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5 votes
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Revealed: The Donald Trump-linked ‘Super PAC’ working behind the scenes to drive Europe’s voters to the far right
12 votes -
“I felt like it was a betrayal, and we had raised funds on a false pretense”: The Correspondent’s first US employee speaks out
13 votes -
Can you access university libraries in your country w/o an affiliation to the university?
In Turkey, where I live, almost all universities restrict access to staff and students (only their own students if not a graduate student); the only exception I can find is the Koç University...
In Turkey, where I live, almost all universities restrict access to staff and students (only their own students if not a graduate student); the only exception I can find is the Koç University where paid membership is open to public. I've researched in the past and found that major universities around the world---i.e. Italy, France, UK, US; selection factor being the languages I can read---seem to allow the public to access in one way or another (article, in Turkish, with results). But I wonder how accurate my reading is with the reality, and thus I'm asking this question.
So, as a plain citizen w/o any current affiliation to any educational institutions, can you access university libraries where you live? Does it matter if you have certain diplomas or affiliations? How easy it is?
10 votes -
After Pentagon ends contract, top-secret scientists group vows to carry on
13 votes -
Virus | Official trailer
6 votes -
Soul Goth
Howdy folks. Some of you will be pleased to find that this is a ~music post of mine not about emo rap, hahaha. Across the past six months I've found myself infatuated with a new sound I can't...
Howdy folks.
Some of you will be pleased to find that this is a ~music post of mine not about emo rap, hahaha.
Across the past six months I've found myself infatuated with a new sound I can't quite put the finger on. These songs have something in common, in spirit. And that's what I'm after.
Here's a little playlist I've assembled under the title of Soul Goth. If you have any other recommendations, give me everything you got.
Or if I'm describing something what already exists; let me know.
Yalla.
"God's Gonna Cut You Down" x Johnny Cash
"Pray I Won't Wake Up" x Honky Tonk Hustlas
"No Sugar In My Coffee" x Caught A Ghost
"In Hell I'll Be In Good Company" x The Dead South
"The Devil Wears a Suit and Tie" x Colter Wall
"When Jesus Comes" x Uncle Sinner
"The Devil Had a Hold of Me" x Gillian Welch
"Fingers To The Bone" x Brown Bird
3 votes -
Tildistas, do you read or have you read any webcomics?
as an offshoot of this topic, i'm interested to see if any of you folks read/were previously big into webcomics. the last time we apparently had this question was about ten months ago and...
as an offshoot of this topic, i'm interested to see if any of you folks read/were previously big into webcomics. the last time we apparently had this question was about ten months ago and obviously the site's grown quite a bit since then, so i'm sure there will be plenty of new answers.
20 votes -
How lobbyists rewrote Washington state’s privacy law
6 votes -
New York City's 'Green New Deal' shows how cities could deal with climate change
5 votes -
Why a classic Levantine dish is sailing from Canada to Syrian refugee camps
5 votes -
Indian Ocean - Kandisa (2000)
5 votes -
Irving Finkel | The Ark Before Noah: A Great Adventure
7 votes -
The best hike in every US state
9 votes -
Inland Knights live @ Mint, Leeds (2019)
3 votes -
Option to temporarily hide read posts
It would be nice to have an optional feature that filters out posts that a) you have read and b) don't have any new unread comments. When a post gets new comments it should reappear. That way we...
It would be nice to have an optional feature that filters out posts that a) you have read and b) don't have any new unread comments. When a post gets new comments it should reappear. That way we could see more unread content on the page, but still keep long running topics going. Have it not affect search, so people can still find posts for reference.
11 votes -
Segodnyanochyu - Sigariety I Kofie (Cigarettes And Coffee) (2008)
5 votes -
Magnetic micro-robots
4 votes -
Why Berlin's fifteen-year-old airport has never had a flight
10 votes -
Saudi fugitives accused of serious crimes get help to flee while US officials look the other way
4 votes -
At what point will technology be sufficient for exact local time everywhere?
