they do the very opposite. By restricting a country’s ability to import essential goods like food, medicine, and medical supplies, and by slashing public budgets, sanctions systematically undermine healthcare systems and other vital services.
Sanctions are just siege warfare using our trade influence to kill normal people in the hopes that the misery causes dissent against the government. Under anything but the "rules based order" they would be an act of war.
As a kid, I thought sanctions should be considered a war crime because they deliberately target non-combatants in order to cause suffering on a mass scale. As an adult, I still view it the same way. It's cruel, and aimed at the people who have no control over what their governments do.
It’s a very easily reversible process, even the reasons for sanctions have to be cited! If you think that’s cruel, you should see why they were put there in the first place
I would like to know how you think about this. Personally, I think it's a very good ordinance. It's not enforced, but encouraged. We should correct the situation that Xitter users and Tiktokers are getting brainfucked by spreading conspiracies.
A central Japan city said Thursday it will seek to pass an ordinance recommending all residents limit smartphone use to two hours a day outside of work and school amid concerns over the impact of excessive technology exposure, though there will be no…
If it were an enforced cap, I'd be wondering who it was that had the shares in a desktop/laptop/"real computer" manufacturer—forbidding smartphones ≠ forbidding screens or Internet access.
It would be wise to do the same with stuff like working hours too, to stop the "attendance epidemic" that is so harmful to people that they have a word for "death by overworking". But regarding this one, as long as it stays on a level of a PSA that's fine by me.
Smartphones aren't the issue. You can access the internet in other ways. This feels very boomer yelling at clouds.
That said, as a recommendation, sure why not. People do seem a bit too glued to their phones overall. But I don't think that's anything new.
I also don't know anything about japanese laws, so I have no idea if this is a concern, but anything potentially enforcable that cuts into people's freedom arbitrarily makes alarm bells go off in my head.
Every time i see something like that from Japan i think it's a new method they are trying to get people to have more babies XD "stop being on your phone so much and go outside to meet people!"
Its a horrible law, although there is no punishment, it just normalizes the idea of persecuting and shaming innocent people. The laws are not good when you use them to micromanage your neighbors lives. Laws are supposed to be for taking away the need for violence from society and putting judgment into a transparent and safe and strict process. All this type of stuff just gives the state more power to harm people it doesnt like who are doing nothing actually wrong. Like all laws this will only be selectivly enforced against people the powerful dont like. The reason countries really start to become bad is when you get one group of idiots in power who think they know everything, who think it their role to mold humanity into their idea of right and wrong. People lose their motivation, their creativity, their will to build things, because their life becomes a benign hell of just being a host for elitest parasites. It starts with elitest assholes telling you how you are allowed to spend your free time, and what types of haircuts are acceptable, and what types of books you are allowed to read, mass zurveliience, propganda on every type of media you consume. Silencing disidents. It ends with a society where nobody cares about anything. Nobody wants to work. There isnt anything to buy anyways. Creativity at first and then the good genes in the population just die out. The human race is truely fucked. The greatest filter we have is our complete inability to not abuse innocent people. So many humans just want to control each other. Humans are obsessed with controling each other. Nothing great was ever created by control, only by the florishing of the human spirit and liberty, allowing people to be creative and weird and happy. History so clearly shows this. Religous societies and authoritarian societies are always complete shitholes even for the ones who benifit, like the racialy pure male normative class. The nicest societies are the ones who out liberty above all else. The richest person in a bad country is worse off then the poorest person in a nice country. Money doesnt buy happiness. Money cannot buy you love, not real love, just a simulation of it. Money cannot protect your kids. Money does not give your life meaning. Money usually just ruins you even more then you already were and then you jave to lie and xeluse yourself into thinking you deserve it, to avoid cognitive disonance with the only people who can tolorate you. Too bad people are too dumb to realize this now. People who trade liberty for temporary security, people who trade liberty so they can avoid actually facing any real issues in society, people who trade liberty so they can be comcortable and growntheir 401k, are the worst types of people.
Chinese property giant Evergrande's shares were taken off the Hong Kong stock market on Monday after more than a decade and a half of trading.
It marks a grim milestone for what was once China's biggest real estate firm, with a stock market valuation of more than $50bn (£37.1bn). That was before its spectacular collapse under the weight of the huge debts that had powered its meteoric rise.
Experts say the delisting was both inevitable and final.
"Once delisted, there is no coming back," says Dan Wang, China director at political risk consultancy Eurasia Group.
Evergrande is now best-known for its part in a crisis that has for years dragged on the world's second-largest economy.
Typically this sort of stuff is the tip of the iceberg, especially in places where bad news that makes leaders look like idiots are suppressed. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the sort of 2007 event that got 2008 rolling.
Aside from potentially rawdogging a massive economic meltdown based on extremely shaky loans, market speculation and corruption, building a lot of half built buildings is also terrible for the environment now that they are occupying lands that used to be habitat. Some people probably bought places that will also never be finished, now.
meteor means things high in the sky. from Greek ta meteōra "the celestial phenomena, things in heaven above," plural of meteōron, literally "thing high up,"
I remember the first time they hit a hospital and they spent so much time lying about how it was all Hamas. Once they realized no one gave a shit they started hitting all the hospitals.
