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abff08f4813c

@ abff08f4813c @j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us

Posts
7
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888
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • Shanghai’s vanishing protest is a study in modern repression

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  • Prominent legal scholar detained at Canadian border while on his way to a conference on Palestine

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  • I speculate that this is the fault of the United States. The scholar, a US citizen, is entering from the US, and as per the article CBSA has concerns regarding "national security" - we know that the CBSA and the US CBP work closely together, so if some top level US official ordered the CBP to pass the "national security threat" along, that'd explain CBSA's behaviour.

    Specifically, why they were concerned in the first place (because they had to take the tip from the US gov't seriously for fear that they'd lose cooperation on actual important matters if they didn't), why it took so long before the scholars were released (because they needed those four hours to make sure that they covered all their bases in case the CBP or another part of the US gov't came knocking again and asking why the scholars weren't arrested or detained), and also why CBSA can't more clearly explain why the scholars were targeted in the first place (because the working arrangements between the CBP and the CBSA, and between the security departments of the governments of Canada and the US more generally, require a considerable level of secrecy).

    The article also mentions,

    Kanji said that prompted them to reach out to different high-ranking officials in an attempt to get Falk and his wife released.

    I like to think though that this wasn't strictly necessary and that CBSA are the good guys who would have still done the right thing in the end, after of course thoroughly documenting the obvious - why the US's tip was off and there actually was no real threat.

  • Lithuania's top diplomat looks forward to expanding relations with Taiwan

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  • Interesting. So if English Wikipedia is accurate, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese/_Representative/_Office/_in/_Lithuania then there's certainly plenty of room for diplomatic relations to grow. Currently the office is still a TECO, in contrast to, for example, the full on embassy in Vatican City (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassy/_of/_Taiwan,/_Holy/_See )

    It's not clear from the article if diplomatic relations between Lithuania and the PRC are fully called off or not. If they are, I don't see it as the best possible move from the PRC. It's just removing any incentive to prevent Lithuania from establishing full diplomatic recognition to the ROC.

    Also, from the article,

    Although Lithuania tried to restore diplomatic links with China after the new government assumed power late last year, it has remained insistent on not changing the name of Taiwan’s representative office in Vilnius.

    I wonder what was tried. If the current government in Lithuania really wants to do this, and the name alone is the sole sticking point, it seems like a solution like this might work out:

    Sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the ROC that the word Taiwan in the name specifically means and is short for Taiwan island (where the city of Taipei is located). Then offer to sign another MOU with the PRC.

    I'm not sure if it'd work, but it's a potential middle ground compromise.

  • Trump adds $100,000 fee for skilled worker visa applicants

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  • So actually this caused quite a bit of chaos this past Friday. Folks who were traveling, say on a quick weekend holiday, suddenly found out that they had to rush back into the US before midnight. Then the administration walked it back, so some of these people who paid premium for last minute flights are now SOL. Another example of how not to run an administration.

    This got me thinking about the fediverse more generally, but as that's off-topic I started a separate thread in https://thebrainbin.org/m/PoliticalDiscussion/t/1097560/How-the-recent-h1b-drama-got-me-thinking-about-the

  • [REPOST] Lawyer has to convince judge of no jurisdiction to return deported man but achieves the opposite

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  • So I meant to write in the above comment that while not every case of quiet quitting is malicious compliance, and not every case of malicious compliance related to employment is the same as quiet quitting, there is definitely room for overlap - a situation where one is both quiet quitting and performing malicious compliance. I thought that this was such a case.

    After reading https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/e285ec96adf8d443/5868d536-full.pdf I'm backing away from that. What the new whistleblower report seems to allege is that Reuveni was ordered to make statements to the court that he knew were wrong and misleading, and he outright refused - which is honourable but it's non-compliance rather than malicious compliance.

    He also actively sought to confidentially relay the situation to folks higher up on the food chain in order to get them to push back against this, which is probably too much effort to count as quiet quitting.

  • White House confirms Trump will visit Canada for G7 leaders’ summit

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  • Yeah, they should clarify that being at the G7 and also being a convicted felon is unusual.

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  • Came here to say this. I wouldn't be surprised if he became obese because of the 33 years he put into the job, always working and not having enough time to himself to self-care.

