So actually this caused quite a bit of chaos this past Friday. Folks who were traveling, say on a quick weekend holiday, suddenly found out that they had to rush back into the US before midnight. Then the administration walked it back, so some of these people who paid premium for last minute flights are now SOL. Another example of how not to run an administration.

This got me thinking about the fediverse more generally, but as that’s off-topic I started a separate thread in https://thebrainbin.org/m/PoliticalDiscussion/t/1097560/How-the-recent-h1b-drama-got-me-thinking-about-the

Lorrianne G. … added subsequently that she is also worried by the frequency with which businesses in her hometown north of Toronto have become owned by newcomers.
“All of our Tim Hortons are no longer owned by white people,” she said.

I think this really says it all.

So I meant to write in the above comment that while not every case of quiet quitting is malicious compliance, and not every case of malicious compliance related to employment is the same as quiet quitting, there is definitely room for overlap - a situation where one is both quiet quitting and performing malicious compliance. I thought that this was such a case.

After reading https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/e285ec96adf8d443/5868d536-full.pdf I’m backing away from that. What the new whistleblower report seems to allege is that Reuveni was ordered to make statements to the court that he knew were wrong and misleading, and he outright refused - which is honourable but it’s non-compliance rather than malicious compliance.

He also actively sought to confidentially relay the situation to folks higher up on the food chain in order to get them to push back against this, which is probably too much effort to count as quiet quitting.

Yeah, it’s really strange that Sonny’s citizenship application is still pending after two decades.

Reasons are mentioned in the article:

I ask Sonny why he thinks his own application for citizenship has taken over two decades.
“It’s racism,” he replies immediately.
At one point his file was lost completely, and he has now been told his case is “pending”.

Insaf’s case is similar.

“I arrived here at nine months old, and maybe at 33 or 34 - if all goes well - I can finally be an Italian citizen,” she says, exasperated.
Her parents finally got Italian citizenship 20 days after Insaf turned 18. That meant she had to apply for herself from scratch, including proving a steady income.

You’re correct of course in that a big part of the problem is that it seems only adults can start the process, as per https://immigration-italy.com/how-to-get-citizenship-in-italy/ there aren’t separate provisions for minors to naturalize, the usual naturalization pathway requires things that normally only adults or emancipated minors would be able to provide, and minors whose parents naturalize are automatically naturalized too.

Good that it’s been blocked by an injunction. The only thing is that I’m a bit sad to hear that Harvard reported that they complied, but the silver lining is that it means their court case should be that much stronger when pushing back against the “insufficient” claim.

He already could dox them if he wanted to, all that information is already accessible to him.

Interesting question actually… for sure the SEVIS records already have what the President wants to expose, but would he personally be able to see these records? I think we know, for example, that when Biden was President, he wasn’t able to view or release his predecessor’s tax return even though the IRS has it.

I don’t know how those IRS protections compare with the SEVIS ones (and would find it plausible if it turns out the IRS is the one with the stronger ones), but I’d certainly be interested in learning more about it either way.

He needs to make it seem like someone’s fighting him on it when nobody really is.

Agreed, this makes sense and is the most likely answer. The other aspect though is even if he could get the records from SEVIS, doxxing from that (likely in violation of laws and pre-existing regulations) would be a serious thing. Now, openly doxxing from Harvard’s own report would likely also create legal issues - but from a practical standpoint there might be fewer controls on drumpf and his underlings in releasing this info if it was successfully obtained in this way. On the other hand I feel like this is giving drumpf too much credit, he’s made far dumber gaffes before.

One final thing. Of course, there’s slightly more plausible deniability here (“oh no some jilted employee at Harvard must have posted the copy of the report after Harvard was forced to write it and send it to us, we didn’t do it”). All the more reason for Harvard to resist any such demands to the very ends of the Earth…

Came here to say this. I wouldn’t be surprised if he became obese because of the 33 years he put into the job, always working and not having enough time to himself to self-care.

The party I’m calling centrist is viewed as centre-left here by the media and general public.
Greens and Labor split each other’s votes, not Labor and LNP.

Sounds reasonable enough, actually.

(Why about 20% of left-wing voters prefer the right-wing over the centre I will never understand.)

Hmm, puzzling. If they were USians then I’d suggest that it was because they confused over the name (liberals are always on the left, right?) but I digress.

Ah, but it was never that.

Isn’t it though? As you wrote,

The precipitous drop in support for the LNP mostly went to help Labor

Just as it’d be confusing why left-wing voters would support a right-wing party over a centrist or centre-left party, it’d be equally confusing why right-wing voters would support a left-wing party (the Greens) over the centrist one. Well, sounds like they didn’t.

