In reality, Germany became entirely dependent on Russian gas, oil and coal. Think about it as Schroeder, Merkel, Nord Stream. For some reason no one really talked about it.

It was left to Donald Trump to point out the contradictions and dangers in that position. When he did, everybody laughed and pointed to it as proof of what an idiot he was.

While I get that it was obnoxious to have the German contingent there laughing at him as he warned him – prior to Russia draining down Germany’s storage and then using it as leverage – that was also not Donald-Trump-the-individual. That will have been at the tail end of a long chain of warnings from the American government that eventually made it up to recommending that the President publicly comment on it. Trump won’t have been the one to identify it; he’ll just have been the last messenger in a chain of many.

The New Balance of Power in Europe is going to look a lot more like 1848 than 1948. In place of the Austrian Empire, however, will be the alliance of the UK and Ukraine, bound in a hundred year Covenant to secure the peace of Europe.

Ehhh. I think that that’s stretching things.

There were also EU member states who acted; the article is specifically talking about Poland.

I think that there is a fair accusation that the EU as an institution was not very active on this. I think that it’s also fair to say that there are some members who took a long while to move. But the EU isn’t a monolith, either: some member states did move.

And the EU-as-an-institution isn’t static and unchanging, either. Like, I don’t know what changes are being made, but I would assume that having been burned once, EU politicians are probably looking at what they can do to avoid a repeat. Countries don’t normally just sit there are get burned over and over. I would be reasonably confident that Russia isn’t going to be able to use natural gas access as leverage to split the EU again. Maybe it’ll be changes to the Single Market, maybe political changes, maybe counterintelligence stuff, dunno.

https://www.verizon.com/coverage-map/

This shows that Verizon has good coverage in part of Wanaque, moderate coverage in part, and no coverage in part.

The planning board’s decision was based on health concerns due to the possible negative environmental impact of telecommunication on the residents, especially the children studying at the school who could potentially be exposed to electromagnetic radiation. The town felt the residents would be ‘unsafe’ due to radio frequencies and rejected the company’s notion of building the tower on the land.

I mean, I think that the planning board is idiotic, but I don’t see why T-Mobile cares enough to fight it. If they don’t build it, okay. It looks like the school in question is right in the middle of town. Then Wanaque is going to have crummy cell coverage. Let them have bad cell coverage and build a tower somewhere else. It’s not like this is the world’s only place that could use better cell coverage. The main people who benefit from the coverage are Wanaque residents. Sure, okay, there’s some secondary benefit to travelers, but if we get to the point that all the dead zones that travelers pass through out there are covered, then cell providers can go worry about places that are determined not to have have cell coverage.

If I were cell companies, I’d just get together with the rest of the industry and start publishing a coverage score for cities for cell coverage. Put it online in some accessible database format, so that when places like city-data.com put up data on a city, they also show that the city has poor cell coverage and that would-be residents are aware of the fact.

I don’t really use calendaring all that much, but when I do, I use org-mode agenda in emacs, which seems to do all the stuff that he’s complaining about not having. It does a lot more than I use.

That being said, I get that that’s probably not what he’s after if he’s not an emacs user.

Between the lead lemmy dev, dessalines, using Stalin as his profile picture and this guy using Goebbels, we’ve got a pretty WW2-retro vibe going on.

Ehh. I mean, if they were just banning sex toys, I could believe something like that, but doesn’t explain why they’d ban stuff other than sex toys simultaneously:

Etsy is also banning nudity for human models, including “gluteal clefts and female nipples/areolas.” If you’re selling a sexy item of clothing, for example, you must censor body parts, use a mannequin, or opt for just photographing the clothing.

“Sexual language” concerning incest or “referencing familial relationships” will also be banned now. The examples Etsy lists are “Daddy’s slut” and “Choke me Mommy.” As of publication, these terms are still searchable on Etsy, and so is nude content. Searches for “porn” come up blank.

They are the largest residential homeowners insurers in California, insuring 1 in 5 homes.

“The rate filing that State Farm just made yesterday (Thursday), they’re triggering a rarely used part of the insurance law,” said Soller.

"It’s a regulation meant to address a company’s financial solvency. That’s what they’re saying and we’re going to look closely at that, and we have some serious questions about State Farm’s financial condition and we’re going to get to the bottom of it. "

That actually sounds like a rather bigger deal that I first thought from the title, if they’re on the brink of going under…

Hmm. If the concern is the Etsy brand value, I’d just spin it off into a new company that does permit it. If you’ve already built a network of people selling and buying stuff and the software to do so, terminating it just sends the value of that to zero.

I don’t have a problem with doing this, but I don’t think that it’ll have much effect in policy terms.

Like, the states that are willing to guarantee abortion rights in their constitution are the states that are unlikely to pass a law ban abortions in the first place.

and Democrats across the nation hope similar measures mobilize supporters on Election Day.

I suppose it might do that, though.

A proposed tax hike sparked unrest, but Kenya’s real problem is a debt crisis.

