@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-11-05 07:31:02
A look at US efforts to train workers for semiconductor manufacturing, led by Arizona, which has secured over 60 semiconductor expansion projects since 2020 (Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/techn
@ErikJonker@mastodon.social2025-10-04 09:44:20
A good account (bot) to follow, it reminds when I forget to add an alt-text to a picture and makes one,
https://fuzzies.wtf/@altbot
@rasterweb@mastodon.social2025-11-03 17:41:46
People complain about the roads but don't do anything about it... well, some of us do.
I've been avoiding these two potholes on my ride home for weeks now, got fed up, finally stopped to report them to the city last week and they just got filled...
In four days. The city street crew filled them in less than a week. Hell Yeah.
(The first photo is what I submitted, second is from the road crew after repairs.)
@aral@mastodon.ar.al2025-09-30 15:25:16
Hey everyone,
You know Joy. We run Gaza Verified together. But while I’m safely tucked away in Ireland, Joy is in Gaza, being forced to endure Israel‘s ongoing genocide and the resulting famine.
Last week, we raised $40,200 for families in Gaza stuck under the bombs in the North to help them evacuate South.
Joy got $0 of that.
She and her family need your help too.
Please take some time to donate to her fundraiser.
Joy is one of the most selfless people I …
@hex@kolektiva.social2025-10-02 21:26:21
It's also easy to imagine that Trump is sending his military to Portland. People forget that the military is actually really big and pretty complex.
Most people join the military because they want to get out of poverty. Some people join because they believe in it. A lot of people are just too young to have any kind of politics, but some of them do develop politics in the military... and some of those folks become anarchists.
There are Nazis in the military. It's a big problem. But there are also anarchists who signed up before they developed a critique of the state, and now they're kind of stuck for a few years until they can get out.
It's also worth recognizing that a lot of people join after they graduate. Basic training is like 22 weeks. So, assuming a random selection, there really aren't a lot of folks who would be deploying to PDX who would have joined under Trump. That's just assuming a random selection, and there may be other things at play that I'm not aware of, but the majority of the types of folks who would get deployed now would have joined under Biden.
The troops who will deploy (if they do deploy) may very much not want to be there. These are also not monsters wanting to kill (like Trump wishes them to be). They're kids from nearby towns. That's not awesome, most of Oregon has absolute shit politics. But joining the National Guard doesn't necessarily mean that a person has any politics at all. All of this is worth remembering.
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-10-03 00:41:40
Just finished "Thief of the Heights" written by Son M. and illustrated by Robin Yao. It's a very cool graphic novel about the illusions of meritocracy and loyalty to one's roots, with an interesting setting and better politics than most stuff out there, even if the plotting is a little rough and perhaps a bit too straightforward. The neat ending and reliance on heroism are themes I don't love in these kinds of tales, but I'm grateful for more stories in this category to exist in the first place, so I can't complain too much.
It's got disability, queer, and POC representation and some of that is #OwnVoices, which is cool, although those dimensions of the work aren't its focus.
#AmReading
@migueldeicaza@mastodon.social2025-10-31 16:00:44
My Xmas won’t be complete until I get a plugin for Swift:
https://aspire.dev
@shriramk@mastodon.social2025-11-01 14:44:36
From reporting about last night's World Series Game 6: This is the kind of amazing act that makes someone a professional. Not only the sensory ability but also the ability to act on it in a fraction of a second. And it completely changed the game's outcome.
@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