#european removal companies

[normal-thoughts-official]

So apparently some Swiss company found out that Brazilian blood has more immunoglobulin (which is used in some medications made by pharma companies) than European blood, and now international pharma companies are lobbying to change Brazilian law to allow them to use our blood as a resource

There is no current evidence that those things are related, but it just so happens that at the same time there is also another law being discussed that would get rid of "bureaucracy" when it comes to ethics analyses of trials on humans. It would also remove the right, which all brazilians currently have, to access to the medication resulting from the trials they participated in

Both sources are in Portuguese because both news have been recently broke by a Brazilian investigative news agency, but if you don't speak it, you can always use automatic translation

I know there's a lot of fucked up shit happening in the world right now, but please pay attention to medical rights in Brasil right now. Especially if you're European, because virtually every company related to this is from your continent and plans to benefit you above all

ETA: using blood as a resource for these medications is not new; however, current law in brasil only allows that use to come from donated blood (because it comes from the plasma and apparently not all of it is used in blood transfusion; I'm not a doctor so I'm not clear on the details but that's the gist of it) and to be processed and used by Hemobrás, the State-owned company that handles this type of medical technology. The new law would allow for private companies to buy our blood from blood banks for their use. It is worth noting that at least one company has already explicitly stated that they won't be making the resulting medication available in the Brazilian market, so, essentially, they will be taking blood Brazilians donated to help other Brazilians and using it to treat immunocompromised Europeans, to the detriment of immunocompromised Brazilians that need the medicine. In the process, they will be making it harder for our State-owned company to use that same blood, forcing us to import from them and therefore making the medication more expensive. They also want to make it possible for Brazilians to sell their own blood - a deeply ethically questionable practice that is discouraged by the WHO and that has led to HIV outbreaks in Brasil in the past

[doyoulikethissong-poll]

Gnarls Barkley - Crazy 2006

"Crazy" is the debut single of American soul duo Gnarls Barkley, taken from their 2006 debut album, St. Elsewhere. It became the first single to top the UK Singles Chart on download sales alone. The song remained at the top of the British charts for nine weeks, the longest number-one spell for more than ten years. The band and their record company then decided to remove the single from music stores in the country (while keeping the download available) so people would "remember the song fondly and not get sick of it". "Crazy" dropped to number five, before disappearing completely from the chart, as under chart rules a physically deleted single could not remain on the chart longer than two weeks after deletion date. Thus, "Crazy" made history at both ends of its chart run. It marked the most rapid exit from the British chart ever for a former number one, and number five was the highest position at which a single has ever spent its final week on the chart at that point.

In spite of this deletion, the song was the best-selling single of 2006 in the UK. In December 2006, it was nominated for the United Kingdom's Record of the Year but lost to "Patience" by Take That. "Crazy" won a Grammy Award for Best Urban/Alternative Performance in 2007 and was also nominated for Record of the Year, and it won a 2006 MTV Europe Music Award for Best Song. The music video was nominated for three 2006 MTV Video Music Awards: Best Group Video, Best Direction, and Best Editing, and won the latter two. It was also nominated for a 2006 MTV Europe Music Award for Best Video. "Crazy" was named the best song of 2006 by Rolling Stone and by The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll. "Crazy" was performed at the 2006 MTV Movie Awards, with Danger Mouse and Green dressed as various Star Wars characters.

The single entered multiple other single charts throughout Europe, including the German, the Swedish, the Austrian and the Irish Singles Charts, and the Dutch Top 40, resulting in a number one position on the European Hot 100 Singles. "Crazy" also performed strongly outside Europe, with top-five positions on the New Zealand and Australian Single Charts, and was also certified gold in both countries. In the US, the song "Crazy" spent seven consecutive weeks in the number-two spot on the Billboard Hot 100.

Musically, "Crazy" was inspired by film scores of Spaghetti Westerns, in particular by the works of Ennio Morricone, and the song "Last Men Standing" by Gian Piero Reverberi and Gian Franco Reverberi from the 1968 Spaghetti Western Django, Prepare a Coffin, an unofficial prequel to Django. "Crazy" samples the song, and also utilizes parts of the main melody and chord structure. Because of this, the Reverberis are credited as songwriters along with CeeLo Green and Danger Mouse. "Crazy" was used in several films and TV shows including Kick-Ass, I Think I Love My Wife, Religulous, The Big Short, Cold Case, How to Rock, Grey's Anatomy, Medium, Boyhood, and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

"Crazy" received a total of 86,8% yes votes!

[thedailyplatypics]

Reminder that Disney actively supports and is complicit with genocide of Palestinians by donating aid to Israel after Oct 7th, but continuing to ignore Palestinians and their overwhelmingly larger amount of deaths and NEED for aid, basically delegitimizing their suffering.

They also still haven’t scrapped any plans to removed Sabra, an already controversial Israeli “superhero” from the next MCU film.

All because they want that 🇮🇱🇺🇸💰💰💵

Palestinians are counting on people to avoid these companies as much as we can.

If you aren’t going to talk about it, at least show that you care about human life by not buying their new merch or posting about it/promoting it.

You know who I am and how obsessed I am with this merchandise, so if I’M able to stop YOU literally have no excuse other than you don’t care about people dying & being erased while Disney has its double standards of only helping white Europeans with cash, but ignoring Arabs and people of color.

[feminist-space]

"Artists have finally had enough with Meta’s predatory AI policies, but Meta’s loss is Cara’s gain. An artist-run, anti-AI social platform, Cara has grown from 40,000 to 650,000 users within the last week, catapulting it to the top of the App Store charts.

Instagram is a necessity for many artists, who use the platform to promote their work and solicit paying clients. But Meta is using public posts to train its generative AI systems, and only European users can opt out, since they’re protected by GDPR laws. Generative AI has become so front-and-center on Meta’s apps that artists reached their breaking point.

“When you put [AI] so much in their face, and then give them the option to opt out, but then increase the friction to opt out… I think that increases their anger level — like, okay now I’ve really had enough,” Jingna Zhang, a renowned photographer and founder of Cara, told TechCrunch.

Cara, which has both a web and mobile app, is like a combination of Instagram and X, but built specifically for artists. On your profile, you can host a portfolio of work, but you can also post updates to your feed like any other microblogging site.

Zhang is perfectly positioned to helm an artist-centric social network, where they can post without the risk of becoming part of a training dataset for AI. Zhang has fought on behalf of artists, recently winning an appeal in a Luxembourg court over a painter who copied one of her photographs, which she shot for Harper’s Bazaar Vietnam.

“Using a different medium was irrelevant. My work being ‘available online’ was irrelevant. Consent was necessary,” Zhang wrote on X.

Zhang and three other artists are also suing Google for allegedly using their copyrighted work to train Imagen, an AI image generator. She’s also a plaintiff in a similar lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway AI.

“Words can’t describe how dehumanizing it is to see my name used 20,000+ times in MidJourney,” she wrote in an Instagram post. “My life’s work and who I am—reduced to meaningless fodder for a commercial image slot machine.”

Artists are so resistant to AI because the training data behind many of these image generators includes their work without their consent. These models amass such a large swath of artwork by scraping the internet for images, without regard for whether or not those images are copyrighted. It’s a slap in the face for artists – not only are their jobs endangered by AI, but that same AI is often powered by their work.