(With IRV of course it’s not that this happened because of a split vote but that because Labor had more support in the first preference that it survived over the Greens, when normally it’d be the other way around - so the specific reasons are different and a bit more complex, but this specific result which occurred is intuitive to someone who only understands FPTP. More generally, both FPTP and IRV suffer from spoiler effects (as explained in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler/_effect ) - while IRV is better than FPTP there are still cases where spoiler effects can happen and this example of a Green losing to a Labor due to a loss of support by the LNP is one of them - it just feels more intuitive to someone familiar with FPTP because this is the worst when it comes to spoiler effects).

we here in Australia had another parallel to your election.

I didn’t realize this, but this is really interesting. Thank you for the hattip!

In essence, a drop in support for the right-wing candidates resulted in a centrist candidate winning where previously a left-wing candidate had won. That’s an aberrant result that doesn’t really match anyone’s intuition of how elections should work.

Unless, like me, you grew up in a FPTP system - then this is exactly what you’d expect. (As you already know in FPTP the votes would be split, so with the centrist and the right-wing splitting the vote, the left-wing would win. But if the right-wing drops out, then the votes would mostly go to the centrist instead, likely putting the centrist ahead now.)

I didn’t realise it was in response to a specific article, but I gathered it was a response to general comments from some in the LNP praising FPTP.

Accurate enough - the article that it was responding - well, it was basically what you wrote above.

I was responding primarily to the headline suggesting we should be “proud” of what is literally the worst acceptable voting system.

I took this with a fair bit of humor. I would have said that it’s not the worst voting system because FPTP is worse, but then,

(Personally, I consider FPTP completely unacceptable and anti-democratic; it should not even be part of any discussion among serious people.)

So actually, you are right. Agree 100% here.

a proportional system would be better.

And here too.

This is awful. He was sentenced to four years but ended up serving five. One wonders if the false confession actually helped reduce the time at all in that case. (I don’t doubt that he would have signed anyways, not after being deprived of food and water and being beaten for two days straight, but still… it’s even worse if signing was pointless.)

Thank you! This is exactly why folks should comment and not just only downvote.

Those who actually read the article know that E.M. is a woman and the victim who is giving testimony (and whose full name can’t be released pubicly), no connection at all to Musk aside from coincidentally sharing the same initials. But for illustration she might be named Ellen Marks, Eva Manns, Ellie Monet, etc.

Agree 100% - this was a non-ludicrous but entirely reasonable and well-reasoned response.

That being said I do think there’s many good points made in the article. The Greens are doing better in Australia, while they hurt quite a bit here in Canada due to FPTP being in use. And it really hurts to see the NDP fall so much, which likely would not have occurred if Canada had the same system as Australia.

The linked article is a response to https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/preferential-voting-system-ousts-half-a-liberal-ministry-of-talent/news-story/7cd4e33e0a05e786a8c4943645c5525d?amp=&nk=d1a6519026cb614e2502f09a887f82c4-1747124133 and I think Canada makes the perfect case for that article being wrong - Canada actually has FPTP but the leader of Canada’s CPC still lost his seat. If FPTP had been in play, perhaps all those Liberals would have still lost their seats, as folks started using strategic voting instead to ensure a Labour win (but also then hurting independents and other parties like the Greens) - which is exactly how it played out in Canada.

I must say that it’s the rare case that I see an upvoted comment on the fediverse that, behind a veil of ignorance ( https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/veil-of-ignorance ), agrees with Israel-supporting Jewish biologist and professor Jerry A. Coyne on anything. ( As per https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/10/15/a-few-thoughts-on-the-war/ he also no longer finds a two-state solution viable. )

With that in mind I’m deeply troubled by one of the comments made in the comments section of the linked article.

Tuvi Todd
A “2-State Solution” would be a step backwards, where now there are already 3 states:
- a peace-loving Jewish State of Israel,
- a terror sponsoring PA “state” in the “West Bank”, and
- a war criminal PA “state” in Gaza/

But this is completely wrong and bonkers. The middle comment is the most off, the West Bank is under Israeli military control and the nominal authority, the Palestine Authority, doesn’t exercise any actual control over the territory (as it should be).

The third comment is also off, as neither Gaza or Hamas are independently recognized by any country as a state, and unlike the Palestine Authority lack status or any sort of recognition in the UN. (Also Hamas explicitly rejects the authority of the PA from what I understand, so calling it a PA state is also too much of a stretch.)

Only the first comment is accurate in terms of statehood - but I can’t really agree with the peace-loving comment.

And, the last two should receive no international assistance, unless they end their support for
“The Palestinian Resistance” of murder, terrorism, and war crimes.

