alyaza

joined 3 years ago
MODERATOR OF
 

the Super Bowl halftime show was pretty good, they should consider continuing the strategy of getting people who aren't totally washed

 

[...]As I've written before, it's becoming more and more clear that schools must become beacons of resiliency in every community in the midst of a climate disaster. And that includes everyday climate disasters, too. It's why our schoolyards need cisterns for capturing stormwater and bioswales to remediate urban runoff and microforests to protect neighborhoods from extreme heat.

Although public schools are chronically underfunded, we do actually have money to make these changes now. The two school bond measures that voters approved in November — one for the state, one for LAUSD — will funnel billions into facility upgrades. This week, LAUSD announced funding for new climate adaptation projects, including updates to emergency procedures. Hopefully that means throwing away the outdated manual and writing a new one. Parents near burn areas aren't getting good answers about how schools are being cleaned and tested for reopening. I spoke with one parent at Paul Revere Middle School, which is about a half-mile from the Palisades Fire perimeter. Upon returning to a school they were assured was safe, students found ash in their lockers. I'm also getting questions about how soils, sand, and garden beds should be cleaned and tested in schoolyards and playgrounds. Providing this guidance immediately should have been a priority for school board members.

[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 1 points 4 hours ago

that's for you to figure out and is, respectfully, not my problem or the problem of anyone else's moderating this instance. you've been told what is expected of you; you can take that or leave it.

 

What does better preparedness look like? Diagnostic tests ready on day one. Universal healthcare (perhaps at state or local levels). Vaccine innovations and new drugs against the families of viruses that pose pandemic threats. In its final days, the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services awarded $590 million to mRNA biotech company Moderna to fast-track bird flu vaccines.

The thing about outbreak response policies is that they look somewhat like prevention when executed well. Aside from vaccines, it looks like paid sick leave for everyone, especially people who work with wild animals, livestock, and labs surveilling disease outbreaks; government access to farms and protections for whistleblowers.

Factory farming drives disease outbreaks by intensely confining animals that have a greater tendency to become infected, combined with incentives for farmers to keep sick and vulnerable animals alive with drugs. Researchers have called this “the infectious disease trap” and it applies to pandemic pathogens, too, according to Carlson.

“The majority of biomass, the majority of animal biomass on this planet is not wildlife anymore — it's livestock,” Carlson said. While it is possible to reduce meat consumption, factory farming likely isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

To this end, labor unions are an underrecognized avenue for pandemic preparedness. After COVID-19 decimated meatpacking plants in 2020, unions negotiated protections with employers that continue today. By union protections, meat workers should have access to personal protective equipment like boots, sleeves, masks, and goggles as fears of bird flu plague farms, plants, and “live hangs,” according to Mark Lauritsen, international VP and director of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union’s Food Processing, Packing and Manufacturing division. (However, dairy workers have become infected by bird flu on farms where employers do not provide P.P.E., according to reporting by Amy Maxmen.)

Today, several major meatpacking companies offer up to 20 hours of paid sick leave — more than they did pre-COVID-19, thanks to union negotiations. Those negotiations provide 4 hours for every 400 hours worked in states without more required leave; the union “would like it to be more hours,” Lauritsen added.

 

"Today, history is made," EU chief Ursula von der Leyen told a ceremony in Lithuania's capital. "This is freedom, freedom from threats, freedom from blackmail."

Polish President Andrzej Duda, praised it as a "truly symbolic moment" that would make the region "more secure and resilient".

"It is the final step towards emancipation from the post-Soviet sphere of dependence," he added.

The so-called Brell power grid - which stands for Belarus, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania - is controlled almost entirely by Moscow and has long been seen as a vulnerability for the three Baltic states.

Now Nato members, they have not purchased electricity from Russia since 2022, but their connection to the Brell grid left them dependent on Moscow for energy flow.

[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

an encrypted messaging app with a handful of people you categorically trust to never tell on you or in any way implicate you in future criminal behavior, not a federated Reddit clone where you have no control over who sees your message, when, on what terms, and with what associated data. like, don't be stupid—and at the very least, if you must publicly agitate in this way, don't say this on a place where your words could have ramifications for people who aren't large corporations and don't have the money to get roped into legal trouble

[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 2 points 1 day ago

aside: Hearing Things is very cool, and you should subscribe to them. they're a genuine worker-cooperative, as far as i know

 

JICO fills a unique role in the world of audio equipment: They’re essentially turntable needle archaeologists, reproducing discontinued needles so that music listeners can continue using vintage record players. Though the 13 people, including Morita, who work in the company’s turntable needle division also make original models like the Kurogaki, their main job is to reverse-engineer proprietary needles that have long gone out of production. If you’ve ever replaced a needle for an old turntable you found at a garage sale, odds are you purchased one of JICO’s handmade clones.