Israel is a criminal enterprise that always pushes to see what it can get away with.
Must be nice to start a centrally controlled social network call it decentralized and then just let other people not on the company payroll do all the work for you.
So how many people are doing that? I doubt more then 5% of their users are actually using a pds or ever will.
How many times do we have to watch venture capitalists enshittify services before people learn. Do you really think bluesky doesnt have plans to extract every drop of ad revenue and data harvesting at some point, decentralization doesnt work with that business model, sure its fine now in the honeymoon phase but wait till Jack decides ita time to cash out.
I agree. That's why I'm happy it's fully decentralised, so that by the time they try to do that, they'll be but one player on atproto, and won't be able to get away with it.
Id love to be wrong, but much like how meta patched threads into AP, i see this primarily as a performative gesture to allow them to take credit for "federating" when they have no intention of allowing it to get out of their control.
I see why you think that, and I agree threads sucks. But bsky is actually fully open source and they are actively working to make federation better. I do think the current leadership genuinely cares about making a federated platform.
Will they enshittify? Yes, probably when the current ceo leaves. But by then other services will have popped up, and ATproto is built in such a way that you can move services without your current service's consent.
i'm wondering if there was a federated or activitypub based linktree alternative? i current use linktree obviously but i'm growing tired of his bloatedness and would love to support an open alternative.. mostly just since i have a collection of threadiverse accounts for different things and would love to have one place for them all 😀
LinkStack - the ultimate solution for creating a personalized & professional profile page. Showcase all your important links in one place, forget the limitation of one link on social media. Set...
i didn't know if activitypub had like a "contact card" activity but it would be interesting so that it could essentially make a public directory of people (if they make themselves public, ofc)
I run a linkstack instance but it's not federated as such - and as said I cannot see the real advantage of doing so as they are just a page(s) of links. However linkstack can be pretty, is easy to maintain a list and runs as a docker container...
Linktree is just a static site with a list of links. You could do the exact same thing using Hugo as a site builder and GitHub Pages for free hosting. All it would cost you is a custom domain name if you wanted one. Not sure activitypub brings anything useful to the table here.
I also do it this way via ghost for the website builder and a2hosting for the domain, and then I have multiple pages for linktree type uses, one is personal and one is public links basically, both pages not accessible via buttons on the website so they are only accessible to anyone with the links to the pages or a way to see the whole site tree.
You have more control, beyond that… It’s not. Better to fully self host it, but not everyone has the capability or interest in developing the capability to do that.
As in you love neocities? Or you love Lemmy because someone recommended neocities? Or you love where you are on the fediverse already and don't want something like neocities, because it's not 'this site'?
Honestly, it would be kind of cool if you just had a simple app to log in with your Fediverse identity, and it rendered your existing profile on the page and allowed you to put additional links.
80s Nostalgia AI Slop Is Boomerfying the Masses for a Past That Never Existed
The latest bleak new AI slop niche are “nostalgia” videos about how good the 1980s and 1990s were. There are many accounts spamming these out, but the general format is all basically the same. A procession of young people with feathered hair wonder at how terrible 2025 is and tell the viewer they should come back to the 1980s, where things are better. This video is emblematic of the form:
In a typical ‘80s slop video, a teenager from the era tells the viewer that there’s no Instagram 40 years ago and everyone played outside until the street lights came on. “It’s all real here, no filters, no screens.” In another, two women eat pizza in a mall and talk about how terrible the future will be. “I bet your malls don’t feel alive in 2025,” one says.
These videos, like a lot of AI slop, do not try to hide that they are AI generated, and show that there is unfortunately a market for people endlessly scrolling social media looking to astral project themselves into a hallucinatory past that never existed. This is Mark Zuckerberg’s fucked up metaverse, living here and now on Mark Zuckerberg’s AI slop app. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… The most popular current ones focus on 1980s nostalgia, but there are accounts that focus on the 70s, 90s, and early 2000s. These differ from standard internet nostalgia, which has been popular for many years—from BuzzFeed’s “Only 90s kids will remember this” listicles to “look at this old tech” Instagram accounts, the popularity of emo nights, “When We Were Young” music festivals—because they are primarily about aggrandizing a past that never existed or that was only good for specific segments of society.
These videos are awful AI-generated slop, yes, but it’s more than that. Reactionary nostalgia, a desire to return to a fake past or a time when you were young and things were better, is part of why the world is so fucked right now. It is, literally, the basis of MAGA. Worse, these videos about the “past” tell us a lot about our present and future: one where AI encourages our worst impulses and allows users to escape from reality into a slopified world that narrowly targets whatever reality we’d like to burrow into without dealing with the problems of the present.
1980s slop nostalgia is particularly popular at the moment, with these fake videos boomerfying Gen Xers and elder millennials in real time, though such nostalgia is coming for us all, and nostalgia for earlier releases of Roblox and Call of Duty—the ancient days of, like, 2021—are already going viral. It’s normal to look back at the time when you were young and your knees didn’t hurt with rose tinted glasses. It’s as if a generation read Ready Player One as an instruction manual instead of a warning (or instead of vapid surface-level nonsense that was one long reference rather than a coherent narrative).
