Tootfinder

Paradromics says it received FDA approval for a human trial of its Connexus brain implant, aimed at restoring speech to those with severe motor impairments (Emily Mullin/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/paradromics-gets-fda-approval-to-trial-…

Paradromics Gets FDA Approval to Trial Its Brain Implant in People
The Austin-based startup will test its high-bandwidth device to help restore speech in people with extremely limited movement.

Trump: I won't use force to take Greenland
On Nato, Trump said “we give so much, and we get so little in return.”
At Davos Trump said the US only gets “death, disruption, and massive amounts of cash [given] to people who don’t appreciate what we do.”
– and he’s taking about both Nato and Europe generally.
Trump then points out Nato chief Mark Rutte in the audience
– who this morning was complimentary about Trump’s pressure to raise military spending among Nat…

Phanpy doesn't support quoots yet, so I'm using Mastodon's stock web interface and.. it's bad. Compare how busy it looks with unnecessary stuff (do I really need a "post" input form on screen at all times? Do I need a link to "favorites" visible at all times?), but also - the fonts are bad. Bad, bad, bad. Just so much harder to read. And the timeline toots just kind of run together, rather than being clearly delineated by whitespace in phanpy.

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

My dog, Stanley is pretty smart.
He has "speech" buttons that he can press to "say" words (it plays an audio recording of a word like “outside" or "water”).
He'll press the "food" button before we'll feed him dinner, and he presses "outside" most mornings as apart of his routine.
But he has absolutely no idea what these buttons are actually *saying*. He just knows that he gets food when he presses that one. He's …

Researchers track massive ice loss from Berry Glacier in West Antarctica #Antarctica

Researchers track massive ice loss from Berry Glacier in West Antarctica
Berry Glacier, a tributary of the Getz Ice Shelf in West Antarctica, has deteriorated dramatically in the past three decades, according to researchers in the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine.

I swear, ever since I updated to the 9070XT, LotRO occasionally gets confused that it's running so fast on Ultra settings that it glitches out. I'll be running along and suddenly the terrain objects (bushes, stumps, grass clumps etc) will blink out and then a second later fade back in. I also get an inch wide band of "static" in the horizontal center of the screen that lasts for like a quarter of a second when I turn around. I spose I could try troubleshooting it, mess with…

We are going to save America.
It’ll get worse before it gets better,
but MAGA fascism is a house of cards.
https://bsky.app/profile/vanhollen.senate.gov/post/3m7vlyhw6kk2j

Senator Chris Van Hollen (@vanhollen.senate.gov)
Today, I spoke with Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his wife, Jennifer. In April, when I met with him in El Salvador, Trump said he would never set foot in the U.S. again. This case has never been about one man alone; if the govt can violate the constitutional rights of one, all our rights are threatened.