cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/30250632

Thought this was interesting. A little gaming history intermixed with EVs, Off grid living, Hydrogen and a bunch of other things.

High in the hills of Hawaii’s Big Island, Henk Rogers—best known for bringing Tetris to the world—is taking on a new kind of challenge: building a fully off-grid life. On his 32-acre Pu‛uwa‛awa‛a Ranch, he’s growing his own food, producing his own energy, and working to protect Hawaii’s future.

If you are interested in Security Hardening, I have made significant enhancements to my Free/ FOSS tutorials and scripts in this arena.

https://eirenicon.org/security-hardening-a-journey-with-eyes-open/

Archived

After decades of relative peace in Europe following the end of World War II, with a few notable exceptions, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine served as a stark reminder that the specter of war is still alive. Within a few days in February 2022, millions of lives were turned upside down and Europe’s sense of safety was deeply rattled.

The longer the war dragged on, the more aware Europeans became of the looming threat that Putin’s Russia poses to European peace, especially after Donald Trump was re-elected and immediately threatened to withdraw support for Ukraine and questioned the U.S. commitment to NATO, which had effectively shielded Western Europe from Russian aggression for decades.

According to a new YouGov survey, many Europeans even consider World War III a possibility, with at least 30 percent of respondents in France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the UK saying that it’s very or fairly likely that there will be another world war in the next 5-10 years. With respect to Europe, tensions with Russia are seen as the biggest threat by far. Around 50 percent of respondents from Germany, France and the UK said that Russia poses a major threat to peace in Europe, while tensions between Europe and the U.S. and between European nations are not perceived as an imminent threat.

[...]

Columbia University student protesters have drawn both praise and criticism after 75 were arrested by the New York Police Department for occupying a room in Butler Library, an escalation in their call for the university to divest from Israel.

On Wednesday afternoon, one hundred university students, led by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (Cuad), took over the Lawrence A Wien Reading Room in Columbia’s main campus library, “renaming” it the “Basel Al-Araj Popular University”.

Cuad released a statement on Substack as the “Emergency Rally” began, stating that “as long as Columbia funds and profits from imperialist violence, the people will continue to disrupt Columbia's profits and legitimacy”.

The action took place in one of the most populated buildings during finals week, Butler Library, which is named after former Columbia president Nicolas Murray Butler, a man that Cuad accuses of being “a shameless Nazi sympathizer” who “limited the number of Jewish people who could attend Columbia, and expelled students who protested against Columbia's ties with the Nazis”.

Link without the paywall https://archive.ph/wbeSU

Israel launched a campaign against former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger after he blamed the Israelis for the breakdown of his mission to achieve an interim agreement with Egypt following the 1973 war, according to declassified British documents

An Israeli source close to Rabin told the ambassador that the Israeli prime minister believed that Kissinger “had tried to deliver the Israelis to Sadat” and he (Kissinger) “had become angry when he found that it would not work”. Rabin came to the conclusion that “he only wished he could talk directly to the Egyptians” without Kissinger’s go-between.

At a dinner with visiting US Congressmen, Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defense minister, accused Kissinger of “humiliating” him, complaining that he played role in delaying his important visit to the US. Peres asked the Congressmen to “say as much (about Kissinger claimed behaviour) when they returned to Washington”.

Another player was Yehoshua Rabinowitz, then Israeli minister of finance who was also informed by Washington that he must postpone his visit to discuss economic aid yet once more. Sources told the UK ambassador that Rabinowitz understood that he will not be received until the re-assessment of American Middle East policy was completed. Rabinowitz detected the “hand of Kissinger in the repeated delays of his mission”, the sources said.

The dispatches from the British embassy in Tell Aviv indicated that the Israelis were talking “as if they were convinced that Kissinger himself is the chief organiser of the present wave of American displeasure which has reached such heights”.

Senior official in Israeli Foreign Ministry Yeshayahu Anug strongly criticised Kissinger in a conversation with the UK ambassador. He said “for the first time we saw him (Kissinger) behaving like a Jew”. Anug argued that when the shuttle went wrong, Kissinger “behaved as if he had been personally betrayed by the Israelis and lost his cool completely”.

Trump's announcement on Tuesday that the US would cease bombing the Houthis, not even two months after he foolishly escalated the cynical sea-and-air assault he inherited from the Biden administration, came as a surprise, particularly while Sanaa International Airport lay smoking on Monday from Israeli warplanes. But the year-long US campaign, from the start, lacked any theory of victory.

Any de-escalation in this frightening Middle Eastern moment is cause for relief, particularly as the Yemen Data Project claims US-led strikes last month alone killed 208 civilians, including 17 children, and wounded 366 more. The Houthis, formally known as Ansar Allah, frustrated the Navy, rather than defeated it outright. And Trump can say whatever he likes to portray this as a victory. But the material realities in Yemen and the Red Sea, as well as both presidents' objectives for the air-sea campaign, make the US capitulation undeniable.

Bonus points if the person saying the offensive thing thought they were being complimentary.

To be clear, if the value of your package is $100, you now only pay an additional $54 in Trumpariffs, before shipping and other taxes, instead of $120.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/43917595

Dozens of community kitchens in Gaza were forced to shut down on Thursday due to lack of food, amidst Israel’s ongoing blockade aimed at starving the Palestinian population and annexing their land.

Assume you have all the luxuries of a modern life in your Tardis (toilet, hot showers, TV, books, game console, ...) which doubles as a mini self-sufficient apartment with it's own energy stores and generation.

Where in history would you go if comfort wasn't an issue?

...The subject of Trump family corruption is an inexhaustible one. His first term was notorious for the use of his “branded” properties, various Trump hotels and resorts, as conduits for corporations and foreign governments to funnel cash into the family coffers. Behind the scenes, far greater sums were raked in through the overseas operations of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, with more than a billion dollars “invested” by Saudi monarchs and Gulf sheiks alone.

However, Trump’s reelection last November and his return to the White House on January 20 have been accompanied by an even greater orgy of money-grubbing. By some estimates, the Trump family wealth has doubled since the election. His social media company Truth Social, despite negligible advertising and customer base, has seen its stock price soar. The president has made significant cash from the sale of branded items, ranging from replicas of his fascist executive orders to bibles, golf clubs and guitars. Trump has also raked in $500 million in contributions to various political action committees to fund future campaigns, although the Constitution bars him from seeking a third term in the White House.

But nothing compares to the vast fortune accumulated through the Trump family’s plunge into the cryptocurrency market, with the launching of World Liberty Financial, a venture that is 60 percent owned by the Trumps. It is overseen by sons Don Jr. and Eric and co-managed by Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump’s top Middle East envoy, billionaire Steve Witkoff. World Liberty has partnered with an array of companies whose financial flimflam is supposedly “regulated” by federal agencies now controlled by Trump himself.

There was little to no interest in World Liberty before the election, but after Trump’s victory, the value of its cryptocurrency, known as $WLFI, soared to a nominal $1.1 billion. Estimates reported by Fortune and Forbes magazines place the Trump family’s total crypto fortune at between $2.9 billion and $6.2 billion...

I moved out of the house where these were taken from last week. Nice memory.

Porn. It's porn.

Cross posted from https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/34345715

Archived

Original Bloomberg link (paywalled).

One of China’s largest online recruitment platforms has quietly stopped providing wage data it’s compiled for at least a decade, making it more difficult to gauge the health of the world’s biggest labour market just as it comes under strain from US tariffs.

Zhaopin Ltd has yet to publish its reports on average wages companies offered to new hires in 38 key cities for the past two quarters. It’s previously released them regularly within the first month after each quarter ended.

Beijing-based Zhaopin didn’t reply to a request for comment.

The missing numbers extend a pattern in China of data providers discontinuing or pausing statistical releases. Alternative figures on employment have become especially sparse, depriving economists and investors of information about a subject that’s grown more sensitive due to soaring youth unemployment, widespread salary cuts and lay-offs.

Zhaopin’s last report, published in early October, showed a decline in salaries from a year ago in the three months ended September, in a resumption of a downward trend that started in mid-2023. The figures it provided were one of the few independent statistical sets that reflected broad-based wage changes across the country.

