Crypto farming, feeding the ai bubble, large scale wars of aggression, commuters replacing cars with trucks, buying throwaway junk has never been easier. That’s the relatively new completely unnecessary hubris that I can think off atm. These should be the low hanging fruits to just not do, but apparently we’re going to continue doing them anyways. If we can’t address the low hanging fruits, then tackling the harder challenges will remain a pipe dream until it’s too late. Climate stability is fucked, and we’re in for a rough ride.

Khan’s lawyer says:
Tayab Ali, head of Khan’s legal team, noted that a judicial panel had “unanimously” determined that findings by the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services “did not establish misconduct or breach of duty by Mr Khan under the relevant legal framework”.

Versus the claimed reason for firing him:
“The Assembly has decided by a majority of 82 States Parties that…prosecutor Karim Kahn committed serious conduct and a serious breach of duty…and to remove [him] from office,” the Assembly president announced, calling for the dignity and privacy of all those involved.

Does not compute.

The narrative of the icc can be read here: https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/07/1168025 Except everything that matters is confidential, so we just have to take their word for it apparently.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/en-masse

The generally refers to the exceptions where no consent is needed. Had the ladies been committing a crime, then no consent was needed to start filming. Had they been filming some landmark and the ladies walked through the frame, again no consent needed from them. But generally speaking, consent is required before you may start filming a stranger.

In Belgium people do have an expectation of privacy in public, what they did is straight up illegal under Belgian law. If they want to film or photograph a person (not as an accidental passerby, but as the subject as was the case here), then they need to get consent from that person. If they want to share that footage online, then they need consent for that as well.

And some other excerpts:
Demonization: The portrayal of Israel as a criminal collective directly connects to the antisemitic interpretation of the accusation of systematic child murder.

The image portrays violence against “the Jews” as just “resistance” and a necessary reaction to a supposedly absolute injustice.

Questioning the German government their continued support for the Palestinian genocide is officially antisemitic, see „NIE WIEDER… FÜR WEN?“ on page 60 of the brochure. https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/SharedDocs/publikationen/DE/allgemein/2026-05-antisemitische-codes-und-chiffren.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=9

The writers of the brochure also try really really hard to equate criticism of Israel with anti Jewish racism. That page 60 meme is about Germany and Israel, and their explanation tries to make it about Jews. It’s jarring.

Pretty much this. A 0.02% error margin when there are tens of thousands of visitors per year, means it’s almost guaranteed to have errors.

99.9% ^700 = 49.6% chance of no errors occurring.
99.98% ^3466 = 50% chance of no errors occurring.
99.98% ^23000 = 1% chance of no errors occurring.

The problem is wider than the tech companies, so personally I’d prefer a wider definition that includes the non tech bad actors. Something like “Return of the Robber Barons”.

Robber Barons = By the late 19th century, the term was typically applied to businessmen who used exploitative practices to amass their wealth. Those practices included unfettered consumption and destruction of natural resources, influencing high levels of government, wage slavery, squashing competition by acquiring their competitors, and to create monopolies and/or trusts that control the market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)

That description seems like a perfect match for the present day USA economy.

The same is true for overtaking in congested traffic on any type of road. There will be someone passing you on the highway by weaving through traffic, tailgating, honking, … And then 5 minutes later you take your exit and that same nutter is standing still 3 cars ahead of you. Being an aggressive dick in traffic is totally not worth it.

The strangest one to me is Slovenia.

When looking it up, some funny stuff is going on: in 2024 Slovenia exported $22.46b to Switzerland, $21.76b from that is pharmaceutical products. An almost 50x increase in exports in less than 10 years. https://tradingeconomics.com/slovenia/exports/switzerland

Most of that pharmaceutical trade is from “intercompany trade”. https://cee.swiss/countries-slovenia/?lang=en

Some Swiss fiscal accountants are having a laugh.

“intentionally using low-quality AI output in their work without fixing it”

This reads like victim blaming or scapegoating. That ai company makes shoddy software that outputs faulty results, users output faulty results when using that software, and now the ai company blames the users for outputting faulty results. That some (but likely not all) users know that the results are faulty, doesn’t change that the software itself is faulty.

My suspicion is that it’s because the playstore has become so awful that google is seeing the effect in their earnings. If customers get burned one too many times on a crappy app with fake reviews, then they’re not going to spend any money on anything else in the store anymore. So now Google tries to sabotage the possible alternatives, rather than try to fix their product.

I usually download apk directly to my android devices and install from there, no pc or other device is needed. So your whenever is for me almost never.

Public payphones in the streets and emergency phones alongside highways have also been removed (at least in my country). So yeah, our society expects us to have our own phones with us whenever we’re away from home.

That article reads like they’re trying to sell the bear’s skin before they’ve caught it. They kidnapped the Venezuelan leader, but the rest of the old regime is still in power. The USA doesn’t control anything on the ground, yet they’re talking as if it’s a done deal and that they can just walk in and take over.

I also wouldn’t want to be a us oil company employee that gets send over to Venezuela. Even if the USA somehow manages to take control of the oil fields, there’s likely to be a lot of sabotage and guerilla attacks.

Chlorine washing doesn’t kill off all pathogens, it only suppresses them so that they no longer show up in standard tests. In other words, chlorine washing conceals the presence of pathogens.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/13/science-on-safety-of-chlorinated-chicken-misunderstood "But the academics point to research published last year which found washing food in bleach does not kill many of the pathogens that cause food poisoning. Instead, it sends them into a “viable but non-culturable state”, which means they are not picked up in standard tests, which take a sample of the food and try to culture any germs on it.

The presence of the pathogens is thus masked by the bleach, but they are still dangerous to human health.

Erik Millstone, professor of science policy at Sussex University and co-author of the briefing, told the Guardian lives would be at stake if food based on these lower standards were sold in the UK. “I am satisfied [by the evidence] that US food poisoning cases are significantly higher than in the UK. A minority of people suffer fatal complications,” he said. “There will certainly be fatalities, and they typically affect vulnerable people, such as infants, small children and the elderly.”"

NATO is such a big threat to Russia, that as soon as Finland had joined NATO, Russia moved it’s troops away from that area. Russia’s problem with NATO is not that it sees a defensive alliance like NATO as a threat, the problem for them is that they can’t bully and invade NATO countries should they feel like it. Which is also why all the formerly occupied countries that are next to Russia, want to join NATO. Who doesn’t want their country to be safe from invasion by a fascist state? Tankies apparently.

Maybe that the government reactions don’t engage with the anger, is what makes those reactions worthy of inclusion? Actually, scratch that, whether or not those reactions do or don’t acknowledge the anger is irrelevant to whether or not they should be included. Those reactions are relevant to the article because they inform us of what the other involved parties are doing.

In this article those reactions at the end do not fit in with the main story of the angry people, because they don’t acknowledge that anger. I’d call them tone-deaf reactions, but a journalist isn’t allowed to write that (except in opinion pieces), so the journalist can only give those tone-deaf reactions as they were (+ provide some context about them, which I appreciated). That the anger of those people was so far only responded to with tone-deaf reactions, makes those tone-deaf reactions very relevant to the anger of the people.

Not unfocused at all imo. The article says that Hong Kong would traditionally hold an open inquiry in cases like this and then goes on to explain why that is probably not going to happen for this disaster (hint: authoritarians don’t like open enquiries). And then at the end of the article there are some reactions from other more remotely involved parties + some context about those remarks. The end of an article is where those reactions are traditionally put and reactions from various parties are always going to be more varied in nature, but that doesn’t make them non topical or “unfocused”.