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Nov 8, 2022

Dear Twitter followers: from now on I will be posting things on Mastodon, where I am @rop@ieji.de I have activated a crossposter so my stuff shows up here, but nothing else will ever be here. If you are on Mastodon, I recommend you follow me there and unfollow here. #tweetonly

Climate change: UAE names oil chief to lead COP28 talks

Jan 12

Our leaders will save the planet. Any day now. ... The head of one of the world's biggest oil companies has been named to lead the COP28 global climate talks in Dubai, later this year.

bbc.com

The CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company has been chosen as president-designate of key climate meeting.

Jan 9

Sadly, the e-Voting system that the fascists in Brazil are blaming for Bolsonaro's loss is indeed plenty sketchy and experts have long said this would lead to trouble some day. If you can't count the votes, count the days until there's trouble. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroni

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Jan 8

Jan 6 style event happening in Brazil, now.

Dec 30, 2022

I worry about emergency care in next 72 hours across Germany, UK and elsewhere. Newyears when system was already stretched to the breaking point. Take care of one another and try extra hard not to need an ambulance folks!

Dec 21, 2022

If the violent nazis of the NSU in Germany had only cut off the tip of a Christmas tree instead of merely killing 9 immigrants, they would have been stopped much sooner.

Dec 18, 2022

This is all just too fucking silly. I'm not going to remove the Mastodon address in my bio. If this account gets shut down: it was a fun ride, nothing lasts forever. See you on the other side.

Dec 13, 2022

Fusion has been 20-30 years into the future since the 1960s. My biggest fear here is human nature: betting the planet on a technology that even in the more hopeful scenario arrives just a little too late to save us.

Breakthrough in nuclear fusion could mean ‘near-limitless energy’

Researchers managed to release more energy than they put in: a positive gain known as ignition

Dec 7, 2022

Dystopia is rolling in fast: Weather App AI will now have a text romance with you if you buy her the "right combination of gifts". theverge.com/2022/12/6/2349

Nov 26, 2022

You can be either_really_ upset or (if you're only just tuning iin) really_ surprised about Trump and Fuentes, but puh-leasse let's not act as if we're both.

Nov 24, 2022

Everyone knows cities become much nicer places to live if you switch the sewage pumps to full-power reverse.

Infantino's Disaster: Opening Day Highlights the Qatar World Cup's Shortcomings

Nov 21, 2022

Interesting how the world's powerful media machines such as FIFA cannot create the global applause anymore. It's not like this is the first open display of brazen corruption, but the absurdity of it all is suddenly everywhere, not on the fringes anymore.

spiegel.de

What a debacle for FIFA. At the end of the opening match, Al Bayt Stadium was almost empty, with the Qatari fans having long since headed for home. It was a powerful symbol of a World Cup taking...

Rop Gonggrijp (@rop@ieji.de)

Nov 21, 2022

I believe this to be mostly true and describes the internal situation as I understand it. medium.com/@victor.ronin/ While I admit the author drags me a little bit further towards "could survive", I still think that for large operations at this level of…

ieji.de

I believe this to be mostly true and describes the internal situation as I understand it. https://medium.com/@victor.ronin/you-can-fire-80-of-software-engineers-and-the-company-will-survive-4117f5a...

Nov 20, 2022

From the Washington Post today...

“I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” a former employee said. “There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”

read image description

ALT

Nov 20, 2022

Imagine yourself on a ship and everyone that knows anything about ships is running for the lifeboats. Probably unrelated, but have you noticed how all your technically knowledgeable friends put their Mastodon address in their bio? #RIPTwitter

felix stalder (@festal@tldr.nettime.org)

Nov 20, 2022

( Oh wow, that Twitter/Mastodon crossposter is smarter than I thought. No need to do replies manually. )

See, this is what I mean: even this level of mockery fools some people into feeling there is democratic legitimacy here, in this case all the way to "you can't complain if you didn't vote".

Try to imagine being a dictator in a country of 400M and able to arbitrarily decide which issues to put up for a vote by notifying your 117M followers and then saying "the people have spoken" when 15M vote in a poll on systems under your control. #trump #elonmusk #riptwitter

I just recognized what TSLA's most important asset is. Trust. To let a computer drive your car, in 2022, that is the definition of _ultimate_ trust.