[...]

Such alternative data has become increasingly important in assessing China’s employment conditions in recent years. Many economists think the official measurements — including the jobless rate and income statistics — have failed to fully capture the extent of stress on the labour market from the economy’s slowdown.

China Institute for Employment Research, a think tank based in Beijing, stopped making its quarterly labour market reports and indexes publicly available since 2022. China Dissent Monitor, which documented protests including those triggered by labour disputes, suspended its work earlier this year after USAID funding was withdrawn by the Trump administration.

[...]

China’s ability to shield its labour market from the trade war is critical to the prospects of the world’s second-largest economy, which is counting on domestic consumers to offset the fallout from US tariffs of as much as 145%. Weak income growth and household expectations have been a major factor behind sluggish consumption in recent years.

While policymakers have pledged to lift wages, the immediate outlook for employment is actually changing for the worse. As many as 16 million jobs are exposed to China’s exports to the US, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc’s estimates.

A total of eight million jobs could be lost over the next two years, based on the last time both exports and the property sector contracted in 2015 and 2016, according to Capital Economics Ltd.

[...]

In an effort to better gauge the labour market situation, Capital Economics recently constructed an index based on data including those from purchasing managers’ index surveys and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business’s poll on firms’ labour costs.

While the index largely used to move in sync with the official jobless rate, it’s been painting a much weaker picture since mid-2024.

“Chinese policymakers will probably find ways to keep the published unemployment rate close to their ‘around 5.5%’ target for this year,” said Julian Evans-Pritchard of Capital Economics. “But this may mask broader weakness in the labour market,” he said in a Wednesday report.

Bill Gates ratcheted up his feud with Elon Musk on Thursday, saying the former DOGE head was "killing" children through USAID cuts.

Driving the news: Gates vowed to give away "virtually all" of his wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next two decades, he announced Thursday.

Gates' "key aspirations" to guide the foundation's funding over the next two decades center on promoting child and maternal health and fighting infectious diseases and poverty.

Those target areas overlap with the USAID programs from which Musk and the Trump administration cut billions.

The event throws into question the perceived heightened accuracy of betting markets like Poymarket over conventional polls.

https://archive.is/Qc8RH

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) is calling on New York City officials to cancel a Central Park performance at a city-sponsored event by Kehlani, a performer who has called for the destruction of Israel and Zionism.

Kehlani is set to perform in June at a Pride event sponsored by the City Parks Foundation, an independent nonprofit that receives city funding to promote arts, sports, education and other programming in city parks. But Mayor Eric Adams has disputed whether the mayor’s office has any ability to cancel the performance or withhold funds.

Kehlani has posted repeatedly on her Instagram stories calling to “DISMANTLE ISRAEL. ERADICATE ZIONISM,” and calling Zionists “the scum of the Earth.” The performer has also reposted content expressing support for “resistance in all of its forms,” describing Zionists as “evil,” saying that “no one should feel comfortable or safe until Zionism is extinguished” and characterizing all Israelis as settlers.

Archived

“In light of the evidence that Russian intelligence services were behind the reprehensible act of sabotage at the shopping centre on Marywilska Street, I have decided to revoke the operating permit of the Russian Federation’s Consulate in Krakow,” Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski wrote on [social media].

The move follows the arrest of several suspects and an international investigation involving Lithuanian authorities, which uncovered similar sabotage efforts.

The closure of the consulate comes just a month after local media reported that authorities had quietly renewed the building’s lease, triggering protests in Kraków.

The fire, which broke out in May last year, destroyed 90% of the centre, but fortunately there were no casualties. It is now seen as part of a wider pattern of Russian-backed sabotage across central and eastern Europe.

[...]

In related news, Poland says Russia recruited arsonists for Warsaw fire on social media.

"We have evidence that they commissioned people living in Poland, they commissioned them on Telegram and paid them to set fire to this huge shopping mall," Sikorski said on Monday ...

The May 2024 fire destroyed 1,400 small businesses, with many of the staff there belonging to Warsaw's Vietnamese community ...

[...]