Came here to say this. I wouldn’t be surprised if he became obese because of the 33 years he put into the job, always working and not having enough time to himself to self-care.

The party I’m calling centrist is viewed as centre-left here by the media and general public.
Greens and Labor split each other’s votes, not Labor and LNP.

Sounds reasonable enough, actually.

(Why about 20% of left-wing voters prefer the right-wing over the centre I will never understand.)

Hmm, puzzling. If they were USians then I’d suggest that it was because they confused over the name (liberals are always on the left, right?) but I digress.

Ah, but it was never that.

Isn’t it though? As you wrote,

The precipitous drop in support for the LNP mostly went to help Labor

Just as it’d be confusing why left-wing voters would support a right-wing party over a centrist or centre-left party, it’d be equally confusing why right-wing voters would support a left-wing party (the Greens) over the centrist one. Well, sounds like they didn’t.

(With IRV of course it’s not that this happened because of a split vote but that because Labor had more support in the first preference that it survived over the Greens, when normally it’d be the other way around - so the specific reasons are different and a bit more complex, but this specific result which occurred is intuitive to someone who only understands FPTP. More generally, both FPTP and IRV suffer from spoiler effects (as explained in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler/_effect ) - while IRV is better than FPTP there are still cases where spoiler effects can happen and this example of a Green losing to a Labor due to a loss of support by the LNP is one of them - it just feels more intuitive to someone familiar with FPTP because this is the worst when it comes to spoiler effects).

we here in Australia had another parallel to your election.

I didn’t realize this, but this is really interesting. Thank you for the hattip!

In essence, a drop in support for the right-wing candidates resulted in a centrist candidate winning where previously a left-wing candidate had won. That’s an aberrant result that doesn’t really match anyone’s intuition of how elections should work.

Unless, like me, you grew up in a FPTP system - then this is exactly what you’d expect. (As you already know in FPTP the votes would be split, so with the centrist and the right-wing splitting the vote, the left-wing would win. But if the right-wing drops out, then the votes would mostly go to the centrist instead, likely putting the centrist ahead now.)

I didn’t realise it was in response to a specific article, but I gathered it was a response to general comments from some in the LNP praising FPTP.

Accurate enough - the article that it was responding - well, it was basically what you wrote above.

I was responding primarily to the headline suggesting we should be “proud” of what is literally the worst acceptable voting system.

I took this with a fair bit of humor. I would have said that it’s not the worst voting system because FPTP is worse, but then,

(Personally, I consider FPTP completely unacceptable and anti-democratic; it should not even be part of any discussion among serious people.)

So actually, you are right. Agree 100% here.

a proportional system would be better.

And here too.

This is awful. He was sentenced to four years but ended up serving five. One wonders if the false confession actually helped reduce the time at all in that case. (I don’t doubt that he would have signed anyways, not after being deprived of food and water and being beaten for two days straight, but still… it’s even worse if signing was pointless.)

Thank you! This is exactly why folks should comment and not just only downvote.

Those who actually read the article know that E.M. is a woman and the victim who is giving testimony (and whose full name can’t be released pubicly), no connection at all to Musk aside from coincidentally sharing the same initials. But for illustration she might be named Ellen Marks, Eva Manns, Ellie Monet, etc.

Agree 100% - this was a non-ludicrous but entirely reasonable and well-reasoned response.

That being said I do think there’s many good points made in the article. The Greens are doing better in Australia, while they hurt quite a bit here in Canada due to FPTP being in use. And it really hurts to see the NDP fall so much, which likely would not have occurred if Canada had the same system as Australia.

The linked article is a response to https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/preferential-voting-system-ousts-half-a-liberal-ministry-of-talent/news-story/7cd4e33e0a05e786a8c4943645c5525d?amp=&nk=d1a6519026cb614e2502f09a887f82c4-1747124133 and I think Canada makes the perfect case for that article being wrong - Canada actually has FPTP but the leader of Canada’s CPC still lost his seat. If FPTP had been in play, perhaps all those Liberals would have still lost their seats, as folks started using strategic voting instead to ensure a Labour win (but also then hurting independents and other parties like the Greens) - which is exactly how it played out in Canada.

I must say that it’s the rare case that I see an upvoted comment on the fediverse that, behind a veil of ignorance ( https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/veil-of-ignorance ), agrees with Israel-supporting Jewish biologist and professor Jerry A. Coyne on anything. ( As per https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/10/15/a-few-thoughts-on-the-war/ he also no longer finds a two-state solution viable. )

With that in mind I’m deeply troubled by one of the comments made in the comments section of the linked article.

Tuvi Todd
A “2-State Solution” would be a step backwards, where now there are already 3 states:
- a peace-loving Jewish State of Israel,
- a terror sponsoring PA “state” in the “West Bank”, and
- a war criminal PA “state” in Gaza/

But this is completely wrong and bonkers. The middle comment is the most off, the West Bank is under Israeli military control and the nominal authority, the Palestine Authority, doesn’t exercise any actual control over the territory (as it should be).

