Lemdro.id

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/16337

OK then.

!cool_rocks@lemmy.today

Imagine my surprise when I wanted to share a cool rock, only to find the geology coms dead and no other options.

You don't need to know anything about rocks to share and discuss cool rocks. You don't even need to post your own rocks, but it's encouraged.

Have rocks to share? Want more rocks in your feed? Then come on down to Cool Rocks.

Among the main demands from the union are: Regulation of platform companies under labour laws; Ban on 10-minute delivery model, End to arbitrary ID blocking and other penalties; Fair and transparent wages; improved social security; and protection of right to organise and collectively bargain. Karnataka App-based Workers Union, along with other unions, has also written to Labour Minister Mansukh Mandaviya in this regard.

A common concern among gig workers remains the rising number of penalties imposed by aggregator platforms. “It could be an error by the restaurant or the customer, but we are the ones who bear the brunt of it. If the restaurant delays the order preparation, the customers raise a complaint against us, and if a customer delays picking up the order and is unresponsive, our time is wasted, but the customer is not held responsible. We are penalised for every delay,” said Salauddin, a 49-year-old delivery driver who plans to join in on the protest on Wednesday.

SINGAPORE – Using electronic devices to distract and calm noisy, restless babies used to be a great idea, or so parents thought.

Singapore scientists recently found that children exposed to high levels of screen time before the age of two showed changes in brain development linked to slower decision-making and increased anxiety by the time they become teenagers.

However, all is not lost – for children whose parents read to them frequently from age three, the link between infant screen time and altered brain development was significantly weakened.

The Hollywood actor is a prominent donor to the Democratic Party in the United States. In recent years, that has regularly led to criticism from President Trump, who has called him a “second-rate movie star,” among other things. According to Clooney, it didn’t bother him much. “It’s not my job to keep the President of the United States happy.”

An important fix has made it into the X.Org Server XWayland codebase ahead of the new year. XWayland has been fixed to avoid sending incorrect pointer coordinates to X11 clients on pointer enter events.

A fix was merged recently to the XWayland code to avoid sending incorrect pointer coordinates to X11 clients on pointer enter events, namely around the cursor/input returning to an XWayland window. The patch now ensures that the pointer sprite coordinates are correctly updated when the pointer enters an XWayland window.

Source

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/44584358

[This piece has been written by Nina Khrushcheva, Professor of International Affairs at The New School in New York City. She is the great-granddaughter of former leader of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev.]

...

To visit Russia over the past four years has been to observe the consolidation of a dictatorship in real time—to answer the question readers confront in 1984, wondering how Big Brother’s gaze became so penetrating and relentless. At the start of the invasion, the state lacked the means to quell all possible opposition, and so it suppressed selectively ... But in the time since, Moscow has built a larger repressive apparatus. It has cultivated a climate of fear and uncertainty that encouraged many Russians to silence not just themselves but also one another. The accumulation of subtle changes on the part of both the state and society has led Russia deeper and deeper into tyranny—a cycle that seems unlikely to break as long as Putin’s regime pursues the kind of total control that until recently seemed only to exist in Russia’s communist past or in Orwell’s fiction.

...

All over Russia, young men have been recruited to go to the front. Their families receive the equivalent of $2,000 to $20,000, or more, depending on the region. In three years, the government spent almost $38 billion, or 1.5 percent of Russia’s GDP, on these payments. The defense ministry said the army received almost 500,000 new recruits in 2024, and 450,000 in 2025. Some are coerced; some are criminals who would rather go to war than to prison. In addition to getting paid, they are absolved of their crimes ... Putin has tried to fashion the campaign in Ukraine as a defensive war, putting it on par with World War II, in Russia known as the “Great Patriotic War”.

...

In his 1993 article “Working Towards the Führer”, the British historian Ian Kershaw explained how authoritarianism takes over: through the use of ideology to justify individual and collective actions, through voluntary societal complicity, and through state repression. The leader outlines repressive requirements, then everyone else—starting with his entourage but extending to businesses, governmental and political organizations, schools and universities, and volunteer groups and individuals—make up the rules of behavior. The uber-patriotism of Putinism follows the same script. Ordinary citizens are not just passively complicit but co-authors of repression as they attempt to please their leader and police members of their communities. Officials eager to outdo each other become ever more aggressive in their crackdowns. The result is absurd spectacles as apparatchiks hone the craft of making the abnormal seem normal, and vice versa.

...

The government has even turned against regime insiders. Since the summer, there have been daily detentions of once-trusted government officials, politicians, and high-ranking army officers, who now stand accused of corruption. June and July also witnessed the brutal arrests of journalists from the online news outlet Ura.ru and the Telegram channel Baza, both hyperpatriotic, pro-war publications that had been obediently hateful toward “the enemy”—Ukraine, foreign agents, Kremlin critics. In the fall, a few of the most faithful were labeled foreign agents, including Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political propagandist, and Roman Alekhin, a prominent pro-war blogger. The reasons are subject to speculation: Markov dared to offer Putin advice, or perhaps he was too cozy with Azerbaijan. Alekhin could be critical of the Russian battlefield situation. The highly militant Crimean-born blogger Tatiana Montyan skipped foreign agent status altogether and was labeled “terrorist and extremist”, apparently because she criticized certain Kremlin-connected patriots. Now, no independent evaluation of Russia’s actions is tolerated, even when it comes from the most loyal of followers.

...

Archive link

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40919733

Purple Heart looks forward to all of the good things next year has to offer.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said that her defense of survivors of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and threat to disclose the identities of some of the men who abused them broke her relationship with President Donald Trump, who said his “friends will get hurt” if she went through with it.

Greene’s claim came in remarks from two long interviews published Monday in the New York Times Magazine. After a closed-door meeting with Epstein victims in September and a subsequent news conference where she made the threat to share the names of some of the men, Greene said Trump rebuked her.

Greene told the Times that the last conversation she had with Trump was when she requested that he invite some of the survivors to the Oval Office. Trump, she recounted, replied that they did not deserve the opportunity.