Tootfinder

you might want to avoid Partiful https://nyc-noise.com/drone-party/

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NYC experimental live music calendar • noise, improv, jazz, new music, avant-electronics, weirdos • performance against corporate interests!

The only remaining criminal case against Donald Trump has been revived
after the head of Georgia’s prosecutor’s council appointed himself to replace Fani Willis,
the Fulton county district attorney, who was removed from the election interference case in September.
Pete Skandalakis,
a Republican and the executive director of the prosecuting attorneys’ council of Georgia,
the state body that provides legal training and is often charged to mitigate prosecutorial co…

Ugandan officials turn off internet on eve of national elections https://therecord.media/uganda-internet-shutdown-elections

Series A, Episode 11 - Bounty
CALLY: But the elections were rigged.
TYCE: It was still failure.
BLAKE: [To Cally] That's something you should understand.
TYCE: I thought I could help him.
BLAKE: He must come with us, by force if necessary.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/111/225

Amid US public media funding cuts, a look at how the model of private donations can lead to an audience that's older, whiter, and richer than average Americans (Sarah Scire/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/11/funding-c…

Funding cuts may make public radio more reliant on old, rich, white donors
After years of interviews, research, and writing, Laura Garbes submitted the final draft of her book on public radio in December 2024. By the time Listeners Like Who? Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry published last month, a lot had changed. Following Trump’s election and fede…

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol

As one who studied the development and growth of cities, the passage of this measure has caused me to wonder how short sighted are some programs to increase housing stocks.
Like rent control, which over decades can erase rental property availability, this measure will slowly nudge builders to locate new single family home construction outside of our city limits. (The average single family home price in our area is among the highest in the US.)
I am less clear about the impact on…

Election 2025: Santa Cruz affordable housing advocates celebrate win on Measure C
Santa Cruz voters have approved Measure C, the housing advocate-supported ballot initiative, with more than 53% of the vote, while the competing Measure B, supported by local real estate interests, failed with just 11.9%. County officials continue counting ballots, with the next update on Friday at 4 p.m.

Multi state neurons
Robert Worden
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08815 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08815 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.08815
arXiv:2512.08815v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Neurons, as eukaryotic cells, have powerful internal computation capabilities. One neuron can have many distinct states, and brains can use this capability. Processes of neuron growth and maintenance use chemical signalling between cell bodies and synapses, ferrying chemical messengers over microtubules and actin fibres within cells. These processes are computations which, while slower than neural electrical signalling, could allow any neuron to change its state over intervals of seconds or minutes. Based on its state, a single neuron can selectively de-activate some of its synapses, sculpting a dynamic neural net from the static neural connections of the brain. Without this dynamic selection, the static neural networks in brains are too amorphous and dilute to do the computations of neural cognitive models. The use of multi-state neurons in animal brains is illustrated in hierarchical Bayesian object recognition. Multi-state neurons may support a design which is more efficient than two-state neurons, and scales better as object complexity increases. Brains could have evolved to use multi-state neurons. Multi-state neurons could be used in artificial neural networks, to use a kind of non-Hebbian learning which is faster and more focused and controllable than traditional neural net learning. This possibility has not yet been explored in computational models.
toXiv_bot_toot

The Venezuelan opposition leader #María #Corina #Machado has
💥vowed to return to the country as soon as possible and rejected the authority of the interim president backed – for now – by the US after it forcibly removed Nicolšs…

Trump expects loyalty from those who benefit from him.
Days after issuing him a pardon,
Donald Trump criticized US House member
Henry Cuellar of Texas
for deciding to run for re-election as a Democrat.
Trump pardoned Cuellar and the congressman’s wife on Wednesday as they faced bribery charges.
They were alleged to have accepted thousands of dollars from Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank in exchange for advancing their interests.
Shortly after the pardo…