@netzschleuder@social.skewed.de2025-12-30 07:00:16
dbpedia_country: Person-Country Affiliations (DBpedia, 2016)
A bipartite network of the affiliations between notable people and countries of the world, as extracted from Wikipedia via the DBpedia project. Countries include former countries, empires, kingdoms, and some country-like entities.
This network has 592414 nodes and 637134 edges.
Tags: Social, Affiliation, Unweighted
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-10-28 21:31:12
Myanmar shut down a major online scam center on October 21 as part of operations starting in September to curb cross-border online scams and illegal gambling (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/myanmar-scam-centers-cybercr…
@hex@kolektiva.social2025-10-30 10:05:59
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
@metacurity@infosec.exchange2025-09-30 08:24:36
South Korea raises cyber threat level after huge data centre fire sparks hacking fears
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/30/south-korea-raises-cyber-threat-level-after-huge-data-centre-fire-sparks-ha…
@cdarwin@c.im2025-12-29 20:09:38
When the Trump administration began freezing federal funding for climate and ecosystem research, one of the programs hit hard was ours: the U.S. Geological Survey’s Climate Adaptation Science Centers.
These nine regional centers help fish, wildlife, water, land – and, importantly, people – adapt to rising global temperatures and other climate shifts.
The centers have been helping to track invasive species, protect water supplies and make agriculture more sustainable in the face of…
@Dragofix@veganism.social2025-12-29 20:08:59
‘When you plant something, it dies’: Brazil’s first arid zone is a stark warning for the whole country https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/dec/28/brazil-first-arid-zone-stark-warning-for-country
@aral@mastodon.ar.al2025-11-28 10:59:39
Right, folks, so there is an account on mastodon.social (@8124@mastodon.social) that has been libelling me and others, defaming us as antisemites for the longest time.
They just sent the posts attached.
They have been reported to mastodon.social and I have raised my concerns with them and yet no action has been taken against that account even though the account has been suspended on at least three major Mastodon servers and limited on at least four others.
It is not limited…
@netzschleuder@social.skewed.de2025-11-28 22:00:24
eu_procurements: EU procurement contract networks (2008-2016)
A bipartite network of public EU procurement contracts, from 2008 to 2016, between issuing buyers (public institutions such as a ministry or city hall) and supplying winners (a private firm). Contracts are aggregated into annual snapshots, edges are annotated with contract value information. Nodes are annotated with location information, including country of origin.
This network has 839824 nodes and 4098711 edges.
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-10-29 14:57:13
Amazon opens Project Rainier, an $11B AI data center on 1,200 acres in Indiana that trains and runs Anthropic's AI models using 500K Amazon Trainium 2 chips (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/29/amazon-opens-11-bi…
@metacurity@infosec.exchange2025-10-29 11:21:25
We've reached the point in the evolution of cyber scamming where military units are blowing up buildings to stop the digital crimes.
Stragglers from Myanmar scam center raided by army cross into Thailand as buildings are blown up
https://apnews.com/artic…