“When it comes to art, unfortunately, we just come from a fundamentally different perspective and point of view, because on the tech side, you have this strong history of open source, and people are just thinking like, well, you put it out there, so it’s for people to use,” Zhang said. “For artists, it’s a part of our selves and our identity. I would not want my best friend to make a manipulation of my work without asking me. There’s a nuance to how we see things, but I don’t think people understand that the art we do is not a product.”

This commitment to protecting artists from copyright infringement extends to Cara, which partners with the University of Chicago’s Glaze project. By using Glaze, artists who manually apply Glaze to their work on Cara have an added layer of protection against being scraped for AI.

Other projects have also stepped up to defend artists. Spawning AI, an artist-led company, has created an API that allows artists to remove their work from popular datasets. But that opt-out only works if the companies that use those datasets honor artists’ requests. So far, HuggingFace and Stability have agreed to respect Spawning’s Do Not Train registry, but artists’ work cannot be retroactively removed from models that have already been trained.

“I think there is this clash between backgrounds and expectations on what we put on the internet,” Zhang said. “For artists, we want to share our work with the world. We put it online, and we don’t charge people to view this piece of work, but it doesn’t mean that we give up our copyright, or any ownership of our work.”"

Read the rest of the article here:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/06/a-social-app-for-creatives-cara-grew-from-40k-to-650k-users-in-a-week-because-artists-are-fed-up-with-metas-ai-policies/

[txttletale]

Hi! Do you think you could link me to some resources about the problems/ evils of the EU? Would love to find some but it's hard to know what's reliable when I have no base knowledge in this area + you seem very well informed :)

sure. let's start with what the EU does to its own member states--in 2009, the EU bailed the greek government out of severe debt on the condition that they establish brutal austerity measures, cutting public spending and welfare. these measures served to immiserate and destroy the lives of thousands of greek people:

Greek mortality has worsened significantly since the beginning of the century. In 2000, the death rate per 100,000 people was 944.5. By 2016, it had risen to 1174.9, with most of the increase taking place from 2010 onwards.

[forbes]

Since the implementation of the austerity programme, Greece has reduced its ratio of health-care expenditure to GDP to one of the lowest within the EU, with 50% less public hospital funding in 2015 than in 2009. This reduction has left hospitals with a deficit in basic supplies, while consumers are challenged by transient drug shortages.

[the lancet]

The homeless population is thought to have grown by 25 per cent since 2009, now numbering 20,000 people.

[oxfam]

the most brutal treatment, however, the EU of course reserves for migrants from the global south. the EU sets strict migration quotas and uses its member states as weapons against desperate people fleeing across the mediterranean. boats are prevented from landing, migrants that do make it to land are repelled with brutal violence, and refugees are deported back to countries where their lives are in lethal danger. these policies have led to many, many deaths--and the refugees and migrants who do survive are treating fucking inhumanely.

After a perilous journey across the desert, Abdulaziz was locked up in Triq al-Sikka, a grim prison in Tripoli, Libya. Why? Because the EU pays Libyan militias millions of euros to detain anyone deemed a possible migrant to Europe [...] A leaked EU internal memorandum in 2020 acknowledged that capturing migrants was now “a profitable business model” [...] in Triq al-Sikka and other detention centres, “acts of murder, enslavement, torture, rape and other inhumane acts are committed against migrants”, observed a damning UN report.

[the guardian]

Volunteers have logged more than 27,000 deaths by drowning since 1993, often hundreds at a time when large ships capsize. These account for nearly 80% of all the entries.

[the guardian]

Refugees and asylum seekers were punched, slapped, beaten with truncheons, weapons, sticks or branches, by police or border guards who often removed their ID tags or badges, the committee said in its annual report. People on the move were subject to pushbacks, expulsion from European states, either by land or sea, without having asylum claims heard. Victims were also subject to “inhuman and degrading treatment”, such as having bullets fired close to their bodies while they lay on the ground, being pushed into rivers, sometimes with hands tied, or being forced to walk barefoot or even naked across a border.

[the guardian]

In September, Greece opened a refugee camp on the island of Samos that has been described as prison-like. The €38m (£32m) facility for 3,000 asylum seekers has military-grade fencing and CCTV to track people’s movements. Access is controlled by fingerprint, turnstiles and X-rays. A private security company and 50 uniformed officers monitor the camp. It is the first of five that Greece has planned; two more opened in November.

[the guardian]

i could go on. i could cite dozens more similarly brutal news stories about horrific mistreatment, or any of the dozens of people who have killed themselves in the custody of border police under horrific conditions. the EU is a murderous institution that does not care about the lives of refugees and migrants or about the lives of the citizens of any member state that is not pursuing a vicious enough neoliberal political program

[ltwilliammowett]

Today on the second advent and door no. 8 we have a lovely pair, La Grace and Shtandart

More about them here:

La Grace is a replica of a historic tall ship from the 18th century that will sail the seven seas like the original ship 300 years ago. The aim of the project is to give anyone interested the opportunity to sail a historic ship as part of the Navy's training programme and to share the proud traditions of sailing.

The brig was built between 2008 and 2010 by a group of volunteers from the Czech Republic and Slovakia in an Egyptian shipyard in Suez using traditional craft techniques. The brig was designed by its owners (Josef Dvorsky and Daniel Rosecky) according to technical drawings published in 1768 in the Architectura navalis mercatoria by the Swedish admiral Fredrik Henrik af Chapman.

According to available sources, the original La Grace was a ship owned by the first Czech naval captain Augustin Herrman, a famous navigator in Czech history. He sailed across the Atlantic in the service of the Dutch West India Company. After leaving the company, he commanded the small privateer ship La Grace. This relatively weak and vulnerable ship with six cannons brought large quantities of captured Spanish galleons to New Amsterdam every year.

The Shtandart is a replica of an 18th century frigate. The original was the first frigate built at the Olonez shipyard under Peter the Great and the first ship to be commissioned as a frigate for the Baltic Fleet. During the Great Northern War, Tsar Peter succeeded in conquering the area that would later become St Petersburg on the Neva. With the conquest of the fortress of Nöteborg in 1702, Lake Ladoga was removed from Swedish control and the Tsar hoped to gain access to Finland. The aim of these endeavours was to gain access to the Baltic Sea in order to establish a port city there for trade and naval purposes.

The frigate was built from 1702 at the Olonez shipyard on the Lodejner Feld on the River Swir near Lake Ladoga, where it was given its name in reference to the newly introduced Russian naval flag, a standard. Tsar Peter personally transferred the ship to the Baltic Sea in 1703. When seven Swedish ships of the line, five frigates and other small ships attacked the mouth of the Neva in June 1705, eight Russian frigates, presumably including the Schandart, lay behind a barrage of trees. In 1712 and 1713, she took part in troop landings in Swedish Finland near Vyborg. No further use is mentioned after this action. The ship was decommissioned as unserviceable in 1718. In 1723, the ship was scrapped in St. Petersburg.

