Engineering is a grand name for dumping a big load of iron sulphates into the ocean to see what happens.

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It is a fair position in the sense that it’s technically within their legal rights to do whatever the fuck they want, but it is a feeble sham compared to the full and well-behaved fedi interoperability they should’ve had from the start since that was how it was sold from to their users from the beginning.

If they some day get there, I would still be open to considering federating with it. For now “it’s an ongoing process” as they carefully tweak things to find out how far they can go with the strictly limited access to the outside world they allow, while still keeping all their users captive.

If you were a threads user, you’d be unable to reply to this even if you did somehow see it. I welcome any of them to do so and prove me wrong.

It makes sense. I just wasn’t sure how likely it would be for species to evolve in significant ways over a long time without obvious changes to the shape of their fossils. Difficult to spot evolution happens a lot, apparently:

Cryptic, or sibling, species are discrete species that are difficult, or sometimes impossible, to distinguish morphologically and thus have been incorrectly classified as a single taxon. Cryptic species are found from the poles to the Equator and in all major terrestrial and aquatic taxonomic groups [2, 3]. For example, a recent meta-analysis yielded 2,207 articles reporting cryptic species in all metazoan phyla and classes, including 996 new species in insects, 267 in mammals, 151 in fishes and 94 in birds [2].

Doesn’t it? It doesn’t seem obvious either way. Are you an actual paleontologist, or just guessing?

You’ve got to keep the airlines running, though. How could we burn such enormous amounts of fossil fuels for ever and ever without them?

While I could imagine reasons to protest against “space radar dishes” it seems that these radar dishes are to be situated down on the ground. They already have nuclear weapons, you know. It’s probably okay if they have radar too.

Is it a good article? I don’t know. There’s some truth in there, but I’m pretty sure there are a hell of a lot more suburban Trump voters than there are rural Trump voters. And in my experience of it the people who live in small towns, medium-sized cities, suburbs, edge city, and even actual rural areas are in general not nearly as monolithic and politically unified as they’re portrayed there. Even if it’s always clear which party is going to get the majority of votes, they most often don’t get all the votes. Perhaps like the writer of that article many of them like to romanticize the idea of being “rural” because they mow their own lawn and could drive to a farm in half an hour if they wanted to, but although there’s some truth in there I think it’s mostly foolish rationalizations. Big cities are alien to me too, that’s not a real reason to buy into all that cheap right-wing mythology that gets used to explain why we should vote against our own interests.

Government isn’t about industrial policy any more, the leaders are all too busy with the latest all-purpose political strategy: Flood the zone with useless bullshit, hope something good happens that you can take credit for.

There’s way more than enough wealth in this country to go around, if it were evenly distributed.

Everyone who is aware of the facts agrees that the big terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were the result of a conspiracy. That the American president was in on it seems unlikely. Some of your “reasonable” questions seem ridiculous, such as the idea that a person having “limited flight time” makes any difference at all. The invasion of Iraq was the result of another conspiracy, one which was ongoing at the time and ready to use any convenient excuse to get started.

I don’t know much about Doug Ford, but this sounds a lot like one of those “every accusation is a confession” situations.

37% of them went so far as to get a mastodon account and mention it in their twitter profile, and then maybe one third of those put some substantial effort into making it work. That’s ~90% who didn’t bother. In the one small-ish academic field where I followed some of the new arrivals on mastodon when they got there, it very much appeared to me that the failure had nothing to do with the decentralized nature of the platform. It was simply that the small number who made the transition did not add up to enough to form a critical mass and get the discussion going. Some few of them did give it a good try.

As a child of the 20th century, so did I.

sign in to websites using your personal web address, without having to use your e-mail address.

What is the point of that? For convenience, email addresses are much easier to come by than is web hosting. For being securely anonymous it’s also much easier to do through email — but not by so much that requiring a website rules it out, if that’s the intention.

One way to stop the alt-right Russian propaganda campaigns from undermining trust in our institutions would be to improve those institutions in order to avoid giving those who aim to disrupt our society so much authentic discontent to work with. But that would take competent government and difficult choices, grappling with under-acknowledged problems, and making radical changes to our economy to make it more financially, democratically, and ecologically sustainable. Why bother, when you can instead simply hire anti-Kremlin influencers like me?

• Genuine disdain for authoritarianism in general and Vladimir Putin in particular
• My Internet comments are regularly seen by an audience of dozens
• Reasonable hourly rates

Give me a call and I’m sure we can work something out.

“commit today to voting for a carbon tax election”

The other guy’s line deserves a mention as well. I hope the other parties join him in calling for a carbon tax election. Let it be a referendum on whether or not to do anything about climate change. Only Poilievre can lose this next election for the Conservatives, and this just might be one way to do it.

Such a dismissive attitude towards politics — that it is only about waging election campaigns, irrelevant to the more substantial matters of government which can proceed once the election is won without the impediments of what are normally thought of as political concerns such as balancing competing interests, weighing public perceptions, and making delicate compromises — is what I object to, yes.

“I’m not focused on politics. I’ll let other parties focus on politics.”

What kind of bizarro world does Ottawa exist in when the country’s top politician does not understand that politics is his job?

By Grabthar’s Hammer, what a camcorder.