JICO’s walls are lined with 2,000 different models of needles that they’ve recreated, but the company’s trajectory changed in 2018 thanks to one needle in particular: the Shure N-447, a discontinued favorite of hip-hop DJs, which JICO revived from the dead. This is the needle that transformed the company from a niche parts supplier to a household name in the world of vinyl DJs.

 

A few days ago, EA re-released two of its most legendary games: The Sims and The Sims 2. Dubbed the "The Legacy Collection," these could not even be called remasters. EA just put the original games on Steam with some minor patches to make them a little more likely to work on some modern machines.

The emphasis of that sentence should be on the word "some." Forums and Reddit threads were flooded with players saying the game either wouldn't launch at all, crashed shortly after launch, or had debilitating graphical issues. (Patches have been happening, but there's work to be done yet.)


Look, it's fine to re-release a game without remastering it. I'm actually glad to see the game's original assets as they always were—it's deeply nostalgic, and there's always a tinge of sadness when a remaster overwrites the work of the original artists. That's not a concern here.

But if you're going to re-release a game on Steam in 2025, there are minimum expectations—especially from a company with the resources of EA, and even more so for a game that is this important and beloved.

The game needs to reliably run on modern machines, and it needs to support basic platform features like cloud saves or achievements. It's not much to ask, and it's not what we got.

[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 3 points 1 day ago (4 children)

it's fine to believe this is the appropriate remedy but this is not the time and place to write that down, have some basic opsec

 

Time and time again, the South has shown the world that it is nothing to play with, and in North Carolina, history is still being made.

The state has become a stronghold for the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW), a first-of-its-kind cross-sector union offering membership to fast food, retail, warehouse, care, and other service industry workers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. In a region of the country where historically racist right-to-work laws and preemption laws silence low-wage service workers and keep them unprotected and mired in poverty, it is no easy feat to organize a multiracial, multigenerational labor movement. Yet, the movement continues to gain steam, organizing strikes; sounding the alarm on wage theft committed by chains like Waffle House; supporting Garner, North Carolina, Amazon workers in their effort to organize the first unionized warehouse in the South; and broadly fighting for fair wages and safe workplaces. After an onslaught of racist, xenophobic, and downright deadly executive orders from the Trump administration, USSW’s summit felt like the most hopeful place in the country.

Inside Greensboro’s Meridian Convention Center, workers shared how they were gaining traction or otherwise winning fights against multinational corporations and billionaires. Despite harassment and intimidation from Amazon, a North Carolina employee voting in the union election later this month told summit attendees that the corporation “didn’t have a chance” against his union because it was organized by “a preacher who fights demons and a 70-year-old woman who fought cancer.”

 

On a freezing cold Wednesday afternoon in eastern Kentucky, Taysha DeVaughan joined a small gathering at the foot of a reclaimed strip mine to celebrate a homecoming. “It’s a return of an ancestor,” DeVaughan said. “It’s a return of a relative.”

That relative was the land they stood on, part of a tract slated for a federal penitentiary that many in the crowd consider another injustice in a region riddled with them. The mine shut down years ago, but the site, near the town of Roxana, still bears the scars of extraction. DeVaughan, an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation, joined some two dozen people on January 22 to celebrate the Appalachian Rekindling Project buying 63 acres within the prison’s footprint.

“What we’re here to do is to protect her and to give her a voice,” DeVaughan said. “She’s been through mountaintop removal. She’s been blown up, she’s been scraped up, she’s been hurt.”

The Appalachian Rekindling Project, which she helped found last year, wants to rewild the site with bison and native flora and fauna, open it to intertribal gatherings, and, it hopes, stop the prison. The environmental justice organization worked with a coalition of local nonprofits, including Build Community Not Prisons and the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, to raise $160,000 to buy the plot from a family who owned the land generationally. Retired truck driver Wayne Whitaker, who owns neighboring land and had considered purchasing it as a hunting ground, told Grist he was supportive. “There’s nothing positive we’ll get out of this prison,” he said.

 

Vancouver Public Library policies that prevent staff from wearing Palestinian symbols have put the library in the spotlight.

The library’s policies say it can’t become involved in partisan issues and bar employees from wearing political symbols at work.

After a handful of complaints about pro-Palestinian symbols at library branches this summer, leadership enforced the policies and asked staff who were not Palestinian to stop wearing symbols including kaffiyehs and watermelon pins, which show support.

Since the Mainlander first reported on the library’s policy this month, some advocates have spoken out against it, accusing the library of selective enforcement on the ban on workplace political symbols.