According to another version, Tsar Peter had ordered the Schandart to be preserved as a reminder of the beginnings of the Russian fleet. Tsarina Catherine I ordered the condition of the Petrine ships to be examined in 1727. However, the Shtandart broke up while trying to take her out of the water.

As a result of the sanctions against Russia following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian ships are denied access to European ports. However, following a request from the Président des Amis des Grands Voiliers association to the French Secretary of State, the Shtandart was granted permission to call at French and Spanish ports and has remained there ever since. There are plans to put her under the French flag, as her captain strongly distances themselves from Russia.

[mervardent]

About Natlan characters

People who somehow twist the situation with Natlan characters and call people wanting more diverse and accurate characters racist blow my mind, so here's me answering some of the most common arguments I see.

"They're Chinese devs! Chinese prefer light skin tones"

My brother in Christ, this is called colorism (prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group). Yes, it is common in China. No, it isn't good or excusable. Colorism being such a thing in China explains why it is like this, it doesn't excuse the devs. Plus... you realize it's not like all Chinese people have such light skin tones, right? The problem of colorism touches various Chinese people themselves, it's all about these unachievable beauty standards. Colorism isn't a preference, it's a prejudice.

"Chinese players pay the most money and they prefer light skin tones"

i already explained why colorism isn't an excuse. Again, what you say is true but it only puts things into a perspective, it doesn't make the situation good. Plus not gonna lie, the whole idea that people other than the CN server cannot express their opinions is ridiculous to me. All players are consumers. All players add to the success of the game, whether with their own money or being free advertisement to their friends. Taking the money of all your players but only opinions of some of them is condescending and money-hungry. You don't want opinions of people from other regions - don't even have servers in them in the first place.

"They'll lose money if they make more playable characters with dark skin tones"

If they'll make them as weak as Xinyan, Dehya or Candace - yeah, people won't roll for them. If they were good in gameplay and meta, however - I'm sure people would use money to get them. And really, the argument about losing some money by a company that is worth literal billions? There are characters with light skin tones that don't sell too well, and somehow Hoyoverse didn't go bankrupt because of one or two worse banners, shocking. Lastly, do you seriously think some CEOs' paychecks are more important than people's cultures?

"All you care about is skin color, you racist!"

Nah, I care about good representation. The ones who don't allow a few darker characters are the racist and/or colorist ones.

"You want all characters to be dark, but there are people from these regions in real life who have light skin tones too, you racist!"

Yes, people from these regions have different skin tones. That's the exact reason why there should be characters that have light skin tones, a little darker skin tones, even darker skin tones... Who said we cannot have a diverse cast? Who said adding a few characters with dark(er) skin tones means removing characters with light skin tones? How does their existence invide your personal space?

"There is no Mesoamerica/Egypt/India/insert-here-another-region-or-country in Genshin, they don't have to be accurate"

Oh yes, the "have cake and eat it" argument. So they take very clear inspirations from the real world (including calling characters after deities) but in this one very specific, heavily prejudiced aspect they choose not to, you say? And they can be very faithful to the culture they take inspirations from, especially if it is their own culture, but then they act carelessly with other ones, you say? And Genshin regions inspired by Asian and European regions are based each on one country (Mondstadt - Germany, Liyue - China, Inazuma - Japan, Fountaine - France, Shneznaya - Russia) but then they merge a few different cultures with Sumeru and Natlan, you say? Interesting. Totally not because of orientalism and colorism, not at all.

"They don't want to/cannot make these characters more accurate"

Then don't make regions in your game based on specific, existing in real life regions or countries. You cannot or don't want to do them justice? Don't use them.

"You said color doesn't matter when they made The Little Mermaid black, heheh"

First of all, your memeing skills suck, I've seen one and the same unoriginal, boommer-core meme like twenty times during my small research, do better. Second, you're fighting with an enemy you've imagined. I, for example, think about the "color doesn't matter" argument as wishful thinking because, unfortunately, we live in a world where it has mattered for a long time. You create your own enemy (because let's be real, you use we vs. they thinking here) and fight with this imagination instead of actually discussing. Third, you use a manipulative technique in which you make the discussion unproductive by making it about a way bigger issue instead of the one it should be centered on: Natlan (and Sumeru) characters. Fourth, there are various historical reasons why blind casting sometimes works and sometimes not, but that's a discussion for a different time. Fifth, let's be real, you haven't watched the new Little Mermaid anyway.

"Jeez, there should just be a Chinese server/there should only be Asian servers"

Depending on who writes this argument, it's either racist, xenophopic or oikophobic because of assumption people of certain origins, nationality, race or ethinicity cause a problem as a result of their origins, nationality, race or ethinicity. And it's not like Hoyoverse had to make these servers. They wanted to. Don't act like they're victims when they literally chose to have money of players from non-Asian regions. And don't act like all people from certain servers think the same.

"Characters from desert regions are/will be darker, these characters are from (a) forest region(s)"

We certainly don't live on the same planet, cause where I live people don't get a little darker only when they live in a desert area. Look at some tribes from the Amazon Rainforest, just as an example. And even look at NPCs in Sumeru - why this flawed logic that characters living in the forest are light-skinned is applicable only to the playable characters? NPCs have more varied skin tones than the playable characters. Because colorism.

tl;dr Don't act like it's anything else than a corporation being money-hungry and colorist.

[alpaca-clouds]

Public Transport COULD Be Great

Americans visiting Europe, especially those more left-leaning Americans, will always be so impressed when it comes to our public transport. And it does not matter where they visit here. Netherlands? "Amazing Public Transport!" France? "Amazing!" Germany? "Amazing!" Even in the UK they will be impressed.

And I kinda get it. While once upon a time the US made a conserted effort to get people moving via train, that has been almost two centuries ago and by now they just decided that people having cars is making more companies more money, so who needs cheap public transport? And while I personally actually kinda liked the public transport on the east coast while I was visiting the US... Yeah, I am well aware that the east coast (especially the area between New York City and DC) is not quite representative for the US.

However, here is the thing: If you ask most Europeans about their public transport... Well, we'll complain as well.

Because they fucking ruined it!

See, here is the issue, in a lot of parts in Europe, at some point or another the government privatized some or all of the public transport. This hit some countries like the UK especially hard, but Germany was hit also quite a lot.

Because of that a lot of things happened that happened when you try to use capitalist logic onto something that cannot work under capitalism.

For example a lot of rails have been removed in areas where it was not "cost efficient" to run trains. Or if they have not been removed, they are at least no longer used. In Germany you will find that in the area where I am living (North-Rhine-Westfelia) we have somewhat good running public transport. Meanwhile a friend of mine is living in former East Germany. And something you gotta understand about former East Germany: After the reunification a lot of people from East Germany tried to move away from there, thinking they would do better in "West Germany". So you will find a lot of mostly empty villages and towns there. And you know what does not pay under capitalism? Right: Running trains to fairly depopulated villages and towns. So... This friend is forced to use a car all the time. Because the next train station that is actually still in use is 45 minutes by car away.

Sure, technically there is a bus running through her village... It comes 3 times a day mondays to fridays, 2 times a day on Saturday and not at all on Sunday. Also to reach the aforementioned train station, the bus connection would take her almost two hours.