  • Attacks on Australia’s preferential voting system are ludicrous. We can be proud of it | Kevin Bonham

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  • The party I’m calling centrist is viewed as centre-left here by the media and general public. Greens and Labor split each other’s votes, not Labor and LNP.

    Sounds reasonable enough, actually.

    (Why about 20% of left-wing voters prefer the right-wing over the centre I will never understand.)

    Hmm, puzzling. If they were USians then I'd suggest that it was because they confused over the name (liberals are always on the left, right?) but I digress.

    Ah, but it was never that.

    Isn't it though? As you wrote,

    The precipitous drop in support for the LNP mostly went to help Labor

    Just as it'd be confusing why left-wing voters would support a right-wing party over a centrist or centre-left party, it'd be equally confusing why right-wing voters would support a left-wing party (the Greens) over the centrist one. Well, sounds like they didn't.

    (With IRV of course it's not that this happened because of a split vote but that because Labor had more support in the first preference that it survived over the Greens, when normally it'd be the other way around - so the specific reasons are different and a bit more complex, but this specific result which occurred is intuitive to someone who only understands FPTP. More generally, both FPTP and IRV suffer from spoiler effects (as explained in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler/_effect ) - while IRV is better than FPTP there are still cases where spoiler effects can happen and this example of a Green losing to a Labor due to a loss of support by the LNP is one of them - it just feels more intuitive to someone familiar with FPTP because this is the worst when it comes to spoiler effects).

  • Attacks on Australia’s preferential voting system are ludicrous. We can be proud of it | Kevin Bonham

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  • we here in Australia had another parallel to your election.

    I didn't realize this, but this is really interesting. Thank you for the hattip!

    In essence, a drop in support for the right-wing candidates resulted in a centrist candidate winning where previously a left-wing candidate had won. That’s an aberrant result that doesn’t really match anyone’s intuition of how elections should work.

    Unless, like me, you grew up in a FPTP system - then this is exactly what you'd expect. (As you already know in FPTP the votes would be split, so with the centrist and the right-wing splitting the vote, the left-wing would win. But if the right-wing drops out, then the votes would mostly go to the centrist instead, likely putting the centrist ahead now.)

    I didn’t realise it was in response to a specific article, but I gathered it was a response to general comments from some in the LNP praising FPTP.

    Accurate enough - the article that it was responding - well, it was basically what you wrote above.

    I was responding primarily to the headline suggesting we should be “proud” of what is literally the worst acceptable voting system.

    I took this with a fair bit of humor. I would have said that it's not the worst voting system because FPTP is worse, but then,

    (Personally, I consider FPTP completely unacceptable and anti-democratic; it should not even be part of any discussion among serious people.)

    So actually, you are right. Agree 100% here.

    a proportional system would be better.

    And here too.

  • 'You start to go crazy': The Australian who survived five years in a Chinese prison

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  • This is awful. He was sentenced to four years but ended up serving five. One wonders if the false confession actually helped reduce the time at all in that case. (I don't doubt that he would have signed anyways, not after being deprived of food and water and being beaten for two days straight, but still... it's even worse if signing was pointless.)

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  • Thank you! This is exactly why folks should comment and not just only downvote.

    Those who actually read the article know that E.M. is a woman and the victim who is giving testimony (and whose full name can't be released pubicly), no connection at all to Musk aside from coincidentally sharing the same initials. But for illustration she might be named Ellen Marks, Eva Manns, Ellie Monet, etc.

  • Attacks on Australia’s preferential voting system are ludicrous. We can be proud of it | Kevin Bonham

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  • Agree 100% - this was a non-ludicrous but entirely reasonable and well-reasoned response.

    That being said I do think there's many good points made in the article. The Greens are doing better in Australia, while they hurt quite a bit here in Canada due to FPTP being in use. And it really hurts to see the NDP fall so much, which likely would not have occurred if Canada had the same system as Australia.

