Sunday, November 20, 2022

20: Trump, Twitter, Elon



Ukraine’s 15,000-Mile Lifeline How the country’s vast rail system has helped it withstand an invasion. ......... .

at No comments:
Labels:

Friday, November 18, 2022

18: Twitter



How Nepal Grew Back Its Forests An effort decades in the making is showing results in Nepal, a rare success story in a world of cascading climate disasters and despair. ............ This transformation is visible across Nepal, thanks to a radical policy adopted by the government more than 40 years ago. Large swaths of national forest land were handed to local communities, and millions of volunteers like Mr. Karki were recruited to protect and renew their local forests, an effort that has earned praise from environmentalists around the world. But the success has been accompanied by new challenges — among them addressing the increase in potentially dangerous confrontations between people and wildlife. ........ Community-managed forests now account for more than a third of Nepal’s forest cover, which has grown by about 22 percent since 1988, according to government data. Independent studies also confirm that greenery in Nepal has sprung back, with forests now covering 45 percent of the country’s land. ....... a NASA-funded study that found Nepal’s tree cover had doubled between 1992 and 2016. “Now, you’ve got the community saying, ‘No, you don’t go there!’ So, the trees are coming back.” ......... Back in the early 1980s, the government couldn’t persuade people to stop cutting trees for farmland and for firewood. ........ What followed was an enormous replantation effort that was bolstered by foreign aid. Villagers like Mr. Karki planted seedlings of rosewood and sal on barren hills. ......... For the community foresters, that involves guarding their forests from the timber mafia, poachers and from nature itself. ........ One morning early this year, Chijamaya Sarki, 61, was cutting grass for cattle feed in a forest when she was attacked and killed by a tiger, her family said. “We only received her half-eaten body,” said Shyam Bahadur Majakoti, her son, still visibly in shock and dressed according to a traditional mourning ritual. ......... Hundreds of thousands of Nepali youth migrate each year to other countries in Asia or to the Persian Gulf in search of stable, well-paying jobs, leaving fewer workers at home. Foreign remittances now represent almost a quarter of the country’s economic output, and brought in about $7.35 billion in 2020. ....... The rejuvenated forests have transformed life for the locals here. Floods are less frequent. Rainfall, once intermittent, is now normal. ...... Many people have moved on from subsistence farming, taking up alternatives like beekeeping and growing profitable crops like dragon fruit and strawberries. .......... Keshav Raj Basnet runs a thriving beekeeping business, earning $5,000 a year from 12 hives. ........ Nepal is expecting a $7.4 billion package from a group led by the British government to “build back greener from Covid-19” and about $300 million from Norway, the United States and Britain, among others, for helping reduce global emissions. ......... Sergeant Gurung, 36, who is armed with an M-16 rifle, said that on a recent patrol he was chased by a tiger. “I was so scared that I climbed a tree,” he said. “We are allowed to use our gun to protect ourselves, but I am here to protect the animals,” not shoot them. ........ More than 100 of Mr. Gurung’s peers have died on duty in wildlife attacks since 1974, the Army has said. The army has also had a fraught relationship with some locals, who accuse it of heavy-handedness against ethnic minorities. ......... In July 2020, troops found Raj Kumar Chepang, 24, fishing in the restricted area of the national park. His punishment, a beating from sticks, was so severe that he died a few days later .

at No comments:
Labels: ,

Thursday, November 17, 2022

Some Suggestions For Twitter

Twitter And Voice
Free Speech And Just Society
Should Elon Musk Be Owning All Of Twitter?
The Masses, Not Mars
Musk's 44 Billion Dollar Give To Foolish Fascism

My Twitter experience has not changed. Is that a problem? The guy from Mars took over. But my Twitter experience has not changed.

He is being criticized for having bought a 10 billion dollar company for 40 billion. I don't want to go into that. It is certainly a dip. But if it is a startup, it has nowhere to go but up. Although there are plenty of people saying this is his Waterloo. That is the New York Times hyperbola. It is a dramatic statement to make, but people like Paul Graham do not seem to be buying.

