Strictly speaking, China has gone from encouraging Chinese to have as many children early on, when IIRC Mao felt that population density encouraged industrialization, then to restrictive birth policy under One Child for a long time, and then back to trying to get people to have kids in the mid-2010s as demographic concerns rose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy

It’s more that China is state-interventionist than that it has consistently favored few or many children.

I’d argue that banning abortion is probably state interventionist, more in line with the consistent thread of overall Chinese policy over the years.

kagis

https://forward.com/fast-forward/675325/pete-hegseth-tattoos-christian-crusades-trump/

One of Hegseth’s most prominent tattoos is a large Jerusalem cross on his chest, a symbol featuring a large cross potent with smaller Greek crosses in each of its four quadrants. The symbol was used in the Crusades and represented the Kingdom of Jerusalem that the Crusaders established.

Hegseth also has “Deus Vult,” Latin for “God wills it,” tattooed on his bicep. The phrase was used as a rallying cry for the First Crusade in 1096. It is also the closing sentence of Hegseth’s 2020 book, titled “American Crusade.”

Hegseth also has a cross and sword tattooed on his arm, which he says represents a New Testament verse. The verse, Matthew 10:34, reads, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

He later added “Yeshua,” or Jesus in Hebrew, under the sword. Hegseth told the site Media Ink in a 2020 interview that the tattoo was Jesus’ Hebrew name, which he mistakenly said was “Yehweh,” a Biblical spelling of God’s name. He told Media Ink that he got the tattoo while in Bethlehem, Jesus’ birthplace, which is located in the present-day West Bank, where he was reporting for Fox Nation.

“Israel, Christianity and my faith are things I care deeply about,” Hegseth told Media Ink.

Hegseth opposes the two-state solution and supports exclusive Israeli sovereignty in the Holy Land. He has also said the idea of rebuilding the biblical Temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount is a “miracle” that could happen in our lifetimes. The First and Second Temples stood on a site where the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine, now stands.

Hegseth expressed these views in a 2018 speech delivered in Jerusalem at a conference organized by the right-wing Israel National News, also known as Arutz Sheva.

The speech laid out a vision of a world beset by a growing darkness that can only be saved by the United States, Israel and fellow “free people” from other countries.

The amusing thing is that OP’s article didn’t even get to him because it was talking about other nominations.

Man, we live in a world which probably has immediate and ready access to nude images of any particular sort one might desire – and we’re getting to the point that computers can synthesize stuff that doesn’t even exist – and you’re committing crimes and risking your job to get a low-quality cell phone picture of a cell phone screen of an amateur nude photo?

EDIT: And randomly checking the first guy, he’s apparently married with four kids:

https://notes.mshp.dps.mo.gov/si01/si01p001.nsf/035631d21d12b3ca8625729800536894/25cc708fab2ad89c8625871e0052e782?OpenDocument

Trooper David L. McKnight, of Sikeston, Missouri, has been assigned to Zone 7, which serves the citizens of Mississippi, New Madrid and Scott counties. Trooper McKnight is a graduate of Scott County Central High School in Sikeston, Missouri. Prior to joining the Patrol, he worked as a patrol officer for the Sikeston Department of Public Safety. He is married to Natalie (Cooper) McKnight and has four children.

Probably not going to do wonders for your marriage, either.

Hmm.

I’d think that that’d also affect Lemmy instance operators were it to enter into force.

The text and its scope would also be interesting, because I can’t see a practical way for, say, an instance operator in Bakersfield, California, to have any realistic way to evaluate the truth of claims about an election, in, say, Malaysia, if it extends to all elections. I suspect that even in California alone, acting as an arbiter of truth would be tough to do reasonably.

EDIT: Looking at the bill text, it probably does not currently, as it looks like it has a floor on the number of California users, and there aren’t yet enough users on the Threadiverse:

(h) “Large online platform” means a public-facing internet website, web application, or digital application, including a social media platform as defined in Section 22675 of the Business and Professions Code, video sharing platform, advertising network, or search engine that had at least 1,000,000 California users during the preceding 12 months.