It’s a thought I’ve had mulling around for a while now. I’m wondering will a point ever come when we return to completely accurate local time; each village, town and city operating on a local time...
It’s a thought I’ve had mulling around for a while now. I’m wondering will a point ever come when we return to completely accurate local time; each village, town and city operating on a local time synced with the sunrise/sunset—noon truly means the solar noon—with technology as the interface.
Is it possible? would we even want it, would it matter? Do we have to wait for brain chips to make a time conversion seamless?
11 votes -
This Week in Election Night, 2020 (Week 5)
week five begins with another page worth of links, a big presidential announcement, and the long creep of this cycle that will make us all go fucking crazy by the end of it. the [LONGFORM] tag...
week five begins with another page worth of links, a big presidential announcement, and the long creep of this cycle that will make us all go fucking crazy by the end of it. the [LONGFORM] tag continues, but i don't think there's any longform this week either, so c'est la vie.
the usual note: common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread. if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.
Week 1 thread • Week 2 thread • Week 3 thread • Week 4 thread
News
General Stuff
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from FiveThirtyEight: What The Potential 2020 Candidates Are Doing And Saying, Vol. 15. if you're curious what candidates have been up to, FiveThirtyEight has you covered with this week's roundup.
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from FiveThirtyEight: Who Might Make The Democratic Debate Stage?. this is probably the most important question now that the field is basically set: how many people will qualify for the debate stage? the DNC has said the cap is 20 candidates, and we have at least 21 running with potentially more on the way. a lot of them meet at least one criterion for being included. the DNC seems to have prepared extensively for that possibility, so it's not like they're on the backfoot here, but i suspect the politicking surrounding this for some of the smaller candidates is going to be pretty wacky.
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from The Atlantic: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet, like CBS News's roundup, this extensive piece covers every candidate currently declared, why they're running, and what they're running on. pretty good resource for those of you needing to cite something.
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from The Atlantic: The Strategic Move That Gave Bernie Sanders a Fundraising Edge. despite its title, this article mostly focuses on fundraising and how it's been either lackluster for democrats or not been, depending on who you ask and under what criteria, and whether or not that even matters in the grand scheme of things. it's an interesting discussion.
Joe Biden
we begin with two words: HE'S RUNNING. The Atlantic first reported this in a piece on the 19th called Joe Biden Is Running for President, and he was expected to announce yesterday but curiously, something (Biden's team was warned about announcing 2020 bid on same day as forum focused on women of color) seems to have interfered with that master plan that joe biden should have known about, so he announced this morning instead.
here is his announcement video:
and nobody was really surprised. anyways, onto articles covering his announcement. take your pick of source:
- NPR: Biden Launches 2020 Campaign As Rescue Mission For America's 'Soul'
- NBC: Biden launches 2020 presidential bid, says 'we are in a battle for the soul of this nation'
- The Guardian: Joe Biden announces 2020 presidential run
- CBS: Joe Biden says he's running for president, in video announcing bid
- Buzzfeed News: Joe Biden Is Running For President
moving on to analysis:
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from Time: Joe Biden and the Hard Choices for Democrats in 2020. this article mostly focuses on biden as a living example of the wedge between the progressive, youthful faction of the democratic party and the older, more traditionally moderate wing of the party. whether or not he gets selected is probably mostly going to come down to what voters prioritize, since the next biggest frontrunner is sanders who is on the literal opposite side of the spectrum from biden. for an alternative perspective on this angled more with respect to biden and #MeToo, you may refer also to this Vox article: The Joe Biden culture war - There’s a split among Democrats on #MeToo and more. Biden might have picked the losing side..
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from The Guardian: Biden brings broad appeal in battle for 2020 – but don't expect a revolution. biden's appeal as a candidate is definitely not going to be for his progressive chops. aside from his... frankly odd ideas and not-ideas of what "progressive" means in the modern discourse (and his identification or lack thereof with the term), it's pretty obvious he's not going to be approaching this race with the intent of radical change. whether that endears him to voters or sinks him also remains to be seen.
