alyaza [they/she] @ alyaza @beehaw.org

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people.

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long-time Beehaw users might see much of this article as the offline corollary to one of the works that influences our community philosophy, which is "Killing Community"

If you want to absolutely destroy a website that is all about building communities and meeting new people, then aim for the site and all communities to always be growing as much as possible. Make that a design goal of the site. Pump those subscriber numbers up.

What you’ll get is a place where everyone is a stranger, where being a jerk is the norm, where there is no sense of belonging, where civility and arguing in good faith is irrelevant because you’re not talking to someone, you’re performing in front of an audience to make the number next to your comment go up so you can briefly feel something that almost resembles belonging and shared values.

the relevant paper here:

Humpback Whales Blow Poloidal Vortex Bubble Rings.

When we everyday people see patterns, we then make deductions from them that tend to be accurate. [...] Let people see evidence and make their own deductions

...no? as humans, our pattern recognition, while well refined, often still causes us to make completely incorrect inferences from nothing. even restricted to the realm of the medical: you need only look at what people think made them sick versus what actually does; most people will blame food poisoning on the last thing they ate, or their sickness on the last person they encountered, even when there are many other possible reasons for their sickness.

also: a pre-print by definition has not been subject to rigorous peer review--it's roughly analogous to a draft--so i would be exceedingly hesitant to even assert something like it having "good data." even if you're the author you wouldn't definitively know that at this stage.

see also the Detroit Socialist article Airgas Teamsters on Strike in Ferndale: Greed Is in the Air

Duncan is an interesting guy these days. he is one of a number of Republicans who was basically run out of the party for refusing to be fascist and autocratic enough, and he was formally expelled from the party last year after endorsing Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris. i doubt he has sufficient distance or credibility to make it through a Democratic primary, but you never know. the Republican-to-Never Trumper-to-Democrat pipeline has been a pretty successful move for other people

because western media--at least on the issue of Palestine--is almost entirely biased toward Israel, Israel's right to exist without change to its apartheid and oppression of Palestinians, and the legitimacy of Zionism as an ideology; Al Jazeera obviously is not, and is far more willing to cover what Israel is doing without attempting to justify it, explain it away, or downplay it

the "chart" is just the thumbnail for the submission, so yeah; you have to actually click through, since that's the point of a link aggregator

for more on this, see the New York Times article on the observatory: How Astronomers Will Deal With 60 Million Billion Bytes of Imagery

Each image taken by Rubin’s camera consists of 3.2 billion pixels that may contain previously undiscovered asteroids, dwarf planets, supernovas and galaxies. And each pixel records one of 65,536 shades of gray. That’s 6.4 billion bytes of information in just one picture. Ten of those images would contain roughly as much data as all of the words that The New York Times has published in print during its 173-year history. Rubin will capture about 1,000 images each night.

As the data from each image is quickly shuffled to the observatory’s computer servers, the telescope will pivot to the next patch of sky, taking a picture every 40 seconds or so.

It will do that over and over again almost nightly for a decade.

The final tally will total about 60 million billion bytes of image data. That is a “6” followed by 16 zeros: 60,000,000,000,000,000.

the Supreme Court is not a legitimate institution and you should be screaming at the Democratic Party to annihilate it if they ever come back into power, because otherwise it will be yet another reason this country croaks

the study: Majority support for global redistributive and climate policies

We study a key factor for implementing global policies: the support of citizens. The first piece of evidence is a global survey on 40,680 respondents from 20 high- and middle-income countries. It reveals substantial support for global climate policies and, in addition, for a global tax on the wealthiest aimed at financing low-income countries’ development. Surprisingly, even in wealthy nations that would bear the burden of such globally redistributive policies, majorities of citizens express support for them. To better understand public support for global policies in high-income countries, the main analysis of this Article is conducted with surveys among 8,000 respondents from France, Germany, Spain, the UK and the USA. The focus of the Western surveys is to study how respondents react to the key trade-off between the benefits and costs of globally redistributive climate policies. In our survey, respondents are made aware of the cost that the GCS [a global carbon price funding equal cash transfers] entails for their country’s people, that is, average Westerners would incur a net loss from the policy. Our main result is that the GCS is supported by three quarters of Europeans and more than half of Americans.

Overall, our results point to strong and genuine support for global climate and redistributive policies, as our experiments confirm the stated support found in direct questions. They contribute to a body of literature on attitudes towards climate policy, which confirms that climate policy is preferred at a global level17,18,19,20, where it is more effective and fair. While 3,354 economists supported a national carbon tax financing equal cash transfers in the Wall Street Journal21, numerous surveys have shown that public support for such policy is mixed22,23,24,25,26,27. Meanwhile, the GCS— the global version of this policy—is largely supported, despite higher costs in high-income countries. In the Discussion, we offer potential explanations that could reconcile the strong support for global policies with their lack of prominence in the public debate.

the study: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

the crowsourced sheet, which is still taking submissions: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/158rlsPk0jxXwh3GIKl2YP1W84dPLC_2RXZnMjaG5bVw/edit?usp=sharing

this is going over hilariously on social media, despite the insistence by the Grammy's that it has nothing to do with Beyonce's win last year:

Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. told Billboard that the proposal for the two new categories was submitted previously several times before it passed this year. The new categories “[make] country parallel with what’s happening in other genres,” he explained, pointing to the other genres which separate traditional and contemporary. “But it is also creating space for where this genre is going.”

Traditional country now focuses on “the more traditional sound structures of the country genre, including rhythm and singing style, lyrical content, as well as traditional country instrumentation such as acoustic guitar, steel guitar, fiddle, banjo, mandolin, piano, electric guitar, and live drums,” the 68th Grammys rulebook explains.

see also the associated Waging Nonviolence article Timely lessons for keeping people safe in the streets

for context: Shawn Fain has been pushing for this since at least the beginning of 2024. so by the time the date happens, he will have been organizing this for over four years--that is the kind of lead time you need for this to not just be toothless posturing (and there's a decent chance it still won't be nearly as sweeping as you might expect of a general strike due to low US union density).

you can't just organize a general strike on the fly, and this is an actual one with actual backing from unions that's been organized since well before our current issues. and currently it's a struggle to even get many unions to align their contracts in a way that would be conducive to the date (since that's not a thing you can just do, you have to negotiate that), so it's not even a guarantee that the over three years of lead time given is sufficient.

‘Uber for Getting Off Antidepressants’ is just... something else. what are these buzzwords

someone on Bluesky analogized what is happening to how QAnon transpired for most people, which is that the crazification it was causing simmered under the surface until January 6, when it all publicly exploded and the influence it had over a non-trivial block of the population became undeniable. hard to disagree with that!