I can’t decide what’s more depressing.

A) The subject of the linked article, or

B) The fact that an article on World Socialist Web Site is linking to posts by Amnesty UK and Defend our Juries (three organizations that should all know better by now) on Xitter.

Jesus

At an absolute bare minimum, the last two should be cross posting everything to Mastodon, and the first should be linking to the Mastodon accounts whenever available.

Oh, look! Amnesty UK has a Mastodon account that they’re not fucking using, apparently never have.

[Edit: spelling]

UG Solutions (UGS) defended its employees’ qualifications for the job, saying it does not screen people out for “personal hobbies or affiliations unrelated to job performance”.

I had to submit to a background check for a job sitting at a desk writing code and had absolutely nothing to do with security or carrying a weapon. Pretty sure that being a member of an anti-Islamic biker gang would have disqualified me.

No. My memory is that the English language article was a bit unclear on the details and had several indications that the author didn’t actually understand the technology, but someone said a Japanese language article did a better job of explaining it.

Brine and fresh water doesn’t make any sense, because you’re spending energy to create fresh water with the brine as the waste. Just turning around and recombining it to make evergy again is stupid. You can’t even get back as much energy as you used to make the fresh water.

But, spending the energy to create the fresh water, letting people use that water as normal, collecting their waste water as normal, treating the waste water as normal, and then, instead of just dumping the treated waste water into the sea, recombining it with the brine to make energy makes a ton of sense.

There was an article the other day about a new plant in Japan that takes the brine from a reverse osmosis plant, and reverse osmosisizes [?] it again back into treated waste water to generate electricity. As I recall, it’s not full scale and meant more as a test/demo/proof of concept, but apparently it works ok for a first attempt.

Russia has won stolen a lot of land and technically they have won stolen (at a big cost).

It matters fuck all what it cost them to steal land.

“Oh, it cost me a lot of money for all the equipment I needed to ‘win’ the money from your bank vault, so you should just let me keep what I 'won '” 🙄

I feel like Ukraine has already made a perfectly reasonable offer. “GTFO of our country and then we’ll stop exploding your stuff.” Russia needs to take that deal.

The front fell off! Is that supposed to happen?

Gerrymandering has been an obvious problem for decades. The only people that didn’t see a problem are those congress critters that got elected to one. (“Well, it worked to get me elected so it’s obviously not broken.”)

The shape of my very blue congressional district in a very blue state most closely resembles projectile vomit on a linoleum floor.

Democrats have had multiple opportunities to fix this shit over the decades, and instead they’ve just been using it to their advantage wherever possible. The Fair Representation Act has been our best opportunity to fix gerrymandering, and it died in committee in every congressional session since 2017.

I would argue most of the elected representatives at the state and federal levels have no interest in fixing gerrymandering, because gerrymandering is what got them elected.

One recent poll found 71% of people in Scotland have an unfavorable opinion of Trump, compared to 57% of people in the United Kingdom overall.

JFC UK?!?! A not insignificant chunk of that 57% are apparently Scots, so what the hell is wrong with the rest of you?

This is a clear example of bureaucrats getting so focused on their task that they miss the forest for the trees. They need to have a little conversation with themselves.

We need to get an accurate count of the Sentinelese!

Q: Why do we even do the census in the first place?

A:Well, as a society we’ve decided that, knowing how many people we have, and where they are, and some other important demographics about them makes it easier and more efficient for the government to effectively serve to the people.

Q: Are the Sentinelese going to benefit in any way from this?

A: Well, no, but…

THEN YOU DON’T NEED TO COUNT THEM!

My current conspiracy theory is that Trump’s owners have decided that he’s become more of a liability than an asset, and are throwing him under the bus to replace him with someone more under their control.

My “evidence” is that this steady daily trickle of new evidence tying Trump to Epstein didn’t just miraculously spawn into existence this week. It’s been in people’s filing cabinets and video/photo archives for years

I just find it really hard to believe none of this was “found” earlier. Instead it’s being “found” now, but not all at once. It’s being “found” at a rate that keeps the story at the top of the news cycle.

Specially Especially

Many people are saying…

Did Ozzy Osbourne really eat a bat onstage? Rock’s most outrageous rumor, explained

The answer is: yes, kinda, a little bit, but there’s some contours to the tale.

" It doesn’t matter if the enemy is called Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or any other name,” he added.

How about, “Palestinian children?”

I imagine Trump has personal experience with knowing what “committing mortgage fraud” looks like.

Who did I scold? You lied. I just pointed out the lie.

👋

I hate to be a downer, but…

Building, running and maintaining a website isn’t free. Building, running and maintaining a popular website is fucking expensive. Somebody’s got to pay those bills.

As the saying goes, if it’s free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Corollary, if it’s not free, you still might be the product.

Furthermore, these days I would assume that 99.9% of profiles on a “free” dating site are scammers, or bots, or scammer bots, many of which are probably run by the people running the website.

And to double down on the downerism, subscription based dating sites/apps are financially motivated to keep you paying for as long as possible. They are not motivated to help you find a match, cancel your subscription, and live happily ever after.

In an attempt to not be a total downer jerk, my suggestion would be to find local meetup groups that interest you (even if just barely) and start going to those consistently.

That’s how I met my spouse almost 14 years ago. We were both on the dating apps but not finding each other. Eventually we met through a meetup group that I ran, and after months of casually chatting occasionally at group meetings, sparks spontaneously started flying. 🤷

The research concludes that policymakers need to better explain the purposes of environmental legislation in culturally sensitive ways

I am so sick of the willfully ignorant expecting society to repeatedly bend over backwards to slowly drag them out of the dark ages without hurting their feelings. Fuck!