Spyke

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world

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Two years under Taliban rule in Afghanistan: ‘I never thought the world would forget about us so quickly’

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I never thought about this at the time. It was all just shocking and frankly pathetic. Didn't realize the men had the least at stake, while women had the most, but were not allowed to join the fight. Many men probably didn't care or even resented the "changes". (Women's rights. Sounds familiar. MAGA?) Unwilling to put up any kind of fight for that kind of future for their partners and daughters.

I wonder what most Afghan women think of these men now. And if joining the military was ever a realistic possibility, and could have changed the result.

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Texas could get a 205-mph bullet train zipping between Houston and Dallas

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Republicans like Abbott went on Fox News and blamed windmills for the storm outage. The party is very different than they were when these projects started, when economics mattered. Texas politics may still accidentally allow a select few progressive things to happen, but the builders and owners must be extremely "friendly" and perfectly thread the needle. Oil and gas owns this state, including the windmills, probably.

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Bill Maher Bashes ‘Barbie’ as a “Preachy, Man-Hating Zombie Lie”

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Maher completely lost focus after T**** was kicked out of the White House. Last I checked, he was obsessed with GOP culture war nonsense (woke, gen z, etc). Spends valuable time on show whining about personal problems (like his mansion's solar panels). Increasingly out of touch, or unable to care about important issues. Needs to be liked more than ever (esp. certain celebs, see Musk interview). Extremely sensitive about his age. He'll be off HBO soon, unless daddy CEO loves him.

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JPEG XL: How It Started, How It’s Going

I'm a huge fan. Have had surprisingly fantastic results with JXL (smaller size, same quality). Lossless option is huge bonus. Encoding tools are ready to go and work as expected (unlike AVIF, etc). I recommend XnView (there's a portable version) to check it out, convert, test, play. The format just needs recognition and adoption at this point.

pics

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Trump's mug shot

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Yup. pats the old camera softly It should've been retired 5-10 years ago. Instead, it will work until death, like most things in "the richest country on Earth'". Sad.

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People who back into parking spots: Why?

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raises hand

I actually like cars. (They're... "cool". I play Forza sometimes, lol.) But the reality is they're fucking expensive to maintain, along with insurance and taxes and fuel. And very much not fun to drive under normal circumstances, next to removeds and idiots. And terrible for the environment, at absurd US numbers at least.

I'd rather save thousands of dollars and have public transit or easily maintained bike. But bikes are not viable when planet is trying to kill us (Texas is 100-110 °F for 2 months straight now).

world

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Taiwan hits back at Elon Musk claim that it is ‘an integral part of China’ and teases him over Beijing’s Twitter ban

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When relentless coverage of terrible people, and their insane words/actions, results in said people winning fair elections, I think the intelligence of the electorate might be the biggest problem.

But yes, that's beside the point, as is their growing mental illnesses and instability. The wealth/power they've been allowed to accumulate will always make them a danger/threat that should be taken seriously.

reddit

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Sound Off: How many 10+ year redditors have left the site?

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Same boat. I remember being a big fan of Digg (and Kevin Rose), and looking down upon "new" copycat... Reddit. Then they completely changed (removed voting?) almost overnight, and so I gave Reddit a chance. Loved it (and later Sync) and used almost daily! Until... well, fuck Steve Huffman, we all know what happened. Hello Lemmy.

I have not deleted account or comments yet, but logged out everywhere, try to never visit, and will never use the (ad-infested) app. Lemmy community (and Liftoff) has been great, just needs to keep growing with good people.