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7.7 million people have left the country since Maduro came to power, the largest refugee crisis in the Americas. Polls show that in a free and fair election, Maduro would have struggled to stay in the double digits. Colectivos actively worked to interrupt the opposition’s recent primary election via armed disruption of voting. Whatever that book is basing its research on, Maduro simply no longer represents the vast majority of Venezuelans and the Venezuelan diaspora.

I wonder what changed in the last 8 years.

Deadname companies, not people.

The video shows easily hundreds, and it’s clear there is a larger crowd behind them.

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There’s a reason that countries started agreeing on a set of laws of war, and it wasn’t the goodness of their hearts. It means if your own soldiers get captured by an enemy working under the same rules, they should ideally be treated with at least a minimal standard of care. But every incident like this or Abu Ghraib weakens those protections and norms.

Sometimes it feels like certain parts of humanity just didn’t really learn all the lessons that they should have from the Holocaust about dehumanizing people.

Chinese economy is successfully reorienting away from real estate towards high tech

functional government

Speaking of functional government, provinces rely on land use sales of various lengths. Many of them heavily overborrowed to build out infrastructure in anticipation of future land sales that are now lower or non-existent. And meanwhile, the real estate crisis is still quite active.

If the Chinese government was so special, it should have learned from the US’s issues with companies that posed a systemic risk with inadequate oversight. Instead, they let Evergrande and others become way too large with too little oversight. They should have taken a cue from the financial regulators in the US, which identify systemically risky companies and imposes onerous regulations. Then at the height of the real estate bubble, Xi introduced a new set of policies that immediately popped the bubble instead of trying to ease it down. Too often, Xi in particular seems to work on principles like “people should invest wisely” instead of “if I introduce this policy, it will cause problems.” The good news is that China does seem to be listening more lately, but it’s already done damage.

How’s Evergrande been these days?

I haven’t, but I have heard of it. I think parts of Lapce are based on some Zed algorithms.

Kamala also has to win an election. Straight up abandoning Israel is nowhere near as popular as Lemmy’s echo chamber would have you think.

No, politicians have to walk a fine line. Biden hadn’t put much of a restriction on use of US weapons and his sanctions against violent settlers in the West Bank are ineffective. Israel has mostly ignored efforts to reign it in. Kamala could lay out some far more concrete measures that would get certain weapons revoked if civilian deaths remain high. At the same time, keeping Patriot missiles well stocked would not impact Palestinians at all.

And that would likely severely impact her chances at the presidency. The attack ads practically write themselves. Trump would just bring up the October 7 attacks, opine that how dare she side with Hamas, and promise to not to abandon Israel. As horrified as many people are by the current war, most aren’t ready to completely cut Israel off, especially if it can be framed against Hamas.

Can I make the grown men cry?

Not if they’re going to disturb the relaxing cat.

Semantic versioning.

Most of the time. I use calendar versioning (calver) for my internal application releases because I work in IT. When the release happens is more consequential than breaking changes. And because it’s IT, changes that break something somewhere are incredibly frequent, so we would constantly be releasing “major” versions that aren’t really major versions at all.

OpenDocument.

Agreed compared to .doc and .docx. And if you’re going to version control it, markdown instead of a binary blob.

For academic documents in STEM fields, I’d love to see a transition from LaTeX to Typst. Much cleaner, better error handling, and it has a web UI if people don’t want to install a massive runtime on their own computer.

Recipes in concrete metric units, preferably mass instead of volume. Recipes come together incredibly quickly when measuring out ingredients can just be dump-tare-dump-tare-dump instead of trying to get sticky ingredients like tahini out of a measuring cup.

More torx screws. There are apparently some uses for phillips, but torx are criminally underused.

Oh? Do you know details on how it’s going to work? All I can find is the BRICS Pay site with a very high level overview. They’re talking a big game, but as of now all that seems to be public is just talk.

Mission Accomplished!

There are lots of details left to hammer out. This is like an announcement that there will be a committee to commission a study to hire a contractor to change a light bulb. The process will likely take a while and may not complete at all.