In reality, Germany became entirely dependent on Russian gas, oil and coal. Think about it as Schroeder, Merkel, Nord Stream. For some reason no one really talked about it.

It was left to Donald Trump to point out the contradictions and dangers in that position. When he did, everybody laughed and pointed to it as proof of what an idiot he was.

While I get that it was obnoxious to have the German contingent there laughing at him as he warned him – prior to Russia draining down Germany’s storage and then using it as leverage – that was also not Donald-Trump-the-individual. That will have been at the tail end of a long chain of warnings from the American government that eventually made it up to recommending that the President publicly comment on it. Trump won’t have been the one to identify it; he’ll just have been the last messenger in a chain of many.

The New Balance of Power in Europe is going to look a lot more like 1848 than 1948. In place of the Austrian Empire, however, will be the alliance of the UK and Ukraine, bound in a hundred year Covenant to secure the peace of Europe.

Ehhh. I think that that’s stretching things.

There were also EU member states who acted; the article is specifically talking about Poland.

I think that there is a fair accusation that the EU as an institution was not very active on this. I think that it’s also fair to say that there are some members who took a long while to move. But the EU isn’t a monolith, either: some member states did move.

And the EU-as-an-institution isn’t static and unchanging, either. Like, I don’t know what changes are being made, but I would assume that having been burned once, EU politicians are probably looking at what they can do to avoid a repeat. Countries don’t normally just sit there are get burned over and over. I would be reasonably confident that Russia isn’t going to be able to use natural gas access as leverage to split the EU again. Maybe it’ll be changes to the Single Market, maybe political changes, maybe counterintelligence stuff, maybe mandates on some minimum level of supply diversification, dunno.

https://www.verizon.com/coverage-map/

This shows that Verizon has good coverage in part of Wanaque, moderate coverage in part, and no coverage in part.

The planning board’s decision was based on health concerns due to the possible negative environmental impact of telecommunication on the residents, especially the children studying at the school who could potentially be exposed to electromagnetic radiation. The town felt the residents would be ‘unsafe’ due to radio frequencies and rejected the company’s notion of building the tower on the land.

I mean, I think that the planning board is idiotic, but I don’t see why T-Mobile cares enough to fight it. If they don’t build it, okay. It looks like the school in question is right in the middle of town. Then Wanaque is going to have crummy cell coverage. Let them have bad cell coverage and build a tower somewhere else. It’s not like this is the world’s only place that could use better cell coverage. The main people who benefit from the coverage are Wanaque residents. Sure, okay, there’s some secondary benefit to travelers, but if we get to the point that all the dead zones that travelers pass through out there are covered, then cell providers can go worry about places that are determined not to have have cell coverage.

If I were cell companies, I’d just get together with the rest of the industry and start publishing a coverage score for cities for cell coverage. Put it online in some accessible database format, so that when places like city-data.com put up data on a city, they also show that the city has poor cell coverage and that would-be residents are aware of the fact.

I don’t really use calendaring all that much, but when I do, I use org-mode agenda in emacs, which seems to do all the stuff that he’s complaining about not having. It does a lot more than I use.

That being said, I get that that’s probably not what he’s after if he’s not an emacs user.

Between the lead lemmy dev, dessalines, using Stalin as his profile picture and this guy using Goebbels, we’ve got a pretty WW2-retro vibe going on.

Ehh. I mean, if they were just banning sex toys, I could believe something like that, but doesn’t explain why they’d ban stuff other than sex toys simultaneously:

Etsy is also banning nudity for human models, including “gluteal clefts and female nipples/areolas.” If you’re selling a sexy item of clothing, for example, you must censor body parts, use a mannequin, or opt for just photographing the clothing.

“Sexual language” concerning incest or “referencing familial relationships” will also be banned now. The examples Etsy lists are “Daddy’s slut” and “Choke me Mommy.” As of publication, these terms are still searchable on Etsy, and so is nude content. Searches for “porn” come up blank.

They are the largest residential homeowners insurers in California, insuring 1 in 5 homes.

“The rate filing that State Farm just made yesterday (Thursday), they’re triggering a rarely used part of the insurance law,” said Soller.

"It’s a regulation meant to address a company’s financial solvency. That’s what they’re saying and we’re going to look closely at that, and we have some serious questions about State Farm’s financial condition and we’re going to get to the bottom of it. "

That actually sounds like a rather bigger deal that I first thought from the title, if they’re on the brink of going under…

Hmm. If the concern is the Etsy brand value, I’d just spin it off into a new company that does permit it. If you’ve already built a network of people selling and buying stuff and the software to do so, terminating it just sends the value of that to zero.

I don’t have a problem with doing this, but I don’t think that it’ll have much effect in policy terms.

Like, the states that are willing to guarantee abortion rights in their constitution are the states that are unlikely to pass a law ban abortions in the first place.

and Democrats across the nation hope similar measures mobilize supporters on Election Day.

I suppose it might do that, though.

A proposed tax hike sparked unrest, but Kenya’s real problem is a debt crisis.