It’s also interesting that traditional media apparently is not covered:

The bill would exempt from its provisions a broadcasting station and a regularly published online newspaper, magazine, or other periodical of general circulation that satisfy specified requirements.

It is apparently specific to elections in California.

My guess is that it’ll probably get overturned on some First Amendment challenge, but we shall see…

I don’t think that the military uses much TNT directly, but military explosives may be derived from TNT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT

Yeah, there’s a list under “Applications”.

Composition B, for example, is a mix of TBT and other stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_B

Composition B (Comp B), also known as Hexotol and Hexolite (among others), is a high explosive consisting of castable mixtures of RDX and TNT. It is used as the main explosive filling in artillery projectiles, rockets, land mines, hand grenades, and various other munitions.[1

Susie Wiles as White House Chief of Staff, I believe. She didn’t serve in an office before, but was high-level in his campaign in 2016, 2020, and 2024, so she’s around for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susie_Wiles

Didn’t just show up with Trump, has done Republican campaigns for a long time.

That’s good, but those are still pretty high levels compared to the historical situation.

Lower-case “L”.

Capital “L” would be, like, the Libertarian Party.

Whether or not he gets the slot, based on Trump’s first term, a lot of the cabinet members aren’t gonna last long anyway.

https://www.statista.com/chart/15071/how-does-trumps-turnover-compare-to-other-presidents/

I wonder what CSIS does? Don’t know what Canada considers threats.

kagis

Man, the US think tank CSIS dominates the Canadian intelligence agency CSIS in search results.

Okay, here’s their jobs page.

https://www.canada.ca/en/security-intelligence-service/corporate/csis-jobs/available-jobs.html

And their language people:

https://www.canada.ca/en/security-intelligence-service/corporate/csis-jobs/available-jobs/foreign-language-communications-analyst.html

CSIS is looking for individuals with the following language proficiency:

• Arabic
• Mandarin
• Russian
• Punjabi
• Urdu
• Hindi

Mmm. So Middle East, China, Russia, and India/Pakistan.

EDIT: Looks like India/Pakistan only made the list recently. Using Archive.org to go back to 2018:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180222080221/https://www.canada.ca/en/security-intelligence-service/corporate/csis-jobs/available-jobs/foreign-language-communications-analyst.html

The Service is looking for individuals with the following language proficiency:

• Arabic
• Somali
• Farsi
• Mandarin
• Kurdish
• Sorani
• Russian

Alexey Pajitnov, who created the ubiquitous game in 1984, opens up about his failed projects and his desire to design another hit.

He prefers conversations about his canceled and ignored games, the past designs that now make him cringe, and the reality that his life’s signature achievement probably came decades ago.

The problem is that that guy created what is probably the biggest, most timeless simple video game in history. Your chances of repeating that are really low.

It’s like you discover fire at 21. The chances of doing it again? Not high. You could maybe do other successful things, but it’d be nearly impossible to do something as big again.

Finally, the documents claim, White admitted that he had injured JW himself because he was angry that he was two points down in the videogame NBA2K.

I’d hate to see this guy lose a game by eight points.

Plus, even if you manage to never, ever have a drive fail, accidentally delete something that you wanted to keep, inadvertently screw up a filesystem, crash into a corruption bug, have malware destroy stuff, make an error in writing it a script causing it to wipe data, just realize that an old version of something you overwrote was still something you wanted, or run into any of the other ways in which you could lose data…

You gain the peace of mind of knowing that your data isn’t a single point of failure away from being gone. I remember some pucker-inducing moments before I ran backups. Even aside from not losing data on a number of occasions, I could sleep a lot more comfortably on the times that weren’t those occasions.

I think that Trump Term 2 is likely to look a lot like Trump Term 1.

Whether-or-not one calls that “that bad”, of course, involves some matter of perspective. The article here is about a Term 1 guy coming back for Term 2, which is pretty much in line with things being like Term 1. I expect a lot of the same stuff that I didn’t like the first time. I expect him to make outrageous statements, violate a lot of Presidential norms, probably do some questionable things legally to try to benefit himself. I expect him to play into conspiracy theory where he thinks it might benefit him. I expect him to make a lot of self-contradictory statements. I expect him to bluster and make crude statements. I expect him to be constantly in the news for doing something outrageous.