    The linked article is a response to https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/preferential-voting-system-ousts-half-a-liberal-ministry-of-talent/news-story/7cd4e33e0a05e786a8c4943645c5525d?amp=&nk=d1a6519026cb614e2502f09a887f82c4-1747124133 and I think Canada makes the perfect case for that article being wrong - Canada actually has FPTP but the leader of Canada's CPC still lost his seat. If FPTP had been in play, perhaps all those Liberals would have still lost their seats, as folks started using strategic voting instead to ensure a Labour win (but also then hurting independents and other parties like the Greens) - which is exactly how it played out in Canada.

  • Removed

    Gave him an offer, then took it away. Thanks PayPal.

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  • I mean it's not really needed in Europe where true legal rights exist for employees, right?

    This is more of a "only in the USA" kind of thing.

  • Removed

    Gave him an offer, then took it away. Thanks PayPal.

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  • My solution to this is that I accept the other job offer, and I don't quit until the night before I start my first day in the new one. As a result I've never spent a single day unemployed. If something I'm counting on doesn't come through I'm already at my backup plan.

    If companies won't be loyal to us in this way, why do we owe any loyalty to them in return?

  • Software engineer lost his $150K-a-year job to AI—he’s been rejected for 800 jobs and forced to DoorDash and live in a trailer to make ends meet

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  • In a working paper released earlier this month, economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard looked at the labor market impact of AI chatbots on 11 occupations, covering 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark in 2023 and 2024.

    Hmm, Denmark you say?

    Also Denmark,

    Denmark doesn’t have at-will employment. Employers may only terminate an employee with just cause and sufficient notice. Just cause can include financial reasons or employee misconduct.

    https://www.rippling.com/country-hiring/denmark-employees

    Actually, perhaps this points at a way forward... we should employment laws in the US that match those of Denmark.

    Not following how his inability to find a job has any connection to AI?

    It's in the fortune article:

    some of those few interviews have been with an AI agent instead of a human. “I feel super invisible,” K tells Fortune. “I feel unseen. I feel like I’m filtered out before a human is even in the chain.”

    That is, he's getting fewer chances to establish a human-to-human connection to an interviewer, which is hurting his ability to get hired.

    The bigger picture is that folks are indeed losing jobs to AI, have had their jobs cut because of AI, see

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/klarna-ceo-says-ai-helped-company-shrink-workforce-by-40/ar-AA1EMHG6

  • Software engineer lost his $150K-a-year job to AI—he’s been rejected for 800 jobs and forced to DoorDash and live in a trailer to make ends meet

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  • Software engineer here - I make more than this guy did and I have roughly the same amount of experience in the industry that he does (perhaps a smidge more, going off of his linkedin profile).

    For folks who are saying that there's something off about this guy - that would not have mattered two or three years ago. At most he would have just been seen as a highly talented dev who was also slightly quirky.

    For those who say it's not about AI and more about the economy - well, maybe. We do have a couple of major ongoing wars right now and moves over the last couple of months by the recent administration of the US haven't helped.

    But I was around during the crash back in 2008, and this still feels different. Harder. Before, I had recruiters just banging on my door. Now, it's tough to past the automated screenings unless I have a contact at the company who can refer me there.

    Meanwhile, I'm hearing from my co-workers about how great AI is - how they ran their code through it and it came up with a bunch of unit tests for them and some boilerplate code. Vibe coding is already a thing. So is using AI to write your resume and cover letters and applying to jobs.

    Likewise, I look upon tools like Devin.ai with increasing trepidation. Today, LLMs aren't good enough to replace a single senior dev, despite a lot of investment happening to move things in exactly this direction. It probably won't happen tomorrow, or even next year. But in 25?

    Let's just say that this article really hit home for me.

    The other point here is - the day that a person with no coding ability can ask an LLM to create and deploy an entire website, write and manage a brand new app from scratch, is going to be a day that's a win for the people. We want to lower the barriers to entry here, to give this highly elite power to others. Actually, there shouldn't be an elite at all - there should just be a democracy where everyone is equally empowered to create and build great things.

    Working in tech will not remain this vaulted, lofty place for much longer. If we aren't content creators, or controlling company owners, then ultimately tech workers like myself are in the same position as any other kind of worker - we work for someone else and serve only at their sufferance.

  • Elections Canada says Terrebonne vote is final, despite ‘error’ with special ballot

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  • It will have to go to court at this point but EC has done nothing wrong in terms of the recount.

