Does anybody have any idea how to evaluate Israel's claim that it wasn't them, that it was a Palestinian rocket towards Israel which went wrong and hit the hospital?

Other than just assuming that whatever side you don't like is lying?

I honestly don't have a heuristic to evaluate that other than "the side I trust less must be lying about it"

And I'd like a better way to find out the truth than that

I had read that the Biden administration kept pressuring the railways behind the scenes after the strike was averted till the unions got what they had wanted in the first place anyway.

I don't know where I first read it but this link seems to confirm it.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/01/railroad-workers-union-win-sick-leave

“We’re very happy about this. We’ve been trying to get this for decades,” said Artie Maratea, president of the Transportation Communications Union. “It was public pressure and political pressure that got them to come to the table.”

That's the right thing to do. Help people who need help.

"I'm gonna only help people who support me, if you don't support me I'll fuck you over" is a Trump way to think.

So apparently they really suck at it? That's kind of hilarious

The trolls have demonstrated a weak command of idiomatic English with articles that, while prolific, often misspell key names or use English and Mandarin interchangeably. Other posts — like a critique of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 trip to Taiwan — appear long after the events they purported to preview.

At other times, the spammers attempted to push niche and esoteric Chinese propaganda talking points onto unreceptive audiences by piggybacking on clickable search engine optimized headlines. In one case cited by Meta researchers, Spamouflage Dragon trolls filled the replies of social media forum questions like “How do I lose belly fat through weight lifting?” with propaganda articles about “Chinese Police Strengthening International Law Enforcement Cooperation.”

They don't mention what the propagandists push about COVID. The usual line from weirdo propagandists is that COVID is a secret bioweapon and was released from the Wuhan labs intentionally. I assume China wouldn't sign on to that one? Do they just push the scientific consensus, which is that the origin is unknown but is probably natural, and possibly an unintentional lab leak? Or an exaggeration thereof which completely discounts the lab leak theory but still asserts what is most probable -- it's from animals? That's pretty weak sauce for propaganda. Maybe they push some nuance about COVID that only the Chinese government cares about. Or maybe they go buck wild and say it was developed by NATO biolabs in Ukraine.

this has nothing even remotely to do with patents, fam

but it is indeed bullshit.

the purpose of a "trademark" is to prevent the public from being deceived about what they're purchasing, so you can't sell "Big Macs" on your own because the public might be deceived into thinking they were purchasing a product from McDonalds, which (I assume) has trademarked the use of "Big Mac" for fast food.

I HIGHLY doubt the Linux Foundation owns the trademark for "Segmentation Fault" with respect to random merch, so... yeah 100% bullshit

(The image does also say "Linux IP" in addition to "Linux Trademark" and I wonder what the hell that is supposed to mean, since "IP" covers a multitude of dissimilar things, maybe it's just a vague handwavy assertion they make in order to make a takedown without particularly justifying it?)

Fucked around; found out.

I don't think you can put this at the feet of BIG DICTIONARY.

Dictionaries are generally descriptivist and don't preach. It's style guides and individual angry language weirdos who preach.

So the idea is that because FTX and Yuga Labs were all mixed up in each other's business, and because FTX was secretly the buyer of the Bored Apes, then functionally this was a giant wash trade, one step removed. A sham auction whose purpose was to blow up the price of NFTs, and Sotheby is supposed to be culpable because they participated in the sham and lent it legitimacy with their reputation.

That seems like a pretty legit complaint.

I mean, I have no sympathy for the people who got fucked buying NFTs but I have even less sympathy for the people who did the fucking, so absolutely let this lawsuit happen and let them burn.

Here's an unbiased source.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/population-decline-by-state

People are indeed getting the hell out of certain blue states, NY, CA, and IL, probably cause they're fucking expensive to live in - at least in the big cities where most of the population is.

And FL, TX, ID, SD, and MT are picking up population. ID, ST, and MT are tiny population wise so any change there is a blip, but people seem to really be moving into FL, SC, and TX, for whatever reason.

This data is a couple years old so it wouldn't reflect recent legal and political changes.

Here's the thing though. Changes in total population of a state on this list are all between -1% and +2%. That matters, but it's not like whole towns are being depopulated or anything.

The brain drain issue -- doctors fleeing red states -- sounds like it's considerably more dramatic than that, given that most TX counties have zero gynecologists and a significant fraction have zero doctors.

The takeaway from this article, IMHO, isn't "Facebook did something terrible" so much as "when you live in a world where the government is terrible, services which compromise your privacy can be exploited against you." It no longer becomes a matter of "advertisers have access to my intimate details" but "people with the power to jail me unjustly have access to my intimate details."

I mean, it's reprehensible for Facebook to have done that, but we kind of never expected them to be the good guys. It's more "the compromise of our basic privacy is more dangerous than you might have thought when it was just being used to advertise to us."

Reconsidering my choice to live inside a walled glass enclosure, only able to eat fish which are thrown in to me, constantly being watched by gawping spectators.

Yay, our carcereal state subjects people to random violence, and it's OK because one of the people it happened to, happens to be a loathsome monster!

"Too young" keeps on going up as your parents get older.

I'd say that having three different words for "because" increases nuance. As the link to merriam-webster's article pointed out, you get a nuance of formality between "because" and "as"; "as" is somewhat more formal. I'm not sure if there's another nuance between "because" and causal "since" but smart money is on there being one (if you survey the use of the two I bet you will find there are very subtle differences of usage there -- there almost always are nuances of difference between supposedly synonymous words, even if they're only differences like level of formality).

Changing the markings isn't so much the issue, it's making (potentially dangerous) structural changes to the building without a permit. You can't put up something like that without certifying that it's done in such a way that it's not going to fall on somebody on the sidewalk and kill them.

(though according to the article it's for "design and safety" reasons, which sounds like maybe there are also rules about making visual changes to buildings, that you have to follow.)

In any case I don't know if it's Elon's property or not, there are a lot of places where he's renting (and not paying his rent, and getting kicked out)

That next year that transition of power came under direct attack

I'm pretty sure Obama allowed power to be transferred peacefully to Trump, just like every other president had before him.

Doesn't he though? He's gotten grumpy about helping the Ukranians with internet from time to time, and he's declared that Russia should get to keep Crimea. I bet if the invasion of Ukraine happened today he'd have refused to help Ukraine with Starlink at all, he's so far down the far-right rabbit hole.

The way the text here it phrased, it sounds like McCarthy wronged the Democrats by giving them nothing, and they're getting him back by letting him go. But the article makes it clear that they asked for nothing and he expects nothing from them, and respects that.

No need to imply animosity and back biting between McCarthy and the Dems that isn't there.

It's more like "you do your thing, we'll do our thing, and that's OK, no matter how it turns out."

Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Tuesday that he would not give Democrats anything in exchange for their votes to help save his Speakership, after Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) moved to force a vote on ousting him.

“They haven’t asked for anything. I’m not going to provide anything,” McCarthy said in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“Hakeem runs his conference,” McCarthy said of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). “He’s going to have a conference, and everybody’s going to talk about it, and I’m not going to put Hakeem in any position, and I respect whatever decision anybody makes.”

ZING!

Goldwater himself was considered a dangerous right-wing extremist nut by the standards of the 1960s. He was a rabid anti-Communist in the style of the John Birch Society, he was anti-Civil-rights, beloved by the Klan. He lost to LBJ partly cause the Democrats painted him as someone ready to start a nuclear war and the voters bought it. Basically on every issue but religion, today's right-wing nuts would probably love him.