"If a woman is playing it, we’re showing it,” says Whoopi Goldberg on her new global women’s sports network.
> According to its website, AWSN will be available in 65 countries and will be dedicated exclusively to women’s sports featuring some of the world’s largest sports leagues, such as the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), The International Basketball Federation (FIBA), the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), and the Women’s National Basketball League (WNBL). > > On a mission to increase representation while filling a gap in global broadcasting, Goldberg partnered with CommonSpirit and Jungo TV to co-found the network. Inspired by her childhood passion for sports, the entertainer says AWSN has been 16 years in the making.
A project receives approval in Garfield Park while Auburn Gresham looks to other areas to fill the grocery void.
We have the power to lean into another standard: one that earns the audience’s trust and never amplifies lies.
> Ahead of Trump’s second term, the historic Black press can serve as a guiding light for practicing journalism in pursuit of a healthy democracy — or, at least, survival and community.
New research shows it is a nightmare for all of us, but especially for people with health issues and marginalised groups
“[Games] must stay accessible, playable, and alive.”
> Sue Gordon, who served as the principal deputy director of national intelligence — the nation’s top career intelligence post — shared her big concern: What if America just doesn’t meet the moment? What if, coming out of the pandemic, America just fails to step up as great powers, adversary nations, partisan polarization, and rising income inequality upends the global system that has kept watch for 80 years? “Our institutions are not keeping up with the turn of the Earth, and they’re being devalued in the moment,” she told me. “Society requires government, yet we’re running out of the structures that make it work.” > > As I wrote then, “There are massive economic, societal and security benefits that come from being the world’s leading superpower. What happens if we’re not anymore? Imagine a U.S. that doesn’t attract top talent. What if the next great innovations happen in Europe or Asia instead of Silicon Valley? What if Chinese venture capitalists get first crack at the hottest deals in the world?”
Hundreds of Bethesda video game workers, who work on titles like Fallout 76 and Skyrim, are going on strike across the country. At issue: Microsoft outsourcing quality control jobs.
> Hundreds of Bethesda video game workers, who work on titles like Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls, are going on strike across the country. Workers in Maryland and Texas are walking off the job, claiming that the company has failed to address their remote work concerns at the bargaining table, and has begun outsourcing quality assurance work without the union's agreement.
> The union is looking to limit the percentage of quality assurance testers the company outsources in comparison to the number of full-time workers present in its bargaining unit. It would not share details on where Microsoft has chosen to outsource labor to. > > The union is also seeking a more flexible remote work policy. ZeniMax workers are currently required to go to the office twice a week, and many, the union says, are being denied their remote work requests. Eichner says that the company has repeatedly ignored the union's remote work proposal.
Surely it can’t just be because a town name happens to contain “lsd” in the middle of it?
Facebook is a remarkably bad website so i think you'd be quite surprised at how stuck in the past they are over there
Soundtrack: Post Pop Depression - Paraguay I haven't wanted to write much in the last week. Seemingly every single person on Earth with a blog has tried to drill down into what happened on November 5 — to find the people to blame, to somehow explain what could've been done differently,
> While it might feel a little tangential to bring technology into this, everybody is affected by the growth-at-all-costs Rot Economy, because everybody is using technology, all the time, and the technology in question is getting worse. This election cycle saw more than 25 billion text messages sent to potential voters, and seemingly every website was crammed full of random election advertising. > > Our phones are beset with notifications trying to "growth-hack" us into doing things that companies want, our apps full of microtransactions, our websites slower and harder-to-use with endless demands of our emails and our phone numbers and the need to log back in because they couldn't possibly lose a dollar to somebody who dared to consume their content for free. Our social networks are so algorithmically charged that they barely show us the things we want them to anymore, with executives dedicated to filling our feeds with AI-generated slop because despite being the customer, we are also the revenue mechanism. Our search engines do less as a means of making us use them more, our dating apps have become vehicles for private equity to add a toll to falling in love, our video games are constantly nagging us to give them more money, and despite it costing money and being attached to our account, we don't actually own any of the streaming media we purchase. We're drowning in spam — both in our emails and on our phones — and at this point in our lives we're probably agreed to 3 million pages worth of privacy policies allowing companies to use our information as they see fit. > > And these are issues that hit everything we do, all the time, constantly, unrelentingly. Technology is our lives now. We wake up, we use our phone, we check our texts (three spam calls, two spam texts), we look at our bank balance (two-factor authentication check), we read the news (a quarter of the page is blocked by an advertisement asking for our email that's deliberately built to hide the button to get rid of it, or a login screen because we got logged out somehow), we check social media (after being shown an ad every two clicks), and then we log onto Slack (and feel a pang of anxiety as 15 different notifications appear). > > Modern existence has become engulfed in sludge, the institutions that exist to cut through it bouncing between the ignorance of their masters and a misplaced duty in objectivity, our mechanisms for exploring and enjoying the world interfered with by powerful forces that are too-often left unchecked. Opening our devices is willfully subjecting us to attack after attack from applications, websites and devices that are built to make us do things rather than operate with the dignity and freedom that much of the internet was founded upon.