ᖇ⦿ᖘ Gonggrijp Retweeted

@stalfel

Nov 18, 2022

How can people seriously announce to leave from twitter to, uhm, instagram? Same kind of dictoratorship. I know people are there, but you will have to flee from there too, once you are forced into the metaverse. It's just matter of time.

Rop Gonggrijp (@rop@ieji.de)

Nov 18, 2022

Imagine for a moment that the unthinkable happens for real: Twitter unusable or gone in 2022. Now suppose out of every 1000 larger communities on Twitter, only 3 perform some kind of function in society that would be immediately and sorely missed…

ieji.de

Imagine for a moment that the unthinkable happens for real: Twitter unusable or gone in 2022. Now suppose out of every 1000 larger communities on Twitter, only 3 perform some kind of function in...

Let that sink in!

One man's "best people" are another man's sad residue of masochist fanboy incels and people with mortgages that the headhunters don't want for some reason. In a few weeks, the only capable and mentally healthy people remaining will be the ones on H1B visas.

Nov 15, 2022

Eight billion people. Wow. I remember my father telling me there were now four billion people when I was seven (in 1975).

Saving democracy starts at the polls. Can we have a round of applause for the poll workers and election administrators of America?

For all my Trump-bashing: we'll miss him when the DeSantis administration shows us what modern competent fascism looks like. 🎶 Don't it always seem to go 🎶 That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone

Shall we just all hope that the accompanying training collar is on a dog?

This seems fine: 636 fossil fuel lobbyists at Cop27. Up >25% from last year, more than any national delegation except UAE (next year's host, 1070 delegates).

Imprisoned activist’s lawyer denied access at Egyptian jail during climate summit – as it happened

British-Egyptian Alaa Abd el-Fattah, who has been on hunger strike for months, stopped drinking water when Cop27 began

Nov 9, 2022

Blue checkmark, blue&grey checkmarks, just one checkmark... Elon is busy destroying one of Twitter's main selling points, which was that you knew how it worked.

Ten-year hunt leads to 50,000 stolen Bitcoin stored in a popcorn tin and underground safe

Nov 8, 2022

So let me get this straight: the DoJ confiscates 3.6B$ in bitcoin (!) on Nov 6 2021 (peak bitcoin), and soon thereafter the market craters. ... Ehm, were these bitcoins perhaps put up for sale?

theverge.com

When investigators seized the funds last year, they were worth over $3 billion — now they’re “only” worth around a billion.

Nov 7, 2022

You know it's bad news when the UN Secretary-General channels AC/DC.

World is on ‘highway to climate hell’, UN chief warns at Cop27 summit

António Guterres tells leaders ‘global climate fight will be won or lost in this crucial decade – on our watch’

Quote Tweet

Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.

Oct 21, 2022

And then we'll all act really surprised when there's holes in the roof, shit in a corner, broken glass on the floor and spray-painted swastikas on the walls.

Elon Musk plans to cut 75% of Twitter staff if he takes over company – report

The news comes at a difficult time for the company, which had announced hiring freezes and has seen low employee morale

'Europe is a garden' says EU foreign policy chief during speech in...

Oct 18, 2022

"Drowning" is such a laden term. We prefer to think of it as "gardening" to prevent an "invasion" from the "jungle".

youtube.com

Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, holds a speech in Bruges to inaugurate the European Diplomatic Academy. "Europe is a garden," he says, praising t...

Oct 17, 2022

Prediction: voting machines will be viewed differently globally after the events in Brazil two weeks from now.

Oct 17, 2022

So for Elon to truly own the entire observable universe, we need lots of wars quickly before the other constellations launch. Swell.

Quote Tweet

Pentagon eyes locking in Starlink funding for Ukraine

Oct 17, 2022

Just as it became crucial for warfare. What a great time in history to own a de-facto monopoly in low-latency high-bandwidth sat connections! I think Elon may have just recouped his entire investment in Starlink. politico.com/news/2022/10/1

Elon Musk's satellite communications service could be paid for using the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative.