The planning board’s decision was based on health concerns due to the possible negative environmental impact of telecommunication on the residents, especially the children studying at the school who could potentially be exposed to electromagnetic radiation. The town felt the residents would be ‘unsafe’ due to radio frequencies and rejected the company’s notion of building the tower on the land.

I mean, I think that the planning board is idiotic, but I don’t see why T-Mobile cares enough to fight it. If they don’t build it, okay. It looks like the school in question is right in the middle of town. Then Wanaque is going to have crummy cell coverage. Let them have bad cell coverage and build a tower somewhere else. It’s not like this is the world’s only place that could use better cell coverage. The main people who benefit from the coverage are Wanaque residents. Sure, okay, there’s some secondary benefit to travelers, but if we get to the point that all the dead zones that travelers pass through out there are covered, then cell providers can go worry about places that are determined not to have have cell coverage.

If I were cell companies, I’d just get together with the rest of the industry and start publishing a coverage score for cities for cell coverage. Put it online in some accessible database format, so that when places like city-data.com put up data on a city, they also show that the city has poor cell coverage and that would-be residents are aware of the fact.

I don’t really use calendaring all that much, but when I do, I use org-mode agenda in emacs, which seems to do all the stuff that he’s complaining about. It does a lot more than I use.

That being said, I get that that’s probably not what he’s after if he’s not an emacs user.

and open-source.

Between the lead lemmy dev, dessalines, using Stalin as his profile picture and this guy using Goebbels, we’ve got a pretty WW2-retro vibe going on.

Sure. Heck, occasionally I do actually do that, like if I post a piece of information that I’ve looked up and then refer back to it later.

It looks like a fair bit of it was TV-watching, which is now being displaced.

https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/15224.jpeg

https://cdn.cablecompare.com/2022/2/1644941050238-1._Average_Daily_Time_Spent_Watching_Television%2C_United_States_2014-2023.png

A proposed tax hike sparked unrest, but Kenya’s real problem is a debt crisis.

Around $35 million of that debt is owned by foreign creditors, primarily China and powerful international groups like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But Kenya’s economic woes didn’t start recently; the nation’s immense debt stems from an economic boom in the early 2000s, when the government borrowed money from a variety of international creditors to fund public infrastructure projects, supporting agriculture and small and medium businesses and external debt servicing but failed to invest those loans in ways that could grow the economy.

China can lend on whatever terms China wants to, but isn’t the IMF supposed to sanity-check spending when a country comes to them for money, and reject loans if they aren’t going to produce a return?

kagis

https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2023/IMF-Conditionality

When a country borrows from the IMF, the government agrees to adjust its economic policies to overcome the problems that led it to seek financial assistance. These policy adjustments are conditions for IMF loans and help to ensure that the country adopts strong and effective policies.

Why do IMF loans include conditions?

Conditionality helps countries solve balance of payments problems without resorting to measures that harm national or international prosperity. In addition, the measures aim to safeguard IMF resources by ensuring that the country’s finances will be strong enough to repay the loan, allowing other countries to use the resources if needed in the future. Conditionality is included in financing and non-financing IMF programs with the aim to progress towards the agreed policy goals.

So, I’d think that at least one of three things happened here:

• The IMF’s requirements weren’t sufficiently-strong.

• The IMF’s requirements weren’t actually enforced; Kenya did something else with the money.

• Something unforeseeable happened (I assume that COVID-19 might have been a factor, as that impacted economies elsewhere).

reads further

Ultimately, even raising capital is a short-term financial fix to the long-term political problems of corruption, waste, and mismanagement. Efforts to undo those patterns are likely to anger the ultra-wealthy, whose businesses depend on corrupt relationships with the government to thrive.

Well, okay, but taking anticorruption actions can be a requirement of loans. Maybe the government has to decide whether they want to keep those connected people happy or get a loan.

looks back at IMF factsheet

They even list that as a condition that they can impose:

https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2023/IMF-Conditionality

Examples

Improve anti-corruption and rule of law

Some will, some won’t. Not a hivemind.

