Lemdro.id

A Google founder has more than doubled his financial contribution to the fight against a proposed wealth tax in California. New filings with the state show that former Alphabet president Sergey Brin donated $25m to a Super Pac dedicated to blocking the tax on top of $20m he had already given.

Brin is not alone among Google’s top brass in upping his financial stake in the campaign against the ballot proposal. The company’s former CEO Eric Schmidt donated $1.02m, adding to a previous $2m contribution.

The tech titans are battling the California Billionaire Tax act, often referred to simply as the billionaire tax. It’s a proposed ballot measure that would require any California resident worth more than $1bn to pay a one-off, 5% tax on their assets to help cover education, food assistance and healthcare programs in the state. It’s sponsored by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, and is still in the signature-gathering phase.

If the measure reaches the ballot and gains voters’ approval, the tax would apply to billionaires based on their residency as of 1 January 2026. For Brin, worth about $247bn, the bill would likely be upwards of $12bn. That stipulation appears to have caused him and several other billionaires to leave California at the end of last year. Brin relocated to a $42m estate on the north-eastern shore of Lake Tahoe in Nevada, and his Pac donations show Reno as his address. Schmidt’s filings show his address as West Hollywood.

But also the worst so i don't know

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44453258

Die Staats- und Regierungschefs der EU treffen sich heute Vormittag in Brüssel zu einem Gipfeltreffen des Europäischen Rates, dessen Tagesordnung zahlreiche Themen umfasst – von der Ukraine und Iran bis hin zu Wettbewerbsfähigkeit und Energiepreisen. Verfolgen Sie unseren Live-Blog (auf Englisch), um den ganzen Tag über – und möglicherweise bis tief in die Nacht hinein – auf dem Laufenden zu bleiben.

Das Wichtigste:
🟢 EU-Spitzenpolitiker stehen vor einem Dilemma namens Orbán
🟢 Exklusiv: Länder erwägen Verlängerung des Schutzes für ukrainische Flüchtlinge
🟢 Zeigt von der Leyens „Dringlichkeitsdenken“ Wirkung?

Today's game is Stardew Valley. Me and some friends got the idea to play a big lobby with around the 6 of us just to see how it went. So far it's gone well. I stole someone's furniture and moved their house to a random corner. Then i sold all my Parsnips just to grow potatoes. I wanted to see how far i could get just growing them.

I've been mostly making a living fishing all day. So far we're on the 13th and i've got enough for a Chicken Coop. Next time we play i plan to have it built. Maybe even pick up a few chickens if we go that long.

The game is interesting as in all my saves, i feel like it becomes a social game in multiplayer. Like, just run your chores and chat in voice call. It's really fun. Plus when you interact you can have some fun experiences. Like fishing next to each other or helping to meet the coop goal.

Single player it's fun too. I can't help but feel it doesn't have a lot of replay ability to me personally once i get out of the early game. By summer it just becomes the standard checklist for me.

We ended just on the egg hunt. It was tired and none of us wanted to tackle it. On retrospect i'm thinking i should have picked a different game though to write about today because this game is definitely proving a challenge to talk about.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.wtf/post/39686444

Per the very first reply on their thread discussing it in their forums, which I linked directly to for the post title:

We'll NEVER require any verification or identification from the user.

However, what's gonna happen should the attempts to age-gate the XDG portal screw over alt-init distros like Artix too? My guess is maybe they start blocking regions which force age gating like Arch Linux 32 is doing.

"Our mistake was to bank on something that was not yet proven," says Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen.

Archived

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday welcomed a joint statement by Australia and New Zealand emphasizing the importance of peace in the Taiwan Strait.

The statement came at the close of Tuesday’s third ANZMIN 2+2 meeting in Canberra. Participants in the annual consultations were New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters, Defense Minister Judith Collins, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, and Defense Minister Richard Marles.

[...]

Australia and New Zealand said they wanted to continue deepening economic, trade, and cultural relations with Taiwan while enhancing the coordination of development efforts in the Pacific.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52545959

*This is an opinion piece by Benedict Rogers, a British human rights lawyer. *

Archived

[...]

China’s new "ethnic unity" law, passed by the National People’s Congress last week, is the latest step in Xi Jinping’s campaign of forced Sinicization. It codifies in law what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been implementing for some years — a program of forced assimilation for China’s ethnic minorities aimed at wiping out ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity.

[...]

Sharing a common loyalty to one’s country, regardless of ethnicity, is a desirable objective.

However, there are three points about China’s plans that should be kept in mind.

First, this is less about social cohesion and more about political control and repression.

The “identity” the CCP wants its citizens, of all ethnicities, to adopt is loyalty to the Communist Party. Indeed, the CCP conflates Party and State, so that to be patriotic means to be devoted to the Party.

In any democracy, you can be loyal to your country without being aligned with the governing party. You can be a patriotic American and a critic of the incumbent president. You can be a British patriot and an opponent of the sitting prime minister.

The same is true in Asia’s democracies, such as Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. Even in India under the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi, or in Indonesia under former dictator Suharto’s son-in-law Prabowo Subianto, you can be a political opponent without your patriotism being in doubt.

But not in China. The Party, the State, and the nation are one in the mind of the CCP.

That is why the new law insists that citizens must have “correct views” on history, culture, and religion, and abandon “outdated customs.” It requires parents to “educate and guide children to love the Chinese Communist Party.”

[...]

Secondly, this will apply to people who were never part of historic China.

The history is disputed, but certainly for significant periods of history, Tibet and East Turkistan were their own nations, which were invaded by China.

Now the CCP wants us to call East Turkistan — the homeland of the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim peoples — by the name it has chosen, “Xinjiang,” which literally means “New Frontier.”

It is also mounting a campaign to persuade the world to call Tibet “Xizang,” a Chinese term meaning “Western Zang.”

China invaded Tibet in October 1950.

Last week, Tibetans and friends of Tibet around the world marked the 67th anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising Day on March 10, 1959. That day, tens of thousands of Tibetans protested against Chinese military occupation and were massacred. The Dalai Lama escaped into exile, where he has been ever since.

A campaign of forced assimilation has already been underway for decades in both occupied Tibet and occupied East Turkistan.

Under Xi Jinping, it has intensified. More than one million Tibetan children have been forcibly separated from their parents and coerced into colonial boarding schools, where they are prohibited from learning their own Tibetan language, practising their own Tibetan Buddhist religion, or celebrating their Tibetan culture.

[...]

Thirdly, Xi Jinping has also been mounting a campaign of Sinicization against Christians across China, which again proves that this is not about culture or language, but politics.

The Sinicization of religion is not about making religion culturally sensitive or integrated — it is about making religion politically co-opted. It is about forcing state-controlled churches to display portraits of Xi and CCP propaganda banners alongside, or sometimes instead of, religious imagery.

A crackdown against Christians who refuse to comply — or who run churches outside the state-approved institutions — is intensifying, resulting in the detention last October of Pastor Ezra Jin, founder of the Zion Church network, and 17 of his pastors and elders.

[...]

“Ethnic unity” is very different from “inter-ethnic harmony.”

A 22-year-old Chinese student, Zhang Yadi, has been detained since last summer because, while studying in Paris, she had become involved with a group working to promote understanding and awareness among Chinese students about Tibetan culture.

This was promoting inter-ethnic harmony, an idea it turns out the CCP dislikes, and so she was arrested when she returned home to visit her family.

[...]

Diversity, of ethnicity, religion, culture, or thought, and inter-ethnic harmony or pluralism of religious, philosophical, spiritual, political, or cultural ideas, are concepts that terrify the CCP.

That is why it has introduced this new law — because it wants to make every Chinese citizen, regardless of their ethnicity, a cookie-cutter mold in the Party’s image. It is a campaign of forced assimilation that is genocidal in its intentions.

Volodymyr Zelensky said that he has sent hundreds of anti-drone experts to help the US take down Iranian UAVs. A statement posted by the Ukrainian President’s Office said, “There are currently 201 Ukrainians in the Middle East and the Gulf region, with another 34 experts ready to be deployed.” Zelensky said the deployment was part […]

From News From Antiwar.com via This RSS Feed.

A new footpath stretching around the entire coast of England is being officially inaugurated later.

At 2,689 miles long, it is the longest managed coastal walking route in the world, according to Natural England, the government body which created it.

Its name is quite a trek too - King Charles III England Coast Path - but for the first time it creates a continuous trail, allowing walkers to explore England's shoreline step by step.

Die Herausforderung in von der Leyens zweiten Amtszeit besteht darin, die Methoden der Krisenbewältigung an längerfristige politische Ergebnisse anzupassen. Ihr selbstbewusster Führungsstil hat in den europäischen Hauptstädten für Unmut gesorgt.

Per the very first reply on their thread discussing it in their forums, which I linked directly to for the post title:

We'll NEVER require any verification or identification from the user.

However, what's gonna happen should the attempts to age-gate the XDG portal screw over alt-init distros like Artix too? My guess is maybe they start blocking regions which force age gating like Arch Linux 32 is doing.