Now mind you: There is a train station about 10 minutes by car from her. But that one has not been in use for almost 20 years. Because, again: It just does not pay. It is not profitable for the company, so it is no longer in use.

And here we get to the issue: Public transport is an amazing thing... But we see again and again, that it really only works in those cases where it is state-run and paid for with taxes. As soon as it is privatized it will just not work. Because, well... In general public transport really is not a thing that will be paying for itself. It is fairly expensive, and to keep it profitable you need to keep raising the prices. (As a German: Believe me, I know!)

Not to mention that company policies will lead to weird stuff happening with the trains. Here in Germany? Well, the biggest train company (that is kinda partly state-owned, but not state-run, so it is run under capitalist ideas) has promised their investors that the trains will not be as delayed as before. But given the piss-poor state in which the rail network is, this is just not feasible. So, what will they do? Simple! If a train gets too delayed they will just cancel it. Will that fuck everyone travelling over way more than letting the train delay for 20 minutes? Yeah. But they do not care. They only care about the investors.

And this is the general issue.

For public transit to work, you need to design the transit network to serve the people - and not to make money. Because it does not matter that there are only some old people left in some depopulated little town in eastern Germany or western England... Those old people deserve to be able to get from their depopulated little town to the next big shopping center and cultural center as well.

As long as you do not design the stuff with those people in mind...

Sure, it is better than no public transport. But it still sucks.

[jacensolodjo]

It is easy to make jokes about the Eastern European and Jewish prerogative about food. It is not so easy when you know both groups have been literally starved to death through no fault of their own.

It is easy for someone to say "why didn't they just leave" but not so easy knowing because these murders by starvation were intentional, the victims were actively prevented from leaving. Which in itself is proof it was intentional for these people to starve to death.

If you want us to believe something like the Holodomor was a natural famine you shouldn't also tell us about internal passports (something many countries have done in order to keep an eye on where their "undesirables" are going) and people being shot for trying to board trains, planes, busses, and carriages. If, instead, it was natural, why stop people from going somewhere that there IS food?

Through the lens of epigenetics we can begin to understand why a third generation American of EE/Jewish descent might have this anxiety about food, about making sure there is enough, that we remember those who are less fortunate, that we appear to subsist entirely on leftovers. Or, indeed, why many with these epigenetic changes tend to trend towards higher percentages of body fat. Our bodies through our genes remember a time nobody could be even a pound overweight and it knows that the body literally eats itself as we starve and the first to go of course is body fat so our bodies, knowing all this, make sure we have extra "God forbid (ptoo ptoo ptoo), just in case".

"They tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat" isn't just a pithy saying. We outlived them even despite being unable to eat. We do not hoard food, we just happen to have a lot of leftovers through this anxiety about food. "Oy, I ate too much" is a blessing. With it, we are aware of how few times our ancestors could say the same. During Pesach (Passover), we have an entire dinner party (complete with perhaps a little too much wine) and recline in style as we eat matzo and remember why it is just so damn flat (we rushed off to escape from Egypt without finishing making our dough. D'oh!). Everything on the seder plate has a meaning, with some items being added or removed based on the traditions of the family or congregation doing the seder. Such as in the past couple years the olive is added to symbolize the hope for peace in Ukraine (or, for some, peace in the Middle East). Or the orange to symbolize the inclusion of the LGBTQ community.

Perhaps it seems paradoxical to eat so much in one sitting instead of saving some for a time where food may be scarce. But it goes hand in hand with "They tried to kill us, they failed". We have survived another day and have enjoyed good food and good company. In spite of everything they did to us. We feast out of spite. Perhaps because of all those times our enemies were eating without a care in the world while our ancestors watched and starved. We have proof of commie buffets while starving Ukrainians watched from the street. We have proof of Jews being teased with food, with Gentiles tossing heels of bread on the ground so they could watch as said Jews fought over it or flinging a sausage and laughing as Jews raced to get it as if they were playing fetch with a dog. Or the innumerable times people were killed for stealing a handful of grain when many times they were the ones who had farmed the grain in the first damn place.

There are many who do not see starvation as a tool of genocide. They don't understand how starvation can break a community. Death by Hunger, the translation of Holodomor, was not about control like people claim (in other words they claim the death was an accident, that the starving was meant to keep people in line. If they had just behaved themselves they wouldn't have died etc.,). It was always and forever about a stronger group ridding the world of another group without getting literal and metaphorical blood on their hands. They could cite plausible deniability. It wasn't their fault, honest, it was just bad luck.

The stereotypical scene of people in lines that stretch multiple city blocks was in fact the norm. And more often than not, only the first few dozen would get anything at all and everyone else would find they had wasted an entire day waiting for food that was never meant to be given to them in the first place. The supply was purposely small. At least for those who were either too low in the Party or not a part of it at all. For Jews, you turned to the black market which was often caught selling spoiled food as well as food that wasn't actually food at all (such as sawdust masquerading as bread). Which happened even with regular stores because as a Jew you could only buy certain things and everyone knew it and still would not sell the genuine article because why should they? It is, after all, going to a Jew. Soviet areas were guilty of doing this to everyone, too.

So if you are visiting an EE and/or Jewish home and they actively push food on you and insist you take leftovers, that is their love language. We want you to have enough because far too many times our people did not. And in Jewish culture, it is a literal mitzvah to provide food to those who cannot procure it themselves either because of money/access, or they are going thru the bereavement process or otherwise incapable of dealing with making sure they have something to eat (such as an illness that prompts them being added to the Mi Shebeirach list which in many congregations is printed and given out to refer to during the Mi Shebeirach prayer during services and may also be paired with the mourner's kaddish list). It is why when you go to a house where the occupants are sitting Shiva, you will often find their kitchen stacked with tupperware of varying sizes and cuisine and you will often be instructed to bring something as well though it isn't a requirement. Generally, your presence is considered the more important aspect of the Jewish bereavement process. (Just do not say you are going to sit Shiva with someone. Rather, you are paying a Shiva call or condolence call. Only the mourners are in fact sitting Shiva. Also important: try the door first before ringing or knocking, as usually that is seen as an interruption to sitting Shiva which is frowned upon. And do not literally call them unless told otherwise for the same reason.)

Food makes or breaks us. Food is not inherently moral or immoral. And yes, perhaps there is always room for dessert. And maybe we do eat too much but that's okay. We have survived to enjoy it, so let us do so. Nu, it is what our ancestors would want.

[reasonsforhope]

"Major technology companies signed a pact on Friday to voluntarily adopt "reasonable precautions" to prevent artificial intelligence (AI) tools from being used to disrupt democratic elections around the world.

Executives from Adobe, Amazon, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and TikTok gathered at the Munich Security Conference to announce a new framework for how they respond to AI-generated deepfakes that deliberately trick voters. 

Twelve other companies - including Elon Musk's X - are also signing on to the accord...

The accord is largely symbolic, but targets increasingly realistic AI-generated images, audio, and video "that deceptively fake or alter the appearance, voice, or actions of political candidates, election officials, and other key stakeholders in a democratic election, or that provide false information to voters about when, where, and how they can lawfully vote".

The companies aren't committing to ban or remove deepfakes. Instead, the accord outlines methods they will use to try to detect and label deceptive AI content when it is created or distributed on their platforms. 

