Tootfinder

https://www.instagram.com/p/DSbtXuCCe9Y/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

Japan Daily on Instagram: "Marty Friedman, an American musician based in Japan, visited a junior high school in Chiba at an event organized by local police to promote coexistence with foreigners. Speaking to first-year students, he said that 99.9% of foreigners who come to Japan are not dangerous and are often eager to communicate with Japanese people. He encouraged students to learn foreign languages and approach others without fear. Friedman also shared a personal story about forgetting his wallet in Japan, highlighting the country’s honesty. The event aimed to help young people understand cultural differences as foreign visitors and workers increase. Learning with empathy can reduce tension and improve everyday interactions. Source:TOKYO NP"
2,062 likes, 113 comments - japandaily_jp on December 18, 2025: "Marty Friedman, an American musician based in Japan, visited a junior high school in Chiba at an event organized by local police to promote coexistence with foreigners. Speaking to first-year students, he said that 99.9% of foreigners who come to Japan are not dangerous and are often eager to communicate with Japanese people. He encouraged students to learn foreign languages and approach others without fear. Friedman also shar…

Series A, Episode 04 - Time Squad
AVON: No, but they weren't planning on coming back. All the instruments are set for landing. There's nothing for take off.
BLAKE: There'd be no point in going back. The world they left would be dead years ago.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/104/234

Me puse a ver las últimas publicaciones de Evelyn Matthei en Instagram -de las que tanto hablan- y realmente parece que es otra persona después de la campaña presidencial. Mucho mšs cercana, amable y simpštica. Si ese hubiera sido el tono de su campaña, quizšs le habría ido mejor.
Ref: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSNZSwzDl_Z/

What @… says is what a lot of us have been lamenting since the ICE invasion started. Shouldn’t local police protect citizens from ICE?? Why this hasn’t happened is a really good question. Factors to consider:
- “Obstructing a federal agent” is illegal, and local police / politicians feel constrained by that (even if the agents themselves don’t seem constrained by the actual law at all, only by what they think they can get away with)
- Police can in theory cite federal agents for e.g. traffic violations or illegal plate swapping after the fact, as long as they’re not “obstructing” the agents — but how do you cite a masked person with fake plates who refuses to give ID?
- Some police are visibly supportive of ICE, chumming it up with them and giving literal fist bumps; a nontrivial subset are outright closet Nazis. A lot of people don’t really see any need to go past “ACAB” as a full explanation for all of this — and certainly The ACAB Hypothesis is…um, not really being proved false right now in Minneapolis.
- I think some police quietly resent ICE for stepping on their turf, but that does not seem to have boiled up into actual confrontation in MSP. One police leader here painted it in early Dec as “some people want to instigate a confrontation between Minneapolis Police, and that’s not going to happen.” Police culture says that police should be a neutral party in a dispute between ICE and residents, and actually protecting residents would be taking sides. (Duh, yes, taking sides that way is your literal job, you dumbasses…but I digress.)
- Some police (especially leadership) really want to get on the community’s good side after the murder of George Floyd, and see this as an opportunity, but unfortunately this has materialized entirely as non-interventionist support: “We responded to a 911 call and help a distressed resident after her husband was abducted!” “We transported children left parentless on the streets by ICE safely back to their home!” “Our officers volunteered at the food shelf!” OK, nice, good for you buddy.
So yeah, I’m wondering this too, and am bitter about it. https://tilde.zone/@n1xnx/115928447564126393

Internal documents and insider communications obtained by CDG News reveal that 700Credit, one of the auto industry's largest credit reporting and identity verification providers, experienced a data breach on or around October 25, 2025
https://news.dealersh…

700Credit suffers data breach exposing consumer SSNs, documents show
700Credit discovered the breach after being "alerted to suspicious activity within our proprietary web-based application 700Dealer.com," according to an internal memo shared with CDG. (3 min. read)

Internal document: Amazon rolled out a manager dashboard that tracks employees' office attendance and how many hours they spend there, after its RTO mandate (Pranav Dixit/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-flags-employees-rto-office-2026-1

Amazon gives managers a new way to spot who's barely coming into the office
Amazon rolls out an updated dashboard for managers to track office attendance and hours, expanding strict RTO policies.

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

What do people think about the "dark forest theory of the internet" ? https://www.ystrickler.com/dftrevisited/

Walter Koroshetz,
director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke,
will soon be leaving his role
His departure in the coming days means nearly half the 27 NIH divisions will have interim leaders.
Koroshetz sent an email to NINDS staff late Friday night explaining that a request to reappoint him was denied, adding that his current temporary extension ends Sunday

Director of NIH neurological disorders institute is ousted, adding to leadership churn
Walter Koroshetz, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, will soon be leaving his role, STAT has learned. His departure

Careless Whisper: Exploiting Silent Delivery Receipts to Monitor Users on Mobile Instant Messengers
https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.11194
Super interesting work 😍
> "an attacker could extract private information such as the online and activity status of a victim, e.g., screen on/off. More…

Careless Whisper: Exploiting Silent Delivery Receipts to Monitor Users on Mobile Instant Messengers
With over 3 billion users globally, mobile instant messaging apps have become indispensable for both personal and professional communication. Besides plain messaging, many services implement additional features such as delivery and read receipts informing a user when a message has successfully reached its target. This paper highlights that delivery receipts can pose significant privacy risks to users. We use specifically crafted messages that trigger delivery receipts allowing any user to be pi…