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Trump just triggered “the dumbest trade war in history”, says The Wall Street Journal. His tariffs will see those “notorious American adversaries”, Mexico and Canada, hit with a 25% tax on goods exported to the US, while China, “a real adversary”, will endure just 10%. The official justification is they aren’t doing enough to stop illegal drugs across the border. The real explanation appears to be Trump’s apparent belief the US can be a “perfectly closed economy making everything at home”.

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in reply to Col

Does Trump really have the authority to put tariffs in place? The Congressional Research Service in December explained that, technically, only Congress has the authority to impose tariffs. But the president does have the authority to adjust tariffs in some cases, according to the CRS. Those cases include situations where an import threatens the national security of the United States, or when tariffs are deemed necessary in order to protect a domestic industry.
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#EightYearsAgoToday #AreYouBetterOff

February 3, 2017 – Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai rolled back an agreement with nine internet service providers that had encouraged ISPs to provide affordable internet access to low-income communities. This reversed the decision of Pai’s Obama-era predecessor, Tom Wheeler, and will remove a $9.25 per month credit for low-income households to purchase internet service.

#StopTrumpNow #GOPKakistocracy #RepublicansDidThis #WeirdGOP #USPol

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"The whole country is behind the retaliation the prime minister has announced, so now we are going to tax American exporters who are trying to sell us stuff. That means Americans are going to lose jobs, so this is really, it is self-mutilation. America is hurting itself. We think that it is utterly crazy, and we're also really, really angry at you.”

— Chrystia Freeland, former Canadian deputy prime minister

#RepublicansDidThis #RepublicansOwnThis #GOPKakistocracy #GOPWeirdos #USPol

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Cicindela sylvicola Dejean, 1822

Specimen was captured in July 1996 in the Ardennes region, France.

I've used the focus-stack technique, DIY hardware only (a Raspberry HQ cam controlled by a Raspberry Pi 3, an old Pentax-m 50mm f1.7 lens, some extension tubes, and a $30 linear rail from Aliexpress)

Published under #CC0 here flickr.com/photos/101430615@N0…

#Coleoptera #Caraboidea #Carabidae #Cicindelinae #Cicindelini #Cicindela #FocusStack #Macro #Pentax #nature #photography #insect #wildlife

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US Pol: What's worth our time?

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Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝

@Moss

It's a thread about a specific protest which one can still go to: actionnetwork.org/events/prote…

which the thread author (one of the two center-leftists I can still read) approves of and wants people to go to. It's organized by DSA. Then:

"If you don't like them [DSA] you should go help them to understand what mistakes they might be making. My understanding is they need help and energy and level heads. If you have one full of opinions go lend your voice in that manner."

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Shakira standing up for immigrants, dedicates her Grammy to them. ✊🏼❤️
bit.ly/4hhoznB
#grammys #shakira #immigrants

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My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

Here are a few crops from a mural I painted for Wollaton Hall Museum (Nottingham, UK), 2020. This is one of the most detailed paintings I've ever created.

#Art #Painting #PaleoArt #PalaeoArt #SciArt #SciComm #DigitalArt #Illustration #Dinosaurs #Birds #Reptiles #Palaeontology #Paleontology #Owl #Gorrilla

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This entry was edited (3 years ago)

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I need to start a hash tag for "ant of the day" but I'm scared to commit to that much work until I know I can stick to it.

I will keep posing ants of the day for a bit and then go back and tag them all when I feel like it's going to keep going for a good long while.

That's a task I'm looking forward too. It would be fun to look at all of the posts in one place.

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in reply to myrmepropagandist

do you take requests? That's probably even more work. How about Oecophylla kraussei , a fossil weaver ant from the early Eocene of Okanagon highlands, British Colombia, Canada?

cambridge.org/core/journals/ca…

in reply to myrmepropagandist

there's also a bunch of bulldog ants known from the same formation.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleofau…
oh yeah, and Titanomyrma, the titan ant!

(to me the Eocene is neat because it's an example of how climate radically alters the where and how of where plants and animals live )

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Over at @WIRED, reporters like Vittoria Elliott are doing excellent work documenting Musk's takeover of the federal government

In this piece, she tracks down the names of the people Musk has installed at various agencies

these guys are all 19 to 24 year old engineers -- one is a Thiel fellow

Story here: wired.com/story/elon-musk-gove…

Unpaywalled: archive.is/L2C7d

in reply to Clive Thompson

@Old_IT_geek This is the part I've been waiting for. They're going to get to the IRS, see the mainframes, perhaps remember the outage on Tax Day 2018 due to a bug in the storage array firmware that the subcontractor forgot to apply, and they're going to jump to the conclusion that they can just migrate everything to AWS in a week.

Then they're going to discover that the IRS's millions of lines of mainframe code are IBM mainframe assembly language and not even as portable as COBOL.

in reply to jhamby

@Old_IT_geek @jhamby

Yeah, very good point – they are totally unprepared, technically, for the vicissitudes of these legacy systems

But I’m not sure they actually want to do any of this work correctly, carefully, and without destroying massive amounts of recordkeeping inside the IRS

For them, I suspect, changing things in a way that absolutely wrecks the IRS’s ability to collect would be a feature, not a bug

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"Move fast and break things" aplicado al Gobierno federal estadounidense. Va a salir MUY mal y va a morir gente. No es hipérbole: VA a morir gente.

#EEUU🇺🇸 #tecnobros #política #noticias

wired.com/story/elon-musk-gove…

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Via Katie Phang:

NEW reporting from Yamiche Alcindor::

At the Dept. of Education, dozens of employees who attended a diversity training course encouraged by former Education Sec. Betsy DeVos during President Trump’s first administration have been placed on paid leave as part of Trump’s targeting of DEI programs.

