I also want you to realize that anything bad that you see on the platform is a symptom of Mark Zuckerberg’s unwillingness to rate-limit or sufficiently moderate the platform. Logically-speaking, one would think that Meta would want you to have a high-quality Facebook experience, pruning content that might be incendiary, spammy, scammy or unhelpful, or at the very least, comes primarily from those within your own network, but when your only concern is growth, content moderation is more of an emergency measure.

And to be clear, this is part of Meta’s cultural DNA. In an interview with journalist Jeff Horwitz in his book Broken Code, Facebook’s former VP of Ads and Partnerships Brian Bolland said that “building things is way more fun than making things secure and safe…[and] until there’s a regulatory or press fire, you don’t deal with it.”

Horwitz also cites that Meta engineers’ greatest frustration was that the company “perpetually [needed] something to fail — often fucking spectacularly — to drive interest in fixing it.” Horwitz’s book describes Meta’s approach to moderation as “having a light touch,” considering it “a moral virtue” and that the company “wasn’t failing to supervise what users did — it was neutral.”

As I’ve briefly explained, the logic here is that the more stuff there is on Facebook or Instagram, the more likely you are to run into something you’ll interact with, even if said interaction is genuinely bad. Horwitz notes that in April 2016, Meta analyzed Facebook’s most successful political groups, finding that a third of them “routinely featured content that was racist and conspiracy-minded,” with their growth heavily-driven by Facebook’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” features, algorithmic tools that Facebook used to recommend content. The researcher in question added that “sixty-four percent of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools.”

When the researcher took their concerns to Facebook’s “Protect and Care” team, they were told that there was nothing the team could do as “the accounts creating the content were real people, and Facebook intentionally had no rules mandating truth, balance or good faith.”

Meta, at its core, is a rot economy empire, entirely engineered to grow metrics and revenue at the expense of anything else. In practice, this means allowing almost any activity that might “grow” the platform, even if it means groups that balloon by tens or hundreds of thousands of people a day, or allowing people to friend 50 or more people in a single day. It means allowing almost any content other than that which it’s legally required to police like mutilation and child pornography, even if the content it allows in makes the platform significantly worse.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/were-watching-facebook-die/

From Oct. 1, when the rules come into force, the government will operate a rare earth traceability database to ensure it can control the extraction, use and export of the metals. China currently produces around 60 percent of the world's rare earth metals, and is the origin of around 90 percent of refined rare earths on the market.

https://www.politico.eu/article/precious-rare-earth-metals-belong-to-the-state-china-declares/

There had already been some proof of collusion between Saudi officials and 9/11 hijackers revealed in the past, but as Benjamin and Simon point out, the new evidence suggests that the actions taken by two Saudi officials working in the U.S. to support the hijackers were “deliberate, sustained, and carefully coordinated with other Saudi officials.” If true, the failure of our government to hold the Saudis accountable for the role of their officials in the attacks is inexcusable

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/saudi-arabia-911/

Italian prosecutors in Milan investigated the LVMH subsidiary Dior's use of third-party suppliers in recent months. Prosecutors said these companies exploited workers to pump out bags for a small fraction of their store price. Citing documents examined by authorities, Reuters reported last month that Dior paid a supplier $57 to produce bags that retailed for about $2,780.

In probes through March and April, investigators found evidence that workers were sleeping in the facility so bags could be produced around the clock, Reuters reported. The probe also said safety devices on gluing and brushing machines were removed so workers could operate them faster.

The probe also extended to Giorgio Armani contractors. Armani paid contractors $99 per bag for products that sold for more than $1,900 in stores, according to documents seen by Reuters.

https://www.businessinsider.com/dior-italy-labor-investigation-contractors-lvmh-armani-luxury-bags-2024-7

"Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip."

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext

I genuinely have no words for the evil of Israel, the US and its allies. I would even write something about it, but it's completely useless. I hope there's a hell for every single person who approved, promoted, defended this, from the people in the IDF, to every single liberal voter who spends their days defending genocide.

RPTU University of Kaiserslautern-Landau has shown for the first time, in a joint study with BOKU University, that permaculture brings about a significant improvement in biodiversity, soil quality and carbon storage.

