Tootfinder

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

Climate inaction linked to millions of preventable deaths each year, study finds #environment

Climate inaction linked to millions of preventable deaths each year, study finds
Climate change is ravaging the health of people around the world and policy failures are leading to "millions" of avoidable deaths each year, an international team of experts said Wednesday.

"We further estimate that the removal of mandates during this time contributed to 21800 COVID deaths through the rest of 2022, 9% of the U.S. total that year. "
https://www.nber.org/papers/w33849

Spillovers from Public Health Policies in Schools: Evidence from COVID Mask Mandates
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

Making Characters Count. A Computational Approach to Scribal Profiling in 14th-Century Middle Dutch Manuscripts from the Carthusian Monastery of Herne
Caroline Vandyck, Wouter Haverals, Mike Kestemont
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00067

Making Characters Count. A Computational Approach to Scribal Profiling in 14th-Century Middle Dutch Manuscripts from the Carthusian Monastery of Herne
The Carthusian monastery of Herne was exceptionally prolific in producing high-quality manuscripts during the late 14th century. Although the scribes remain anonymous, previous research has distinguished thirteen different scribal hands based on paleography and codicology. In this study, we revisit this hypothesis through the lens of linguistic characteristics of the texts, using computational methods from the field of scribal profiling. Using a newly created corpus of diplomatic and HTR-based …

Former Republican strategist and operative Rick Wilson
called out Bob Kennedy as a
“heroin addict, sex addict, anti-vaccination lunatic and aspiring architect of millions of deaths”
who’s dedicated to replacing real scientists with “radical eugenicists.”
And why would Kennedy be doing this?
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis
— one of the top scientists and physicians who quit the CDC in protest over the anticipated replacementof Dr. Susan Monarez with an anti-vax cra…

MAHA Madness: Bob Kennedy’s Cruel New Gospel of ‘Fitness’”
If we let Bob Kennedy, MAHA madness, and his billionaire patrons redefine America as a place where only the strong survive, we will lose not just our health but our souls.

Interactive semantic segmentation for phosphene vision neuroprosthetics https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19957 "findings demonstrate the value of user feedback and the potential of gaze-guided semantic segmentation to enhance neuroprosthetic vision";

Enjoying my 2nd cup of coffee before the day gets crazy. The granddaughter, 2 daughters, and son-in-law are due to arrive momentarily. That means a trip to the beach this afternoon, BBQ duties for dinner, and lots of stuff in between.
Glorious October day here in Belle Ewart - sunny and 23°C. I hope everyone has an awesome weekend.
#GetOutside #CoffeeFirst

dutch_criticism: Dutch literacy criticism (1976)
A network of criticisms among Dutch literary authors in 1976. The directed edge (i,j) denotes that an author i passed judgment on author j's work in an interview or review.
This network has 35 nodes and 81 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted
https://

Calibrating the Full Predictive Class Distribution of 3D Object Detectors for Autonomous Driving
Cornelius Schr\"oder, Marius-Raphael Schl\"uter, Markus Lienkamp
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01829

Calibrating the Full Predictive Class Distribution of 3D Object Detectors for Autonomous Driving
In autonomous systems, precise object detection and uncertainty estimation are critical for self-aware and safe operation. This work addresses confidence calibration for the classification task of 3D object detectors. We argue that it is necessary to regard the calibration of the full predictive confidence distribution over all classes and deduce a metric which captures the calibration of dominant and secondary class predictions. We propose two auxiliary regularizing loss terms which introduce …