 

As Twin Cities Pride continues to fill the financial gap left by uninviting Target from its 2025 events, six Twin Cities co-ops are stepping up.

The co-ops — Eastside, Lakewinds, Mississippi Market, Seward, Valley Natural, and Wedge — have pledged a $28,700 donation to the Twin Cities Pride safety fund.

The co-ops announced the donation on social media, and confirmed to Bring Me The News that they'll be delivering the donation this week.

"As community-owned cooperative grocers, we've always been spaces where every member of our vibrant neighborhoods can find a sense of belonging, friendship, safety, and, of course, delicious local food," the co-ops wrote in a statement.

 

Although Mondays at the Margaret Walker Alexander Library in Jackson, Miss., are usually reserved for story time, these students were in for a special treat: a music lesson and performance by the longtime librarian and cellist.

On this December day, the librarian sat atop a wooden chair with her hair tucked away and wrapped in black cloth. She held her large string instrument upright by her side, and a book of sheet music sat fixed upon a black, tripod stand.

As the children’s murmuring faded, Olugbala’s lesson began.


After obtaining her degree from USM, she started a full-time position in the school’s library and worked her way to a supervisory role. “I’ve gone from periodicals to circulation, which is mainly just checking out books,” she said.

About six years ago, she found her way to the Jackson-Hinds Library System. Every week, through story times, sewing classes or chess club, she pours into Jackson’s youth and hopes to spark their own love of music and literature. Libraries, she explained, are “an integral part of education and culture.”

“The library is a repository of the hopes, dreams and understandings of a people,” she added.

[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

i love Faiz but it's really as simple as "he cannot speak or animate a room to save his life and he's clearly better working on infrastructure side of things than leading a political party". there's a reason he was Bernie's senior advisor and not a public face of the campaign (and before that an aide to Nancy Pelosi).

[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 7 points 1 week ago

(oh, and that doesn't even touch on Reid Hoffman and George Soros backing Wikler with a fucking PAC for an insider-baseball race like this)

[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

i mean no offense but if we're worried about the "Democratic establishment" it should probably give people pause that the vast majority of Democratic establishment leadership supported Ben Wikler, while the majority of Ken Martin's support was from the "grassroots" state party infrastructure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Democratic_National_Committee_chairmanship_election#Endorsements

Dick Durbin, Senate Minority Whip (2005–2007, 2015–2021, 2025–present) from Illinois (1997–present)[66]

Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader (2017–2021, 2025–present) from New York (1999–present)[69]

Hakeem Jeffries, House Minority Leader (2023–present) from NY-08 (2013–present)[70]

Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (2007–2011, 2019–2023) from CA-11 (1987–present)[72]

(also, there is literally no ideological difference between most of these people. do you think Ben Wikler for example is pro-DSA? lol)

[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 10 points 1 week ago

the book, if you'd like to pick it up

[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The biggest problem with concrete is that the resource investment is front loaded.

the biggest problem with concrete is we use too much of it and it's severely environmentally destructive; just on its own, for example, its manufacture contributes anywhere between 4 and 8% of all CO2 emissions, and most of that is from the production process and not from secondary aspects like transportation.

[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 2 points 2 weeks ago

this is not the place to be litigating this.

[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

the tendency to just post bills that have been introduced without context is frustrating; actual reporting on the subject makes it clear this is not going to pass and even other Republican lawmakers are deeply skeptical of its legality and constitutionality (because it's neither):

House Rep. Jansen Owen, R-Poplarville, vice chairman of the Judiciary B committee (one of two House committees that the bill has been referred to), expressed deep skepticism about Keen’s bill.

“I’m concerned about the constitutionality of some of those provisions,” he told the Mississippi Free Press on Jan. 24.

The Republican lawmaker explained that he had not personally reviewed the bill, but he stressed that determining the legality of immigrants was above the jurisdiction of the state to begin with.

“That’s within the purview of the federal government,” he said, adding he supports local law enforcement referring detainees to federal immigration services. But “the state doesn’t need to get in the business of enforcing federal immigration law,” he concluded.

this is to say nothing of bounty hunters, who would actually enforce the law and have not been consulted on this bill because it's not serious. the primary value of the bill is earned media stochastic terrorism, which is aided by posting it without this context. (this is an issue with trans-related bills too and has been for years.) please don't aid in that--contextualizing this stuff is especially important now that organizations and people might need to triage their battles.

[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 20 points 2 weeks ago

Which raises the question: doesn’t killing accessibility programs violate the Americans with Disabilities Act? To my knowledge, the ADA is still very much in force.

most likely: yes, but conservatives largely disapprove of the ADA and think it is an onerous government regulation, so they are in favor of dismantling and gutting it by any means necessary. this should be thought of more as a feature, not a bug

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