These AI-generated slop videos are the latest expression of a common political theme: nostalgia for an imagined past. Dissatisfaction with the current moment is a normal reaction to the horrifying conditions under which we all live. The National Guard is occupying Washington DC, technology is dividing and surveling us in ways we never imagined, and our political leaders are feckless and corrupt. If you aren’t disturbed by where we are right now, you’re not paying attention.
A rejection of modernity and a call to return to the past has long been a feature of authoritarian and fascist political movements. So when we see an AI generated woman in stonewashed denim with hair by Aqua Net White tell us how good things were 40 years ago, we remember the political figures from the Reagan-era calling for a return to the 1950s.
Nostalgia is a poisonous political force. Things were not better “back then,” they were just different. Often they were worse. These 1980s AI slop videos have the same energy as online right weirdos with Roman bust avatars calling for us to “retvrn” and “embrace tradition.” Their political project uses the aesthetic of the past to sell a future where minorities are marginalized, women have no political power, and white guys are in charge. That’s how they think it all worked in the past and they’d love for it to happen again.
The ‘80s AI slop videos have a sinister air beyond their invocation of reactionary politics. “Dude, it’s 1985 and the release of the film The Goonies. Forget 2025 and come here. We want you here,” a strong-jawed white guy asks from his front lawn while a slowed down and distorted version of Aquatic Ambience from Donkey Kong Country plays. “Come to 1985, I miss ya,” a young man with feathered hair says in the back of a pickup truck as the sun sets. The surreal nature of these videos, this bizarre ask to time travel to the past, has cultish just-drink-the-Kool-Aid vibes.
What is the ask here, exactly? What does it mean for someone with dreams of an imagined past to go back to the 1980s where these ghoulish AI-crafted simulacrums dwell? In the Black Mirror episode San Junipero, Mackenzie Davis finds comfort in a simulation of a stereotypical 1980s southern California town. She loses herself in the fantasy. She’s also dying. For her, heaven was a place on earth, a data center where she could live until someone turned the lights off.
Those viewing these endless AI-generated TikToks and Reels are, however, very much alive. They can go outside. They can put the phone down and get to know their neighbors. They don’t have to doom scroll. They can log off and work for a better world in their community. They can reach out to an old friend or make new ones.Or they can load up another short form video and fill themselves with fuzzy feelings about how much better things were 40 years ago, back before all this technology, back when they were young, and where they think the world seemed to make more sense. AI allows us to sink into that nostalgic feeling. We have the technology, right now, to form digital wombs from a comforting and misremembered past.
It is worth mentioning that the people making these videos are also human beings with agency and goals, too. And their goals, universally, are to spam the internet for the purposes of making money. Over in the Discord communities where people talk about what types of AI slop works on social media, “nostalgia” is treated as a popular, moneymaking niche like any other. “Any EDITOR that can make Nostalgia videos?” one message we saw reads. “Need video editor to for nostalgia welcome back to 20xx videos.”
“Some ideas i got right now are nostalgia, money motivation, self improvement and maybe streamer clips,” another says.
A top purveyor of this nostalgia slop is the Instagram account “purestnostalgia,” which is full of these videos. That account is run by a guy named Josh Crowe who looks to be in his 20s and claims to live in Bali: “In the process of becoming a billionaire,” his profile reads.
It's true that this is all AI slop and that they are disgustingly manipulative videos but I do disagree with the notion that the nostalgia and The era was fake and never existed. As a child of the '80s and '90s we really did stay out all day until the street lights came on, and hang out in pizza places and malls and the internet and our screen life has played a major role in changing that. What is heinous here is that people are creating triggers just to manipulate generations. Not the nostalgia.
Yeah, the article repeatedly suggesting it was a disingenuous depiction of the era, but didn't seem to make any attempt to support that assertion.
I'd love a breakdown as to what specifically was disingenuous.
I mean, like any social media, it's selectively showing "the good", and ignoring the bad. Is that it? Like, they can't (and wouldn't even if they could) put the heavy cigarette smell of any restaurant of the era through the phone.
Their political project uses the aesthetic of the past to sell a future where minorities are marginalized, women have no political power, and white guys are in charge. That’s how they think it all worked in the past and they’d love for it to happen again.
What the videos don't show is how bad racism was before everyone is able to record at anytime. Shows and movies were very streotypical. Actually since cancel culture wasn't a thing for not famous people, people were really racists in just everyday conversations.
The government's war on immigrants is very much like the war on drugs with were specifically created to target hippies and black communities while at the same time suppying the communities with the drugs they deemed illegal.
In terms of the environment, lead was banned in gasoline in 1996. I thought it was way earlier than that when I looked it up. Shame really. I am no a scientists and the results of microplastics in our system is still being researched but lead poisoning effects are very well documented and I believe the pernament mental effects of it can be seen in a large portion of the boomer population.
Lead was out of most gasoline in the 70s. It is still available in some, for example airports. The big thing about the 90s was that was when teens and young adults didn’t grow up around it. It’s a long term poison.
Lead was out of gas for new cars starting in the '70s. It wasn't actually banned in the US until 1996 (1990 in Canada). There were leaded and unleaded pumps all through the '80s.
