A Boring Dystopia

Will the current turbulent situation lead to a third world war?

Nothing is more American than the Opossum! They only reside in North America.

An account trading under the username "Magamyman" made more than $553,000 placing bets on the prediction market Polymarket that Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would be out of power just before an Israeli strike killed him on Saturday.

....Under U.S. commodity trading laws, making trades based on death and war are illegal, since those kinds of bets create a financial reward for violence, human suffering and geopolitical instability.

Oh wow what a happy unintended consequence for oil producers/companies!

In the space of eight minutes, Trump proceeded to upend half a century of US foreign policy [...?], renege on his campaign promise to avoid the risk of forever wars and leave the Fifa boss, Gianni Infantino, with some explaining to do about why he gave Trump a made-up peace prize.

“There is also a beautiful medal for you that you can wear everywhere you want to go,” the oleaginous Infantino had told Trump last December. Trump was not wearing that medal on Saturday. Instead he delivered a performance that would have had soccer fans chanting: “Are you George Bush in disguise?”

Bush dragged the US into a tragic war in Iraq in 2003 that costs hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars and was recently crowned by the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank as the worst foreign policy decision in history. The avaricious Trump seems determined to seize that title for himself with another act of Middle Eastern regime change.

This is cool in the abstract, on our timeline though?...

“My other thought is how difficult it is to obtain stem cells from volunteers. There would need to be a lot of volunteers to treat everyone with frailty.”

Gonna be a LOT of "volunteers" for rich people I suspect.

Greenpeace has said the lawsuit is meant to use the courts to silence activists and critics and chill First Amendment rights.

The world soon learned that Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq was based on manipulated intelligence and outright lies; the Iraqi regime no longer had any weapons of mass destruction and was not developing them. But the administration’s relentless campaign to convince Americans that Saddam was a threat had paid off by generating significant support. As the invasion got under way in March 2003, many polls showed public approval of the war at more than 70%. Bush’s own approval rating hovered around a similar high, underscoring that war can boost the popularity of America’s commander-in-chief as few other things can.

Today, Donald Trump is marching the US toward war with Iran, but without making a case for why Washington should attack and whether Iran poses a threat to Americans that would justify the risks of military action. Trump has ordered the largest US military build-up in the Middle East since the Iraq invasion in 2003. To be sure, Trump has broadly described concerns over a supposed nuclear threat. But unlike in the lead-up to that war, when the Bush administration secured approval from Congress for an attack and spent months promoting its false argument that Iraq was developing WMDs, Trump and his top aides aren’t bothering to make clear why they might bomb Iran or what, exactly, the US hopes to achieve.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43606758

The company compiled information from franchisees and guests on how to measure friendliness, resulting in the fast food chain training its AI system to recognize certain words and phrases, such as “welcome to Burger King,” “please,” and “thank you.” Managers can then ask the AI assistant how their location is performing on friendliness.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/42641099

The leftist party of Yanis Varoufakis, a former finance minister and critic of the conservative government, said he had been charged based on admitting he had tried ecstasy once.

Mr. Varoufakis, a famously outspoken left-wing economist, author and critic of Greece’s conservative government, was charged with “promoting and advertising drugs,” according to his party, known as MeRA25, or the European Realistic Disobedience Front.

Kids I care about have gone to these things. Grown adults are showing up to harass - “roll coal” in the kids faces, throw things from cars.

Mustang public schools suspended all children who walked out, with support of the governor of Oklahoma.

People almost seemed to get a hard on at the idea of hurting these children in Facebook comments.