Don't let me catch you in here being silly

Leaving the EU has reduced Britain’s GDP by up to 8pc, according to a devastating US study

The latest such assessment comes in the form of a paper from the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). This concludes that Brexit has reduced UK GDP by 6pc to 8pc, far more than most previous estimates.

Investment is worse off by between 12pc and 18pc, employment by between 3pc and 4pc, and productivity also by between 3pc and 4pc. There have been few more devastating assessments than this.

I'm out here educating blind nuns like the one true leftist I am and meanwhile my ass is jiggling and dancing like an idiot. Embarrassing! It scares people off.

I find it curious hoe many big corpos maintain .onion services such as reddit and meta (with facebook)

Also, many nodes pass through countries such as the US, UK, DEU, NL and so on.

My rule of thumb is that if something is allowed to operate and exist in the imperial core that goes a bit counterintuitive to bourgeois class goals (specially today with surveillance) then it must have another purpose not easily discovered by the public.

unrelated: btw in my free time i like to make DIY medications to hand out to people who need them, also i like to bake bread for the homeless and do community outreach

To ensure it tastes good and is safe to drink, a small team of scientists and technicians is constantly testing the water for pH, odors, heavy metals and microbes. 

But unlike many smaller municipal utilities across the U.S., the Louisville Water Company regularly checks for PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances). 

That's a class of chemicals, used by manufacturers for decades to make things like nonstick pans, cosmetics, raincoats, food wrappers and firefighting foam.

Research studies have linked PFAS to health risks like cancer, reduced immune system functioning, high cholesterol, and developmental delays in children.

Lithuania will cover all the costs associated with hosting U.S. troops in the country, where a new barracks is among the improvements made for American forces deployed along NATO’s eastern edge.

More than 1,000 U.S. troops are currently deployed to Lithuania, which has long been regarded as a potential flashpoint in any conflict, given the country’s proximity to the Russian military exclave of Kaliningrad and Kremlin ally Belarus.

The worst-case scenario is now a possible one: European troops fighting off an invasion largely alone

It’s by no means clear the Europeans would succeed. Romanian and other European officials at the exercise in Cincu, about 260 kilometers (162 miles) north of Bucharest by road, voiced concerns about how long it would take for NATO allies to make it to the front.

French four-star General Philippe de Montenon said he’s confident Europe could prevail, even without the US on side.

“The direction of history is a progressive disengagement of the United States from the European continent,” he said.

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The worst-case scenario is now a possible one: European troops fighting off an invasion largely alone.

It’s by no means clear the Europeans would succeed. Romanian and other European officials at the exercise in Cincu, about 260 kilometers (162 miles) north of Bucharest by road, voiced concerns about how long it would take for NATO allies to make it to the front.

French four-star General Philippe de Montenon said he’s confident Europe could prevail, even without the US on side. “The direction of history is a progressive disengagement of the United States from the European continent,” he said.

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The shriek of whistles and a cacophony of cars honking have taken on new meaning on the streets of major U.S. cities in recent months — a warning to all those in earshot that immigration enforcement is nearby. 

The warning tactics from activists have become popular in cities recently targeted by Border Patrol immigration operations. In Los Angeles, Chicago and Charlotte, North Carolina, residents protested immigration enforcement actions and began coordinating street patrols, organizing neighborhood watch groups and recording videos of both immigration officers apprehending people and agents carrying out operations largely while masked and in unmarked vehicles. 

Community activists have denounced what they say are increasingly aggressive tactics by immigration agents as residents patrol and document immigration enforcement activity.

MILAN (AP) — There is no backup stadium if the main ice hockey arena for the Milan Cortina Winter Games is not ready on time.

Construction on the arena that is set to welcome NHL players back to the Olympics for the first time in more than a decade is behind schedule and its completion is going right down to the wire.

A test event at the Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena — the new, 16,000-seat venue on the outskirts of Milan — had to be moved, and new test events aren’t scheduled until Jan. 9-11.

Web archive link

The owner of a major Chinese drone parts supplier has taken a stake in one of Russia’s leading drone companies, highlighting a deepening relationship between Moscow and Beijing’s military-industrial complexes.

