alyaza [they/she]

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she

  • 818 Posts
  • 438 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • Swift Current began construction on the 3,800-acre, 593-megawatt solar farm in central Illinois as part of the same five-year, $422 million agreement. Straddling two counties in central Illinois, the Double Black Diamond Solar project is now the largest solar installation east of the Mississippi River. It can produce enough electricity to power more than 100,000 homes, according to Swift Current’s vice president of origination, Caroline Mann.

    Chicago alone has agreed to purchase approximately half the installation’s total output, which will cover about 70 percent of its municipal buildings’ electricity needs. City officials plan to cover the remaining 30 percent through the purchase of renewable energy credits.










  • Kind of annoying to have to click the damned link if the text can just be in the body of the post. What, do you work for PC gamer?

    no offense but why are you on a link aggregator (and a clone of Reddit in particular) if you’re averse to clicking links? that’s literally the point of this form of social media: emphasis on sharing interesting links from other places, with the expectation that you’ll follow them.

    in any case we strongly discourage the practice of copying the entire article because it’s technically copyright infringement, we generally expect people to actually engage with what’s posted instead of drive-by commenting, and it’s just generally bad form to rob writers of attention and click-throughs for their work.




  • Now, we have actual data about the impact of the law. The Shift Project took a comprehensive look at the impact that the new law had on California’s fast food industry between April 2024, when the law went into effect, and June 2024. The Shift Project specializes in surveying hourly workers working for large firms. As a result, it has “large samples of covered fast food workers in California as well as comparison workers in other states and in similar industries; and of having detailed measurement of wages, hours, staffing, and other channels of adjustment.”

    Despite the dire warnings from the restaurant industry and some media reports, the Shift Project’s study did “not find evidence that employers turned to understaffing or reduced scheduled work hours to offset the increased labor costs.” Instead, “weekly work hours stayed about the same for California fast food workers, and levels of understaffing appeared to ease.” Further, there was “no evidence that wage increases were accompanied by a reduction in fringe benefits… such as health or dental insurance, paid sick time, or retirement benefits.”




  • The Yurok Tribe has released 18 condors into the wild so far, over four rounds of releases. They’re doing great, says Williams. “It’s been really exciting to watch the flock expand and change in their dynamics.” The first couple of cohorts stayed close to home, only exploring within a 30-mile (48km) radius. Now the birds wander as far as 95 miles (152km) away, she adds.

    “It’s awesome to see these young birds who’ve literally never flown in their life because they were reared in facilities with limited flight space, starting to learn the ropes and how to use the landscape to their advantage,” says Williams.


    The tribe has a release and management facility to monitor the birds for the foreseeable future – many challenges remain before they become a fully self-sustaining population. The birds are brought back into the facility twice a year for check-ups to ensure they are doing well, and to check the transmitters they’re fitted with.


    West believes the key to a true, sustainable condor recovery is education. “The only way to combat a lack of information is to reach out to these communities and empower them with that information,” he says. “If [the public] all make the transition to non-lead ammunition, our intensive management efforts could virtually stop overnight.”

    Remedying this single issue should allow condors to “again have a meaningful place in modern ecosystems”, says West.


  • By necessity, Maryam’s reporting process is far from typical—she takes great pains to keep the authorities from knowing who she is, and has to work with a male family member to secure interviews. Sometimes, the process of scheduling an in-person meeting can resemble a game of telephone: she asks her brother to call a male relative of the potential subject to make the arrangements. When she wants to meet with a source in person, she must bring along a man to chaperone. She’ll also ask around to assess if the person she’s supposed to meet can be trusted to keep her identity a secret. “It’s really hard for me,” she said.

    Once the piece is ready to be published, Maryam removes all traces of her reporting from her devices, including deleting every email and call log, except for contacts with her immediate family. “If the Taliban checks my phone [and finds something], it will not be good for me. So, I delete everything,” she said. She only publishes the article after she has confirmed again that her subjects are comfortable with everything they’re quoted as saying. “It’s my job to keep her safe,” she said.


  • How would they even enforce this if the site is hosted in a different state or even country?

    you’re asking a question they don’t care about, which is the first problem here. the purpose is not to have a legally bulletproof regulation, but to cast doubt on the ability of websites like this to operate in Texas without incurring liability and thereby force them to block users from the state or another such action. this is also how most abortion restrictions work in practice: they muddy the water on what is legal, so risk-averse entities or entities without the revenue to fight back simply avoid doing/facilitating the practice in a given jurisdiction or completely move out of state.

    is this dubiously legal? yeah, obviously. but it doesn’t matter if you don’t have the money to pay a lawyer. and the vast majority of these sorts of websites obviously don’t–they’d likely need someone to represent them pro bono, which is not likely.



  • i mean if Roblox is any indication, Valve will probably bend the knee sooner or later. government scrutiny is obliging them to make changes and actually do even basic moderation over there:

    The fast-growing children’s gaming platform Roblox is to hand parents greater oversight of their children’s activity and restrict the youngest users from the more violent, crude and scary content after warnings about child grooming, exploitation and sharing of indecent images.

    The moves comes after a short-seller last month alleged it had found child sexual abuse content, sex games, violent content and abusive speech on the site. In the UK, Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science and technology, told parliament: “I expect that company to do better in protecting service users, particularly children.”







  • With no voices in support in the original post and currently the only two voices in support here being the mods themselves.

    bluntly: this is not a democracy, we don’t pretend it is, and we’ve never run it that way so this is not a particularly relevant consideration for us. democracy at the scale of communities is an incredibly fraught issue that requires a lot of time and energy to administer we don’t have. in any case none of our referendums in the community (which we’ve done before) have been majority votes, they’ve solicited feedback that informs our judgement. our judgement here is this is a good idea regardless of how the community feels about it, and that even if we didn’t implement the moratorium we’d be cracking down on posts, handing out bans, and doing sweeping removals because we’ve been more permissive than our usual moderation on the subject and let behavior we’d normally step in on go.

    in short: even if the moratorium were removed, that’d just mean heavier-handed enforcement from this point forward. if people really want no moratorium then they should be prepared to start catching 30-day bans (or permanent bans if they’re off instance) for any unkind behavior.



  • If one takes that attitude, you’re right, you won’t change the world.

    i think you’re conflating “having value” with “changing the world” when these are two essentially independent qualities. at no point have we ever sought to “change the world” with this (because we’re five people running this in our spare time, that’s not in our capabilities as people), and from the beginning we’ve said we’d be content with only a handful of people using this place as long as they get something out of doing it (because that’s what we consider valuable, not whether or not this can have sweeping social impact or importance).