Idk if I really trust Alan Dershowitz or Sean Spicer or this news site. Idk, it might be true (and I think it is), I’m just saying these particular people saying it and then hand waving away from talking about any of the details isn’t what makes it true.

Yeah. That might be the only productive result of this, just to stake it out a little more clearly who’s on what side. That’s worthwhile. But the direct practical impact of this bill will be 0, as sad as that is to say.

I feel like these guys are missing the mark.

Yes, it’s fine if you want them to show their faces. But, also, it would be better if they weren’t snatching random innocent people and sending them to turbo-prison in some other country without bothering to prove that they did anything wrong, even when judges order them not to. That seems like the problem.

Again, the bill is fine. But even getting caught up in wrangling about the masks, or assuming they would pay the slightest attention if congress passed a bill requiring them to stop wearing them, is way missing the mark of what is happening.

It’s just a one-off fetching script I made. Hosting for it and ponder.cat together is just on a super basic $30/mo VPS, I think it is 4 CPUs and 16 GB memory.

I read this with a hell of a lot of scrutiny.

For one thing, they’re not wrong. Ukraine has been a puppet of conflicting massive powers for so many decades it’s hardly worth counting, and this new thing is obviously a corrupt continuation (although its actual negative impact on Ukraine may be limited, since Ukraine doesn’t have as many valuable minerals as the people who engineered this deal seem to think it does) but not really that surprising.

The anomalously intense scrutiny they’re giving to Hunter Biden in the story, while memory-holing the much more egregious corrupt pressure Trump got impeached for putting them under, is a little weird. And the coverage of Ukraine’s internal politics being messed around with by great powers that doesn’t see fit to talk about any of it happening from the Russian side gets into “very weird” territory. But whatever, even after reading it I still wasn’t really sure if it was a legit thing that just happened to be similar to some propaganda I’ve seen in the past, or it was as it appeared to be, a planted story to spread around pro-Russian and Trump-friendly talking points (“nothing to see here, this kind of thing is perfectly normal, don’t worry”). So I went to the author’s Substack.

infamously corrupt Security Services (SBU)

The OCCRP’s reporting also played a major role in Russiagate. ‘OCCRP’s reporting on Rudy Giuliani’s political work in Ukraine was cited four times in the whistleblower letter that led to President Donald Trump’s impeachment.’

I have written here in detail about how USAID-funded media cooperated with the SBU back in 2016 to ‘spark’ the ‘Russiagate’ saga. Naturally, many in Ukraine believe that these ‘independent journalists’ were simply given orders to set such a fire by their handlers in the Democrat Party.

Journalists at MintPress

Bellingcat was founded in 2014 after the start of the war in Ukraine. It is well known for its role in attempting to prove that pro-Russian forces were responsible for the downing of Dutch passenger plane MH-17 in July of that year.

I was apprehended by a loud young man from the nationalist svoboda party

in 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected on the platform of a peacemaker with Russia

And so on. That’s all from https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/bellingcat-and-the-occrp-regime-change. There are also stories about how Ukraine’s military is collapsing, and they’re about to lose the war, any day now.

I am pretty confident at this point in calling this person a Russian stooge. I am accustomed to seeing this stuff on blogs and in the European press but I am sad to see it has now infiltrated Al Jazeera.

Thank you! Yeah, I’ll figure something out. I might also just get a normal account on someone else’s server like a normal person. My only real concern is preserving the RSS stuff, I feel like it’s a good thing.

Holy shit that’s a wonderful idea… it is fine to get an .at domain no matter who you are, apparently, although there are subdomains (.ac.at and .gv.at and like that) that are reserved for particular Austrian uses.

Also, Hostinger’s uncanny valley AI-generated commentary which it emits unprompted every time you want to see how much a domain costs, has returned.

• ponderc.at: “This domain is ideal for a thoughtful cat-related blog.”

IDK, maybe it will lead to too many typos or be confusing… I do like the idea but I’ll want to think on it, I’m not even really decided about what I want to do. I feel like anyone who’s not in on the joke will just have trouble remembering it.

Other Hostinger domain commentary:

• beehaw.online: “This domain is ideal for a beekeeping community platform.”
• mander.social: “This domain is ideal for community engagement and networking platforms. It suits social initiatives or collaborative projects effectively.”
• hexbear.shop: “This domain is ideal for a niche retail store. It can showcase unique products related to its theme.”
• gruesome.dog: “This domain is ideal for horror-themed pet content. It suits unique dog merchandise with a macabre twist.”

And so on. Don’t use Hostinger BTW. I have learned that there’s a reason they are cheap. Also, it cheerfully informs me that I can get gruesome.dog + gruesome.info + gruesome.online as a big bundle, for just $8.97 for the first year. A steal.

IDK… it’s a good idea, but at the same time, if I was Catalonia I probably wouldn’t want English speaking people using my domains just because it means a word in their language, even if they were also setting up a half-translated Catalan side also. I might work but I think it’s probably better just to move to a domain that’s intended for it.

Of what use is a newborn baby

All good. Yeah, at least one person from each instance has to follow a community in order for it to go to that instance.

Done: !jacobin@rss.ponder.cat

It may take a little while to populate, since my disk filled up and the bot died, so it’s now working through a pretty significant backlog. It should get there though, let me know if you don’t see content or anything.

Why did you think I had blocked that instance? I’ve never blocked it, what is the problem that you’re seeing?

They’re fucked. Hopefully. We don’t have to be they.

Pro tip for anyone who’s in photo #6 position: Look up, pour water in your eyes from above, blink really fast. Keep doing it, go for a long time. It’s hard to do because it hurts a lot and won’t work right away, but it works.

Sure, sounds good to me.

!quantamagazine@rss.ponder.cat

This is good because I just now saw this lol

Glad it worked out, let me know if there’s anything I can do.

It couldn’t possibly be that jobs pay $16/hr and rent is $2500

Yeah, maybe fair. Let’s put real numbers to it.

https://vegetables.ces.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Tomato-Budget-2021.pdf?fwd=no

So, for each acre of tomatoes, the total cost is $15,562, of which $7,673 is all labor combined. That’s for 42,000 tomatoes. So the total cost of all farm-related labor per tomato is 18 cents out of a 40-50 cent tomato. Profit per tomato is roughly ten cents.

My point was that if they have to pay people a living wage and worker’s comp and whatnot, it won’t impact the price you pay at the supermarket. Maybe that’s not true; I could see it that if the labor doubles because all of a sudden they’re paying more than $12/hr (probably relatively accurate even for an under the table worker; maybe they might get $10/hr and literally no other costs to the business, whereas if all of a sudden they were treated like a human, the employer would be paying $25/hr for salary and all HR related expenses roughly speaking), then you’ll pay more at the market.

So, I think you’re right. I think the tomatoes might cost 60-65 cents each instead of 40-50 if the people growing them got paid more than $10/hr and no health insurance or anything of the like. I think I would be okay with that, but I do think it would be a significant increase maybe, just looking for this one expense breakdown.

Not all that many

The price of the people who do agricultural work is roughly 0% of the cost you pay at the grocery store. They could literally be using slave labor (some places they already do) and would pocket roughly 100% of the difference as profit. It simply doesn’t matter, unless you own stock in agribusiness or are employed on behalf of someone who does.