I expect that a lot of his outrageous statements are going to just be political theater, the same way they were the first time around. A lot of very firey talk about immigration and free trade agreements, making sure that he’s seen by supporters saying things, not a lot of dramatic actual effective change in most policy.

I don’t expect some of the predictions that are often thrown around here about the end of democracy or the free press or a long list of other things to come true.

One of the points that I want to see is what happens on Ukraine policy. This isn’t a major popular issue for Republican voters the way policy on Israel is. Vance has been pretty vocal about opposing support for Ukraine, but I also don’t know (1) the degree to which that is an actual concern for Vance, (2) the degree of influence that Vance will have, as the VP’s power is usually almost entirely dependent on what the President wants to delegate to them and listen to them, and (3) the degree to which the bureaucracy will affect this, as politicians don’t simply go craft foreign policy on their lonesome, and there are going to be a lot of the same domain experts that were present under Biden. It’s possible that there could be very material impact for Ukraine, but I could also believe that the impact is muted.

My guess is that four years from now, I’m probably going to be pretty happy to see the last of him. But that was pretty much the case in 2020, and I remember no shortage of dire predictions in the opposing press and social media all through his first time through that didn’t pan out.

When the market is flooded, any paid title has an incredibly difficult time standing out.

If that’s true, that it’s simply an inability to find premium games, but demand exists, that seems like the kind of thing where you could address it via branding. That is, you make a “premium publisher” or studio or something that keeps pumping out premium titles and builds a reputation. I mean, there are lots of product categories where you have brands develop – it’s not like you normally have some competitive market with lots of entrants, prices get driven down, and then brands never emerge. And I can’t think of a reason for phone apps to be unique in that regard.

I think that there’s more to it than that.

My own guesses are:

• I won’t buy any apps from Google, because I refuse to have a Google account on my phone, because I don’t want to be building a profile for Google. I use stuff from F-Droid. That’s not due to unwillingness to pay for games – I buy many games on other platforms – but simply due to concerns over data privacy. I don’t know how widespread of a position that is, and it’s probably not the dominant factor. But my guess is that if I do it, at least a few other people do, and that’s a pretty difficult barrier to overcome for a commercial game vendor.

• Platform demographics. My impression is that it may be that people playing on a phone might have less disposable income than a typical console player (who bought a piece of hardware for the sole and explicit purpose of playing games) or a computer player (a “gaming rig” being seen as a higher-end option to some extent today). If you’re aiming at value consumers, you need to compete on price more strongly.

• This is exacerbated by the fact that a mobile game is probably a partial subsititute good for a game on another platform.

  In microeconomics, substitute goods are two goods that can be used for the same purpose by consumers.[1] That is, a consumer perceives both goods as similar or comparable, so that having more of one good causes the consumer to desire less of the other good. Contrary to complementary goods and independent goods, substitute goods may replace each other in use due to changing economic conditions.[2] An example of substitute goods is Coca-Cola and Pepsi; the interchangeable aspect of these goods is due to the similarity of the purpose they serve, i.e. fulfilling customers’ desire for a soft drink. These types of substitutes can be referred to as close substitutes.[3]

  They aren’t perfect substitutes. Phones are very portable, and so you can’t lug a console or even a laptop with you the way you can a phone and just slip it out of your pocket while waiting in a line. But to some degree, I think for most people, you can choose to game on one or the other, if you’ve multiple of those platforms available.

  So, if you figure that in many cases, people who have the option to play a game on any of those platforms are going to choose a non-mobile platform if that’s accessible to them, the people who are playing a game on mobile might tend to be only the people who have a phone as the only available platform, and so it might just be that they’re willing to spend less money. Like, my understanding is that it’s pretty common to get kids smartphones these days…but to some degree, that “replaces” having a computer. So if you’ve got a bunch of kids in school using phones as their gaming platform, or maybe folks who don’t have a lot of cash floating around, they’re probably gonna have a more-limited budget to expend on games, be more price-sensitive.

  kagis

  https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

  Smartphone dependency over time

  Today, 15% of U.S. adults are “smartphone-only” internet users – meaning they own a smartphone, but do not have home broadband service.

