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Ursula von der Leyen says €150bn EU defence loans should be spent in Europe
  • US military hardware is top notch. But the US has shown itself to be an unreliable ally. So spending that money at home, supporting the local economy where the money will ultimately flow back to the governments via taxes. Also there is almost nothing the US makes that we don't or can't make here with a few exceptions like the F-22 or X-37 (AKA the satellite snatcher).

  • Princeton nuclear physicist, fusion energy expert Liu Chang leaves US for China
  • Hardly surprising considering the current funding climate and anti-intellectual sentiment of the current American administration. He will probably get an amazing salary and support to work on his project. Canada and Europe should set up something similar, easy visas and citizenship for American scientists and engineers.

  • Should English stay the lingua franca of Europe?
  • A common language serves common communication. As a happenstance of history that turned out to be English. Changing it would be enormously costly and hinder cooperation. Aside from that, learning English is useful as it's more or less commonly understood in almost every country in the world.

  • uBlock Origin is no longer available in the Chrome store
  • if ads were normal and unobtrusive. We wouldn't need ad blockers. Instead we get an almost unusable internet where ads take up more and more real estate. I had been running an ad blocker for so many years that when a friend (who doesn't use an ad blocker) showed me a website, the unfiltered experience was horrifying.

  • ‘A new phase’: why climate activists are turning to sabotage instead of protest
  • A common refrain from those opposing these protests was to protest at the oil companies instead of on the highway. But they did that already, blocked office entrances and even coal transports. But they were ignored by the media and politics. The companies in question were hardly inconvenienced. The new strategy of public disruptive campaigns was a result of this. Highly effective in gathering the attention of media and politics. But the push back as the article states is driving certain protestors into the next phase;

    "He said new laws further criminalising disruptive protests had made traditional, accountable methods of activism increasingly unsustainable, and a clandestine approach increasingly attractive."

    If you get 5 years for cutting data cables or sitting on the street, might as well do the thing that seems more effective.

    2 years ago I was at a "Just Stop Oil" gathering nearby, mostly out of curiosity. The room was packed and outside a small group was discussing more escalating measures, which I won't repeat here. The reasoning was that disruptive tactics had been losing effectiveness and governments were still lagging behind their own unambitious goals. That more violent action could be justified because of self-defence. If companies are deploying violence towards our environment, why should they not defend it in the same manner.

    From that moment it became clear, to me at least, that for some violence is not off the table. And that this kind of vandalism would just be a first step to more extreme action.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)JI
    Jimius @lemmy.ml
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