We will stop posting from our official editorial accounts on the platform, but X users can still share our articles
As many as one million black-footed ferrets lived on the continent in the late 1800s, but by the late 1950s, the species was presumed extinct. Scientists discovered a wild population in 1964, but even that group died out, and a captive breeding effort failed. Since a second rediscovery of a wild population in 1981, conservationists have worked hard to conserve the species using traditional breeding programs as well as more innovative technologies, including freezing semen and cloning.
One of the challenges conservationists face when tasked with bringing back a species from the brink of extinction is limited genetic diversity, which leads to inbreeding and can make offspring more vulnerable to issues, including hereditary abnormalities, poor reproductive efficiency and increased mortality rates.
The current population of black-footed ferrets—thousands of which have been reintroduced across the western U.S. since the 1990s—is all descend from just seven individuals, except for a few clones and Antonia’s new offspring. That’s a recipe for genetic bottlenecks that threaten the longevity of the species.
Cue cloning. In 1988, scientists had the foresight to collect tissue samples from a black-footed ferret named Willa after she died and preserve the material in the Frozen Zoo at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. Willa never reproduced, so her genetic material was not included in the modern ferret population. Her preserved genes contain three times more genetic diversity than living black-footed ferrets do.
Antonia, a cloned black-footed ferret at the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, has produced two healthy offspring that will help build genetic diversity in their recovering population
In Missouri, Alaska and Nebraska, where voters supported President-elect Donald Trump, they also voted to expand paid sick leave, proving that "voters don't see these as partisan issues.”
> In every state where paid sick leave was on the ballot, voters approved it. On Election Day, measures in Missouri, Alaska and Nebraska passed by wide margins: In Alaska, 57 percent of voters approved it, in Missouri it was 58 percent and in Nebraska a whopping 74 percent. > > The three new initiatives will give workers earned sick time depending on the size of their employer. If the business has 15 or more workers in Missouri and Alaska, or 20 or more in Nebraska, workers earn up to 56 hours of paid sick time a year. That’s equivalent to seven days if they work eight-hour shifts. Those who work for smaller businesses can earn up to 40 hours a year, or five eight-hour days. > > The paid leave laws go into effect in May (Missouri), July (Alaska) and October (Nebraska).
Rejected Proposition 6 would have banned forced prison labor, while Proposition 36 passed to restore higher penalties on some drug and theft offenses
> While eyes have been on the presidential election, particularly results in key swing states, this election season also brought a blow to criminal justice reform advocates in California. Voters’ final decision on pivotal ballot measures Proposition 36 and Proposition 6 will shape both policing and the experiences of and opportunities afforded to currently incarcerated people across the state. Not only did voters approve increased penalties for theft and some drug offenses, but they also rejected a move to ban forced prison labor.
In the days after Donald Trump was elected president, the 4B feminist movement is capturing young women’s interest on social media.
Though the urban-rural divide can sometimes appear like a primordial fault line in American political life, it is a relatively recent development. The Democratic Party’s collapse in the countryside…
> Starting in the 1990s, the Democratic Party emerged as the champion of a new globalized, knowledge economy, whose centralizing tendencies concentrated the most sophisticated and profitable enterprises in metropolitan areas. As a result, the historic party of industrial workers morphed into the home of highly educated metropolitan professionals. Meanwhile, rural areas struggled to adapt to the global era, becoming a repository for slow growth sectors—manufacturing, retail, construction, agriculture, and gas and oil—that provided mostly low paying, unskilled jobs. The Republican Party capitalized on this decline, arguing that their economic agenda of low taxes, minimal government spending, and weak regulations was critical to the well-being of rural industries and their largely non-college educated employees. > > By examining the emergence of the urban-rural divide in detail, we can see that the results of last week’s election were by no means inevitable. The Democratic Party’s collapse in the countryside was the predictable consequence of decisions to prioritize certain constituencies to the neglect of others. If the party is ever again to capture a sufficient governing majority to enact the social and economic agenda our country needs, it won’t be through eking out 2% higher turnout in the suburbs. It will be through transforming the Democratic Party into an organization that once again can compete in both urban and rural counties.
