I mean, I have a chaotic solution we might try. Let’s simply…reverse the Budapest Memorandum! Let’s just hand Ukraine a few hundred thermonuclear warheads, with launchers and launch codes and say, “here, go have fun!”

“The president has announced…that we have reversed the Budapest Memorandum…”

:D

Cities should all operate publicly-run day labor programs to protect workers from shit like this and from contractors who would steal their wages or put them in unsafe conditions

Sorry, in 2026, the best we can do is to allow you to legally sell yourself into indentured servitude for a period of time. Yup, that’s it. We’re bringing back literal peonage. Also we’re bringing back debt slavery for student loans. /sigh

Yes. Do not purchase a dozen gallons of flammable spirits and some matches, and then “return” them to Home Depot after the store is closed and empty of people.

I don’t get why companies can’t solve this problem entirely by just flying out applicants for in-person interviews towards the end of the hiring process. Or hell, maybe only even ask the candidate to fly out for a visit after they’ve already accepted the job offer. Just one minimal and relatively cheap step to confirm the remote worker you’re hiring is who they claim to be. For the cost of a flight, a night or two in a hotel, and some meal vouchers, you can verify someone’s identity. Sure, maybe not for freelance work. But for any well paid technical field? This is a trivial expense.

I know that anybody who has consistent access to an internet connection in North Korea is almost certainly working for the benefit of the great leader and they aren’t actually seeing any money or benefit for themselves.

Eh, this doesn’t sound like the job you would give someone in a prison camp. You’re talking about people that you’re allowing to interact and work regularly with foreigners outside the country. That does not sound like the type of position you trust to a political prisoner. That sounds like a position you put someone of high trust. It’s probably a pretty cushy job as the standards of North Korea go. Sure beats scratching at dirt or working in some godawful arms factory. It’s probably the type of job you need some good family connections in the Party in order to get. Sure, the government takes all the direct monetary benefit of the work, but that is just kindof how Communist systems work. I imagine the people working those jobs have some of the highest standards of living available to people that aren’t senior party leadership.

It’s more just that while they’re calling Mamdani a communist, at the same time they’re doing the thing that is literally the single most Communist thing a government can do: have the state gain direct ownership or control of the means of production. Communism is many things depending on where, when, and who you ask. But the bare minimum, the common denominator under all forms? State owns of the means of production. And here’s Trump literally seizing the means of production. Not just giving out grants or loans, but literally taking a permanent equity stake in a major international company. That is the literal, most basic definition of a Communist action. If literally seizing the means of production isn’t Communist, what the hell is?

Meanwhile, Trump is over here practicing literal state socialism. The government now owns 10% of Intel.

Harris could have promised to kiss Bezos’s feet and anyone remotely antifa should have still voted for her.

You’re beyond saving. You are why Kamala lost the election. Please emigrate to Russia so you can vote for the lesser of two evils there and not pollute our electorate further.

Frankly, the answer should be for every site to just cut the UK off entirely. Let them have their own little North Korean style micronet. Maybe when the people of the UK can’t visit anything but a bunch of miserable English websites, they will get off their asses and elect competent leaders. If not, well maybe they’re just not the sort of people we should allow access to the global communications network. Let the barbarians stew in their own barbarism.

The company that did this didn’t directly clone Dire Wolves. Instead, they identified several “key traits” that defined the species external morphology and then edited wolf DNA to gain those traits.

First, this obviously isn’t bringing the species back. It’s more like artificial convergent evolution than anything else. But even if you accept that bringing a species back that will fit the same ecological niche and resembles the old species is “bringing it back,” there’s a much bigger problem. We cannot know what the “key traits” for a dire wolf are.

We don’t know what key traits are actually required for dire wolves to re-inhabit their ancient ecological niche. All we have are their skeletons. We don’t know what their fur was like. We don’t know if they had any key soft tissue adaptations. We don’t know if they have any unique behaviors that were key to them surviving in their niche. Imagine trying to bring back bowerbirds if you didn’t know anything about their nest building behaviors. You could try to modify something similar from a similar species, but if all you had are their skeletons, you would have no idea that they were famous in life for making their elaborate nests.

No one alive has ever seen a dire wolf. No one has ever spoken to someone that has seen one. No one has ever read an account of what these animals looked like, behaved like, and lived like. We’re just assuming here that their behavior is identical to other wolf species, and that the only differences are the major morphological ones. We can’t know what these creatures were truly like, as they were hunted to extinction long before writing was ever invented. And there’s nothing in the oral histories either, beyond just maybe stories about great big wolves that might, by some miracle, be a distant remembrance of them.

Also, for perspective:

the two species share 99.5 per cent of their DNA

And humans and chimpanzees share 98.8% of our DNA. Imagine if we went extinct, all you had was our bones, and some space alien landed and tried to bring us back by modifying chimp DNA. If they had nothing else to go on, how close do you think they would actually manage to really bringing us back? Odds are they would end up with something more akin to various ancient hominid species than our present human race.

She did this as an act of civil disobedience and let them know in advance she was coming and was going to use the women’s restroom.

But imagine she didn’t. Instead she went to the capitol, and, following the law, used the male restroom. Just look at her. Do you think she wouldn’t have been harassed or possibly arrested for doing so?

In practice, trans bathroom bans work like this:

Use the restroom the law requires you to: get harassed, beat up, and possibly arrested.

Use the restroom that matches your presentation: violate the law, hope no one clocks you, and you don’t get arrested.

I’m a trans woman myself. You wouldn’t know it if you saw me in public. And I don’t even have any ID documents with an “M” on them. If I wanted to obey the Florida bathroom law, I would have to use the men’s restroom. But then when I inevitably caused a scene, I wouldn’t even be able to show an officer that I was just complying with the law.

Trans bathroom bans are ultimately just a means of driving trans people from public life entirely. Comply with the law? Get assaulted by some chud who thinks you’re violating the law. Disobey the law? Risk arrest for actually violating it.

There’s a reason labeling this a genocidal movement is not hyperbole.

Yeah, mutual aid works on the local level or in insular communities like long-term discord groups with a tight group of regular members. With community mutual aid, I’m generally in favor of just taking people at their word. If they say they need help, give them help. No need to interrogate them like the food stamp office will. You prevent people from abusing the system by simply not granting endless requests from the same person. Or if someone needs severe aid, at that point you can start actually verifying their story, helping them access government benefits, helping them find employment, etc.

But that kind of open approach works for in-person aid. It doesn’t work for anonymous online aid, where someone can use bots to spin up hundreds of convincing profiles each begging for money.

I just don’t think mutual aid works well in an online context. The only online context it works in is among communities like small discord groups where people know each other for years. But on a lemmy or mastadon-type service? Mutual aid is impractical. Any people asking for aid should be directed to local groups that can help them in person.