It notes the companies will share best practices and provide "swift and proportionate responses" when that content starts to spread.

Lack of binding requirements

The vagueness of the commitments and lack of any binding requirements likely helped win over a diverse swath of companies, but disappointed advocates were looking for stronger assurances.

"The language isn't quite as strong as one might have expected," said Rachel Orey, senior associate director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. 

"I think we should give credit where credit is due, and acknowledge that the companies do have a vested interest in their tools not being used to undermine free and fair elections. That said, it is voluntary, and we'll be keeping an eye on whether they follow through." ...

Several political leaders from Europe and the US also joined Friday’s announcement. European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova said while such an agreement can’t be comprehensive, "it contains very impactful and positive elements".  ...

[The Accord and Where We're At]

The accord calls on platforms to "pay attention to context and in particular to safeguarding educational, documentary, artistic, satirical, and political expression".

It said the companies will focus on transparency to users about their policies and work to educate the public about how they can avoid falling for AI fakes.

Most companies have previously said they’re putting safeguards on their own generative AI tools that can manipulate images and sound, while also working to identify and label AI-generated content so that social media users know if what they’re seeing is real. But most of those proposed solutions haven't yet rolled out and the companies have faced pressure to do more.

That pressure is heightened in the US, where Congress has yet to pass laws regulating AI in politics, leaving companies to largely govern themselves.

The Federal Communications Commission recently confirmed AI-generated audio clips in robocalls are against the law [in the US], but that doesn't cover audio deepfakes when they circulate on social media or in campaign advertisements.

Many social media companies already have policies in place to deter deceptive posts about electoral processes - AI-generated or not... 

[Signatories Include]

In addition to the companies that helped broker Friday's agreement, other signatories include chatbot developers Anthropic and Inflection AI; voice-clone startup ElevenLabs; chip designer Arm Holdings; security companies McAfee and TrendMicro; and Stability AI, known for making the image-generator Stable Diffusion.

Notably absent is another popular AI image-generator, Midjourney. The San Francisco-based startup didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

The inclusion of X - not mentioned in an earlier announcement about the pending accord - was one of the surprises of Friday's agreement."

-via EuroNews, February 17, 2024

--

Note: No idea whether this will actually do much of anything (would love to hear from people with experience in this area on significant this is), but I'll definitely take it. Some of these companies may even mean it! (X/Twitter almost definitely doesn't, though).

Still, like I said, I'll take it. Any significant move toward tech companies self-regulating AI is a good sign, as far as I'm concerned, especially a large-scale and international effort. Even if it's a "mostly symbolic" accord, the scale and prominence of this accord is encouraging, and it sets a precedent for further regulation to build on.

[whysperingwoods]

Tasmanian tiger comeback??

From the article:

“It was literally a head in a bucket of ethanol in the back of a cupboard that had just been dumped there with all the skin removed, and been sitting there for about 110 years,” Prof Andrew Pask, the head of the thylacine integrated genetic restoration research (with the acronym Tigrr) lab at the University of Melbourne, says.

[...]

A year on, he says it has advanced the work of the team of Australian and US scientists who are trying to resurrect the species more than expected at this stage. “We are further along than I thought we would be, and we have completed a lot of things that we thought would be very challenging and others said would be impossible,” he says.

The plan to ‘de-extinct’ the thylacine The project to bring back the thylacine is being driven by Colossal, a Texas-based biotechnology “ de-extinction and species preservation” company that is also aiming to recreate the woolly mammoth and the dodo using genetic engineering techniques.

[...]

The thylacine was Australia’s only marsupial apex predator. It once lived across the continent, but was restricted to Tasmania about 3,000 years ago. Dog-like in appearance and with stripes across its back, it was extensively hunted after European colonisation. The last known survivor died in captivity in 1936 and it was officially declared extinct in the 1980s.

Colossal says researchers have made several breakthroughs in its work on the species, putting the company much closer to its goal of returning it to the wild. They include what they say is the highest quality ancient genome ever produced, with just 45 gaps in a genetic blueprint that contains about 3bn pieces of information.

Lamm says it is an “incredible scientific leap” putting the program “on track to de-extinct the thylacine”, while other recent breakthroughs will be useful in protecting critically endangered species. “We are pushing as fast as possible to create the science necessary to make extinction a thing of the past,” he says.

[djuvlipen]

A 6yo girl died of electrocution in a Romani camp in Italy last month. this is what racialized poverty looks like; children are always among the first victims. may she rest in peace

04 March 2024

The Saturday before she was due to start school, six-year-old Michelle died by electrocution in the Roma camp in Via Carrafiello di Giugliano in Naples. Despite desperate attempts to resuscitate the girl, who had brushed against exposed electrical cables, she was pronounced dead at about three p.m. on the 13 January 2024. 

Allegedly, distressed family members caused a disturbance at the hospital and were accused of attacking health care personnel and police. This ‘chaos’ quickly became the focus of local media attention, and coverage of the tragic death of a child quickly morphed into an issue of public order and security.   

Deputy Francesco Emilio Borrelli of the Alleanza Verdi Sinistra, weighed in by describing the Giugliano camp “populated by violent people whose lifestyle is many times beyond the law” as one of many “outlaw settlements where children are abandoned to degradation”; and declaring his solidarity with the emergency room doctors and the police. 

After a meeting of the committee for public order and safety, the prefect of Naples, Michele Di Bari, set the objectives for the local administration “Clean the camp from waste in the next few weeks and start the transfer of a Roma family of around 40 people, to an asset confiscated from organized crime.” 

The authorities responded with a blitz on the camp coordinated by local police, and supported by Carabinieri, military personnel and employees of the water company. Waste was removed, electrical cables made safe, vehicles seized, and the water supply was disconnected, leaving about 450 Romani people without access to water by 25 January. Behind the expressions of concern about the safety of children, the official stance is – to borrow a phrase from Matteo Salvini – one of “Legalità, ordine e rispetto prima di tutto!” (Legality, order and respect before all).

The reporter from Avvenire tells a different story, of bereaved families, wrongly accused of affray at the hospital, routinely scapegoated and repeatedly evicted. After the seventh eviction they ended up on this long-abandoned industrial site, amongst the rubble and mud, without water or electricity, except for illegal connections – an ‘informal settlement’ in officialese. In reality, a squalid and precarious site, where 200 Romani children subsist in conditions that do nothing to nurture “an atmosphere of happiness” for the “full and harmonious development of his or her personality”, envisaged in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In a submission to the UN Human Rights Council back in 2014, ERRC research revealed that Romani children raised in camps across Italy were prone to a number of severe and debilitating conditions: they suffered from high levels of anxiety, were more frequently born underweight, and became ill with respiratory disease in greater numbers. They suffered more often from poisoning, burns and accidents at home. There was a greater incidence of “diseases of poverty”, such as tuberculosis, scabies, and lice.

The roots of the crisis can be traced back to official policies in the 1990s which placed Roma in segregated ‘nomad camps’. Things worsened with Berlusconi’s illegal declaration of a State of Emergency to combat the so-called ‘Roma menace’ in 2008. This overtly racist demonisation of Romani people heralded a prolonged period of mass evictions and destruction of camps, harassment, expulsions, mob violence and pogroms against Roma communities. Up to this day, the legacy of this illegal state of exception still afflicts Roma, as successive governments have failed, or simply refused to honour the commitment to ‘get beyond the system of camps.’ 