How Do You Say Your Name? Difficult-to-Pronounce Names and Labor Market Outcomes by Qi Ge and Stephen Wu. Published in volume 16, issue 4, pages 254-79 of American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2024, Abstract: We test for labor market discrimination based on an understudied characteris...
> We test for labor market discrimination based on an understudied characteristic: name fluency. Analysis of recent economics PhD job candidates indicates that name difficulty is negatively related to the probability of landing an academic or tenure-track position and research productivity of initial institutional placement. Discrimination due to name fluency is also found using experimental data from prior audit studies. Within samples of African Americans (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004) and ethnic immigrants (Oreopoulos 2011), job applicants with less fluent names experience lower callback rates, and name complexity explains roughly between 10 and 50 percent of ethnic name penalties. The results are primarily driven by candidates with weaker résumés, suggesting that cognitive biases may contribute to the penalty of having a difficult-to-pronounce name.
Our south of the borough correspondent, PEARL LEE, on the seemingly random block on some harmless organisations that is forcing them to turn their backs on social media Businesses, community groups…
> Businesses, community groups, arts organisations and residents in a thriving town on the Croydon-Surrey border are in uproar because the automatic systems employed to police social media have silenced them on one of the world’s biggest digital platforms – all because Coulsdon has the letters L, S and D in its name. > > Residents’ associations and businesses with “Coulsdon” in their titles have found themselves “cancelled”, with posts being removed from Facebook and warnings issued as to their future conduct under a set of rules so vague that any post, however innocent, might fall foul of them.
We categorized songs in the Billboard Top 10 to see if love songs are on the decline.
> This Baby Boomer-centric sentiment seems to crystallize around one topic in particular: modern pop music’s treatment of love and romance—or the lack thereof. According to Boomer Bob, the love song is dying. But is it true? Let’s investigate...
Liberals won some important races, but conservatives made gains, too
> Despite the outcome at the top of the ticket, races for state supreme courts across the country offered a much more mixed result, with Democrats and liberals scoring some important wins but also facing some setbacks. Below we catalog Tuesday's most notable races.
DRC becomes first African nation to formally endorse the creation of an international crime of ecocide, following September 2024 proposal from Pacific nations to add ecocide to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Corporations that once touted their green initiatives have lately been keeping them quiet to avoid aggravating Republican members of Congress and state legislatures. The trend is called “greenhushing.”
With no voices in support in the original post and currently the only two voices in support here being the mods themselves.
bluntly: this is not a democracy, we don't pretend it is, and we've never run it that way so this is not a particularly relevant consideration for us. democracy at the scale of communities is an incredibly fraught issue that requires a lot of time and energy to administer we don't have. in any case none of our referendums in the community (which we've done before) have been majority votes, they've solicited feedback that informs our judgement. our judgement here is this is a good idea regardless of how the community feels about it, and that even if we didn't implement the moratorium we'd be cracking down on posts, handing out bans, and doing sweeping removals because we've been more permissive than our usual moderation on the subject and let behavior we'd normally step in on go.
in short: even if the moratorium were removed, that'd just mean heavier-handed enforcement from this point forward. if people really want no moratorium then they should be prepared to start catching 30-day bans (or permanent bans if they're off instance) for any unkind behavior.
Why are you doing this if you don’t think what happens here matters?
if you think something has to arbitrarily "matter" to be socially valuable to do then there's your problem. in any case, i certainly don't think the value of this platform rests on "people knifing each other about a presidential election they have very little power over the outcome of."