The third comment is also off, as neither Gaza or Hamas are independently recognized by any country as a state, and unlike the Palestine Authority lack status or any sort of recognition in the UN. (Also Hamas explicitly rejects the authority of the PA from what I understand, so calling it a PA state is also too much of a stretch.)

Only the first comment is accurate in terms of statehood - but I can’t really agree with the peace-loving comment.

And, the last two should receive no international assistance, unless they end their support for
“The Palestinian Resistance” of murder, terrorism, and war crimes.

But the PA did - https://www.jfeed.com/news-israel/spzypn

{A} - The Jewish State of Israel targets only Islamic Jihadist militants in northern Gaza attacks, who
-2- Use schools, hospitals, cities, and civilians as human-shield, and thus {B} - Only Gaza’s Islamic Jihadist militants are responsible for all the subsequent -2- Killings of over 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza attacks

I feel that this ignores a lot - in particular the recent news report of a hospital being mistakenly misidentified as hosting a hidden underground military base - because it got confused with a school that was next to the hospital that had some odd markings, https://news.sky.com/story/gaza-hospital-attack-analysis-contradicts-israels-evidence-justifying-airstrike-13367823

Or the concerns from Holocaust survivors such as Veronika Cohen about how the war is hurting innocent Gazan children, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/25/we-have-lost-our-humanity-holocaust-survivors-call-for-end-to-war-in-gaza

So a couple of thoughts here.

First of all, the page itself just correctly warns that orcas can’t just be freed. It’s not like we should go ahead and literally dump them into the ocean and abandon them. No one is advocating for this. Doing this generally with most types of animals still causes all kinds of problems (see for example https://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/07/23/snakehead.poison/index.html )

On the flip side, when a well prepared effort is launched, captive orcas have survived in the wild successfully. See https://killerwhales.fandom.com/wiki/Vasilievna for a good example - and this is what folks are pushing for.

Finally, I have some concerns about the source itself. From https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Environmental/_Literacy/_Council it seems that enviroliteracy.org is part of the George C. Marshall Institute.

In case you don’t know much about that institute, here’s the most important bits:

The George C. Marshall Institute (GMI) is a “non-profit” organization funded by the profits from oil and gas interests and right-wing funders (listed later). It has received substantial funding from Exxon’s Exxon Education Foundation.
Its nominal creators, aside from Exxon-related entities and others, were William Nierenberg, Frederick Seitz and Robert Jastrow. This industry and right-wing front group

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=George%5C_C.%5C_Marshall%5C_Institute

The article doesn’t really explain why though.

Captive-born dolphins have been successfully released into the wild before, see for example: https://www.thedodo.com/another-seaworld-myth-debunked-751539462.html

“Annessa, a captive-born Atlantic bottle-nose dolphin held at the Dolphin Research Center in the Florida Keys, disappeared and was feared lost during a hurricane in August, 1992. Annessa survived the hurricane, however, and was adopted by a pod of wild dolphins. She has been sighted numerous times - healthy and foraging on her own. One dolphin; Captive since birth; followup successful.”

Edit: Oops https://whalescientists.com/captive-dolphins-release/ were still wild born. Replaced with a better example

They can be, albeit that it may require some serious $$$ to actually do it the right way, but it’s been done before, the most famous example being https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/latest/blogs/story-keiko-first-captive-orca-returned-wild/

Edit: and for dolphins born in captivity, see https://www.thedodo.com/another-seaworld-myth-debunked-751539462.html

I mean it’s not really needed in Europe where true legal rights exist for employees, right?

This is more of a “only in the USA” kind of thing.

My solution to this is that I accept the other job offer, and I don’t quit until the night before I start my first day in the new one. As a result I’ve never spent a single day unemployed. If something I’m counting on doesn’t come through I’m already at my backup plan.

If companies won’t be loyal to us in this way, why do we owe any loyalty to them in return?

I hear what you’re saying. Just remember that Cygnus Solutions and Red Hat, both prominent commercial supporter of FOSS, were based in and headquartered in the US when they were independent companies. (Now they’re both part of IBM.)

Even the Linux Foundation and the Free Software Foundation have to obey US sanctions - LF is based in San Francisco and the FSF is based in Boston.

Going FOSS is good, but the US abusing their sanctions powers is a different kettle of fish.

The reponse is going balls deep on Foss but I don’t think your avg westoid regime is willing to open that Pandora’s box.

I mean, GMail is from Google who uses Linux/GNU extensively (as per https://www.computerworld.com/article/1612523/the-story-behind-google-s-in-house-desktop-linux.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16175182 )

Even M$ supports using Outlook on Linux/GNU via the webapps (see https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/microsoft-365-and-outlook-for-linux/0eeaef13-c337-4c92-8260-8ac7fdf4df9f ) and back in the day they ran Hotmail on FreeBSD ( see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31113296 )

The issue here isn’t the use of FOSS per se but that these folks aren’t tech savvy and don’t want to run things themselves - they’d rather pay someone else to do it. They want “enterprise customer support” and all that. And then whoever they pay might end up bailing out due to fear of US sanctions … which sadly even Swiss banks aren’t immune to.

