Spyke

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world

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Zelenskiy secures $325m in new US aid even as Republican support wanes

From a strategic standpoint, we are fighting a proxy war with one of the world "superpowers" without putting a single American soldier at risk. We are straining the resources of said "superpower", exposing their military weaknesses, and thus indirectly strengthening our position of military power on the world stage.

From an economic standpoint, the war being in Ukraine is fantastic for the US military industrial complex. This is a rare case of public support of increased arms production. It's an opportunity to offload old weapon inventory, and gives manufactures the luxury of honing logistics of new weapon production without the threat of conflict to the United States. Weapon manufacturers currently have live-fire test zone in conflict with a superpower to test old and new weapon systems.

It's all red-state, support our troops, big-business war profiteering touted by conservatives for the last two decades safely bottled up on the other side of the world. Why would conservative-minded politicians not support the war?

Every headline of "We gave $X of new aid to Ukraine" is windfall subsidy for one of the strongest sectors of the US economy - weapons manufacturing.

reddit

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Reddit will offer shares in its IPO at issue price to 75,000 of its most active users

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I hope investors will see that the technology powering Reddit is no longer novel in execution or deployment. ActivityPub and its derivatives like Lemmy have proven this fact in practice.

The value of Reddit lies in its userbase and quality of dataset. As Reddit evolves to become increasingly hostile toward its userbase, the most valuable members become the most heavily impacted. This leads to the migrations away from the platform and eventual degradation of data quality. The sale of user data to AI ahead of the IPO is an important indication that the Reddit c-suite is keenly aware of this.

Hopefully the financial world will view the IPO as a cash-out for investors and not a viable investment into a sustainable business model.

news

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Smash Mouth frontman Steve Harwell in hospice care, representative says

Smash Mouth story time:

At the ‘height’ of their career, Smash Mouth and Harwell were responsible for one of the funniest and most bizarre concert experiences of my lifetime.

Smash Mouth performed at Universal Studios during one of the Mardi Gras theme nights. The concert took place at an outdoor stage just after the nightly parade.

They were terrible. Smash Mouth refused to play either of their one hit wonders, instead they chose to struggle through a bunch of unknown songs. The crowd grew more and more agitated as the set list wore on. Eventually, enough was enough.

Freshly armed with Mardi Gras beads, the audience switched from booing to hurling the beads at Harwell. It wasn’t just one guy. Beads were flying at the band from all corners of the audience. In defiance, Smash Mouth continued to play whatever shitty song they were on about while actively dodging incoming bead fire.

Finally, Harwell took a string of beads center-mass. That was it. The crowd emerged victorious. The horrible Smash Mouth music stopped. Harwell ran off stage with the band following close behind. Beads continued to rain in from the crowd as Smash Mouth made their escape.

But it wasn’t over. Chants of “All-Star” echoed through the audience-turned-angry-mob. The people wanted their pound of flesh, in the form of a early 2000’s radio pop song. Someone backstage convinced Smash Mouth that running away from their fans was a bad look. The band returned several minutes later and angrily performed ‘All-Star’. The beads continued to rain in, and the band played on.

TLDR: I watched Smash Mouth get pummeled with Mardi Gras beads during a shitty, halfhearted performance.

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Chernobyl's mutant wolves appear to have developed resistance to cancer, study finds

40 years seems like a relatively short time for natural evolutionary processes to adapt a mammal to a highly radioactive environment. That’s like 10 to 20 generations of wolf and suddenly they are cancer resistant?

After all the needless loss of life surrounding the Chernobyl reactor explosion, finding viable cancer-resistant genetic mutations would be the ultimate silver lining.

news

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Appellate judge refuses to halt Trump's $454 million fraud penalty while he appeals

The appellate judge paused Engoron’s two-year ban on Eric and Donald Trump Jr. holding executive positions in New York corporations, meaning they can continue running the company. He also paused a similar three-year ban that applied to Trump, but said the company must move forward with hiring an independent compliance director to ensure it follows financial reporting obligations and rules.

That’s more of a concession than I would like to see the courts make. Trump’s lawyers argued that government oversight of the Trump organization is sufficient to secure non-payment of the judgment against him and a bond of just a faction of the judgement amount is merely “additional security”.

Like if I robbed a bank and after I’m found guilty I tell the court: “I appeal the guilty verdict! But I’m gonna keep most the money while I do. You’re the government, you know where I live, so it’s all good man.”

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Proton Mail says that the new Outlook app for Windows is Microsoft's new data collection service

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Of course you can access everything through the web on Linux. I really like Proton's web mail interface. Unfortunately, Proton does not have a Linux analog to their windows client that provides automatic file syncing. I think that what the commenter is complaining about.

There is a dedicated Linux client for Proton VPN and in my experience it integrates quite well on Debian-based distributions.

news

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Alabama Supreme Court chief justice spreads Christian nationalist rhetoric on QAnon conspiracy theorist's show

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The Supreme Court has been captured by a handful of ideological billionaires. Turns out it’s relatively easy and cheap (if you’re a billionaire) to own a Supreme Court justice. All it took was a few free vacations and scraps from the table to own half the court.

Alabama has been a socially failed state since reconstruction. I don’t know why anyone would willingly live there.