If one takes that attitude, you’re right, you won’t change the world.
i think you're conflating "having value" with "changing the world" when these are two essentially independent qualities. at no point have we ever sought to "change the world" with this (because we're five people running this in our spare time, that's not in our capabilities as people), and from the beginning we've said we'd be content with only a handful of people using this place as long as they get something out of doing it (because that's what we consider valuable, not whether or not this can have sweeping social impact or importance).
because you can play meaningless "what if?" games like this forever. at the end of the day you don't have to be a pessimist to realize the odds of something here changing the world are so minute that it's fine to put a moratorium on certain kinds of posts. you're not going to convince me otherwise. and even in the optimistic scenario: virtually all of what's discussed here, while interesting, is designed to be fleeting and buried. conversations on link aggregators tend to have a shelf-life of no more than a week, and that's not really where you're going to find ideas that make change. here the conversations usually die down after an even shorter period (about two days).
frankly: if the next Lenin or whatever is actually on Lemmy, i'd tell them to get a blog instead of hashing it out in link aggregator comment sections. it's a better use of their time, it's a better place to test and hone their ideas, and they have actual editorial control over everything.
A lot of people are understandably upset right now, and yes, all the facts of the election are not in yet. But do you really want to have a moratorium on election posts for a whole month?
yes, the mod team is in more-or-less unanimous agreement on the subject. and if we were moderating to the exact same standard we usually do we'd likely be removing, locking, or severely pruning nearly every thread posted in the politics section on the subject in the past few days. maybe we'll shorten if it need be but moratorium itself is not controversial and i do not anticipate us reversing course on it. please remember that this cannot be a day job for any of us.
Who’s to say some random comment in a random post on the presidential election doesn’t come up with some incredible idea or solution?
if someone does this i trust they won't limit it to a niche social media website with like 500 users, where it will have no actual visibility and will reach exactly zero actual powerbrokers. i don't think this is a remotely convincing hypothetical, personally, and its logic would extend far beyond talk of the presidential election.
Because these are literal sky scrapers. Fire on a wood structure is a recipe for catastrophic failure. A fire in a large structure could have similar effects to those large high rise condos that collapsed in Florida from poor maintenance.
i think you're operating under 1) an extremely 1800s understanding of how fire-resistant a wood skyscraper would be and 2) a misguided understanding of where fire safety problems tend to come from in most contemporary buildings
wood is not uniquely flammable,[^1] and the vast majority of the problem in a fire is not going to be with the actual wood itself (as is true of steel, concrete, etc.) but moreso with the fact that we make nearly everything that isn't the building itself out of extremely combustible materials and we probably should not do that? as i recall that was the entire problem at Grenfell, where the cladding used was a flammable plastic that rendered any airgapping measures between flats useless and allowed the fire to spread uncontrollably. the fire at Grenfell also reportedly began from a refrigerator that was plastic-backed.
[^1]: it can rather trivially be treated to be fire-resistant--and as the person you're replying to notes has already been tested extensively and implemented in existing buildings to that end, and in multiple locales, just from a brief search on the subject
Does this extend to not discussing plans, posting information about which states may be taking measures to protect their citizens or how effective those measures might be, or discussing things like resistance or mutual aid?
no, why would it? even way you're describing them makes it clear they're not about the presidential election. don't be too clever by one half--if there's a problem with a submission we'll just tell you.
my understanding is yes that's the general avenue people are researching; there's also the actual energy inputs powering steelmaking that hypothetically can be made greener (currently, it's a process that seems to almost exclusively use fossil fuels because of the very high temperatures needed)
as the article kind of notes steelmaking in specific is very carbon intensive, so we either need to use less of it or decarbonize its production (or more likely a mixture of both). the statistics on this according to Wikipedia are:
As of 2021, steelmaking is estimated to be responsible for around 11% of the global emissions of carbon dioxide and around 7% of the global greenhouse gas emissions.[12][13] Making 1 ton of steel emits about 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide.[14]
one thing i'd be interested in: is it possible to make a fun 4X-style game that challenges the very premises of 4X (which are mostly patterned after the models of expansion we're familiar with in the West)?
The Mozilla Foundation laid off 30 percent of its workforce and completely eliminated its advocacy and global programs divisions, TechCrunch reports.
“Fighting for a free and open internet will always be core to our mission, and advocacy continues to be a critical tool in that work. We’re revisiting how we pursue that work, not stopping it,” Brandon Borrman, the Mozilla Foundation’s communications chief, said in an email to The Verge. Borrman declined to confirm exactly how many people were laid off, but said it was about “30% of the current team.”
note: i've proposed this to the community mods, if we think it's a good idea (i think it is, and i'd like to enforce it asap) it'll go into effect soon.