For its part, the European Commission chose to remain silent in the face of mounting and overwhelming evidence of systemic anti-Roma discrimination, forced evictions and camp segregation. On 6 April 2017, The Financial Times reported that the European Commission had repeatedly blocked publication of a report which recommended sanctions against Italy for mistreatment of its Roma minority, in an attempt to avoid a damaging public row. Seven years later, little has changed in Brussels, and the Commission has consistently kept schtum on this issue.

On 20 May 2019, in response to an emergency case was brought before the court by Associazione 21 luglio and the ERRC, the European Court of Human Rights ordered the Italian Government to provide suitable accommodation for the 73 Romani families who were forcibly evicted from Giugliano the previous week. The court recognised the right to family unity and the need to provide adequate housing to the 450 Roma who had been evicted, and were camped in an area with no shelter, and were forced to sleep inside cars or outdoors, despite the difficult weather conditions, without access to electricity, clean water or toilets. And this is where Michelle and her friends spent the next four years.

Despite the availability of EU funds, the precarious living conditions endured by the Roma remained unresolved. On 12 January 2021, the Campania Regional Council approved the "Abramo" project worth €846,000 for a path of housing, work and social integration of the Roma populations of Giugliano in Campania. As is all too painfully evident, no tangible progress had been made on housing, and as Avvenire noted, in the aftermath of this latest tragedy “now the focus is on the reuse of houses confiscated from the Camorra.” As part of the education path of the Abramo project, “Interventions on school integration have started and yesterday Michelle would have gone to school with the apron and backpack given to her.” Instead, on that first day at school for the cohort of Romani kids, one desk remained empty.

[stevenbasic]

Growing into the Job, Post 419: A Few Hours to Kill

The man looked at her from across the bar, lifting the drink in his hand, standing, and then smiling at her as he came over. “Thank you for cocktail. Can I get you one?” he predictably asked, finally stepping up to the bar beside her and pulling out a barstool for for himself…

…

Ten minutes ago she’d watched as he had entered this quaint izakaya, probably on his walk back to his hotel here in Utsunomiya City. He looked like he was here on business. Shoes were Northern European, haircut vaguely nothing, but the accent he’d used while struggling to answer the barkeep’s simple greeting of  ‘Irrasshaimase’ pegged him as a traveler from just outside of Hamburg , which seemed to her oddly fitting. 

She’d seen how he glanced around at the local patrons as he stepped in and awkwardly made his way to the bar, under the paper lanterns and past the framed photos of the nearby shrine in Nikko. He pulled up a stool on the opposite side of the bar, across from where she’d been sitting. His back was to the door. Moderately busy, the pub had attracted a few salary men arguing loudly in the corner, a smattering of students and professors from the local university, and a small group of senior citizens from Europe, maybe Australia. Aside from the tourists he was one of the only foreigners in the room, and he was sure to notice that she was one of the only women present. 

Drying his hands on a towel, the bartender welcomed him again. She noticed how he asked for a beer, choosing a Kirin as it was likely familiar. A cold draft soon appeared for him in a frosty glass, which he drained halfway in a single gulp. The bartender didn’t raise an eyebrow but asked if he wanted to order food. Scanning the menu, which was entirely in Japanese, she saw how he looked around for inspiration. That, in a brief moment, was the first time their eyes met.

He’ll do.

“What are they eating?” he asked the man behind the bar in rudimentary Japanese - broken, strongly accented - as he gestured with his hands to the men over in the corner. 

“Yakitori,” replied the bartender, now switching to English, “Baked chicken on skewers. It is very good.”

With her heightened senses, the redhead could hear his stomach rumble. 

“I’ll take a portion of .. yaki .. chicken,” he replied, giving up on his Japanese, “and some of those green beans.” A minute later a plate of chicken yakitori appeared along with a bowl of salted edamame. He attacked his meal with gusto, and again surreptitiously eyed her across the bar. 

It had been many, many years since Dr. Olivia Henders had gone out looking for the company of men, but she knew she had the attention of this one. She took the opportunity to sit up straight on her barstool, gazing sidelong towards the low tables and tatami mats in the dim pub and allowing him to take in her figure. She was tall, and despite her age she was shapely. She smiled secretly to herself. Casually, while still looking away, she removed her tan cardigan. She almost chuckled, knowing what had become of men and therefore knowing that the plunging tank neckline of her taut bodysuit would suddenly become this little pub’s main attraction. She felt eyes, his included, suddenly drawn to her.

She wrapped her sweater around her waist and returned to both her grape shochu cocktail and her ruminations on the most recent leg of her travels. Though the nearby town of Nikko and its Toshugo shrine was what drew most foreigners to travel to Utsunomiya, the picturesque attractions were not why Olivia was here. Rather, it was the university, and its Department of Molecular Agriculture, that she had been here to visit. That, along with a handful of the dozen or so other sites that she’d seen on her trip, seemed adequately appropriate for a new hive. One of the younger professors had amenable genetics and, more importantly, she had the right politics. Olivia had already been in communication with KOLECTV and Evolution would be sending a team out next week to get Dr. Sato started on her treatment. 

In the meantime, she had the following few hours to herself. A rarity to be sure. While the next several weeks of Olivia’s schedule were more than busy - I need to clone myself, she sometimes thought, always followed by: but you’ve tried that already - her last few hours in Japan were free. Then it was “home” - she needed to see this Melissa thing for herself - and then back on a plane.

She looked up from her phone, where she’d been checking in on the KOLECTV pilot who’d get her back to the States, and, again, looked across the bar to the hapless European male. He’d finished his food, and, though she could still sense his all-too-apparent interest in her chest, he had been too reticent to come over and talk to her. His beer was almost gone.

Privately, Olivia smiled. In all her years on this earth - and she’d seen a lot of them - men the world over had never been as timid as they’d been these last few months. The prion had done its job, and she had no doubt it would continue to do its work.. She bit her lip, anticipating the day. In the meantime, though, she needed a fuck and was thirsty for something else besides cheap japanese liquor.

With a curl of her finger and her impeccable Japanese, she called the barkeep over and ordered the European a budo sawa to match her own. No one else at the bar saw what she covertly slid into the bartender’s hand or heard the weirdling tone to her voice when she told him what to do with it. She observed closely as the cocktail was made, watching to make sure her extra ingredient was added, and then delivered. The man across the bar looked up at her, picking up the drink with a smile. Coyly - men love that - she looked away.

“Thank you for cocktail,” he said in awkward English, finally stepping up to the bar beside her and pulling out a barstool seat for himself, “Can I get you one?”

“No thank you, I got it” Olivia replied, watching him take a seat. He had the balls to do that, at least. For the time being. They both looked up as the bartender placed a new buda sawa down in front of her. It shared the same slight pink blush as his.

He picked the drink up and took the first sip.

Immediately, Olivia took a sip of hers and - Bingo. 