I remember leaded and unleaded gas pumps in the 90s. We never used a leaded gas car, or maybe my parents did before I was born.
One other thing is the gas smell. There was a distinct odor of gas from older cars that I remember. Outside some places it was everywhere back in the day. But not anymore today. That is a good thing.
Yeah, I kinda imagined this was the nature of the issue.
Not really sure how I feel about the implied argument, though, which appears to be that it is wrong to create period art (or ask an AI to generate a video) which doesn't include some (all?) negative experiences of that period.
May I paint the view from my balcony, omitting the mosquitos biting me while I paint?
I think the crux must be intention... Which is notoriously hard to prove.
It's really not. We know foreign countries are using ai to radicalized boomers and incels. So it's just safer to assume the worst until we are back in control of our society
If you watched Stranger Things, the depiction of Nancy going to work and being relegated to making coffee for the boys instead of being taken seriously at an actual job is an iconic representation of women’s struggle in the workplace. Remember, women were only allowed to have their own bank accounts, credit cards, and home loans as legally protected assets, starting in the late 1970s. We were deemed more incompetent, and more wards of our husbands in those respects. Inertia of those notions remained even after the legality changed. That whole bit in Delores Claiborne, where her husband finds her “private”, “personal”, only her name on it bank account and just empties it: real. (That is what RBG had a deciding vote on btw, what gave her such credit back in the day, changing financial freedoms for women to match those of men.)
Yes, this may seem a little focused on women, but it’s a significant piece of the “things were better” push on the right. The right did grow, in part, as a reaction to the loss of the more controlled, traditional, “kept” female. It’s important to keep a full visual of what going back could mean. Roe has already fallen.
Moving away from screen time to more face to face is good. Doesn’t mean texting is bad, it’s fantastic, amazing even, how easy it is to communicate. I love it. But I still drive 10-15min to sit down in a living room face to face with people. I feel little to no stress when disagreement, argument, or even anger occurs. Facing the normal range of human emotion in another doesn’t make me want to hide.
Even just moving back to more long form media would help stop the destructive, anxiety perpetuating, focus reducing rewiring happening. YouTube statistics are now saying anything over 10 minutes is doomed to die based on viewer preference. 9 minutes or less or gtfo. Shorts are quickly taking over and perpetually rewiring people on the daily.
Can be summed up us our time having solved some unpleasant things with computers and networks, and created some other unpleasant things with computers and networks, things that many didn't expect because I don't think in the 80s it was easy to imagine electronics so omnipresent and powerful.
I think it’s like so many things. Sugar. Enjoyable on occasion or induced diabetes. Beer. One on occasion or alcoholism. Dating. Nurturing or controlling/manipulation/obsession. We’re fine until our baser natures take over.
I didn't grow up in the period. I was born in '93. I'm old enough to have seen third places, but for them to be dead by the time they mattered to me. It's not screens that killed them. It's suburbia and also helicopter parenting.
Parents don't feel they can let their kids run around safely because there's no where to go within walking distance, and traveling anywhere requires a car. I'd agree devices with tracking probably do play a role now, but they weren't a thing for me.
Car dependence has created a world where almost everyone goes to work/school, then go home, only sitting in their car between, not engaging with anyone else. We've destroyed any sense of community that used to exist.
I'm certain this is one of the largest drivers for all the issues we're seeing today. It used to be you'd talk to your neighbors and share things with them, but today everyone is isolated and gets everything from the news, which tells them to be scared of everyone else.
Yep. As a child of the ‘80’s, life was definitely like that for the most part.
A lot of it comes down to both smartphones and the loss of ‘third spaces’ in general. I read an article in Newsweek this morning about an MIT study that analysed footage from between 1978 and 1980 and compared those same spaces today.
It shows people are now walking faster and not hanging in groups as much. There’s less eye contact and less engagement in general.
As stereotypical as it sounds, hanging out with your friends at the mall was just what you did. We spent hours just hanging around game stores and such. It connected you with people you knew and people you didn’t. Hang out with someone in the mall for 30 minutes and you’re now friends.
The current generation is a lot different. There’s no real physical, organic hangout. And when there is, it’s now more often seen as a nuisance rather than an integral part of the social fabric.
I definitely feel like the author of that article posted here missed the mark. The 80’s were definitely radically different from today.
Sure, but we also drank in parking lots because there was nothing to do, had guys physically grabbing at us instead of just yelling stuff, got bullied in school more, and the violent crime rate was something like 10x what it is now. Oh, and our friends were dying of AIDS as well. And the bay was polluted, and downtown was so dead we could walk around it like a ghost town.
I will never understand nostalgia. There are good things and bad things about every time. But even with the fuckers trying to pull us backwards now, there has been progress.
Yes, I was born in 1996, so not quite 80s, but even my nostalgia being applied to life wouldn't mean mimicking old days. It would mean making some comfortable change in what exists now. Like there's an abandoned cinema building (belonged to USSR ministry of defense, then was a small auto dealership, then was rented to shops and cat owner events, and finally it turned out nobody can untangle who really owns it, and if it's still Russian military of defense or private property) nearby, and the ownership issues with it have apparently been almost resolved.