Around $35 million of that debt is owned by foreign creditors, primarily China and powerful international groups like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But Kenya’s economic woes didn’t start recently; the nation’s immense debt stems from an economic boom in the early 2000s, when the government borrowed money from a variety of international creditors to fund public infrastructure projects, supporting agriculture and small and medium businesses and external debt servicing but failed to invest those loans in ways that could grow the economy.

China can lend on whatever terms China wants to, but isn’t the IMF supposed to sanity-check spending when a country comes to them for money, and reject loans if they aren’t going to produce a return?

kagis

https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2023/IMF-Conditionality

When a country borrows from the IMF, the government agrees to adjust its economic policies to overcome the problems that led it to seek financial assistance. These policy adjustments are conditions for IMF loans and help to ensure that the country adopts strong and effective policies.

Why do IMF loans include conditions?

Conditionality helps countries solve balance of payments problems without resorting to measures that harm national or international prosperity. In addition, the measures aim to safeguard IMF resources by ensuring that the country’s finances will be strong enough to repay the loan, allowing other countries to use the resources if needed in the future. Conditionality is included in financing and non-financing IMF programs with the aim to progress towards the agreed policy goals.

So, I’d think that at least one of three things happened here:

• The IMF’s requirements weren’t sufficiently-strong.

• The IMF’s requirements weren’t actually enforced; Kenya did something else with the money.

• Something unforeseeable happened (I assume that COVID-19 might have been a factor, as that impacted economies elsewhere).

reads further

Ultimately, even raising capital is a short-term financial fix to the long-term political problems of corruption, waste, and mismanagement. Efforts to undo those patterns are likely to anger the ultra-wealthy, whose businesses depend on corrupt relationships with the government to thrive.

Well, okay, but taking anticorruption actions can be a requirement of loans. Maybe the government has to decide whether they want to keep those connected people happy or get a loan.

looks back at IMF factsheet

They even list that as a condition that they can impose:

https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2023/IMF-Conditionality

Examples

Improve anti-corruption and rule of law

You can buy discs online.

I don’t speak French either – I just wanted an English-language article about the French elections, but you’re welcome.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I’m sure that you can find media here in the US that is going to provide useful political coverage of France, but I don’t think that this article is gonna be it.

kagis for Le Monde English

Hmm.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/06/29/french-elections-who-would-don-quixote-vote-for-today_6676135_23.html

French elections: Who would Don Quixote vote for today?

Ugh. This is not really what I was hoping for.

checks the BBC

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2q0rv05p19o

French PM in final appeal to stop far-right victory

That’s better.

Lemmy is not designed to provide reasonably-hardened anonymity in the sort of way that Hyphanet, I2P, or maybe Tor or something like that is.

I would not recommend using Lemmy if I were seriously concerned about government prosecution for content on it.

Lemmy’s a good alternative for something like Reddit.

Stewart (and Colbert) are literally a clown

what this job even freaken entails.

You know Volodymyr Zelenskyy, current president of Ukraine?

He’s a comedian who did a political satire TV series about being president of Ukraine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy

Born to a Ukrainian Jewish family, Zelenskyy grew up as a native Russian speaker in Kryvyi Rih, a major city of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in central Ukraine. Before his acting career, he obtained a degree in law from the Kyiv National Economic University. He then pursued a comedy career and created the production company Kvartal 95, which produced films, cartoons, and TV shows including the TV series Servant of the People, in which Zelenskyy played a fictional Ukrainian president. The series aired from 2015 to 2019 and was immensely popular. A political party with the same name as the TV show was created in March 2018 by employees of Kvartal 95.

EDIT: Darn, someone else apparently mentioned it as well, checking their link. I’m still gonna leave this text up, though.

George Washington wasn’t able to attend school after the age of 11, because his father died and he had to take over running the family farm.

https://www.georgewashington.org/education.jsp

Despite being the Commander in Chief of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, the President of the Constitutional Convention, and the first President of the United States, George Washington’s level of education was far lower than any of the other Founding Fathers of the United States. In fact, he was often scorned by some of the other Founding Fathers for this inadequacy. However, this lack of education was not George Washington’s fault. Upon the death of George Washington’s father in 1743, George’s formal schooling ended. He is thought to have attended the nearby grammar school run by Reverend James Marye, the rector of St. George’s Parish, up until this time. Therefore, the extent of young George’s formal educational training was in basic mathematics, reading, and writing.

Although his older half-brothers had the opportunity to gain a formal education over in England at the Appleby School, George was required to take on the responsibility of running the family farm after his father’s death.

On this list, every ranking places him as the highest-ranked President to ever serve other than one that places him at #2 and one that places him at #3:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_presidents_of_the_United_States

Yes. I wouldn’t be preemptively worried about it, though.

Your scan is going to try to read and maybe write each sector and see if the drive returns an error for that operation. In theory, the adapter could respond with a read or write error even if a read or write worked or even return some kind of bogus data instead of an error.

But I wouldn’t expect this to likely actually arise or be particularly worried about the prospect. It’s sort of a “could my grocery store checkout counter person murder me” thing. Theoretically yes, but I wouldn’t worry about it unless I had some reason to believe that that was the case.