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Ecuador President Says New Trade Deal With Canada Finalized usnews.com/news/world/articles…
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Protestors blockade Farnborough airport over private jet expansion plans

Local residents and climate activists have blocked access to Farnborough Airport to protest against the proposed expansion of the airport which they say will almost double the number of private jet flights to 70,000 a year

itv.com/news/meridian/2025-02-…

#Farnborough #Rushmoor #Hampshire #England #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #GlobalBurning #ClimateDestruction #ClimateSuicide #MassExtinction #environment #climate #ClimateStrike

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yesterday‘s hike was phenomenal. my body feels wrecked today but it was worth it. 💯
more photos in colour incoming on my new pixelfed @gestalter@pixelfed.social.

#hike #hiking #nature #landscape #photography #landscapephotography #fuji #fujifilm #blackandwhite #mountains #alps

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Marianne Faithfull was the ultimate poster child for the “freewheeling spirit of the 1960s”, says The Times. Born in 1946, the daughter of Glynn Faithfull, a British spy during WW2, and Eva von Sacher-Masoch, a baroness. She left home at 17 sank into drug addiction, made multiple suicide attempts, and ended up living on the streets. Her road to recovery was marked by a refusal to feel sorry for herself. “I don’t feel cursed,” she said in one of her final interviews. “I just feel f***ing human.”

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Sonnet 120 - CXX
That you were once unkind befriends me now,
And for that sorrow, which I then did feel,
Needs must I under my transgression bow,
Unless my nerves were brass or hammer'd steel.
For if you were by my unkindness shaken,
As I by yours, you've passed a hell of time;
And I, a tyrant, have no leisure taken
To weigh how once I suffered in your crime.
O! that our night of woe might have remembered
My deepest sense, how hard true sorrow hits,
And soon to you, as you to me, then tendered
The humble salve, which wounded bosoms fits!
But that your trespass now becomes a fee;
Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me.

bot by @davidaugust

#sonnet #poem #Shakespeare

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CPBD is down in Chile doing plant surveys in urban environments and cussing up a storm.

He talks about how "anthropic stone is shaped by water" which kind of gave me chills.

anthropic is geologist speak for "man made" and I think about how all of this will just be a very strange layer among many some day in a far future. The trace fossils of humanity.

youtube.com/watch?v=wujEfC4rAH…

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in reply to myrmepropagandist

I don't know if you ever dabble in video games, but one of the best pieces of fiction, in any medium, I've experienced in my life is titled Horizon: Zero Dawn. I saved the sequel as a pick-me-up "for emergencies," I'm playing it now. Both titles debuted the same year as major entries in famous beloved series, so they were very undersung.

Specifically (likely only) because of that context, "anthropic stone" didn't startle me in the least. It's a major feature of the game's landscape.

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If you’re anything like me and are disheartened by businesses bending the knee, this article gives me a bit of hope.

“Business has to pick up the mantle when government fails you” Rose Marcario, CEO of Patagonia

time.com/5684011/patagonia-2/

#Leadership #Strategy

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in reply to Alex Jimenez

We have come to accept that businesses will gouge us if they can; that a business's only motive is making as much money as possible. Businesses not longer even pretend to be primarily interested in providing a good product or service. I think this is a change.

For example, if I ran Netflix, I'd think about how to provide entertainment to as many people as possible, while keeping employees paid a decent wage and the doors open. But Netflix simply announces, "We are raising our subscription prices and will start showing you ads, because we want to make more money."

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Statistics Stumper:

Throw darts at a 1*1 square in uniform distribution. You can estimate pi by comparing the ratio of darts inside of an inscribed circle to those that fall outside of the circle.

But, what happens if you are aiming your dart? If the darts are normally distributed about the bullseye?

Can you still extract pi from the data? What will ratio of those inside the circle and out approach?

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mastodon - Link to source

myrmepropagandist

@bob I just wrote a program to test this and it works! and the further out you go the better an estimate of pi you will produce— you do need to take two samples: a square and an inscribed circle but the normal distribution is almost kinda uniform if you don’t mind ignoring like 99.9% of the graph— should I show my students? I don’t think I can resist!
@bob

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US Government Websites Are Disappearing in Real Time
https://www.wired.com/story/us-government-websites-are-disappearing-in-real-time/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Elon Musk's Twitter @elon-musk-s-twitter-WIRED

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And now a federal agency says it will withhold public information in order to lock journalists into a failing private communications channel. (Yes, that one.) The courts will stop this, if anyone cares to sue.

thedesk.net/2025/02/ntsb-moves…

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My overarching goal for 2025 is to organize, simplify, and clarify how I spend my days. I'm working on a loose framework to guide my overall wellness. To thrive in the ways that I want to thrive.

One early discovery: I forgot how much I love the library.

It's the second Saturday in a row that, as part of my new routine, I'm at the library to basically do some disk defragmentation for my brain. "Braintenance" I call it.

The library has a perfect blend of "solitude" and "be productive!" for me.

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This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Altbot

@altbot

NYT, Feb 11, 1933

DANES SEE HITLER WAGING TARIFF WAR
Increases Virtually Ban Their
Cattle
Scandinavian Papers Call for Reprisals.
Wireless to THE New york Toes,
COPENHAGEN, Feb. 10.

The recent cancellation of the Swedish-German trade treaty, with the resultant voiding of the most-favored-nation clause, has seemingly been used by the Hitler government as an opportunity to open a tariff war
on the Scandinavian countries andthe Netherlands.
@Some_Emo_Chick

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USAID website offline. usaid.gov