Around $35 million of that debt is owned by foreign creditors, primarily China and powerful international groups like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But Kenya’s economic woes didn’t start recently; the nation’s immense debt stems from an economic boom in the early 2000s, when the government borrowed money from a variety of international creditors to fund public infrastructure projects, supporting agriculture and small and medium businesses and external debt servicing but failed to invest those loans in ways that could grow the economy.

China can lend on whatever terms China wants to, but isn’t the IMF supposed to sanity-check spending when a country comes to them for money, and reject loans if they aren’t going to produce a return?

kagis

https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2023/IMF-Conditionality

When a country borrows from the IMF, the government agrees to adjust its economic policies to overcome the problems that led it to seek financial assistance. These policy adjustments are conditions for IMF loans and help to ensure that the country adopts strong and effective policies.

Why do IMF loans include conditions?

Conditionality helps countries solve balance of payments problems without resorting to measures that harm national or international prosperity. In addition, the measures aim to safeguard IMF resources by ensuring that the country’s finances will be strong enough to repay the loan, allowing other countries to use the resources if needed in the future. Conditionality is included in financing and non-financing IMF programs with the aim to progress towards the agreed policy goals.

So, I’d think that at least one of three things happened here:

• The IMF’s requirements weren’t sufficiently-strong.

• The IMF’s requirements weren’t actually enforced; Kenya did something else with the money.

• Something unforeseeable happened (I assume that COVID-19 might have been a factor, as that impacted economies elsewhere).

reads further

Ultimately, even raising capital is a short-term financial fix to the long-term political problems of corruption, waste, and mismanagement. Efforts to undo those patterns are likely to anger the ultra-wealthy, whose businesses depend on corrupt relationships with the government to thrive.

Well, okay, but taking anticorruption actions can be a requirement of loans. Maybe the government has to decide whether they want to keep those connected people happy or get a loan.

looks back at IMF factsheet

They even list that as a condition that they can impose:

https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2023/IMF-Conditionality

Examples

Improve anti-corruption and rule of law

You can buy discs online.

I don’t speak French either – I just wanted an English-language article about the French elections, but you’re welcome.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I’m sure that you can find media here in the US that is going to provide useful political coverage of France, but I don’t think that this article is gonna be it.

kagis for Le Monde English

Hmm.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/06/29/french-elections-who-would-don-quixote-vote-for-today_6676135_23.html

French elections: Who would Don Quixote vote for today?

Ugh. This is not really what I was hoping for.

checks the BBC

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2q0rv05p19o

French PM in final appeal to stop far-right victory

That’s better.

About 9% intercept ratio during Desert Storm, which was 30 years ago, but both the Patriot and the Al Hussain missiles were pretty much brand new.

Regarding being brand new, what I mean is that the Patriot existed for an anti-aircraft role, but its anti-ballistic-missile capability wasn’t supposed to have been done by that point.

Shit-talking aside, though, Russia never claimed that the S-500 was actually done – I assume that they just yanked their prototype onto the battlefield because the S-400 wasn’t able to intercept ATACMS missiles either (which it’s supposed to be able to – the S-400 doesn’t have an excuse). We rolled out the Patriot when it was still in a prototype, half-baked stage in Iraq, too – just that it was all we had that might be able to intercept a ballistic missile, and we really needed the capability right then – and it didn’t fare well either.

So I suppose that the S-500 guys probably don’t necessarily deserve quite the ribbing that the S-400 guys do. They were probably put in kind of the same place that our Patriot guys were.

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-s500-air-defense-system-crimea-ukraine-kyrylo-budanov-1912333

The S-500 is designed to intercept short-to medium-range targets, including ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles, according to Russian state-run media.

Less than two weeks in the field and the first S-500 has apparently already intercepted a ballistic missile of the sort it was designed to counter.

One imagines that additional S-500 systems would surely produce additional interceptions.

Lemmy is not designed to provide reasonably-hardened anonymity in the sort of way that Hyphanet, I2P, or maybe Tor or something like that is.

I would not recommend using Lemmy if I were seriously concerned about government prosecution for content on it.

Lemmy’s a good alternative for something like Reddit.

Decided to be conservative and leave the Picatinny-rail-to-bayonet-lug piece on the top off, I see.

Stewart (and Colbert) are literally a clown

what this job even freaken entails.

You know Volodymyr Zelenskyy, current president of Ukraine?

He’s a comedian who did a political satire TV series about being president of Ukraine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy

Born to a Ukrainian Jewish family, Zelenskyy grew up as a native Russian speaker in Kryvyi Rih, a major city of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in central Ukraine. Before his acting career, he obtained a degree in law from the Kyiv National Economic University. He then pursued a comedy career and created the production company Kvartal 95, which produced films, cartoons, and TV shows including the TV series Servant of the People, in which Zelenskyy played a fictional Ukrainian president. The series aired from 2015 to 2019 and was immensely popular. A political party with the same name as the TV show was created in March 2018 by employees of Kvartal 95.

EDIT: Darn, someone else apparently mentioned it as well, checking their link. I’m still gonna leave this text up, though.