But the PA did - https://www.jfeed.com/news-israel/spzypn

{A} - The Jewish State of Israel targets only Islamic Jihadist militants in northern Gaza attacks, who
-2- Use schools, hospitals, cities, and civilians as human-shield, and thus {B} - Only Gaza’s Islamic Jihadist militants are responsible for all the subsequent -2- Killings of over 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza attacks

I feel that this ignores a lot - in particular the recent news report of a hospital being mistakenly misidentified as hosting a hidden underground military base - because it got confused with a school that was next to the hospital that had some odd markings, https://news.sky.com/story/gaza-hospital-attack-analysis-contradicts-israels-evidence-justifying-airstrike-13367823

Or the concerns from Holocaust survivors such as Veronika Cohen about how the war is hurting innocent Gazan children, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/25/we-have-lost-our-humanity-holocaust-survivors-call-for-end-to-war-in-gaza

So a couple of thoughts here.

First of all, the page itself just correctly warns that orcas can’t just be freed. It’s not like we should go ahead and literally dump them into the ocean and abandon them. No one is advocating for this. Doing this generally with most types of animals still causes all kinds of problems (see for example https://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/07/23/snakehead.poison/index.html )

On the flip side, when a well prepared effort is launched, captive orcas have survived in the wild successfully. See https://killerwhales.fandom.com/wiki/Vasilievna for a good example - and this is what folks are pushing for.

Finally, I have some concerns about the source itself. From https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Environmental/_Literacy/_Council it seems that enviroliteracy.org is part of the George C. Marshall Institute.

In case you don’t know much about that institute, here’s the most important bits:

The George C. Marshall Institute (GMI) is a “non-profit” organization funded by the profits from oil and gas interests and right-wing funders (listed later). It has received substantial funding from Exxon’s Exxon Education Foundation.
Its nominal creators, aside from Exxon-related entities and others, were William Nierenberg, Frederick Seitz and Robert Jastrow. This industry and right-wing front group

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=George%5C_C.%5C_Marshall%5C_Institute

The article doesn’t really explain why though.

Captive-born dolphins have been successfully released into the wild before, see for example: https://www.thedodo.com/another-seaworld-myth-debunked-751539462.html

“Annessa, a captive-born Atlantic bottle-nose dolphin held at the Dolphin Research Center in the Florida Keys, disappeared and was feared lost during a hurricane in August, 1992. Annessa survived the hurricane, however, and was adopted by a pod of wild dolphins. She has been sighted numerous times - healthy and foraging on her own. One dolphin; Captive since birth; followup successful.”

Edit: Oops https://whalescientists.com/captive-dolphins-release/ were still wild born. Replaced with a better example

They can be, albeit that it may require some serious $$$ to actually do it the right way, but it’s been done before, the most famous example being https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/latest/blogs/story-keiko-first-captive-orca-returned-wild/

Edit: and for dolphins born in captivity, see https://www.thedodo.com/another-seaworld-myth-debunked-751539462.html

My solution to this is that I accept the other job offer, and I don’t quit until the night before I start my first day in the new one. As a result I’ve never spent a single day unemployed. If something I’m counting on doesn’t come through I’m already at my backup plan.

If companies won’t be loyal to us in this way, why do we owe any loyalty to them in return?

I hear what you’re saying. Just remember that Cygnus Solutions and Red Hat, both prominent commercial supporter of FOSS, were based in and headquartered in the US when they were independent companies. (Now they’re both part of IBM.)

Even the Linux Foundation and the Free Software Foundation have to obey US sanctions - LF is based in San Francisco and the FSF is based in Boston.

Going FOSS is good, but the US abusing their sanctions powers is a different kettle of fish.

The reponse is going balls deep on Foss but I don’t think your avg westoid regime is willing to open that Pandora’s box.

I mean, GMail is from Google who uses Linux/GNU extensively (as per https://www.computerworld.com/article/1612523/the-story-behind-google-s-in-house-desktop-linux.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16175182 )

Even M$ supports using Outlook on Linux/GNU via the webapps (see https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/microsoft-365-and-outlook-for-linux/0eeaef13-c337-4c92-8260-8ac7fdf4df9f ) and back in the day they ran Hotmail on FreeBSD ( see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31113296 )

The issue here isn’t the use of FOSS per se but that these folks aren’t tech savvy and don’t want to run things themselves - they’d rather pay someone else to do it. They want “enterprise customer support” and all that. And then whoever they pay might end up bailing out due to fear of US sanctions … which sadly even Swiss banks aren’t immune to.

Either EU can do it now or later

The sooner they stop/prevent/workaround the abuse of power by the US here, the better.

The US should no longer be allowed to lead the international banking system. Under the current administration, they’ve proven that they can’t be trusted with that kind of power anymore.