  Reliance on smartphones for online access is especially common among Americans with lower household incomes and those with lower levels of formal education.

• I think that for a majority of game genres, the hardware limitations of the smartphone are pretty substantial. It’s got a small screen. It’s got inputs that typically involve covering up part of the screen with fingers. The inputs aren’t terribly precise (yes, you can use a Bluetooth input device, but for many people, part of the point of a mobile platform is that you can have it everywhere, and lugging a game controller around is a lot more awkward). The hardware has to be pretty low power, so limited compute power. Especially for Android, the hardware differs a fair deal, so the developer can’t rely on certain hardware being there, as on consoles. Lot of GPU variation. Screen resolutions vary wildly, and games have to be able to adapt to that. It does have the ability to use gestures, and there are some games that can make use of GPS hardware and the like, but I think that taken as a whole, games tend to be a lot more disadvantaged by the cons than advantaged by the pros of mobile hardware.

• Environment. While one can sit down on a couch in a living room and play a mobile game the way one might a console game, I think that many people playing mobile games have environmental constraints that a developer has to deal with. Yes, you can use a phone while waiting in line at the grocery store. But the flip side is that that game also has to be amenable to maybe just being played for a few minutes in a burst. You can’t expect the player to build up much mental context. They may-or-may-not be able to expect a player to be listening to sound. Playing Stellaris or something like that is not going to be very friendly to short bursts.

• Battery power. Even if you can run a game on a phone, heavyweight games are going to drain battery at a pretty good clip. You can do that, but then the user’s either going to have to limit playtime or have a source of power.

I think that the age data there is the most interesting bit.

There’s very little difference in perception for the 18-29-year-old demographic, with 16% of Republican/lean-Republican voters saying that the economy is excellent/good, and 21% of Democratic/lean-Democratic voters.

But every time the age cohort rises, so does the separation in perception of the economy. For 65+ year-olds, it’s down to 7% for Republican/lean-Republican voters, and up to 55% of Democratic/lean-Democratic voters.

Just searching Kagi, like googling on Google.

Kagi provides a subscription-based service; the user pays a subscription fee, rather than the search engine generating a return via data-mining and profiling users, which is something that I’d wanted for some time; at some point in the past year or so someone pointed me to it. It also provides some other features, but what I really care about is the no-log aspect.

If Google would sell some kind of analogous subscription for YouTube (rather than just ad-free service with their “YouTube Premium” stuff) I’d happily get “YouTube Private” as well, as I think that that’s probably the other major source of online data-mining that I very regularly use and don’t have a great way of dealing with today. But as things stand, that’s not something that they have on offer.

Bill Kristol really dislikes Trump.

kagis

This looks like a recent article. He’s not exactly pulling punches.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/what-will-trumps-win-mean

The American people have made a disastrous choice. And they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open.

Donald J. Trump will be our next president, elected with a majority of the popular vote, likely winning both more votes and more states than he did in his two previous elections. After everything—after his chaotic presidency, after January 6th, after the last year in which the mask was increasingly off, and no attempt was made to hide the extremism of the agenda or the ugliness of the appeal—the American people liked what they saw. At a minimum, they were willing to accept what they saw.

And Trump was running against a competent candidate who ran a good campaign to the center and bested him in a debate, with a strong economy. Yet Trump prevailed, pulling off one of the most remarkable comebacks in American political history. Trump boasted last night, “We’ve achieved the most incredible political thing,” and he’s not altogether wrong.

Certainly, even before he once again assumes the reins of power, Trump has cemented his status as the most consequential American politician of this century.

