cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20502760

Populist leader alleged to have ‘copied word for word’ a monologue by TV show’s fictional president Jed Bartlet

Argentina’s rightwing populist president, Javier Milei, has been accused of plagiarising a chunk of his recent speech to the United Nations general assembly from the political drama The West Wing.

“It seems like fiction, but it isn’t,” the left-leaning Buenos Aires newspaper Página 12 reported on Friday, claiming Milei had “copied, word for word, a monologue” by the television show’s fictional president, Josiah “Jed” Bartlet.

Suspicions over Milei’s address surfaced this week when the political columnist Carlos Pagni flagged the “extraordinary” similarities between part of the president’s speech and words uttered by Martin Sheen’s Bartlet 21 years earlier. “Didn’t anyone else notice?” Pagni wrote in the newspaper La Nación, before transcribing the words of both men.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/30176676

Amazon‎ .com has been accused by a U.S. labor board of illegally refusing to bargain with a union representing drivers employed by a contractor, the agency announced on Wednesday.

The complaint from the National Labor Relations Board claims that Amazon is a so-called "joint employer" of drivers employed by the contractor, Battle Tested Strategies (BTS), and used a series of illegal tactics to discourage union activities at a facility in Palmdale, California.

BTS drivers voted to join the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union last year, becoming the first Amazon delivery contractors to unionize.

The NLRB in the complaint, which was issued on Monday, said Amazon broke the law by terminating its contract with BTS after the drivers unionized without first bargaining with the Teamsters.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16017036

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

We're readying the release of Lemmy v0.19.4 (currently on 0.19.4-rc.2), in the upcoming weeks, but still have a few more issues to address, and testing that needs to be done. If you'd like to help us test betas to help find issues, you can go to https://voyager.lemmy.ml or ds9.lemmy.ml for the newest RC, or run your own test ones locally from our beta docker tags.

Please do not run unreleased builds in production, as these could cause issues which require some manual intervention to fix.

We've also added a few github milestones for our upcoming releases, to keep track of what we'll be working on, but you can also look at our pending pull requests.

@flamingo-cant-draw increased the character limit for alt-text fields.

@dullbananas just graduated from high school and will have a lot more time to work on Lemmy for a few months. Has been working on a custom database migration runner.

@matc-pub cleaned up and added a lot of asynchronous loading for various components in lemmy-ui.

@sleepless and matc-pub fixed an issue with leap years in lemmy-ui.

@sleepless fixed a bug with admin settings in lemmy-ui, fixed an issue with language not allowed, fixed an issue with video thumbnails, and upgraded to a non-deprecated QR library. Has also been adding a lot of the backbone for lemmy-ui-leptos.

@nutomic fixed some issues with importing partial settings backups, 2, made NodeInfo standard compliant, and upgraded to 2.1, added some test cases for user reports, removed unused federation code, added a stricter rate limit for logins, made password reset tokens non-reusable, marked DB fields as sensitive so they don't show up in logs, allowed passing of command-line params via environment vars. Also prevented removal of comments which are already deleted, and configured a max comment width in clippy.

@dessalines fixed some issues with image proxying, 2, made some fixes to our woodpecker CI jobs. Replies and mentions are now correctly hidden for blocked users.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

With the debut of remarkably effective weight-loss drugs, America's high obesity rate and its uniquely astronomical prescription drug pricing appear to be set on a catastrophic collision course—one that threatens to "bankrupt our entire health care system," according to a new Senate report that modeled the economic impact of the drugs in different uptake scenarios.

The HELP committee analysis cited a March Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report that found: "at their current prices, [anti-obesity medicines] would cost the federal government more than it would save from reducing other health care spending—which would lead to an overall increase in the deficit over the next 10 years." Moreover, in April, the head of the CBO said that the drugmakers would have to slash prices of their weight-loss drugs by 90 percent to "get in the ballpark" of not increasing the national deficit.