The small talk began. This was pretty standard courting behavior for normals, she knew. Thankfully she spoke his inelegant first language because his English was nearly as horrible as his Japanese. This guy was obviously a businessman here on work, and he made sure  to explain his bland job to her in excruciatingly grueling detail. Despite all the reorganization that the male mind has undergone with the prion, men still liked to talk about themselves, and they loved to explain things that were entirely obvious and boring. What he did, who he was, or where he came from was really not all that important to what she needed from him, and honestly he wasn’t much for entertaining conversation, even without the language barrier. He was nervous, she allowed him that, but she would not tolerate his tiresome mansplaining much longer. Maybe we can get a law passed, she thought in reverie. 

“So you’re…traveling also?” he asked her finally. 

“Yes. Just here on business, not nearly as interesting as yours I’m afraid.” Olivia was able to bite back a bit of cold sarcasm, and noticed that he’d been doing an admirable job of not glancing down at her full cleavage. His cocktail would likely take care of that soon enough. 

“How long have you been in Japan?” he continued, “How long is your trip?”

“It’s been just six days in Japan - here, Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka.” Olivia explained, rattling off the most recent locations, “But I’ve been in Asia for about a month - Khazakstan, Mongolia, all over really.” Her tongue was probably looser than it should be, but she knew this scrotum wouldn’t be seeing the chance to tell anyone else anything. “I have a plane leaving in eight hours, but for now I have some time to kill.”

She took a sip of her drink, and let her eyes sparkle. 

“Are you headed home?”

She had to admit, even if he wasn’t quite catching her innuendo, he was showing some honest interest in her. There was possibly something moderately endearing about this fellow. He reminded her of a lamb. 

“Yes, sort of,” she replied, allowing her hand to brush closer to his.

“It’ll be good to be back in your own bed after all that time?” he asked, “I always feel that way when I travel.” His eyes, for the first time and just the briefest of seconds, dropped to her neckline.

Olivia chuckled, both at his errant gaze and his question. “I don’t know. I’m used to the lifestyle, and don’t really feel the pull of home like most,” she said, briefly smiling as the barkeep slid a bowl of edamame to them. “I’ll only be home for a couple nights. There’s a grand opening for a new medical facility I need to attend before I’ll be off again. A formality, really. I’m looking at some new clinic sites in Des Moines, Madison and Mankato. Then my mother is demanding a visit, she’s in Washington.” She paused, and wondered for a moment why she was telling him all this. Maybe it would sweeten the first bite, she figured. “Those are cities, in the US.”

The man nodded hesitantly, and reached down for an edamame pod. She saw how suddenly he found himself unable to look up after glancing again at her big white breasts.  

““Wh-who do you work for?” he asked, struggling to recover, “What is it that you do?” 

The first telltale stammer in his voice, did not go unnoticed by her, nor did the first real tingle of what was in her new budo sawa. She was sure he was feeling his own tingles too. 

“Well, I work for myself,” she decided to answer, “I consider myself a consultant at this point. I sold a biomed startup and now I work with the groups that are using the technology, trying to get it out into the world. I suppose you could say that I’m overseeing a few things.”

“So you’re a…biomedical consultant?”

“Genetics research and implementation, mostly,” she explained, watching him take another swig of his drink. Whether or not he finished it at this point wasn’t all that important, but the drunker he got, the better. He’ll fight less. “I also do some political consulting, helping candidates, pushing policies, trying to change the world and all that.”

At her mention of politics, she saw him immediately get a little nervous. She realized, with all their recent victories, old governments everywhere were changing, and that not everyone was comfortable with it. Many of the men, worldwide, were oblivious, honestly. But many men, she knew, were scared, and some were outright opposed to what they’d been doing. But, you know what? Too fucking bad. 

“Ha…ha…trying to ch-change the world? R-r-really?” he stuttered, and she saw the gears starting to roll in his increasingly addled brain. Maybe he was getting his first inkling as to what sort of people she worked with, and the ambitions they were trying to achieve. 

“Yes well I have a project I’m working on that some people would rather see fail,” she added, a bit cryptically, “But the important thing is that we all have the same goals.”

Looking over another sip of her - what would Ashleigh call it? A ‘Panther Sawa’? - she eyed the innocent Bavarian male, and pictured him in a cage. A small cage. 

“What are your goals, little man?” Olivia purred, letting the first real hint of seduction seep into and deepen her voice. She saw him stiffen at the term. ‘Little man’ was something secretly arousing to most men these days, along with ‘good boy’ and a host of other infantilizing and demeaning expressions. She would be sure to try some of them out tonight. “What do you want to accomplish tonight, here in this beautiful country, in this quaint little pub?”

Olivia realized that, just for a night, she wanted to do what normals did. Not that this evening is going to turn out like anything even vaguely resembling “normal”. “Dating” was not something in Olivia Hender’s playbook. There was always, invariably, just too much to do. She’d fed, for sure. She’d used what the younger sisters might call ‘Pink Panther’ several times in her years on earth, but she hadn’t tried something like this - picking up a guy - well, not since, haha, that time.. She was out of practice, maybe? And romance, taking a lover she felt was generally a waste of time. But a quick one-night fling while on a business trip? Sure. Fun. Easy. She could be a seductress for a night and then get back to business. 

Olivia noticed the male hadn’t answered her question. The poor thing looked at a loss for words. And fighting hard, so very hard, to keep from staring at her chest.

“So? Hm?” she asked, leaning in a bit towards him and casually  pressing her breasts together between her arms, “Is there something in particular you’d like to do tonight?”

Now he couldn’t help himself, and goggled at her bust. He struggled to find his words. 

“Y-you mentioned your family?” he asked, scrambling for something he thought might be a safe topic. 

Ha. If only he knew. “Had I?”

“Y-your mother? She is in Washton DC?” 

The last thing Olivia wanted to talk about, tonight, was her mother. Not as talented as her mom, she’d always made up for it with her studies, her science, her research and discoveries. She liked to think, in her career of - it was hard to count the decades - that one art complemented the other. Olivia knew she was a pioneer in bringing the Dark Female to the field of genetic engineering. Still, her mother had always cast a big shadow. 

“We don’t need to talk about my family,” Olivia abruptly announced, now in English as she put down her drink and from her clutch pulled a ¥10,000 bill to lay down on the bar. With one gesture she paid his bill and her own wasting no time as she stood, and offered him her hand. She’d tired of conversation. “Take me back to your room.”

She watched him stand, and she watched his eyes as he realized she was taller than him. She smiled. The man, younger than her, was obviously thrilled. Olivia still had quite the looks, and she was undoubtedly tall. She’d inherited some of her mother’s famous behind and shapely legs, and had grown into a heavy bust over the years. It was at that chest that this man was now struggling not to stare, the poor thing. It had become universal: males all over the world were attracted to these kinds of tall, shapely women: primordially busty, powerfully maternal. 

“Wow, you are one big American,” he managed in English. 

She chuckled. “Yes I am,” she brooked, back in his native tongue, placing one hand on his chest, “And this big American is going to lock the door to your hotel room, pin you to your cheap mattress and let you suck on her big, mother’s nipple as she hovers her giant white breasts over your weak, tiny, shrunken little face before she smothers you and steals every inch of your size.” 