POLL CLOSED, the results are as follows:
- Kamala Harris (Democratic) (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)
- Claudia De la Cruz (Socialism and Liberation) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 30–10
- Vermin Supreme (Independent/Pirate) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 34–6, loses to Claudia De la Cruz (Socialism and Liberation) by 15–11
- Cornel West (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 31–10, loses to Vermin Supreme (Independent/Pirate) by 15–12
- Bill Stodden (Socialist) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 34–7, loses to Cornel West (Independent) by 11–9
- Rachele Fruit (Socialist Workers) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 34–6, loses to Bill Stodden (Socialist) by 9–7
- Jill Stein (Green) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 34–6, loses to Bill Stodden (Socialist) by 15–8
- Blake Huber (Approval Voting) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 33–8, loses to Jill Stein (Green) by 13–9
- Laura Ebke (Liberal) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Blake Huber (Approval Voting) by 10–7
- Joseph Kishore (Socialist Equality) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 35–5, loses to Laura Ebke (Liberal) by 9–8
- Peter Sonski (American Solidarity) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Joseph Kishore (Socialist Equality) by 12–5
- Lucifer "Justin Case" Everylove (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–3, loses to Peter Sonski (American Solidarity) by 10–8
- Jay Bowman (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Peter Sonski (American Solidarity) by 9–7
- Robby Wells (Party) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Jay Bowman (Independent) by 8–6
- Chris Garrity (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Robby Wells (Party) by 8–6
- Richard Duncan (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Chris Garrity (Independent) by 8–4
- Shiva Ayyadurai (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Richard Duncan (Independent) by 7–6
- Chase Oliver (Libertarian) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Shiva Ayyadurai (Independent) by 11–8
- Joel Skousen (Constitution dissident) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Chase Oliver (Libertarian) by 10–8
- Michael Wood (Prohibition) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Joel Skousen (Constitution dissident) by 10–6
- Randall Terry (Constitution) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Michael Wood (Prohibition) by 8–7
- Mattie Preston (Godliness, Truth, Justice) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Randall Terry (Constitution) by 10–5
- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Mattie Preston (Godliness, Truth, Justice) by 14–6
- Donald Trump (Republican) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 39–1, loses to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Independent) by 22–2
Gaming culture and sex has a vexed history when it comes to gender, given the industry’s long history of bad assumptions that ‘real’ gamers are straight men, and that building an adult game audience means sexually appealing to straight men. Female characters in adult games are often expected to have sexualised designs, with entitled male gamers complaining about characters like Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy or The Last of Us II’s Ellie not being sexy enough; meanwhile, the BBC has reported about female games workers also being affected by a blasé culture around women’s sexualisation, such as graphic, distressing sexual content being thrust upon female games actors without warning. The few semi-famous titillating console games, like the Leisure Suit Larry series or Playboy: The Mansion, don’t exactly seem like they’re interested in feminism.
But understanding sex in video games means understanding it as more than just cheap eye candy for straight guys. Sex is central to how many video games work, including games that don’t technically have any explicit content. Nintendo games present themselves as bastions of childlike, lightly heterosexual wholesomeness – Mario gets his kiss on the cheek from Princess Peach! – but I’ve written about the gay and trans innuendos common throughout the Zelda games, for instance, and how they’re used to both build Link’s androgynous character and to make use of covertly gay and covertly homophobic comedy. Levels of awareness of sex, from basic focuses on satisfying touch to creating sexual tension, are intrinsic to games in various ways, and the games that play with this awareness often find new and interesting ways to tell their stories, and to reflect on why we play games in the first place.
Dystopika (Steam, Windows) is a city builder in maybe the strictest definition of that two-word descriptor, because it steadfastly refuses to distract you with non-building details. The game is described by its single developer, Matt Marshall, as having "no goals, no management, just creativity and dark cozy vibes." Dystopika does very little to explain how you should play it, because there's no optimal path for doing so. Your only job is to enjoy yourself, poking and prodding at a dark cyberpunk cityscape, making things that look interesting, pretty, grim, or however you like. It might seem restrictive, but it feels very freeing.
apparently, the path to profitability was "shamelessly sell out on AI hype bullshit"
alyaza [they/she] @beehaw.org internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she