Tag: email_newsletter

“Defence” is not supposed to be about seeking justice from your enemy,” says Colleen Bell, an international relations scholar at the University of Saskatchewan. Yet that’s how the concept is largely perceived. Many have rightly questioned how many Palestinians Israel needs to kill before it feels it’s sufficiently defended itself. While international humanitarian law dictates that defensive strikes must not disproportionately harm civilians, there are no legal precedents that specify what is considered proportionate”

https://thewalrus.ca/what-does-defence-really-mean/

“If you still want to track down the point where bad IT became a crisis, then you have to look past the tech altogether. The Post Office declared, as fiat, that Horizon worked. From there, everything that happened after was the logical conclusion. If Horizon works, then the errors must be because of what the subpostmasters did. If they say they made no errors, then they must have committed fraud. If they committed fraud, then a conviction is morally just.

But Horizon didn’t work”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/16/techscape-big-tech-post-office-horizon-scandal-substack

“The craziest stat of all? There are 45.6 million tracks that generated ZERO streams last year. There were 10 tracks that had more than 1 billion.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-01-14/universal-music-layoffs-record-labels-need-a-new-growth-story

“He cites S&P Global’s estimate that, in transitioning to green energy, manufacturers will need more copper in the next three decades than the world consumed over the past 120 years. Demand for copper is expected to roughly double between now and 2035, to make hardware such as rechargeable batteries, solar panel heat exchangers, and wind turbine generators. The question now is whether biomining can scale up fast enough to meet soaring demand”

The Future of Mining Might Be Smaller than You Think

“Although Schwab’s book is a tale of frustration and even rage at the culture of secrecy and often incompetence inside Gates’s philanthropic world, it is also strangely heartening. Perhaps we are starting to solve the “Bill Gates Problem” by the creeping (if highly uneven) return of faith in the ability of public authorities to do better than private world-makers, alongside the ongoing discrediting of the tech saviours who enjoyed such a gullible audience in the early years of the millennium”

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2023/11/bill-gates-is-bad-for-humanity

“A family stands at the grave of Danylo Boguslavskyi, born on April 7, 1990, and killed in action on October 16, 2022. “We always come on Saturdays,” says his brother Roman. “One Saturday, I drove him to the station. That was the last time we saw him. He was a lawyer and historian and was present at the Maidan protests in Kyiv in 2014. He volunteered after Russia’s invasion and was then wounded several times. For a while, he was in the hospital every month,” Roman recalls. It was almost as if the injured man maintained the hope that, by getting wounded again and again, he would be given a reprieve and would never be killed. Until he was”

https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/russlands-krieg-gegen-die-ukraine-uschhorod-der-friedlichste-ort-der-ukraine-a-48943553-cba2-4c04-8cc2-6dd4f6a10a14

“It was not a real newspaper but a zombie – a piece of promotional material created for the local Conservative MP, Robert Largan, by a company in nearby Manchester. As such, it was just the latest example of how the local newspaper industry, which has been all but destroyed, is now being replaced. Freed from the oversight of local reporters and editors, businesses and politicians have begun to create their own information networks – they look like local news, but report only the things their owners want the public to see”

https://www.newstatesman.com/business/2023/11/zombie-news-the-strange-resurrection-of-the-local-paper