You can buy discs online.

I don’t speak French either – I just wanted an English-language article about the French elections, but you’re welcome.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I’m sure that you can find media here in the US that is going to provide useful political coverage of France, but I don’t think that this article is gonna be it.

kagis for Le Monde English

Hmm.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/06/29/french-elections-who-would-don-quixote-vote-for-today_6676135_23.html

French elections: Who would Don Quixote vote for today?

Ugh. This is not really what I was hoping for.

checks the BBC

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2q0rv05p19o

French PM in final appeal to stop far-right victory

That’s better.

Lemmy is not designed to provide reasonably-hardened anonymity in the sort of way that Hyphanet, I2P, or maybe Tor or something like that is.

I would not recommend using Lemmy if I were seriously concerned about government prosecution for content on it.

Lemmy’s a good alternative for something like Reddit.

Yes. I wouldn’t be preemptively worried about it, though.

Your scan is going to try to read and maybe write each sector and see if the drive returns an error for that operation. In theory, the adapter could respond with a read or write error even if a read or write worked or even return some kind of bogus data instead of an error.

But I wouldn’t expect this to likely actually arise or be particularly worried about the prospect. It’s sort of a “could my grocery store checkout counter person murder me” thing. Theoretically yes, but I wouldn’t worry about it unless I had some reason to believe that that was the case.

I mean, you can probably create something akin to a god, but I don’t see as to whether it being open source or not would change that.

I don’t really have a problem with this – I think that it’s rarely in a consumer’s interest to choose a locked phone. Buying a locked phone basically means that you’re getting a loan to pay for hardware that you pay back with a higher service price. But I’d point out that:

• You can get unlocked phones and service now. I do. There are some privacy benefits to doing so – my cell provider doesn’t know who I am (though they could maybe infer it from usage patterns of their network and statistical analysis). It’s not a lack of unlocked service that’s at issue. To do this, Congress is basically arguing that the American consumer is just making a bad decision to purchase a plan-combined-with-a-locked-phone and forcing them not to do so.

• Consumers will pay more for cell phones up front. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – it maybe makes the carrier market more competitive to not have a large portion of consumers locked to one provider. But there are also some benefits to having the carrier selecting cell phones that they offer in that the provider is probably in a better position to evaluate what phone manufacturers have on offer in terms of things like failure rates than do consumers.

Being libertarian doesn’t need mean one’s an anarchist (or even a minarchist!).

And he’s also libertarian in the sense that the unadorned word has been used in the US, a right-libertarian, rather than how it was historically used in Europe in an unadorned sense, left-libertarian, where I’d say that it was somewhat-closer to anarchism than the more small- or minimal-government right-libertarianism.

I mean, if you want to play a game made by volunteers, that’s where Team Fortress came from.

There originally was the Quake-based Team Fortress mod.

There was Weapons Factory for Quake II, which was similar.

The TF team was hired by Valve to do the confusingly-named Team Fortress Classic for Valve’s Half-Life, itself based on Quake II.

And Valve did Team Fortress 2.

Only HR, IT, and management are believed to be unaffected by the cuts, which reportedly would see the developer’s title, 2016’s Disney Magic Kingdoms, transferred to Gameloft’s studio in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

Kharkiv? Damn. I mean, Kharkiv is an active war zone. As in “I read regular news reports about fighting there”.

This was today:

https://kyivindependent.com/russia-attacks-kharkiv-with-fab-500-bomb-for-first-time-injuring-4/

Russia attacks Kharkiv with FAB-500 gliding bomb for first time, injuring 4

searches further

And it’s not just casually using the term to refer to Kharkiv Oblast, either. The studio is in the city, slightly on the Russia side.

10 Nezalezhnosti Ave, BC Kvartal, 61022 Kharkiv, Ukraine

EDIT: They aren’t in the district that was bombed above, but they’re one block away from said district.