Bernie Sanders
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from Buzzfeed News: Bernie Sanders Isn’t Fighting The Wars Of 2016, His Campaign Says — The Democratic Establishment Is. in case you haven't noticed, we're still religitating the bullshit that characterized the 2016 primary because nobody can drop it. nowhere is this more clear than with the sanders campaign, who feel like they're still having to defend themselves from the same lines of attack they did back then. whether or not this is accurate is probably debatable, but it's pretty obvious that this isn't going to just go away, so expect it to continue to be a fracture point this year.
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from The Guardian: Sanders dares Democrats to stop him – but is he the man to beat Trump?. in a similar vein, the sanders campaign seems to be contending with the prospect of the democratic party trying to meddle in the primary and anoit a non-sanders winner, as they were accused of doing in 2016. this is going to also likely remain a fracture point, because the democratic party no doubt feels it has reasons to step in here--but also, it would absolutely be inviting trouble if sanders is the leading candidate when everything is said and done at the convention and they step in, given 2016.
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from Vox: Republican strategist Karl Rove says Bernie Sanders could beat Donald Trump in 2020. whether realpolitik or genuine concern (and in contrast to rick wilson in the above piece), karl rove seems to think that sanders is the exact sort of candidate who would beat donald in 2020.
Beto O'Rourke
- from Buzzfeed News: A Top Adviser To Beto O’Rourke Has Left His Presidential Campaign. beto's campaign lost two people significant to his presidential campaign a few days ago on what appear to be mutual, pre-determined terms. the article gives the reason for these two departures:
In a statement about her and Malitz’s departure to BuzzFeed News, Bond said it was “time for us to move on to other challenges.”
“Launching a presidential campaign without a big staff or even a campaign manager was no easy feat and it took everyone pitching in,” she said. “We’re proud to have been part of the team of deeply dedicated staff and volunteers who nearly pulled off a historic upset in the 2018 Texas Senate race and broke records launching Beto’s campaign for the presidency.”- from the Huffington Post: Beto O’Rourke’s Non-Media Strategy. on a more strategy-driven note for beto, his campaign has interestingly been one of the only thus far to not have a nationally televised town hall. this seems to be intentional. as the article notes:
O’Rourke ... sa[id] he preferred interacting with voters “eyeball to eyeball” rather than by doing TV, as evidenced by his dozens of events where he regularly takes questions from the audience and reporters alike. But he acknowledged “at some point, I may have to give in” to doing cable television.
it's a bold strategy for certain, but i do suspect that he's going to have to at some point get his voice out nationally. he's been slightly slipping in recent polls, mostly to candidates like buttigieg, and it suggests that he's lost a bit of his lustre with democratic voters.
Elizabeth Warren
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from TIME: Elizabeth Warren Calls for House to Start Impeachment Proceeding Against President Trump. warren decided to become the first democratic candidate to stake her claim to this particular idea. as far as i'm aware, nobody has gone out on this limb with her, but i'd be shocked if she isn't eventually joined by someone else.
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from NBC News: Warren's plan to wipe out student debt (and how she'd pay for it). another one of warren's seminal policies is wiping out student debt, which NBC News helpfully has a piece on (and of course, how she intends to pay for it since the question is literally inescapable). to save you some trouble: she pays for it with her wealth tax.
Pete Buttigieg
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from Buzzfeed News: Pete Buttigieg’s Presidential Run Has Many LGBT Democrats Eager For Their Obama Moment. buzzfeed has a piece on the significance of pete buttigieg to LGBT americans and how he's been able to leverage that to tap into a donor network that's usually pretty splintered. it's unclear to me that he's going to be able to parlay that untapped base into success, though, and more recent polling seems to have buttigieg sorta stalling out around 10% with the logjam of other sorta-kinda-frontrunner candidates.
