The second wave of arrests was almost entirely students, because Columbia has been on lockdown and it’s been increasingly difficult for non-students to get in in the first place. The “outside agitators were at fault” narrative that Columbia is pushing is at odds with this.

Not sure what the use case is for a federated wiki. It lets you… edit a different wiki with your account from your initial one? View pages from other wikis using your preferred website’s UI? Know which wikis are considered to have good info by the admins of the wiki you’re browsing from?

This is presented as a solution to Wikipedia’s content moderation problems, but it doesn’t do much against that that wouldn’t also be done by just having a bunch of separate, non-federated wikis that link to each others’ pages. The difference between linking to a wiki in the federation network, and linking to one outside the federation network, is that the ui will be different and you’d have to make a new account to edit things.

I suppose it makes sense for a search feature? You can search for a concept and select the wiki which approaches the concept from your desired angle (e.g. broad overview, scientific detail, hobbyist), and you’d know that all the options were wikis that haven’t been defederated and likely have some trustworthiness. With the decline of google and search engines in general, I can see this being helpful. But it relies on the trustworthiness of your home wiki’s admin, and any large wiki would likely begin to have many of the same problems that the announcement post criticizes Wikipedia for. And all this would likely go over the head of any average visitor, or average editor.

I don’t know. I’m happy this exists. I think it’s interesting to think about what structures would lead to something better than Wikipedia. I might find it helpful once someone creates a good frontend for it, and then maybe the community can donate to create a free hosting service for Ibis wikis. Thank you for making it.

Stuff like “Unions aren’t guaranteed to give you a raise, or any other benefits,” “Unions just want you to join so you can pay dues to them (think about all the things you can buy with 1% of your income!),” “Unions get in the way of workers having a healthy relationship with management,” “Unions make things less efficient, so we may dip into unprofitability and have to close down the factory…” Employers also often hire “neutral third parties” to tell employees that unions can be good, or used to be good, but aren’t at [employer].

Joining a union is the sensible thing to do, but employers fighting tooth and nail and breaking every slap-on-the-wrist law on the books is also the sensible thing for them to do, so they do everything from anti-union pamphlets to one-on-one intimidation meetings to calling ICE on their pro-union immigrant workers

Wars tend to involve civilians getting hurt, because yeah, it’s cheaper and easier to disregard international law.

I wouldn’t generalize that to evil always winning vs good, though. Human life is complicated, and mean, but progress gets made anyway. There’s a reason most people dislike war.

Hexbear only recently started opening itself up to federation. It’s one of the old leftist instances that was around before the reddit api fiasco. Think lemmygrad but more tolerant and pro-lgbtq.

This question is analogous to “why hasn’t anarcho-communism yet worked on a wide scale?” Which is a question with many, many facets to it. You’d have to ask a lot of questions separately.

If I were to try, though, I think the simple answer is “people who work in X area usually do not own the means of production and as such cannot redirect the end product to horizontalist organizations.” Most people can’t just quit their jobs to join a mutual aid group because, without being able to contribute things, the biggest thing a mutual aid group can pass around is time, and most mutual aid groups that exist irl are focused on doing tasks like “picking up prescriptions for others,” and cannot replace participation in the capitalist economy.

Nevermind how most governments don’t want horizontalist non-capitalist organizations to gain enough power to provide a viable alternative to living under capitalism.

If you’re looking for something arcadey and replayable, the Touhou series might be worth looking into. Great music, too.

I’ve never heard of bribes being used to bypass a driver’s test, at least where I’ve grown up (Washington, US). If you tried to open a conversation like “where do I go if I want to bribe you?” I imagine that people would just assume it’s a joke.

A big part of this can be the family people grew up in. I have a few friends who interrupt constantly because that’s just how their family has conversations.

no, since the misleadingly-true fact is still that congestion wastes gas - congestion is cars spending gas on going nowhere, so the gas is wasted

My bad, I didn’t know HRT was a term used outside of transgender healthcare. Thank you for the info!

explanation, since this one might be more confusing than most:

Traffic congestion does indeed waste gas. However, any place worth driving to is going to have congestion–driving without congestion is easy, fast, and comfortable, so people generally won’t take other options until roads become congested. Thus, congestion actually reduces gas usage overall, because it is only once areas become congested that people stop driving places.

Trying to avoid congestion, on the other hand, usually involves expanding roads, something which increases driving, and makes other forms of transportation less useful/comfortable, thus increasing gas usage overall.

Every year, traffic congestion wastes billions of gallons of gas.

HRT is short for Hormone Replacement Therapy, a treatment many transgender people use to feel more aligned with their gender identity. It’s been proven to increase mental health, and has a low regret rate. However, it is correlated with higher mortality because trans people overall have a higher mortality rate and HRT is primarily used by trans people.

A more extreme example of the same thing would be “People on chemotherapy have a higher chance of dying from cancer than people not on chemotherapy.” It’s true, but only because people without cancer don’t tend to enter chemotherapy.

People on HRT have a significantly higher mortality rate than people not on HRT

Dihydrogen Monoxide, commonly used in laundry detergent and other cleaning supplies, is also present in Subway sandwiches