cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
We know. There was a group chat.
Did you? This story is about the 17 air strikes that happened yesterday. The attacks described in the group chat were the ones that happened 12 days ago.
The US has continued to bomb Yemen every day since then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_2025_United_States_attacks_in_Yemen
Because Netanyahu doesn’t want to testify at his corruption trial
Yes, that was one reason…
and because the United States has not stopped giving them weapons to carry out this war, regardless of what they did and or who the US president was
and that is another.
But, this article buries the lede about what was probably the most compelling reason for Benjamin Netanyahu in making his decision to murder hundreds of people yesterday and today:
Netanyahu has a deadline: his government must pass a national budget in two weeks, or face the prospect of his government collapsing, triggering new elections.
Returning to war paved the way for Netanyahu to bring his far-right ally Itamar Ben Gvir back inside the coalition and beef up his governing majority. Ben Gvir had quit because of the January ceasefire with Hamas, and returned Tuesday with the resumption of the war.
[…]
The strikes could last at least another two weeks until Israel passes its national budget, giving Netanyahu a stronger position in power and more flexibility to resume a ceasefire, analysts say.
1525 the economic powers of the world were India and china https://www.businessinsider.com/mckinsey-worlds-economic-center-of-gravity-2012-6
that is a fascinating map; i noticed that despite making projections about 2025 the date of that post is actually 2012; Business Insider attributes it to McKinsey, but via ZeroHedge (who charges for access to their archives).
I wanted more context so I spent a few minutes searching; in case anyone else is curious it comes from a report called “Urban world: Cities and the rise of the consuming class” by McKinsey Global Institute.
Here is their summary of it, and here is the 92 page PDF of the full report.
The center of gravity analysis is based on country-level historical estimates from Angus Maddison for the period AD 1 until 2007, and country-level growth rates from Cityscope 2.0 until 2025. We then allocated each country’s GDP value to the approximate center of landmass of the respective country. The same center of each country was used throughout the entire time frame. To calculate the global center of gravity, landmass radian coordinates were transformed into Cartesian coordinates with a tool from the UK Ordnance Survey that uses ED50/ UTM data and projection (see www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/gps). We then transformed these coordinates into respective momentums and averaged these to a true economic center of gravity for each year, located within the sphere of the earth. To illustrate the shift of gravity, we lengthened the vectors from the center of the earth to the center of gravity so that they lie on the earth’s surface. Although the concept of “surfacing” might create problems for interpreting data, both the resulting direction and the magnitude of the surfaced shifts were directionally consistent with the internal shifts, too. The four periods with the fastest shift, 2000–10, 1940–50, and 2010–25, maintain the same rank order, while the 1500–1820 period ranks 11th on surface but eighth on the “true” center of gravity.
Until 1500, Asia was the center of gravity of the world economy, accounting for roughly two-thirds of global GDP. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, urbanization and industrialization vaulted Europe and the United States to prominence. We are now observing a decisive shift in the balance back toward Asia—at a speed and on a scale never before witnessed. China’s economic transformation resulting from urbanization and industrialization is happening at 100 times the scale of the first country in the world to urbanize—the United Kingdom—and at ten times the speed (Exhibit E2).
They actually cite Angus Maddison’s Monitoring the World Economy 1820–1992 which doesn’t sound like something that goes to AD 1. It looks like Maddison also published The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (currently only a limited preview on archive.org) in 2001, which this reproduces Appendix B of - which seems like probably their source:
World GDP, 20 Countries and Regional Totals, 1-2001 AD
I’m not sure how Geary–Khamis dollars (“a hypothetical unit of currency that has the same purchasing power parity that the U.S. dollar had in the United States at a given point in time”) are supposed to work for time periods prior to the existence of the United States, but i think I’ve spent enough time on this rabbit hole for now :)
They had a Republican governor from 2003 to 2011.
Clinton got 46.4% there in 2016, only a 1.5% lead over Trump.
Their House of Representatives is currently split 50/50 (with Republican leadership due to this), and the DFL has a one-seat majority in the Senate.
I wouldn’t call it “incredibly blue”, and certainly not “one of the bluest”.
Like one of the bluest.
In fact, if you sort the table here you can see that of the states Harris/Walz won there was only one (New Hampshire) where they got a lower percentage of the vote than in Minnesota.
However with the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party having a majority (by a single seat) in the Senate, this bill will obviously not pass, and if it did, obviously the governor (Tim Walz) would not sign it.
This is just trolling by some deeply unserious politicians.
While USAID definitely funds/funded many ridiculous things (such as this) they also provide much-needed food and medicine to a lot of people - for cynical politically-motivated soft-power reasons, but still. It seems very likely that abruptly cutting off those programs will cause some people to die. I really hope someone (the PRC seems likely) will step in and replace some of those programs!
i don’t usually cross-post my comments but I think this one from a cross-post of this meme in programmerhumor is worth sharing here:
The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).
The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:
I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey
(there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog…)
It’s on F-Droid if you load their repo.
It is not allowed in F-Droid’s official repos because it is not open source; anyone can run their own F-Droid repo and distribute proprietary software from it.
Also it’s open source but I understand some people don’t like their license.
It is not open source; that is a term with an internationally recognized definition. Even FUTO themselves now acknowledge it is not.
Am I still missing something? This is posted on the instance of .world, wtf are we talking about .ml and politics for? If your instance filters your comments on other instances than that’s concerning and something I didn’t know.
Yes, something you’re missing is that it was your (our) instance which removed the word from your comment. I believe the slur filters are effectively a combination of the configured filters on the writer’s instance, the reader’s instance, and the community’s instance.
If you view this thread from other other users’ instances (via the 
link on their comments in the web view), you will see that the word which was removed from your comment is not removed from comments by users on some other instances (despite that it is also removed from their comments when viewed from our instance). HTH.
(imo false positives from the slur filter are annoying, but so are the people casually using slurs who are prevented from doing so by it; it’s a tradeoff i don’t feel strongly about. although i do think it would be much better if the writer-side version of it could notify users of the impending bowdlerization prior to posting.)
I assumed it was a joke, but (correct me if i’ve misunderstood) I understood it as a joke rooted in the misconception that the US bombing of Yemen was a thing that happened 12 days ago rather than something that has continued every day since then.
If there is some way that this joke works in light of the fact that this article is from yesterday, I failed to grasp it.