22
submitted 1 year ago by ffmike@beehaw.org to c/politics@beehaw.org

This is actually pretty significant - not just as Supreme Court "inside baseball" but because, coupled with the recent decision in Allen v. Milligan, it will likely result in several new Democratic members of the House of Representatives in the next election. With the House majority as tight as it is, this will be one of the key factors in who controls that chamber.

[Image description: the front of the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C.]

[-] ffmike@beehaw.org 19 points 1 year ago

The article here takes a bit stronger stance than "losing debates because of tweets":

The NSDA has allowed hundreds of judges with explicit left-wing bias to infiltrate the organization. These judges proudly display their ideological leanings in statements—or “paradigms”—on a public database maintained by the NSDA called Tabroom, where they declare that debaters who argue in favor of capitalism, or Israel, or the police, will lose the rounds they’re judging.

The article calls out five judges for being biased. The NSDA site shows 47,168 paradigms. So, while there may be an issue, there doesn't seem to be much proof here. It could equally well be that the author is cherry-picking instances that fit his ideology.

23

Note: U.S.-built buses at that.

[Image description: A Lion electric school bus is seen on display in Austin, Texas, Feb. 22, 2023.]

38

A sad reminder that the MAGA wing of the Republican party continues to be against most anything that can actually help turn around climate change.

[Image description: former President Trump]

120
submitted 1 year ago by ffmike@beehaw.org to c/gaming@beehaw.org

Not quite your traditional gaming, but with 600 responses to user actions at least as complex as some interactive computer games I've played.

[Image description: two new Furbies]

10

[Image description: Lead claimant Rikki Held, 22, confers with members of Our Children's Trust legal team before the start of the nation's first youth climate change trial at Montana's First Judicial District Court on June 12, 2023 in Helena, Montana]

44
submitted 1 year ago by ffmike@beehaw.org to c/science@beehaw.org

Wild. I for one would not have guessed that we could detect even moderately complex organic molecules from 1.6 billion years ago.

[Image description: Geochemist Jochen Brocks and colleagues report they discovered the earliest molecular footprints of eukaryotes, dating back 1.6 billion years, in this Barney Creek rock formation in northern Australia.]

121
submitted 1 year ago by ffmike@beehaw.org to c/news@beehaw.org

ProPublica strikes back.

[Image description: Justice Alito with a salmon, Wall Street Journal editorial page, connected by circles, lines, and arrows.]

[-] ffmike@beehaw.org 41 points 1 year ago

I've seen this "sub affects logitech stock" story a few times now, and I don't find it very credible. If you look at the 1-month or longer price of the stock, it's pretty evident that (a) a 5% intraday variation in price is totally normal and (b) the recent news that has actually hurt the stock price substantially is that their CEO resigned.

I'm skeptical that Amazon review trolls are buying enough stock to move the market.

[-] ffmike@beehaw.org 23 points 1 year ago

In addition to making it easier to find authentic perspectives, we're also improving how we rank results in Search overall, with a greater focus on content with unique expertise and experience. Last year, we launched the helpful content system to show more content made for people, and less content made to attract clicks. In the coming months, we’ll roll out an update to this system that more deeply understands content created from a personal or expert point of view, allowing us to rank more of this useful information on Search.

That seems like just a step in the inevitable AI arms race.

5

A longish essay, but it does a great job of capturing the conflicted feelings that I share about giving up air travel.

[Image description: a jet plane in a forest of evergreen trees]

[-] ffmike@beehaw.org 19 points 1 year ago

Well, most of my work was programming books, so honestly a 5 year copyright term would have been plenty. But the internet put most of those publishers out of business anyhow.

Outside of my own special case, I don't have really strong opinions on the term.

[-] ffmike@beehaw.org 39 points 1 year ago

As a published author, I'm glad copyright existed. Without it, none of my publishers would have been in business and I would have had to find some other income source. But I think the default should be "public domain" rather than "copyright", and I'm skeptical of allowing corporations to own the copyright to individuals' works.

1
submitted 1 year ago by ffmike@beehaw.org to c/hiking@lemmy.ml

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/748817

I spent most of the morning at Mogan Ridge West, putting in about 12 miles in all. Basically, I hiked the outer loop, though I did bushwhack about a mile and a half for variety.

We're definitely into summer hiking weather here, with high humidity, spider webs, gnats, and ticks. This trail also hasn't seen much use lately, so it's overgrown in grass in many areas. About half of it is gravel road, so you can combine unpleasant walking surface with increased ticks and chiggers.

Still, it was a pleasant walk in the woods and decent exercise. I met one other hiker about halfway and we swapped notes on which local trails were worth revisiting. Fortunately we were hiking in opposite directions so we didn't have to have the awkward conversation about whether to hike together.

More pictures on imgur.