And when he assumes the reins of power, he’ll start off as a powerful and emboldened president. He’ll have extraordinary momentum from his victory. He’ll be able to claim a mandate for an agenda that the public has approved. He’ll have willing apparatchiks and politicians at his disposal, under the guidance of JD Vance and Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson and Stephen Miller, eager to help him advance that agenda. He’ll have a compliant Republican majority in the Senate. And it looks as if Republicans may narrowly hold the House.

It’s hard to imagine a worse outcome.

If you think, as I do, that Trump’s agenda could do great damage to the country and to the world, if you think of deportations of immigrants at home and the betrayal of brave Ukrainians abroad and you shudder, if you think that turning our health policy over to Robert Kennedy Jr. will cause real harm, you’re right to feel real foreboding for the future.

And of course there is no guarantee that the American people will turn against Trump and his agenda. They knew fully well who it was they were choosing this time. Their support may well be more stubborn than one would like. It certainly has been over the last four years.

Sounds like this website he’s currently writing for is also pretty opposed to Trump.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bulwark_(website)

Following the end of publication of The Weekly Standard in December 2018,[6] editor-in-chief Charlie Sykes said that “the murder of the Standard made it urgently necessary to create a home for rational, principled, fact-based center-right voices who were not cowed by Trumpism.”[7] The site was created in December 2018 as a news aggregator as a project of the Defending Democracy Together Institute, a 501©(3) conservative advocacy group led in part by The Weekly Standard co-founder Bill Kristol.[8] Several former editors and writers of The Weekly Standard soon joined the staff and within weeks of launch began publishing original news and opinion pieces.[5] The website has frequently published pieces critical of Donald Trump and of pro-Trump elites in politics and the media.[1]

In some polls I’ve seen before the election, the top item for people – this is in general, not a specific demographic – who said that they would vote for Trump was the economy.

But you can break that down more than “economy”. “Economy” can mean a lot of things. How the stock market is doing. Unemployment. Inflation.

And when people were asked about that, in the polling data I saw, prices were the top concern.

I commented well before the election and pointed out that inflation is extremely unpopular with publics. In a study – and this is an old one, but apparently a well known one – that looked at the public in Germany, the US, and Brazil, the public – and particularly in Germany and the US – said that they’d rather have a recession than inflation. That is significant, because in contrast, the mainstream economic position is that it’s preferable for a country to have inflation than a recession.

I also listened to some interviews of people voting Trump, and a lot of people said “I was better-off under Trump than Biden”.

My guess is that you can probably chalk a considerable amount of this up to:

• Not understanding that inflationary policies weren’t simply adopted in isolation, but to avoid a recession resulting from COVID-19.

• Not knowing that it’s normally considered that inflationary policy is preferable to a recession.

• Not knowing that the Trump administration also adopted inflationary policy.

I also remember reading some stuff going well back saying that in general, people tend to credit the President pretty directly for whatever the present state of the economy is. If there are issues, they put it at the feet of the President, and if it’s going well, they put it at the feet of the President…even if the President didn’t have much to do with it (or if it was actually policies from a prior administration that took time to have effect). So to some extent, the politics of being the President always, not just in a situation with a fair bit of inflation as we had stemming from COVID-19, have to do with that voter attribution to the President of the short-term state of the economy.

I’d also add that political organizations know this and will – not always honestly – aim to exacerbate that take.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/sep/08/donald-trump/fact-checking-donald-trump-on-the-scale-and-causes/

Donald Trump

stated on September 7, 2024 in a rally in Mosinee, Wis.:

Vice President Kamala Harris “cast the tiebreaking votes that caused the worst inflation in American history, costing a typical American family $28,000.”

So if one wants to avoid the executive being unreasonably penalized for – or taking credit for – the economic state of affairs, then there’s probably a hard communication problem that hasn’t been solved for decades and decades that needs to happen.

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/11/04/cop29-what-is-the-paris-agreement-and-how-will-countries-be-held-to-account-in-baku

The iconic international climate treaty - the Paris Agreement - includes a pledge to try and keep temperatures from rising by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

So how are countries doing on sticking to 1.5C or below? Well, not very well. Just last month the UN warned that current climate policies put the world on track for 3.1C of warming by 2100.

Probably going to need to be some change from the current trajectory, if so.