Her smile curled as she watched his eyes goggle again. 

“What do you have to say about that, boy?”

He didn’t say much. There was not much he could say as she pushed him towards the door and into an awaiting cab…

 …

Two hours later, Dr. Henders stood, alone, on the sidewalk outside a hotel once known to be  popular with traveling businessmen. Her shoes were now tight, and she’d just barely been able to squeeze herself back into her top. To anyone who had known her, they might also be impressed that despite all her travels she looked five years younger. She’d politely paid the man’s bill on the way out, at the desk, with what yen she had left in her clutch. His debt was paid, but he wouldn’t be checking out anytime soon. Or ever. 

Where’s that car? she mused, as she stood waiting for KOLECTV’s local driver to appear and feeling the new youth and strength the male had given her coursing through her ancestral blood. Let’s go. I’ve got a plane to catch.

===========================

Thanks to Frag592 for his insights into Japanese bar culture.

[solarpunkbusiness]

Solar-Powered Weeding Robot by Bulgarian Startup Raises €2.36M EIC Funding

Bulgarian Smart Farm Robotix, a fully autonomous solar-powered lightweight weeding robot, secured €2.36M in funding from the European Innovation Council (EIC)

Founded in 2022, Smart Farm Robotix primarily focuses on organic herb producers, targeting a gap in existing technology that often overlooks the perennial plants segment and the semi-mountainous terrains of Southern Europe. 

Smart Farm Robotix produces a fully solar-powered weeding robot equipped with cameras, positional sensors, and AI for weed detection with autonomous navigation. It deploys both contact and contactless methods to cope with weeds. 

The first two prototypes were developed with the founders’ funding and with the support of the PARA incubator, 2022 edition. 

In their own words:

According to the company’s founder, Rossen Kolev, “Most weeding robots from Europe are designed for the flat, well-aerated, well-watered fields in Northern and Central Europe. So, there is a lot of potential here that is simply neglected.”

[a-typical]

Probability figures in everyday decisions we make. Consider the public’s sentiment toward genetically modified organisms—GMOs. Reactions tend to be bimodal, depending on your politics, itself a warning flag. The truth and efficacy of science should never correlate with your political views.

The food chemical company Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, developed a genetically modified variant of corn that was completely resistant to glyphosate, a weed-killing herbicide marketed under the name Roundup, which they also developed. Monsanto scientists genetically removed their corn’s susceptibility to the chemical. This potent combo—Monsanto’s GMO corn coupled with Monsanto’s weed killer—enabled farmers to spray their entire crops and have the herbicide kill everything but the corn. The Vermont ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s uses corn syrup as a sweetener for some of their products. (Yes, I too was surprised to learn this.) News that some of their ice creams had trace amounts of glyphosate from the corn used in their syrup created a media dust-up. In response, Ben & Jerry’s decided to stop using GMO corn syrup altogether, even though the one-part-per-billion detection levels of glyphosate were far below US and European standards. Since many people who buy Ben & Jerry’s ice cream lean left—aligned with the company’s generally progressive views on all things—Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Holdings Inc. judged this ban to be a wise business decision.

Let’s look closer at what happened there. Every substance you could possibly ingest, food and otherwise, has a calculated lethal dose associated with it, measured by what’s called LD50. That’s the dose per kilogram of body weight where 50 percent of the people who consume that amount will die quickly. These data often come from tests on laboratory mammals such as mice. There’s another metric, called no-observed-adverse-effect level (NOAEL), which addresses the long-term influence of a substance on your health and is more sensible when thinking about food safety. LD50 helps to make a different point. The smaller its value for a substance, the more lethal it is. As such, tables of LD50s can be quite illuminating. Here’s a sampling:

Sucrose (table sugar) | 30 grams per kilogram

Ethanol (common alcohol) | 7 grams per kilogram

Glyphosate (Roundup) | 5 grams per kilogram

Table Salt | 3 grams per kilogram

Caffeine | 0.2 grams per kilogram

Nicotine | 0.0065 grams per kilogram

The most lethal substance on this hand-picked list is nicotine. Caffeine looks quite potent too. Just drink about eighty demitasse cups of espresso if you want to die from it. Next comes salt.

The least deadly on the list is sugar, as you might expect. Notice further that glyphosate is less lethal than table salt, but not by much. Actually none of this concerns us here. What matters is what happens to a 150 lb. (70 kg) person who eats Ben & Jerry’s ice cream—a fact I calculated but relegated to my Forbidden Twitter file, where it remains, simply for how disturbing it would be. In social media, I never intend to be disturbing:

You would need to consume four hundred million pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream for its trace amounts of glyphosate to kill you. But after only 20 pints you will die from its sugar content.

Ben & Jerry’s made the right corporate decision if it protected their profits. Although they could have also used the occasion as a teaching moment—a mind-blowing lesson on comparative risk. But that works only if people are open to learning. In modern times, many of us don’t satisfy that criterion, perhaps because, according to the nineteenth-century British essayist Walter Bagehot,

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

It is, as common people say, so “upsetting;” it makes you think that, after all, your favourite notions may be wrong, your firmest beliefs ill-founded.… Naturally, therefore, common men hate a new idea, and are disposed more or less to ill-treat the original man who brings it.

— Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization - Neil deGrasse Tyson (2022)

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Seth Mandel

Yesterday on CNN, John King noted that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is being considered as a potential running mate for Harris. The fact that Shapiro is Jewish—and not part of the self-hating AsAJew movement—means “there could be some risks in putting him on the ticket.” Progressives have been relying on token anti-Israel Jews willing to publicly renounce the Jewish people. Shapiro does not appear to have the appetite to do so. King is therefore correct.

King is also correct to reject euphemistic word games. Shapiro’s Jewishness would be a target of the progressive base’s ire, even if those voters tried to hide their ignobility by using the word “Zionist” as a proxy for “Jew.”

On July 9, Meta (formerly known as Facebook) announced it would be cracking down on this game. “Going forward, we will remove content attacking ‘Zionists’ when it is not explicitly about the political movement, but instead uses antisemitic stereotypes, or threatens other types of harm through intimidation, or violence directed against Jews or Israelis under the guise of attacking Zionists,” the company wrote on its site.

Zionism is at heart a simple position in favor of Jewish civil rights. Since 1948, anti-Zionism means the destruction of the Jewish nation. There isn’t actually any gray area here. We have indeed arrived at a moment when a politician’s Jewish faith is considered a mark against him. This, a mere quarter-century after Joe Lieberman was nominated as Al Gore’s vice presidential running mate.

Both the corporate and the political worlds have opened the door to this downhill trend. A major European airline removed from its in-flight entertainment menu a show about a British Jew—not an Israeli—because they were afraid it would upset customers and/or social-media activists. The review of a book by Jewish farmers was pulled because, the editor said, “In the current, rather febrile, atmosphere I think we need to give a wide berth to anything which references Jewish people and Judaism. It just isn’t worth the hassle that will ensue.”

We can expect the ceding of a degree of policy to any figure who is sensitive to the very loud and public tantrums of progressive activists. Whatever his faults, Joe Biden ignored them when those tantrums demanded the right to persecute Jews here or abroad. Those days are over, and what lies ahead is cause for trepidation.