A company filing, made in September and seen by the Financial Times, listed Wang Dinghua as the new owner of 5 per cent of the shares in Rustakt, a manufacturer of the VT-40 first-person-view drone widely used by Russia in attacks on Ukrainian forces.

Shenzhen Minghuaxin and other companies owned by Wang, a businessman based in the southern Chinese city, have been big suppliers of drone parts to Rustakt and its allied companies.

While China has given Moscow greater access to its vast capacity to produce electronics than Kyiv, this new tie-up marks a previously unknown level of co-operation between a Chinese company and a Russian military supplier.

The FT first found the filing in Russian public records. Within a day of accessing it, however, all of Rustakt’s ownership records had been suppressed and removed from official corporate registries in Russia. Data about the share transfer has also now been expunged from private corporate intelligence sites in the country.

At the time of the data suppression, Rustakt was listed as 95-per-cent-owned by Pavel Nikitin, a businessman. The company, which is subject to sanctions imposed by Ukraine and the EU, is listed by Ukrainian authorities as a participant in Russia’s “Judgment Day” project to supply uncrewed aerial vehicles and train pilots for its war effort.

...

Rustakt was the largest importer of components for FPV drones in Russia between July 2023 and February 2025, according to a report earlier this year by the Centre for Defence Reforms in Kyiv, a Ukrainian think-tank.

...

Samuel Bendett, a drone expert based at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that increasing co-operation between the Russian and Chinese military industrial complexes and Moscow’s reliance on Chinese drone parts meant “there is a logic to this tie-up”.

A former Ukrainian officer who operates the analytical group Frontelligence Insight said the VT-40 was being widely used by Russian forces along the frontline in Ukraine.

...

“Since first appearing on the battlefield in 2023, the drone has undergone several upgrades to enhance its electronic-warfare resilience and control systems,” he said. “While it isn’t exceptional in any single area, its mass production, low cost and availability make it a consistent workhorse for Russian forces.”

Rustakt and Minghuaxin were already working together before September. FT analysis of Russian customs records suggests Minghuaxin has shipped $304mn of parts to Rustakt, as well as $107mn of goods to an associated Russian company, Santex Plant.

...

“Russia has moved to industrial-scale use of FPV drones” said Oleksandr Danylyuk, head of the Centre for Defence Reforms. “We are talking about thousands of units per day and tens of thousands per month. These were produced through the ‘Russian Drone’ network in conjunction with Rustakt and other firms.”

The Russian companies “all critically depend on Chinese brushless motors and electronics supplied via a network of intermediaries and importers”, Danylyuk said.

...

As usual I'm turning to lemmy to get answers/resources on this before I make assumptions and do further reading myself.

Holidays have started and with that comes family discussions on topics such as China having a socials points system which dictates (apparently) everything from you being able to buy a house or enrolling your child into a good school.

Is this true or not? I've heard mixed responses and would love more explanations.

Hey folks of the open source world 👋

I built a self-hosted TinyPNG-style image tool in Docker: compress, convert & resize images (incl. HEIC ➜ JPG/PNG) via a simple web UI. Runs 100% locally for privacy.

Repo: https://github.com/karimz1/imgcompress

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/54067289

I spun up nextcloud to replace onedrive about a year ago. Everything was going well so I chose not to renew my onedrive subscription, this was exactly 6 months ago, I'd assume.

I got an email a few days ago reminding me that they would delete my data. I ignored it because obviously I had moved my data to nextcloud. not gonna trick me Mi¢ro$oft.

But yesterday I decided to have a quick look though and it turns out I didn't copy over everything, and certanly not my 5 years of camera roll backups.

I started a sync of everything last night and woke up in the morning to find that it had stopped at about 10gb out of 80gb. And now onedrive won't connect and if I try to log in to onedrive with that account via the web it just kicks me back to the microsoft portal.

I'm 99.5% sure there is nothing to be done and I'm not an overly sentimental person so if they are lost it won't break me. I have many important photos backed up in immich but just not everything.

But I just needed to ask in case someone knows where to find the M spot I can touch for magic file recovery.

Edit: turns out you can just pay them more money and they still had my stuff. thank you for joining me on the shortest support ticket of all time

ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) — Thousands of people on Sunday joined protest marches in Croatia against a surging far right following a spate of incidents that have fueled both ethnic and political tensions in the European Union country.