Either EU can do it now or later

The sooner they stop/prevent/workaround the abuse of power by the US here, the better.

The US should no longer be allowed to lead the international banking system. Under the current administration, they’ve proven that they can’t be trusted with that kind of power anymore.

Agreed. If only kbin.social had implemented this, it might still be up and running…

Great to see piefed.social taking steps to avoid the same fate!

Good question. I went through the code but I actually can’t find that option, https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/app/templates/admin//_nav.html#L14 (that’s with the latest commit being https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/c1c718180fc39d51a8ac1820f727491e17c86fbd as I write this)

From the screenshot it should be showing between lines 14 and 15 of that file.

Unpopular opinion here but

The choice of M$ - made before the sanctions - was likely just a case of “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”

I’m quite worried here actually - M$ did this not because they sided with Netanyahu or against Palestine, but because the US threw its might and compelled M$ to do so. The article says the chief had to move to Proton Mail which is a Swiss provider. While the Swiss have historically been independent and unyielding to foreign pressure, the US got them to agree to information sharing under FATCA (see https://international-adviser.com/us-and-switzerland-finally-seal-delayed-double-tax-deal/ and https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/switzerland-us-agree-exchange-financial-account-data-2024-06-27/ )

So, worried. How long before the US comes and tries to sanction Proton Mail? The free world needs to come up with a response to this and prevent the US from abusing it’s power here. Perhaps the free world needs to sanction the US and kick them out of our international banking system before it’s too late?

And in an alternate universe where Harris won and the US was using its sanction power responsibly, it’s not that unreasonable to go with M$. As per https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/office-365-platform-service-description/office-365-us-government/gcc-high-and-dod M$ actually has offerings tailored to highly classified and secure agencies. (Not that I’d go with M$. I’m just saying I get why a bunch of intelligent lawyers and prosecutors who aren’t particularly tech savvy would say yes to M$.)

In a working paper released earlier this month, economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard looked at the labor market impact of AI chatbots on 11 occupations, covering 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark in 2023 and 2024.

Hmm, Denmark you say?

Also Denmark,

Denmark doesn’t have at-will employment. Employers may only terminate an employee with just cause and sufficient notice. Just cause can include financial reasons or employee misconduct.

https://www.rippling.com/country-hiring/denmark-employees

Actually, perhaps this points at a way forward… we should employment laws in the US that match those of Denmark.

Not following how his inability to find a job has any connection to AI?

It’s in the fortune article:

some of those few interviews have been with an AI agent instead of a human.
“I feel super invisible,” K tells Fortune. “I feel unseen. I feel like I’m filtered out before a human is even in the chain.”

That is, he’s getting fewer chances to establish a human-to-human connection to an interviewer, which is hurting his ability to get hired.

The bigger picture is that folks are indeed losing jobs to AI, have had their jobs cut because of AI, see

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/klarna-ceo-says-ai-helped-company-shrink-workforce-by-40/ar-AA1EMHG6

Software engineer here - I make more than this guy did and I have roughly the same amount of experience in the industry that he does (perhaps a smidge more, going off of his linkedin profile).

For folks who are saying that there’s something off about this guy - that would not have mattered two or three years ago. At most he would have just been seen as a highly talented dev who was also slightly quirky.

For those who say it’s not about AI and more about the economy - well, maybe. We do have a couple of major ongoing wars right now and moves over the last couple of months by the recent administration of the US haven’t helped.

But I was around during the crash back in 2008, and this still feels different. Harder. Before, I had recruiters just banging on my door. Now, it’s tough to past the automated screenings unless I have a contact at the company who can refer me there.

Meanwhile, I’m hearing from my co-workers about how great AI is - how they ran their code through it and it came up with a bunch of unit tests for them and some boilerplate code. Vibe coding is already a thing. So is using AI to write your resume and cover letters and applying to jobs.

Likewise, I look upon tools like Devin.ai with increasing trepidation. Today, LLMs aren’t good enough to replace a single senior dev, despite a lot of investment happening to move things in exactly this direction. It probably won’t happen tomorrow, or even next year. But in 25?

Let’s just say that this article really hit home for me.

The other point here is - the day that a person with no coding ability can ask an LLM to create and deploy an entire website, write and manage a brand new app from scratch, is going to be a day that’s a win for the people. We want to lower the barriers to entry here, to give this highly elite power to others. Actually, there shouldn’t be an elite at all - there should just be a democracy where everyone is equally empowered to create and build great things.

Working in tech will not remain this vaulted, lofty place for much longer. If we aren’t content creators, or controlling company owners, then ultimately tech workers like myself are in the same position as any other kind of worker - we work for someone else and serve only at their sufferance.