Bullshit.

Editorialise titles, don’t editorialise titles, only editorialise titles when someone is going to act like a baby if you don’t.

It’s a global website. You know that articles won’t always hail from your corner of the world. Deal with it.

Juan Guaidó, at the time Venezuela’s highest-ranking democratically elected official, as its rightful leader.

Wut?

How hard is it to check the source?

That’s true but it’s more than fair to say that SBF was powerful. He wasn’t donating to the GOP and Dems for shits and giggles, yaknow?

He did do what other rich folk do. Based himself in a tax haven and, initially, tried to challenge extradition.

Not many rich folk end up on trial. But even fewer end up absconding with their cash, never to be seen again. He is the normal kind of rich folk: he assumed he would get away with it because he is a born-rich kid who has never faced a consequence in his life.

but I want to drink more water

Do you want to drink more water, or less milk?

If your milk consumption doesn’t bother you, then milk is mostly water. It all counts. Have your matcha however you like your matcha.

He’s the reason toots are called toots, and this is probably his most famous (short) video.

E2A: to answer your question, I think there’s some kind of youtuber beef about, maybe, plagiarism? Dunno, he goes viral fairly frequently.

That just forces everyone who wants/needs the bigger ecosystem to leave Mastodon and join Threads. It’s daft.

The beauty of the Fediverse is that different instances can make different choices and people can choose their instance based on the choices they prefer. The Fediverse is not a monolith and demanding that it become one is just wildly missing the point.

Calibri is bad for technical documents because you can’t easily tell the difference between I and l.

Whatever sans serif you use, choose one that makes the difference legible, like Trebuchet or Bierstadt.

Use a whiteboard notebook so the kids can do the drawings themselves?

They cannot make all the military equipment they require to continue the occupation. It’s a country of ~8 million people. With the fourth or fifth largest military in the world.

Please don’t draw parallels between this self-serving nonsense and trans identities.

You haven’t linked the CNN article you mention so it’s difficult to respond to your post, even after mentally stripping it of nonsense.

We tend to end up with defined ages for eg driving, consent, criminal responsibility, etc because it is difficult to use more nuanced criteria. In practice, the law does (or can) take nuance into account (except for things like being able to have a driving licence or legally buy alcohol). Sometimes that is for good, humanitarian reasons (eg an adult with learning difficulties who cannot comprehend the consequences of their actions) or for misguided, vengeful reasons (eg trying a child as an adult because of the severity of their crime), or just plain prejudice (eg treating Black and/or poor children as greater threats than white, middle-class children).

There’s no easy way to draw lines, and no easy way to allow nuance while excluding prejudice. But “whatever the accused decides is convenient for them, personally, right now” is never going to be a criteria, for obvious reasons.

Ablism would be something like planning a company outing, and choosing the location up a tall, steep hill when other options were available, specifically because you don’t like the fact that your coworker has asthma.

It doesn’t have to be deliberately malicious to be ableism. It’s often just thoughtlessness.

The social model of disability distinguishes between ‘impairment’, which is some functional limitation, and ‘disability’ which is created by barriers to people with an impairment. Most of those barriers exist because their designers just didn’t think about it and/or were not required to. The building with steps and no ramps, the information provided by written sign only, the flashing lights which can trigger seizures. They’re not (usually) a product of irrational hate, just ignorance and carelessness, and in some cases a conscious refusal to cater for a minority need because of costs or aesthetics.

The effect on disabled people is much the same, whether it was deliberate or careless, of course.

It’s an interesting question.

Musk was forced to buy Twitter after accidentally promising to do so in legally binding terms. So, to a very great extent, there is no endgame, just the endless flailing of a rich kid who can’t comprehend just how much luck (rather than genius) got him where he is.

But, his supporters are primarily far right authoritarians, and his partners in Twitter include some extremely authoritarian regimes which have an interest in being able to suppress speech (and have had more help to do so with X compared to old Twitter). And his idea of free speech is being able to say whatever he likes without criticism, which means silencing any ideas that could possibly be construed as criticism, whether directed at him or not. The standard far right nonsense. If you point out the existence of racism you’re attacking white people. If you point out the existence of sexism you’re attacking men. If you choose not to advertise on a website promoting far right ideas, you’re attacking him personally.

Is he trying to turn Twitter into a more successful version of Gab or Truth Social, or is that just a by-product of his peculiar psyche? Is it with the intention of influencing elections, or is it just that his particular type of narcissism happens to be very useful to authoritarians? Are the ideas of the far right anything other than extreme narcissism anyway?

He’s not an evil genius but evil clowns can do a lot of damage too.

Don’t. Just don’t. Lithium batteries are very nasty when they go wrong. They’re not expensive to replace. The risk is absolutely not worth the reward. Dispose of it safely (dump it in salt water for a few hours then take it for recycling).

Two of us running a quiet little wine bar, him behind the bar, me taking a break at the back of the room. Three lads come in and we both recognised them as the ones who had trashed one of the rooms upstairs the previous week. When my co-worker refused to serve them, one of them grabbed a bottle and hit it against the bar, trying (and failing) to break it for a weapon.

I saw red. All 5’4" of me advancing in fury, yelling “get out” repeatedly at the top of my voice. They looked at me, froze for a second, then scrambled out the door.

I was quite impressed with myself until I turned round and saw one of our regulars, a great big bear of a man, had heard the commotion and come in from the back room to see what was going on.

Because they’re being sold into the foreigners’ gag-gift market where demand, and thus price, is higher.

As others have said, it depends a lot on the reason for having that guest on. But there are a lot of ‘leftists’ with questionable analytical skills and/or questionable ideas and/or questionable associates. You don’t need to boycott them for one bad decision, or even a series of bad decisions, but you do need to decide what is worth your time.

If you disagree with platforming certain people in any context, don’t give those videos any views. If they do it a lot, maybe give up on them altogether. And have a think about their other ideas/guests/associates that might have clued you in earlier if you’d picked up on it. Or the trajectory that got them where they are. There are plenty of ‘leftists’ who have ended up in a bad place without necessarily having been a shithead to start with.

There was a mini scandal at the Atlanta Olympics because they made the track surface very hard, to suit sprinters and long-jumpers (in the hope of new records, in sports where the US is strong) and it meant that some of the runners who usually do the 5k and the 10k (track) struggled to compete in both events. (The sprinters, of course, were not covering enough distance to care.)

I managed to track down a decent reference for it, which also addresses your question in some detail: The Hard and Soft of It

The Atlanta Olympic Track was built as hard and fast as rules would allow. I know because I circled the thing 49 times in the 1996 Trials before I dropped out of the 10,000-meter finals with one lap to go. Those Games weren’t for me, and the concrete-hard track aggravated a case of plantar fasciitis that kept me from running more than a block for about a month after that.

On the surface, others had better luck: Michael Johnson and his golden slippers set world records later that summer in the 200 and 400; the former endures nearly a decade later. However, after Haile Gebrselassie won the 10,000 meters, he withdrew from the 5,000 meters, complaining of severe blisters on the bottom of his feet caused in part by the hard track.

But comparing trail to road is a bit more complicated. Trails can be pretty hard and also, not as smooth and even as (some) roads, and asphalt is different from concrete. The linked article has some good discussion of different surfaces.