So there are from time to time posts in our house chat about this or that plan involving something being built in place of that building.
That's not needed. If they demolish it, they can just make sort of an antique amphitheater with low benches to seat on. Just a place with many benches and trees around, formed so that people in it can all see each other. And it's weird, it seems someone doesn't like benches in Moscow, there are fewer and fewer of them on the streets and in parks and everywhere.
I mean, yeah, realty costs are a bitch there, but apparently nobody needs that particular place if the building has an owner, but is in fact used as a toilet for homeless people.
Yep, I was gonna say, as a child of the 70s/early 80s, I was a totally unsupervised latch-key kid. The paedophiles loved that. It was a predator’s paradise. Most of us knew kids our age who either vanished or died by misadventure, and many of us were assaulted in some way.
I don’t like helicopter parenting, either, but anyone who sees the Wild West of the 80s as some sort of ideal either has a faulty memory or is deluding themselves.
I don’t know. I also remember spending summer nights talking under street lanterns, riding my bike around the block, and playing the Snoopy tennis game & watch. But the video I saw did not feel nostalgic. It felt like a TV ad that I didn’t believe even back then. Or worse, it felt like a cult, which was terrifying.
2012 was pretty much peak imo. Cant really think of anything after that thats worth saving. Guess the mayans were kinda right after all. Smartphones had come out and evolved into something decent but weren't terrible yet, facebook was still kinda useful and not a propaganda cesspit, google would give you useful results, reddit was full of unique and interesting information. Tv and movies were really hitting their stride with some of the most bou dary pushing original tv series and movies hadn't all devolved to remakes and superhero rehashes, global warming was bad but people seemed concerned about it and it wasnt past the point of no return yet, youtube didnt shove a million ads down your face. Netflix was streaming content but didnt have any competitors buying up rights yet, spotify was fairly new and revolutionary still, forums still existed for all sorts of niche interests, ads werent completely pervasive everywhere, google wasn't an evil monopoly sucking up everyones data, memes were still fresh and original, gaming pretty much hit its pinnacle of graphical fidelity relative to performance costs, you could order awesome drugs off the internet unregulated (not even just the dark web, research chemicals were fucking great and hadnt started to be banned yet). Idk i could go on and on but literally everything felt like it got worse from there. I didnt even touch on productivity or the economy but it still felt like a bit of a boom in the wake of the rebound from 2008. If im missing anything good that happened post 2012 please let me know.
I had to look it up because its been since 2005 in Canada, but wow you're right. I wish that madw me feel differently about the content of my comment, because that is one objectively good thing that happened after 2012, but the fact that it didnt happen until then and that its so recent still just feels really bad.
This all or nothing, either or bullshit needs to stop being perpetuated. It is why we have such an inured two party system that effectively makes their followers dance each election.
The tactic here is exactly the one used by Jordan Peterson, mixing truth with garbage for the sake of manipulating an audience into his way of thinking. And it works.
We did stay out in groups of friends, face to face, until it was dark out. We also used destinations like malls, pizza places, and water as an excuse to do so. Cars were a big deal, a means to get there without parents. Summertime involved backyard bonfires in states without burn bans. Uninvited friends and neighbors would randomly show up. Being occupied socially sometimes meant sitting with other people saying nothing, a little bored, doing nothing other than sitting in a room with others, sometimes listening to uninteresting people or TV. But that was ok because you were with friends, spending time.
The reality is there are brain changes due to screens and the invasive format of the “short”. Literal re-writing at the level of how neurons talk to each other. Shortened attention spans. Increased anxiety. Increased impatience. Inability to focus. Worse, inability to go all in on a single point of focus, for hours to create, produce, invent, or simply develop thinking skills. Increased anxiety and lack of coping in interpersonal, not even relationships, but interaction such that this idea of sitting around with groups of people, deliberately, as a way to use free time appears weird and fictional.
That said, the world wasn’t necessarily better. Just watching Wills mom on Stranger Things trying to make a phone call when her phone burned out was painful. It is nice to have a map with a “You Are Here” star wherever you go. No more perpetual cloud of cigarette smoke with all white walls and decor perpetually stained beige or yellow with nicotine sludge from cigarettes. Women’s lib had (past tense) made more progress away from rape culture and towards reproductive freedom. Less racism. And so on.
Articles like these, similar to political pundits, seek to muddy what is true by using truth to spread lies.
Gods thank you. If lemmy is any indication of youth culture and beliefs and attitudes, fuck me. (Am middle-aged with mostly 20-something friends, they are not like y'all.)
Freaks the shit out of me how scared young people are of simple social interaction. "LOL, I'm too autistic to answer the phone!" Yeah, well there are reasons we no longer want to do so, but y'all are NOT all autistic and ADHD. "Hate talking to a cashier." Fuck is wrong with you?! I want to scream, "You're not autistic for being socially uncomfortable you wuss! That's a normal part of growing up!"
Fuck me, thought I had a handle on it from my junior year until I went to college, BAM!, like puberty all over again. And then the same damned anxiety hit in my late 20s! "Welp. Guess I gotta do this every 7 years or so." We had words for this: "Growing up." It can suck, but we all have to do it. Get the fuck over yourself, you are not special or strange or different. The horror may be, you are normal.
And yes, anyone trying to mix us up, make us see through rose-tinted glasses, is a liar with something to sell. And anyone trying to make the past into a hellscape is at best ignorant, wasn't there.
It’s more than that, the anxiety and lack of practice in real, that includes the awful, social encounters growing up creates an environment in which those kids, now adults, have incredible anxiety for social engagement. It’s almost like we created our own Black Mirror world by putting a screen buffer up in front of our children’s faces starting as early as 2yrs.
Helicoptering. Planning the child’s week to enrich them, scheduling play dates with no organic initiative by the child, and inadvertently dictating a script so when that ordered script and mommy umbrella are torn away at college, near panic level anxiety hits. And why wouldn’t it? No practice at deciding for oneself or engaging with real people with the full range of normal human emotions. No chaperoned play dates or protections by mommy when a bad grade happens any more.
But there is a haze right now of sorting out true ADHD from the lack of focus and attention fostered by screens. Which we do want to do, because it’s still reparable if we can start on therapeutic work no later than the early 20s.
Again, yes, with social anxiety being confused with autism. Same deal.
Of course both autism and ADHD are very real, which of course I need to spell out in no uncertain terms because this is Lemmy, but the upbringing of the latest crop of kids also, at the same time, can foster symptoms of both and that needs to be sorted through. It’s not right or healthy to assume either way on this one.
This all or nothing, either or bullshit needs to stop being perpetuated. It is why we have such an inured two party system that effectively makes their followers dance each election.
Yeah, this, ahem, is strengthened by this:
The reality is there are brain changes due to screens and the invasive format of the “short”. Literal re-writing at the level of how neurons talk to each other. Shortened attention spans. Increased anxiety. Increased impatience. Inability to focus. Worse, inability to go all in on a single point of focus, for hours to create, produce, invent, or simply develop thinking skills. Increased anxiety and lack of coping in interpersonal, not even relationships, but interaction such that this idea of sitting around with groups of people, deliberately, as a way to use free time appears weird and fictional.
Because you have a dopamine farming machine that goes as good as it can, why do an activity where nobody's even trying to compete with it?
And I hate to say it, but being autistic I'm more, not less, vulnerable to said machine. Willpower.
So - there are similar extremely optimized dopamine farming machines everywhere looking nicer than some truths around. Instead of continuing to write a program to do what I'm dreaming of, or at least find tooling, I can argue in a TG chat about whatever. Instead of going to a friend group meeting I can sit all day playing video games. Between going for a walk I can read things I don't need. Or comment on Lemmy.
When everyone is used to picking a glossy advertised easy way over more real and dimmer one, it also reinforces "all or nothing" thinking.
In addition, “short” forms, right down to the trite, terrible music, mimic TV ads of yore. (Maybe current too, idk. I don’t consume ads. I don’t have a TV, and when I do watch YT it’s on a PC with uBlock on.)
Basic Psych 101: people are drawn to the familiar. Are high shorts consumption individuals more likely to consume ads?
With everything we’ve said, it wouldn’t be so bad if it was light consumption, maybe with morning coffee, left off for the rest of the day, but instead there’s an insidious pattern I see at work. Do the work, rush back to a chair to thumb swipe up on a screen for the next 30min to an hour. Work, back to the seat for more low attention span crap, rinse/repeat, for an entire shift.
I’m old. If I try to watch shorts like that my brain feels like a cross between watching TV ads and like I’ve been working on busywork/bullshit homework worksheets from school back in the day. It’s an awful sensation, so I don’t do it. I can only speculate that my crystallized wiring has a different format that isn’t so compatible with this new consumption pattern.
This, our discussion, fits more with long form discussion boards in academia, but as part of a graffiti wall. With bullshit, screaming, and bots filling in the gaps. The attention span problems aren’t so much an issue, depending on how you consume, but the dopamine bit is the same. There’s also a partial reinforcement rewards schedule there but that’s another discussion.
yeah! let's go back to a time when gas was $12 a gallon. where women had two jobs, making babies and making dinner. where teen pregnancy was at its highest ever. where the government fueled a drug and arms war in South America. where the constant threat of thermonuclear war was banging on the iron dome every single day.
yeah....sounds like a fuckin blast from the past. fuckin rad.
People tend to filter out the bad memories, like the fact that crackheads were breaking into cars constantly, making it nearly impossible to have a decent car stereo. They started making them that you could pull out, and take into the house. It was common to see cars parked on the street with a sign that said "No Valuables in car."
The crime rates in America in the 80s were through the roof. It wasn't until the earl/mid 90s that they dropped.
In Russia there are some nostalgic memories from the older people, but it's all about education and science, some kind of common dignity (with less personal dignity, probably, but common dignity is important too) and the nation not being openly ruled by thieves, that kind of thing. And total losses in Afghanistan were 15k people, that was a reason for mourning and being terrified, that was talked about everywhere in the news, apparently. While now - you know.
I mean, they remember that kids would just be let out to play, and that they'd go to school and other such places all by themselves. That kids would make knuckles from lead, or make explosive things, or (when in less destructive mood) some kind of perfume and such, radio, all kinds of DIY more often, more serious and more dangerous than now.