Trump’s run on pretty anti-immigrant speech, but he’s pretty moderate in most other respects. He’s probably the least-religious president we’ve ever had, and ran for the “religion party” ticket; he had to run with Pence to make up for lack of appeal to social conservatives. He advocated for (well, or at least gave the impression of) fairly-protectionist policy and ran for the free trade party’s ticket. Since the start of the Cold War, the GOP’s tended to be the hawkish party, and he ran on a relatively noninterventionist platform (though I’ll concede that there’s always been a paleoconservative isolationist faction, but it’s been relatively weak for quite some decades).

Trump constantly says outrageous stuff – he definitely makes it a point to be politically incorrect – but his policy is actually not especially exciting.

I looked at his website way back in the 2016 election before his campaign had built up any steam. This was back when Hillary was running a nice, typical website, long list of issues, you know what campaign websites normally look like. At that point in time, he – hillariously – had only three issues on his campaign website. And none of his actual positions represented much of a change from the status quo:

• Opposition to FTAs; at the time, we had been negotiating TPP with the Pacific Rim countries and TTIP with the EU. Both had effectively failed already at this point. Trump gave the public the impression that he was responsible for this, but it was something that was going to happen under Obama or not. He also spent a long time complaining about NAFTA. Thing is, I already had listened to speeches from a few politicians who had played this game with NAFTA (e.g. Ron Paul complains a lot about NAFTA but is quieter about why he opposed it, because it wasn’t permissive enough, whereas most people listening to him are upset that it isn’t restrictive enough). I had a pretty good guess that Trump was going to pull similar shennanigans on policy, looked at his white paper and sure enough, no specific changes, just lots of fluffy emotional text giving the impression that he was in opposition. And in office, he took NAFTA, negotiated a few minor changes, and then renamed it to USMCA. Having kicked the legs out from decades of time that manufacturing unions had built public opposition to NAFTA, he left the thing alone. So, he advocated for a position that sounded unusually close to the position that the folks on the left side of the spectrum wanted and, in fact, essentially left existing policy alone.

• Opposition to immigration. Now, you could make a fair argument that he worked pretty hard to sell a nativist image. But his actual policy also wasn’t particularly notable. He put through one regulation that SCOTUS was pretty sure to shoot down and kept it a constant source of political theater for a significant chunk of his term. He made an enormous deal out of his wall, kept it in the news, gave the impression without ever saying so that he was going to build a wall along the entire border. But this isn’t even a new game to play from Trump. Bush Jr used the same shtick back when he ran. In his case, it was a “fence” and played a less-prominent role in his campaign.

• Gun rights. He has no specifics and this is trivial to do: just don’t involve yourself in additional restrictions. This has been a pretty stock generic Republican point because it costs nothing to do ever since the Democrats did the federal Assault Weapon Ban, which was not popular and sunsetted; it’s something that every candidate just slaps on their page.

Hell, Trump was a Democrat back when Bush Jr was in office.

But Trump is far right. The news says so.

If you read news media that favors the Democratic Party, it will say that Trump is far right. If your regular news sources favor the Democratic Party, you have probably read a lot of articles over past years that say that.

If you read news media that favors the Republican Party, you will find plenty of material that will say that Biden is far left.

But Biden’s not far left! That’s ridiculous!

Yup. But presenting someone as being extreme is a good way to make them less appealing. You can find people who will self-identify as “left-of center” or “right-of-center”, even “left” or “right”. But very few politicians will call themselves “far left” or “far right”. That’s usually a label used by the media favoring the other side.

There are a lot of things that I don’t like about Trump. But they mostly deal with his presentation and the tactics he uses. I dislike his willingness to make contradictory statements. I don’t like the fact that he tries to piss people off about someone else – especially via dishonest claims – and exploit that anger. I dislike his willingness to disregard the political-consensus-building role that elections have, to concede, though I’ll grant that maybe if there’s a problem there, it needs to be fixed in the underlying system. But he’s extraordinary mostly in his presentation, not in the policy that he’s adopted. We had him for four years. US policy didn’t change much, certainly not from mainstream Republican Party policy.

When Trump first ran for office, I remember Bill Kristol – a conservative commentator who really dislikes Trump – stating that most of what Trump says is misdirection. Basically, Trump can’t force the media to say what he wants. But he can make a colossal amount of noise about something outrageous that they cannot resist covering, so that they talk about that instead of whatever meaningful actual policy stuff is going on. The coverage may not be positive, but it lets him direct the media narrative – it’s all about whatever outrageous thing he said on Twitter. I was a bit skeptical at the time. I could believe that Trump wouldn’t change much on NAFTA because I’d seen other Republican politicians play the same game he was, but had a harder time buying that on immigration. But that was, I think, pretty accurate as an assessment. Most of what is unusual about Trump are the outrageous things that come out of his mouth when he’s politicking. It’s not really his policy.

I believe that candidates from a given area are expected to perform disproportionately-strongly in the state that they’re coming from. Sometimes I’ve seen Presidential candidates coming from large states, with commentary that they’ll bring that state’s support to the table.

That being said, I don’t have numbers available.