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from CBS News: Pete Buttigieg on the presidency as a "moral office". this is mostly a personality piece on buttigieg and both his history in afghanistan and his electoral history, and how that has influenced his current candidacy and what he views as priorities. it's kinda straightforward and the title sorta speaks for itself, so there's not actually that much to be said for it.
Kamala Harris
- from Buzzfeed News: Kamala Harris Says She’ll Take Gun Control Into Her Own Hands As President If Congress Doesn't Act. kamala harris has decided that congress will do something about guns in a reasonable timeframe if she becomes president, or else she's just gonna take the nuclear option and just start dropping executive orders:
Harris said she would mandate universal background checks on anyone selling more than five guns a year, ending a loophole that allows private gun sellers to bypass background checks on 1 in 5 gun sales nationwide, bar people classified as fugitives from buying guns. She would also, her campaign said, close a loophole in federal law that allows perpetrators of domestic violence to keep their guns if they are not married to their partner.
- from POLITICO: Kamala Harris says she supports adding third gender option to federal IDs. she also supports the fairly small idea of adding a third gender option to federal IDs. i guess you gotta have some tiny policies in there too with the big ones for maximum efficiency. it is possible this raises questions about her history of LGBT policy, though, which is probably not something that she wants to litigate because it's not the best.
Everybody else
- people who joined the race this week: Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts representative
- people who did not join the race this week: Terry McAuliffe
Opinion/Ideology-driven
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from the Guardian: Joe Biden is the ultimate centrist Democrat. Is that a liability or strength?. this oped mostly focuses on whether or not biden's whole centrism thing is actually good, or whether or not it's just going to end up splitting the party now that biden is in the race. this is a legitimate question, and i'm not sure anybody really knows how it's going to shake out.
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from NBC News: Cory Booker wants to be the nicest Democrat running for president. But his own past makes that difficult.. this one, i think i'll just quote directly since the last paragraph kinda summarizes the whole thing:
For voters, Booker's Wall Street ties and his T-Bone stories are part of the same problem: Authenticity. Can you be a liberal Democratic willing to take on billionaires, entrenched corporations and the deregulation unleashed by the Trump Administration after years of cozying up to Wall Street and pharmaceutical donors? Can you address the racial divides in America — not just what's in people's hearts, but the problems of differential education, mass incarceration and inequality of opportunity — if you can't bring yourself to call Trump a racist? And can you be trusted to tell the truth of why you've arrived at your liberal politics if you made up a T-Bone to explain to white people a cartoon version of black intergenerational trauma?
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from NBC News: Kamala Harris' candidacy requires a nuanced debate about her record, race and gender. Is the left ready?. this op-ed focuses on the issue of parsing out where harris is being actually held accountable for things she genuinely took a "bad" stance on, and where she's just being held to a standard that nobody would expect of a non-minority, non-female candidate. it's a tough question, of course, and it's also not exactly one you can have with soundbites and hashtags--but that's probably not going to stop people from continuing to do that.
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from NBC News: Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign will face the scrutiny Clinton got in 2016. Here's what voters missed.. this op-ed mostly focuses on the not-exactly-perfect record of voting and policy positions of bernie sanders prior to the 2016 election, and how that will likely come to the forefront this time around since it was barely focused on in 2016 and sanders wasn't running against literally 20 other people.
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from NBC News: Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and the sexist hypocrisy of the 'likability' media narrative. Here we go again.. this op-ed is not necessarily about elizabeth warren in the same way the other op-eds are about candidates--rather, it's more of a piece that uses warren as an example of how the standard of "likability" that tends to be assigned to female candidates is kinda arbitrary and usually bullshit, and how the narrative of warren's candidacy has changed as she's gone from a sort of outsider-looking-in to a near frontrunner.