The HELP committee report offered a relatively simple solution to the problem: Drugmakers should set their US prices to match the relatively low prices they've set in other countries. The report focused on Wegovy because it currently accounts for the most US prescriptions in the new class of weight-loss drugs (GLP-1 drugs). Wegovy is made by Denmark-based Novo Nordisk.

In the US, the estimated net price (after rebates) of Wegovy is $809 per month. In Denmark, the price is $186 per month. A study by researchers at Yale estimated that drugs like Wegovy can be profitably manufactured for less than $5 per month.

If Novo Nordisk set its US prices for Wegovy to match the Danish price, spending to treat half of US adults with obesity would drop from $411 billion to $94.5 billion, a roughly $316.5 billion savings.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/9406726

Archived copies of the article: archive.today web.archive.org

Tesla’s German factory, which produces electric cars and batteries, has for months been the target of protests by climate activists, who call the company’s green credentials a sham.

“Companies like Tesla are there to save the car industry, they're not there to save the climate,” Esther Kamm, spokesperson for Turn Off the Tap on Tesla (known by its German initialism TDHA) told WIRED last week.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15475568

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

We're readying the release of Lemmy v0.19.4 in the upcoming weeks, but still have a few more issues to address, and testing that needs to be done. If you'd like to help us test betas to help find issues, you can go to https://voyager.lemmy.ml for the newest beta, or run your own test ones locally from our beta docker tags.

Please do not run unreleased builds in production, as these could cause issues which require some manual intervention to fix.

We've also added a few github milestones for our upcoming releases, to keep track of what we'll be working on, but you can also look at our pending pull requests.

@ticoombs converted our docker upgrade script to the newer version, and has been readying lemmy-ansible for the next release.

@dullbananas optimized the actor language inserts, and fixed an issue with triggers locking the tables.

@sleepless Removed an unecessary login step from our crates.io publish, fixed a deprecated reliance on encoding.rs, fixed an issue with onBlur in lemmy-ui, and added a dependency on lemmy-rs-client for lemmy-ui-leptos, which included a lot of structural changes. Fixed an issue with broken direct messages in lemmy-ui, and a bug with newly-created communities.

@nutomic added setting the show_nsfw site setting based on content_warning, fixed an issue with Discourse federation, added NodeBB federation, fixed an issue with crashes for missing domains, added wordpress federation, fixed an issue with early exits when only running scheduled tasks, added a timeout on incoming activities, and made instance.preferred_username optional.

@dessalines fixed an issue with broken community outboxes, fixed an issue with search returning deleted / removed posts. The liked_only for GetPosts now doesn't return your own items, making this more usable to show a history of your likes.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/13402469

"We have a technical debt that stretches back many decades."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14106579

On Monday, it appears X attempted to encourage users to cease referring to it as Twitter and instead adopt the name X. Some users began noticing that posts viewed via X for iOS were changing any references of "Twitter.com" to "X.com" automatically.

If a user typed in "Twitter.com," they would see "Twitter.com" as they typed it before hitting "Post." But, after submitting, the platform would show "X.com" in its place on the X for iOS app, without the user's permission, for everyone viewing the post.

And shortly after this revelation, it became clear that there was another big issue: X was changing anything ending in "Twitter.com" to "X.com."

Authorities in the Russian Republic of Chechnya have announced a ban on music that they consider too fast or slow.

Minister of Culture Musa Dadayev announced the decision to limit all musical, vocal and choreographic compositions to a tempo ranging from 80 to 116 beats per minute (BPM) at a meeting Friday, the Russian state new agency TASS reported.

Under Kadyrov’s directive, the region now ensures that Chechen musical and dance creations align with the “Chechen mentality and musical rhythm,” aiming to bring “to the people and to the future of our children the cultural heritage of the Chechen people,” Dadayev added.

The ban will mean that many songs in musical styles such as pop and techno will be banned.