Interesting Links for 17-12-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Twitter blocks users from sharing Mastodon links

(tags:Twitter Mastodon censorship OhForFucksSake )

2. Would you like the perfect Christmas present for your cat?

(tags:cats christmas video viaKirsty )

3. Chaosium announce that they will not use AI Art in their products (first company I've seen make such a pledge)

(tags:ai art games roleplaying viaJamesNicoll )

4. The Indian doctor who saved 50,000,000 lives with a simple invention

(tags:healthcare sugar salt water india )

5. The German office for data protection and freedom of information suggests that German ministries move to Mastodon

(tags:germany mastodon twitter )

6. China's War Against Taiwan Has Already Started

(tags:China Taiwan disinformation war )

7. Queen's death events cost Edinburgh council £500,000

(tags:Edinburgh Queen death money )

8. EU adopts global minimum 15% tax on big business

(tags:Europe tax globalization )

9. Games kind of suck at designing female heroes

(tags:design games bodies women )

10. How the campaign to stop the United Kingdom government from making it more difficult to prosecute war crimes was won

(tags:torture law WarCrimes UK politics )

11. Schizophrenia: Parasite x Genotype x Stress

(tags:stress genes Parasites schizophrenia )

12. Congress passes legislation to end US participation in global shark fin trade

(tags:sharks USA )

Comments

[channelpenguin]

11. Thank you so much, fascinating

[fub]

1. You can use spacekaren.sucks to create links to post on Twitter. The Twitter bots are prohibited from crawling those URLs, so you can use it as a shortener (for now...)
5. An organisation can run their own Mastodon instance and have full control over the way they publish information into the 'fediverse', and that makes a lot of sense to me as it cuts out all the middlemen.

[andrewducker]

1) Until they just block that!

5) Absolutely, and so you can trust that specific accounts are definitely from those domains, and at least somewhat verified!

[fub]

You can verify your account by sticking a link to your Mastodon profile with a 'rel="me"' attribute in it, and that link will be marked 'verified' on your profile. So you can verify your account on any instance in that manner.
And from the perspective of an individual journalist, it might make sense to not post on their employer's instance (other than maybe links to articles), as it's impossible to migrate entries -- and what if they go to another newspaper and lose access to that instance? But from the viewpoint of the newspaper, it is an attractive proposition.

[maia]

11. Schizophrenia: Parasite x Genotype x Stress

Fascinating. Thank you for the link.

If you ever see something like that about OCD, please share?

Thanks!!

[andrewducker]

I don't think we know yet - if we ever work it out I absolutely will do!

[hairyears]

The current progress of the EU minimum corporation tax accord is one of the biggest positives of Brexit.

The UK always, always, always blocked and undermined this policy initiative, to the extent that other countries - especially smaller countries who found it difficult to resist external pressures to become tax havens and accept the inevitable slide into money laundering and corruption - felt unable to even raise the issue when genuinely reforming parties won elections and came to the EU table as governments.

Brexit happened, and now we're out.

Although 'we', for me personally as a Citizen of the Republic of Ireland, means that my government is caught in the small-country trap of hosting extremely dangerous and corrupting parasites, while being fiscally-dependent on large companies 'onshoring' EU-wide profits into our competitive low-tax regime.

That's now over.

Also... Read this paragraph from the BBC again, it is an absolute work of art:

Even this week, Poland blocked the formal adoption of the measure while arguing about unrelated policies, such as sanctions on Russia.

There are no redundant words in it, at all, and every clause has been crafted so as to be both true and untrue, in a horribly illuminating way.

This has repurcussions outside the EU, and the Biden administration being onside with this is a reassuring sign of the return to internationalism in Washington politics and policy.

It remains to be seen whether the ugly realities of America's dysfunctional legislative politics will now permit effective laws to be passed in both houses.

Nevertheless, a legislative victory in Washington is at least possible, before their election cycle dumps billions of dollars of corporate funding into negative campaigning that makes it impossible for their elected politicians to be a force for good in the World.

Let's be clear about this: coordinated US and EU legislative efforts and tax reform really will make a difference in the World.

Big tech companies - Amazon especially - will start paying taxes in full, and smaller companies everywhere will no longer be competing against rivals whose prices and access to capital reflect the fact that trading untaxed beats-out best practices in business.

And the corrupting influence of hosting cross-border tax avoidance will no longer weigh down smaller countries: I suspect that this will have effects far beyond continental Europe.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes, having the UK out of the EU has made a definite difference. If Hungary wasn't also in there I wonder how they'd be doing...