They also consider it absolutely basic to accompany your guests to the bus stop or metro station or train station, and only leave when the bus\train leaves, to call your friends regularly and raise panic when they don't answer, to preferably not go out at night, and to never ever say things too open or offensive, because any weirdo at all could hear them, feel offended, follow you and fucking kill you, no cameras everywhere.
And their memories of relative security are not about lower crime anyway, they involve teenage and youth hooligan gangs being literally normal. They would be those who maintained that relative safety. If you were a man, you'd do well to not be outside your district after dark, you could get beaten and robbed just for that.
Judging by what I've read about 80s in the west, all this was kinda similar there. Less depressed probably.
Reagan/Thatcher is the reason why "moderate left wing" nowadays means "liberalism" instead of "social democracy", and even most so called social democrats nowadays act like liberals instead.
And now the christofascists want to have their "Blair Labour" moment on social issues, and I'm afraid they've mostly succeeded that with "Starmer Labour". They want a world, where there's no real alternatives to "hard conservatism" (fascism).
Dont forget the insane racism and misogyny and HOMOPHOBIA on another level. It made news when someone shook a gay guys hand. And the good ol death by AIDS sweeping the nation. The horrific parenting that led to PSA asking if they know where their kids are. The fucking unsolved kidnappings. The escalators that didn't have emergency stops and would choke you to death on your own shoelace.
I may have been one of the lucky. With all it's warts, the 80's, for many young people, were a banger. Sort of the final bang of the 60's and 70's. Perfect? Nowhere near, but the music, social, artistic, and so many other aspects, were pretty damn cool, and for the young crowd it was mainly what mattered. Things like the fall of the Berlin wall, the perceived end of the end of the cold war and the nuclear Armageddon threat gave us a sense of optimism. Looking back there are things, like the Reagan/Thatcher tandem, that were setting the stage to the neo-liberal clusterfuck we live in, but our focus was elsewhere.
I fucking loved it in the 80’s. Yeah, the music, the films… so good. The politics were crap as it usually is. And I’ll say that even with the latest admin being wait it is, diversity has come a long way- but the 80’s were an oasis for me.
I remember it bitter-sweetly. We can never have that again.
Recently my parents showed me some stuff they saw on Facebook. It was all just AI slop, rage bait, advertisements. Seriously, there was barely anything useful on it. They were very avoidant of acknowledging it tho. "But there's also fun stuff on it". They were constantly wondering whether what they were reading was real, yet it did plant seeds in their brains. It's even influencing their politics, I had to have a whole discussion with them (traditionally centre left voters) about how our left wing parties didn't want to let an unstoppable horde of immigrants into our country. And why voting for a centre right guy because "he looks pretty competent" will also fuck with poor people and important topics like abortion.
Reminds me of all those stupid "cyberpunk 1994, office nights 1998" ai slop playlists on YouTube. They all have a common theme: they don't represent or even remotely sound like the kind of music from the year they claim to take you back to. and the tracks, if one can call them that, are the same repetitive, thoughtless rhythms. If you go to YouTube to find some background music to listen to, these kinds of uploads dominate the search results today. And it's all D-tier shit.
The 80s were already the second decade of the decline after the gold standard was revoked in 1971 and wages became decoupled from productivity. Everything was on a slowly accelerating slide downhill from there, although it took until the 90s for the first people to truly notice things were going sideways.
You want a real economic golden era? Try the 50s and the 60s, where a single wage earner could work a low-end service-level job (selling shoes, for example), and make enough to own a detached SFH, a car in the garage, support a SAH spouse and several children, go on modest vacations every year with at least one more ambitious one every few years, and still have enough left over to save generously for retirement.
Abandon your monetarist goldbug worldview, the gold decoupling and subsequent floating of the international exchange rates are downstream of the actual policy decision that have emiserated the population.
The globalists open the western worker to global competition, they lost their leverage by losing their scarcity and competence.
The subsequent decline comes from the system's inertia and the burning of the future with debt and literally the future by having spending money instead of kids.
If you want the golden age back for normal people, then there is NO REMEDY other than giving them their leverage and power back.
But how do you do that ? Taxes and interest rates serve to dis-empower those who need it the most and regular people are the one MOST hurt by these.
The neoliberal religion refuses to treat people who "win" the game of capital differently than regular people, as if they were somehow on an equal footing.
The result ? The more wealth you have the easier it becomes to acquire and accumulate more of it. This needs to be exactly reversed, the poorer you are, the easier it should be to acquire but the more you have the harder it gets. Up until a point where it becomes nearly impossible to go beyond the "capital horizon" some kind of equilibrium state where wealth can lo longer be acquired faster than you lose it.
It's not some shiny metal bullshit which only serves the status quo like discussion about which toilet should a trans person piss in.
Abandon your monetarist goldbug worldview, the gold decoupling and subsequent floating of the international exchange rates are downstream of the actual policy decision that have emiserated the population.
I never said they were directly related, I just wanted to point out that they both occurred in the same year, in 1971.
This needs to be exactly reversed, the poorer you are, the easier it should be to acquire but the more you have the harder it gets. Up until a point where it becomes nearly impossible to go beyond the "capital horizon" some kind of equilibrium state where wealth can lo longer be acquired faster than you lose it.