[Image description: trail marker post with area map and arrows pointing in many different directions]

33
submitted 1 year ago by ffmike@beehaw.org to c/greenspace@beehaw.org

I spent most of the morning at Mogan Ridge West, putting in about 12 miles in all. Basically, I hiked the outer loop, though I did bushwhack about a mile and a half for variety.

We're definitely into summer hiking weather here, with high humidity, spider webs, gnats, and ticks. This trail also hasn't seen much use lately, so it's overgrown in grass in many areas. About half of it is gravel road, so you can combine unpleasant walking surface with increased ticks and chiggers.

Still, it was a pleasant walk in the woods and decent exercise. I met one other hiker about halfway and we swapped notes on which local trails were worth revisiting. Fortunately we were hiking in opposite directions so we didn't have to have the awkward conversation about whether to hike together.

More pictures on imgur.

[Image description: trail marker post with area map and arrows pointing in many different directions]

83
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ffmike@beehaw.org to c/news@beehaw.org

Once again the conservative republicans seem to be better than anyone else at finding ways to "win" at politics.

[Image description: a row of "OhIo Voted" stickers over a blank ballot.]

59
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ffmike@beehaw.org to c/news@beehaw.org

[Image description: "Protect Trans Rights" and "Too cute to be binary" protest signs]

[-] ffmike@beehaw.org 22 points 1 year ago

Non-paywall article on the same topic: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iowa-meteorologist-chris-gloninger-quits-18-year-career-after-receiving-death-threat-over-his-climate-coverage/

I'm saddened by this, but not surprised. The rationalist in me wants to think that at some point the red state attacks on science will have consequences in worse quality of life for their residents, but I'm not optimistic enough to believe that will happen before the whole culture collapses.

[-] ffmike@beehaw.org 18 points 1 year ago

It's not just about the information though, is it? Web forums can offer a sense of community that his preferred alternative (long-form Medium articles with comments) just can't match, in my experience.

[-] ffmike@beehaw.org 39 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Looks like only available in one restaurant for now, but it's a start.

"For one thing, cultivated meat is not vegan or vegetarian." -> I know some vegans who would disagree with that, on the grounds that no animal cruelty or slaughter is involved. I suspect there will be a fair bit of debate on this as cultivated meat becomes more widespread. I would guess just like we've already got "I'm a vegetarian who eats fish" we'll end up with "I'm a vegan who does/doesn't eat cultivated meat."

You might want to cross-post this to https://beehaw.org/c/food too.

[-] ffmike@beehaw.org 88 points 1 year ago

In my opinion it's unreasonable to think anything can truly be deleted in a federated system. Even if the official codebase is updated to do complete deletion & overwrite, it's impossible to prevent some bad actor from federating in a fork that just ignores deletion requests.

Seems sensible to just not post anything that you don't want to be available for the lifetime of the internet.

[-] ffmike@beehaw.org 22 points 1 year ago

Hopefully not repeating things others have said...

  • Thanks for taking the time to write long thoughtful posts explaining the admin thinking, rather than just "we have decided X, live with it" posts.
  • It seems entirely appropriate to me for the admins to set the tone of this instance, through explicit rules, through deciding who to add as a user and who to make a mod, and through deciding which other instances to federate with. Anybody who disagrees can always start their own instance. That you're opening a coffee shop doesn't mean anyone can come in without shirt and shoes (bad analogy like all analogies).
  • It's entirely possible that I (older white male with plenty of income raised in a homegeneous white suburb) have some opinions that would be appropriate on one of those defederated instances but not here. I can always make an account over there if I feel the need to post those opinions. Likewise, if someone on a defederated instance wants to post here and can behave themselves according to the house rules, they can create an account here. This doesn't seem like a huge burden to impose on anyone.
  • During a long career as a software developers, just about every successful fork I can recall came about because a majority of a project's developers (not its users!) decided they had to leave a dysfunctional project. Until/unless Lemmy gets to that point it seems pretty silly to me to talk about forking the codebase.
[-] ffmike@beehaw.org 21 points 1 year ago

Thank you to everyone :

  • Admins for doing a brutal amount of work for something they believe in
  • Mods for keeping their own areas humming along
  • Financial contributors for keeping the lights on
  • Everyone who posts and comments for making this a nice place to visit

There's this odd dynamic that turns up in all sorts of communities where people someone equate "person who volunteers their own time" with "person who has to do anything I want them to do". When stated that baldly it's easy to see the nonsense and yet somehow it keeps happening. Hopefully folks here won't fall into that trap.

[-] ffmike@beehaw.org 35 points 1 year ago

Bear in mind that Antenna (the source of this info) has no access to internal Netflix metrics, only to opt-in consumer information. We won't really know what's going on with Netflix's numbers until their next quarterly report.

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ffmike

joined 1 year ago