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finally, from NBC News: Elizabeth Warren's ideas blow rival 2020 Democrats away. Her public lands plan is no exception.. this other warren op-ed is more candidate focused, and basically makes the case that warren's plans are super good and that literally no other candidate comes close to having policy like it.
anyways, feel free to as always contribute other interesting articles you stumble across, or comment on some of the ones up there.
11 votes -
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Netflix’s wonderful Street Food focuses on the human aspect of ordinary food
6 votes -
Africa's rarest carnivore fights for survival in the Ethiopian highlands
4 votes -
The return of the pie company that gave the Frisbee its name
6 votes -
In Spain's election, far right could win first seats in parliament in decades
6 votes -
On verge of space history, Beresheet fails to land safely on Moon
8 votes -
I have a basic and possibly uninformed question about the event horizon of a black hole
It is my understanding that if you are looking at an object falling into a black hole from a remote viewpoint, then the object will appear to take “forever” to complete the fall into the black...
It is my understanding that if you are looking at an object falling into a black hole from a remote viewpoint, then the object will appear to take “forever” to complete the fall into the black hole. The object is effectively frozen in time at the black hole’s event horizon, from the remote viewer’s POV.
Is this the correct interpretation so far? If so, let’s remember that.
It is also my understanding that a black hole can increase in mass as it captures new objects. The mass does increase from an external viewpoint. Is this accurate?
If I understand known science on the above points, then the paradox I see here is that while the visual information is frozen in time from the external POV, the mass of the black hole does increase from the external POV. So is this where the Holographic Principle comes in? Or is there another explanation here, or am I off-base entirely?
Or is it just that the accretion disk gains mass and black holes never increase in mass from an external POV, after they are initially formed?
Is this known?
Please either attempt to answer my tortured question, or point me to material that might lead me ask a better question.
Thanks!
13 votes -
Safe Schools scare campaign targets Chinese-Australian voters
4 votes -
Mark Zuckerberg & Yuval Noah Harari in Conversation
5 votes -
Discovery of a secret, fan-run City of Heroes server causes a community meltdown
12 votes -
City Builders EP4 - Get people thinking
7 votes -
Rebelling Against Climate Death: For all its flaws, Extinction Rebellion's direct actions against climate change are growing in popularity and pissing off the right people. We should support them.
16 votes -
Apartheid ended twenty-five years ago. How has South Africa changed?
10 votes -
Swordwielder - Violent Revolution (2019)
3 votes -
The curious tale of the St. Louis street barriers
5 votes -
How ‘pretendians’ undermine the rights of indigenous people
5 votes -
Musk must face cave rescuer lawsuit over ‘pedo guy’ tweet
16 votes -
What is your top 1 song?
For me it is Holy Wars by Megadeth. The entire album really, but this song just blows everything away. It will never be surpassed. Tornado of Souls is right up there, but i have to choose just one...
For me it is Holy Wars by Megadeth.
The entire album really, but this song just blows everything away. It will never be surpassed.
Tornado of Souls is right up there, but i have to choose just one so...
24 votes -
Khruangbin @ Villain | Pitchfork Live (2018)
8 votes -
"Synchronous Text" - Discontinuing IRC at Mozilla
16 votes -
Stephane Wrembel - Full Session - 4/13/2017 - Paste Studios - New York, NY
6 votes -
The ROM image for Akka Arrh, an extremely rare Atari arcade prototype was dumped and added to MAME recently, but now there are allegations that the ROM was stolen from a collector's machine
14 votes -
The woman who plotted a Valentine's mass murder shares how the internet radicalized her
17 votes -
Arbor Day Foundation to plant 100 million trees by 2022
10 votes -
The five biggest lies about 5G
6 votes -
Hand dryers vs. paper towels: The surprisingly dirty fight for the right to dry your hands
11 votes -
Delia Derbyshire - The Delian Mode | The unsung heroine of electronic music
4 votes -
Guam starts new effort to save dying CHamoru language
7 votes -
A highway runs through it: Inside the push to tear down an Oakland freeway
6 votes