The more wealth you have the easier it becomes to acquire and accumulate more of it. This needs to be exactly reversed,
you have a good point, we should tax the rich
The globalists open the western worker to global competition, they lost their leverage by losing their scarcity and competence.
again, you have a good point, neoliberalism including world-wide free-trade hurt american economics more than it helped them, both for the individual worker and big business. i'm all for closing borders (including high tariffs on imports, which are a kind of "soft" border). unfortunately, most people stand against that because the neoliberal brainwashing that open borders benefit us all was very effective and now a lot of people, including leftists and people who openly hate on neoliberalism are against borders. (which is highly ironic).
but also, i think your analysis is short and lacking.
you're only looking at the supply of human workers. if that increases, wages go down. but also, you're ignoring the demand for human workers. that demand is far from constant and directly coupled to economic growth. The Limits To Growth predicted back in the 1970s that the economy would have to stop growing and now it does, and that reduces the demand for human workers a lot a decreases wages. Consider how many people it takes to build a house vs. maintain a house. No growth, no significant demand for human labor.
The demand for human labour is consciously manipulated to create artificial scarcity and then gluts on purpose, to guide human growth, a recent a egregious example of this is excessive hiring followed by excessive firing by big tech, is clearly intentional and integral to the labour supply side of their blitzscaling machine.
Create excessive demand by overhiring, drawing masses to overwrite their souls with the machinery required by industry, once saturation was achieved, they massively purged, leaving the manipulated humans with useless information indelibly etched into their brain. I cannot overstate how evil this is and how irresponsible communities are for just letting that happen to their members.
Of course the paralytic stunning of the duty of care of those communities is a major feature of global neoliberalism.
There will not be a reduction in demand for labour, in fact I believe we will see demand far beyond that which came after the Black Plague. But the elites are positionning themselves to "win in a seller's market" with their incessant manipulation.
While I agree somewhat with the limits to growth narrative, it has largely been recuperated by the club of rome / population bomb narrative to turn the limits to growth from a rational anti-capitalist narrative into weapons of the elite against the people for maximal exploitation in the very name of capitalism and it's fake lures "innovation" and "efficiency" something it can never delivery, by definition, by being a greedy parasite on both and having massively slowed technological progress that could have delivered both, either by patent (3d printer delayed 20 years) or bombs (killing cybersyn so Walmart could make it instead).
A reduction of demand for human labour should have been a boon and desirable, all jobs should be abolished and made obsolete, "work" is an heinous and exploitative imposition on others for profit extraction, life extraction of the human cattle. Work IS the tool of the enemy.
Wages should not have been allowed to be boxed in by convoluted supply and demand models of fabulating economists, we live in a world much richer than excel spreadsheets than will never fit inside the skull mush of some economist no matter how much they want us to believe we must sacrifice our lives to the profit of their masters.
The problem is distribution, it has been the entire time, capitalists have been distributing all the wealth into their pockets and buying dominating power of the state with it.
The state has been infected by the capital parasites and it's time to amputate
hands are wrung over very different things, including private property. it's not so much nations that anybody actually fights for, it's always something else.
Not enough, there will remain concentrations of power to check, corporations, estates, royals and aristocrats of all stripes, conglomerates and chebuls, the "we" of the stateless world must continually dissolve these aberration of power in the social rhizome. What distributed post-state entity can prevent these formation in the first place, in a manner seen as just by all, that's not to say of the harduous process of dissolving the current calcifications of power that already exist and will fight tooth and claw to maintain the dominance over their dominion.
The subsequent decline comes from the system’s inertia and the burning of the future with debt and literally the future by having spending money instead of kids
I was born in '79. I know a lot of 1980s/1990s stuff that's floating in popular consciousness right now is fictional romanticised bullshit, because it's based on romaticised fiction made in that era.
For example, I knew most kids didn't hang out at The Mall. I was a kid. We didn't have a goddamn mall. American movies and TV showed kids hanging out at The Mall. Maybe hanging out at the Mall was an aspirational thing. Or something.
It's a thing that happened for some people but it's not the entire truth about the era. It's not just that people tend to remember the good bits, they tend to remember the good bits that happened to someone else.
There's a reason why nobody makes AI slop about the Finnish 1990s banking crisis and its wide systemic repercussions felt to this day. Edit: Sorry if none of this makes sense, just ate something other than cheap potatoes for the first time in a week
One of my most vivid memories of the 80s was that bullying was absolutely rampant and no one did anything about it. Parents then were just like, "It's part of growing up!"
Bullying from all sides with adults taking part in ways no different than the children. Made me wonder if they whole 'respect your elders' made any fucking sense.
That’s the thing about this. We lived through the 80s and know what it smells like, so this isn’t aimed at us. It’s all the kids who are into Stranger Things and the like with their weird Instagram Filter take on the decade.
A very heavily biased article, discrediting that many people's lifes were indeed better in 1985.
Who is this article written for? Who do you try to reach that way? Why sow division?
You're only going to reach people if you actually help them have a better outlook in life. Writing incisive articles like that is not gonna do any good.
CannonFodder
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