Since the early 2010s, I have looked at Twitter and thought, what a waste! So much potential, so little of it realized.

Could Musk be the break Twitter has needed? Or is this Musk's Truth Social?

I just had to say that. I don't believe it. I think Musk might be able to pull it off.

I quite like Twitter. I have an experience on Twitter that I do not have on any other social media platform. And so you are left wanting more.

What is it about Twitter? The brevity? The text? That 1% feel?

How about letting people verify for free? And instead of using government isued IDs letting people use biometric IDs provided by Twitter itself? A selfie? An iris scan? Fingerprint? And you get a checkmark? If not blue, then green. The bots don't have that.

If you can verify your name also with some sort of official ID, you get an additional checkmark. For free.

You could use an assumed name, but it would say so.

The ability to read 10 or 100 or 1,000 tweets at once. How do you read the sentiment?

Real time search engine. Twitter could be tops.

The Twitter archives are a wasteland. So unnecessary.

at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Thursday, September 15, 2022

Putin



Life Is an Accident of Space and Time
Why the U.S. Is Being Ominously Compared to Hungary and Turkey A conversation with Max Fisher, who covers the decline of democracy around the world.

Opinion: Putin is fooling no one -- certainly not Xi In Samarkand, Putin will undoubtedly keep up his triumphant, self-assured demeanor -- but that will fool no one, certainly not Xi, who must be deeply worried about the astonishing collapse of Russia's forces in northeast Ukraine....... Not only is Russia humiliated, Ukraine exuberant, and the West united, but even China, which still expresses support for the Kremlin, is making statements that embarrass Russia. ........ Russia confirmed Xi and Putin would meet on the sidelines of the summit for "very important" talks. China has confirmed Xi's trip, but its foreign minister on Tuesday declined to confirm a meeting with the Russian president. ........ The relationship between Xi and Putin was never one of equals, but now Putin is encountering Xi during one of the most disastrous moments of his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. He will likely seek more support from Xi, who has been generous with words but much less with deeds. ......... China has been reluctant to break the sanctions, or step in to provide a major boost to Russia's dwindling military supplies. If it had, Putin could have avoided the awkward spectacle of seeking weapons from Iran and North Korea, minor, if aggressive powers. .......... Putin needs Xi much more than Xi needs Putin, and that imbalance has grown far greater since their last meeting. ........ he Russian president's suppression of all criticism about the war has taken an expected turn. Those who opposed the "special military operation," have gone to prison, exile or have mostly fallen silent. But now some of the war's most vocal supporters are fuming, enraged by the military's poor performance. (They even call it a "war" -- a word that could not previously be uttered without some consequence.) ........... A strongman cannot afford to be weak, and Putin knows it. ........ For now, there's no chance that Beijing will discard its unofficial alliance with Moscow, even if Russia is a greatly diminished power. Xi wants to be the leader of a global front opposing the US-led liberal democratic order. To do that, he needs to line up support from nations large and small. And Russia remains an important, nuclear-armed nation. ........... Next month, China's Communist Pary will hold its twice-a-decade party congress. Xi, China's most powerful figure since Mao, is expected to secure an unprecedented third term amid a sharp economic slowdown, made worse by his extreme zero-Covid policy. The possibility of a global recession, heightened by Russia's gas wars against Europe, would hit export-reliant China very hard.



Why the U.S. Is Being Ominously Compared to Hungary and Turkey A conversation with Max Fisher, who covers the decline of democracy around the world. ....... That democracy is declining more or less everywhere now. Not necessarily in every country but in every region, in rich and poor countries, old and new democracies. And the decline is incremental but steady, which means that the scale of the change isn’t necessarily obvious until you start looking at the data. ......... What happens is more like what has occurred in Venezuela, say, or Turkey or Hungary. Elected leaders rise within a democracy promising to defeat some threat within, and in the process end up slowly tearing that democracy down. ......... more democracies are in decline today than at any other point in the last century. .......... The United States fits pretty cleanly into what is now a well-established global pattern of democratic backsliding.

at No comments:
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)