    Agreed. This isn't the step where the EC did wrong - it was earlier in putting the wrong postal code on the envelope that caused it to be returned.

    You make it sound like a conspiracy that they counted more votes for the Liberals.

    Not the OP but - I'd agree that this is definitely not the case. It seems to instead be a clear and accidental mistake on the part of whoever handled the printing of the envelope.

    Now, while it's definitely troubling if the overall vote can be swung by an "administrative error" of some sort, there's no evidence that this happened more than in this one case. And thus it only matters because the final call was done to having a single vote more for the Liberal candidate.

    If it was down to even just two votes for the Liberal candidate instead, getting this lost vote counted would not have changed the results. So definitely not a conspiracy.

    They’re doing everything by the book.

    I guess the point here is - laws can be changed. Perhaps not retroactively this specific case, but going forward the laws can be updated to better handle situations like this in the future where EC made a mistake.

    This is a totally different situation, but when I went to exchange my expired driver's license at Service Ontario, one of the first workers that I saw there made a mistake and incorrectly refused my abstract.

    I had to return after a weekend, and spoke with someone else who acknowledged the issue. At this point I was technically outside the 1-year window by a couple of days to be able to perform the exchange - but I wouldn't have been if not for their mistake. Luckily for me, they were empowered to correct it and accept the exchange.

    So - is there a compelling reason to avoid granting EC the ability to correct their own mistakes, particularly in a clear-cut situation like this one?

  • Elections Canada says Terrebonne vote is final, despite ‘error’ with special ballot

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  • They’re following the law.

    Never stated otherwise.

    They never saw the vote. They can’t count it,

    I get what you're saying, but it's still disturbing that EC can cause a mistake of this nature and not have the ability to rectify it.

    Certainly this isn't the worst case of disenfranchisement by Elections Canada (see for example https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/this-is-unacceptable-polling-station-problems-prompt-calls-for-investigation/ )

    it has to go to court.

    Thinking it over, there's a good counterargument here. Even if EC could directly order a by-election in this case (or even was given the power to just outright count the vote), someone would contest this and it'd likely end up before a judge at some point anyways. So might as well just go direct.

  • Elections Canada says Terrebonne vote is final, despite ‘error’ with special ballot

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  • Then make an application to a judge to challenge the result and they will have to count it.

    I'm not sure that I'm eligible to do this..

    Truly, it should be the BQ that does it. I’m guessing they will in the coming days.

    Agreed. This isn't so bad, at least there's a way forward.

  • Canada @lemmy.ca
    abff08f4813c @j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us

    Liberals won Terrebonne, Que., riding by 1 vote — but this woman's Bloc ballot wasn't counted

    www.cbc.ca /news/canada/montreal/elections-canada-investigating-terrebonne-1.7533228
  • Work Reform @lemmy.world
    abff08f4813c @j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us

    US: Major Companies Violate Gig Workers’ Rights

    www.hrw.org /news/2025/05/12/us-major-companies-violate-gig-workers-rights
  • Australian Politics @aussie.zone
    abff08f4813c @j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us

    Labor’s landslide victory obscures a disturbing trend for the major parties

    www.abc.net.au /news/2025-05-10/election-results-independents-rising-charts/105267162
  • Malicious Compliance @lemmy.world
    abff08f4813c @j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us
    REPOST

    Lawyer has to convince judge of no jurisdiction to return deported man but achieves the opposite

    www.npr.org /2025/04/04/nx-s1-5352448/judge-orders-the-trump-administration-to-return-man-who-was-mistakenly-deported-el-salvador
  • World News @quokk.au
    abff08f4813c @j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us

    Bishops grapple with divided Philippines after former president Duterte’s arrest

    thecatholicherald.com /bishops-grapple-with-divided-philippines-after-former-president-dutertes-arrest/
  • politics @lemmy.world
    abff08f4813c @j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us

    Congressional leaders announce three-month spending deal to avert government shutdown

    www.pbs.org /newshour/politics/congressional-leaders-announce-three-month-spending-deal-to-avert-government-shutdown
  • politics @lemmy.world
    abff08f4813c @j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us

    Second apparent assassination attempt of Trump being investigated by FBI

    www.cnn.com /2024/09/15/politics/donald-trump-safe-shots/index.html