Surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, caused largely by burning fossil fuels, have produced potent changes in the way plants grow — from increasing their sugar content to depleting essential nutrients like zinc. Experts fear the degradation of Earth’s food supply will cause an epidemic of hidden hunger, in which even people who consume enough calories won’t get the nutrients they need to thrive.

archive.is

Mildly interesting loop

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has asked the Army’s top uniformed officer to step down, the Pentagon said Thursday without giving a reason for the departure as the United States wages a war against Iran.

Occam’s razor says the reason is likely that a 44-year-long career army official refused to further escalate the commission of war crimes that his boss and his boss’s boss keep demanding. Perhaps more firings will continue until WWIII is too big to fail.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/54743054

February 5, 2026 - 10:00am to 11:00am PST

You see it. We see it. ICE and CBP are out of control. Many people are exercising their right to say it's unacceptable. But what are the limitations around recording immigration agents? Is it true that ICE is using facial recognition technology? Are you unsure how to protect your privacy while protesting? EFF has called together an online town hall to discuss ways to stay safer and how the digital rights community can help address brutality against immigrants, observers, and all those involved in holding ICE accountable.

Join our panel featuring EFF's Executive Director Cindy Cohn, Senior Staff Attorney Saira Hussain, Security and Privacy Activist Thorin Klosowski, and Senior Staff Technologist William Budington.

Follow the link to RSVP and get the Twitch livestream link

February 5, 2026 - 10:00am to 11:00am PST

You see it. We see it. ICE and CBP are out of control. Many people are exercising their right to say it's unacceptable. But what are the limitations around recording immigration agents? Is it true that ICE is using facial recognition technology? Are you unsure how to protect your privacy while protesting? EFF has called together an online town hall to discuss ways to stay safer and how the digital rights community can help address brutality against immigrants, observers, and all those involved in holding ICE accountable.

Join our panel featuring EFF's Executive Director Cindy Cohn, Senior Staff Attorney Saira Hussain, Security and Privacy Activist Thorin Klosowski, and Senior Staff Technologist William Budington.

Follow the link to RSVP and get the Twitch livestream link

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/44032506

The political crisis in the United States today is the consequence of economic processes that have been underway for generations. The rise of fascism is not a fluke brought about by the demagoguery of a single individual, but the logical outcome of profit-driven capitalism.

The neoliberal order paved the way for this by deepening the gulf between the rich and poor, militarizing policing in order to preserve those disparities, and creating a downwardly mobile population desperate for scapegoats. In a globalized economy, politicians cannot mitigate the impact of capitalism on their constituents without investors taking their business elsewhere.

Consequently, “left” parties have consistently failed to deliver on their promises, while reactionary parties have pulled public policy and permissible discourse steadily to the right—with centrists serving as a sort of ratchet preventing policy and discourse from shifting back.

US citizen here. I recently returned from my first international travel in a few years, and I was unpleasantly surprised by how easy it was to get back into the country.

In the returning citizens line, everyone was directed by an officer to one of three tablets each on a stand about 3-4 feet high. You stuck your face in the right spot for the camera and the tablet turned green. And that was it, free to go. No conversation with a human about where you went, no human verifying your passport, no need for the passport at all. Just a face scan (presumably matching a database of digitized passport photos) and you’re done.

Makes me wonder what the bar is for various local law enforcement or different federal agencies to get access to the database and hook in with surveillance cameras.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/1359360

Climate goals go up in smoke as US datacenters turn to coal

Let’s say I’m browsing Home and come across an interesting post by [email protected] in community b.lemmy/c/whatever, while my home instance is c.lemmy. If I use the share button to get a link to the post, which server should it point to?

Maybe this is my misunderstanding of federation, but I think my client is doing all of its interaction with c.lemmy and everything is marked with where it came from. So the user originally submitted it to a.lemmy, whose backend then replicated it over to b.lemmy and from there out to all other instances that federate with b.

In my mind, the appropriate way to reference the post in question is via the server that hosts the community, b.lemmy. But when I get a link from Voyager’s share button, it points to a.lemmy. Is this a feature or a bug?

Probably more relevant today than when the article was first published 7 years ago, this is the guy who went on to make Signal possible in its current form.

If walking away from $850 million feels like penance, Acton has gone further. He has supercharged a small messaging app, Signal, run by a security researcher named Moxie Marlinspike with a mission to put users before profit, giving it $50 million and turning it into a foundation. Now he’s working with the same people who built the opensource encryption protocol that is part of Signal and protects WhatsApp’s 1.5 billion users and that also sits as an option on Facebook Messenger, Microsoft’s Skype and Google’s Allo messenger. Essentially, he’s re-creating WhatsApp in the pure, idealized form it started: free messages and calls, with end-to-end encryption and no obligations to ad platforms.   Acton says that Signal now has unspecified “millions” of users, with a goal to make “private communication accessible and ubiquitous.” While Acton’s $50 million should take it a long way—Signal could afford only five full-time engineers until he came along—the foundation wants to figure out a perpetual business model, whether that means taking corporate donations like Wikipedia or partnering with a larger company, as Firefox has done with Google.

None of the other private messaging services that people like to talk about on Lemmy have a solidly moral billionaire on their side.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/35648744

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/50309495

NASA chief to defy agency's charter, terminating science

This is the swivel mechanism for the high pressure air at the center of my Campbell Hausfeld automatic retracting air hose reel. That hose is crimped directly on the swivel mechanism instead of adding negligible cost with a threaded fitting.

The upshot is that the hose is not replaceable by itself if damaged. And of course parts are not readily available. Throw out the whole thing instead and buy something new. Assholes.

Incogni has great advertising claims, but it feels pretty expensive as an ongoing subscription. Have you used it or do you currently use it? Please tell me about it.

The link is to a year-old article that helped me decide not to pay Alaska Airlines’ voluntary SAF carbon mitigation fees. I’m still not certain about the right choice, and would like to hear your thoughts on the matter.

The big picture includes acknowledgement that there’s no such thing as ethical consumption within capitalism, so in some ways this choice is entirely irrelevant. Also that flying is by far the most polluting form of transportation per passenger mile so we should each minimize doing it. Finally that flying has the most challenging logistics of shifting energy sources, fundamentally because batteries are heavy.

Alaska offers me a choice during the checkout procedure to contribute to SAF accounting for between 5% and 20% of the fuel that my flight will use, but it has nothing to do with the fuel actually consumed by my flight. They are already buying some amount of SAF and using it in their SFO hub only, so the program is hand waving about the fungibility of fuel consumption. Really they’re just offering me the opportunity to donate money towards their SAF usage, indirectly supporting the growth of the SAF industry.

It seems to me that the whole SAF industry is currently greenwashing bullshit, piggybacking on the big lie from the past few decades that adding ethanol to automotive gasoline is “sustainable” in some meaningful way. But that ignores the water usage depleting aquifers at an accelerating rate, necessary fertilizer use and soil depletion, using food-producing acreage for fuel instead, energy usage in planting/harvesting/refining/distilling, and so on.

Please validate my choice not to donate to the current state of SAF, or provide links to interesting reading that supports your claim otherwise.