Permaculture uses natural cycles and ecosystems as blueprint. Food is produced in an agricultural ecosystem that is as self-regulating, natural and diverse as possible. For example, livestock farming is integrated into the cultivation of crops or the diversity of beneficial organisms is promoted in order to avoid the use of mineral fertilizers or pesticides.

https://phys.org/news/2024-07-permaculture-sustainable-alternative-conventional-agriculture.html

The world we live in today is not just the one created by the likes of Tiberius of Rome, or even Emperor Wu of Han. Until surprisingly recent times, spaces of human freedom existed across large parts of our planet. Millions lived in them. We don’t know their names, as they didn’t carve them in stone, but we know that many lived lives in which one could hope to do more than just scratch out an existence, or rehearse someone else’s script of ‘the origin of the state’ – in which one could move away, disobey, experiment with other notions of how to live, even create new forms of social reality.

Sometimes, the unfree did this too, against much harder odds. How many, back then, preferred imperial control to non-imperial freedoms? How many were given a choice? How much choice do we have now? It seems nobody really knows the answers to these questions, at least not yet. In future, it will take more than zombie statistics to stop us from asking them. There are forgotten histories buried in the ground, of human politics and values. The soil mantle of Earth, including the very soil itself, turns out to be not just our species’ life support system, but also a forensic archive, containing precious evidence to challenge timeworn narratives about the origins of inequality, private property, patriarchy, warfare, urban life and the state – narratives born directly from the experience of empire, written by the ‘winners’ of a future that may yet make losers of us all.

https://aeon.co/essays/an-archeological-revolution-transforms-our-image-of-human-freedoms

Israel IDF Hannibal Directive

IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive
'There was crazy hysteria, and decisions started being made without verified information': Documents and testimonies obtained by Haaretz reveal the Hannibal operational order, which directs the use of force to prevent soldiers being taken into captivity, was employed at three army facilities infiltrated by Hamas, potentially endangering civilians as well

https://archive.ph/WuAgT

Green Corridors - Medellín, Colombia

The $16.3 million initiative led to the creation of 30 Green Corridors along the city’s roads and waterways, improving or producing more than 70 hectares of green space, which includes 20 kilometers of shaded routes with cycle lanes and pedestrian paths.

These plant and tree-filled spaces — which connect all sorts of green areas such as the curb strips, squares, parks, vertical gardens, sidewalks, and even some of the seven hills that surround the city — produce fresh, cooling air in the face of urban heat. The corridors are also designed to mimic a natural forest with levels of low, medium and high plants, including native and tropical plants, bamboo grasses and palm trees.

Heat-trapping infrastructure like metro stations and bridges has also been greened as part of the project and government buildings have been adorned with green roofs and vertical gardens to beat the heat. The first of those was installed at Medellín’s City Hall, where nearly 100,000 plants and 12 species span the 1,810 square meter surface.

The 72 species of plants and trees selected provide food for wildlife, help biodiversity to spread and fight air pollution. A study, for example, identified Mangifera indica as the best among six plant species found in Medellín at absorbing PM2.5 pollution — particulate matter that can cause asthma, bronchitis and heart disease — and surviving in polluted areas due to its “biochemical and biological mechanisms.”

The groundwork is carried out by 150 citizen-gardeners like Pineda, who come from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds, with the support of 15 specialized forest engineers. Pineda is now the leader of a team of seven other gardeners who attend to corridors all across the city, shifting depending on the current priorities.

The project’s wider impacts are like a breath of fresh air. Medellín’s temperatures fell by 2°C in the first three years of the program, and officials expect a further decrease of 4 to 5C over the next few decades, even taking into account climate change. In turn, City Hall says this will minimize the need for energy-intensive air conditioning.

A separate study estimated that in just one of Medellín’s corridors, the new vegetation growth would absorb 160,787 kg of CO2 per year and that over the next century 2,308,505 kg of CO2 will be taken up – roughly the equivalent of taking 500 cars off the road.

In addition, the project has had a significant impact on air pollution. Between 2016 and 2019, the level of PM2.5 fell significantly, and in turn the city’s morbidity rate from acute respiratory infections decreased from 159.8 to 95.3 per 1,000 people.

There’s also been a 34.6 percent rise in cycling in the city, likely due to the new bike paths built for the project, and biodiversity studies show that wildlife is coming back — one sample of five Green Corridors identified 30 different species of butterfly.

https://reasonstobecheerful.world/green-corridors-medellin-colombia-urban-heat/