Hard Pass

Literally fascism on full display

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34411807

While many of them still provide free food and pay well, they have little compunction cutting jobs, ordering mandatory office attendance and clamping down on employee debate. [...] “Tech could still be best in terms of free lunch and a high salary,” Ms. Grey said, but “the level of fear has gone way up.”

Along the way, the companies became less tolerant of employee outspokenness. Bosses reasserted themselves after workers protested issues including sexual harassment in the workplace. With the job market flooded with qualified engineers, it became easier to replace those who criticized. “This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said in a blog post last year.

A jury convicted former Republican candidate Solomon Peña of conspiracy, weapons and other charges in the shootings in 2022 and 2023 on the homes of four Democratic officials in Albuquerque, including the current state House speaker.

What could possibly go wrong?!

Also, it’s really cool how everything is going straight to hell. /s

1200 London School of Solarpunk: A new free art school for the people of earth (O) 0100 Solar panels: Most efficient self-sustained energy source 0200 Decentralization: The process by which the activities are distributed away from a central authority 0400_1another_: CONNECTING WITH LANOTHER THRU 1 OF 1 UPCYCLED CLOTHING (O) 0500 CDC: Hacktivism, free and open source software and encryption 0600 Gardening: Wether guerilla or not it beautifies the places and combats global warming 0700 shebuildsrobots: o Fashioneering (O) 0800 Collaboration: Globally or locally cooperation always wins over competition 1000 Instructables: Collection of DIY projects empowering makers 1100 Hydroponics: horticulture which involves growing plants without soil in an artificial environment. "smartprinters" (O) = page on instagram

As of June 2025, over 1,400 veterans of Israeli intelligence are now working in U.S. tech—with 900 of those coming from Unit 8200 alone. That number comes from a database of people who publicly identify themselves as being both former Israeli intelligence officers and holding a job in U.S. tech on their LinkedIn profiles.

The database was assembled by an independent researcher, who is remaining anonymous for personal security and has dubbed the database the “Eagle Mission” influence network. The 1,400 people are self-identified veterans or active reserve members of Unit 8200, Israeli military intelligence, and the IDF Cyber Defense Directorate working in senior and mid-level engineering and security roles at major U.S. tech firms with offices in Israel, the U.S., and Europe. Drop Site crosschecked many of the records in the database for accuracy.

“This does not mean that every person who served in Unit 8200 is an Israeli spy looking to send classified data back to Tel Aviv,” the researcher emphasized. “But it does create a serious vulnerability. No other country has this kind of access to the American tech sector. We obsess over Chinese involvement in the tech industry and worry about corporate espionage, but Israeli penetration rarely gets mentioned.”

The global tech giant Microsoft is one of the most prominent employers of Unit 8200 alumni, employing roughly 250 veterans of the unit, alongside other major multinational companies including Nvidia, Meta, Google, Intel, and Apple, many of whom employ dozens of individuals drawn from the unit. Microsoft was recently revealed to have closely collaborated with Unit 8200 leadership on the creation of cloud services intended to store millions of private communications of Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. Microsoft declined to comment.

As Gov. Gavin Newsom launched his California redistricting campaign Thursday at an event in Los Angeles, a U.S. Border Patrol sector chief showed up outside with a contingent of armed and masked agents.

(Washington Post gift article)

Selected quotations:

Many Western democracies lining up to recognize a Palestinian state are in the process of conferring legitimacy on something that, legally speaking, doesn’t yet exist. Meanwhile, an economically crucial and politically functional democratic state that Western leaders have vowed to aid in case of outside aggression — Taiwan — remains unrecognized. This kind of hypocrisy invites trouble.

Note: The context of the writer's opinion that Palestine is "unqualified" for recognition stems from the fact that their government is only partially-functional, divided, with borders nobody seems to respect, and ultimately just gets bullied around by Israelis and doesn't seem to be able to exercise sovereignty in any way other than what the Israelis allow them to. The article's author seems to understand that recognitions of Palestinian sovereignty are more to do with being lip service expressing sympathy for the Palestinian suffering perpetrated by Israel rather than real, tangible attempts to establish relationships with a functioning state that exercises sovereignty.

This year, Taiwan’s gross domestic product is set to surpass $800 billion. Freedom House scores its democracy at 94/100 — more free than Britain and nearly on par with Germany. The Economist Intelligence Unit ranks it 12th in the world for democratic governance, the highest in Asia. Taiwanese passports grant visa-free travel to almost 140 countries.

This stark contrast reflects a failure of political courage. Western democracies’ refusal to recognize Taiwan stems not from doubts over qualifications, but rather from fear of economic retaliation from China. Yet this diplomatic self-censorship undermines the very rules-based international order the West purports to defend. If and when China launches an invasion and calls it an “internal matter,” any legal and political legitimacy the West would hope to muster in opposing such a move would be hobbled.

Trump is willing to sacrifice Alaska and Ukraine just so people aren't focused on Trump being a fucking pedophile.

Does anyone remember an old blog post where someone used various Python language hacks to override boolean primitives, such that the statement false == true evaluated as true? I'm 90% sure it was python, but maybe it was some other language.

I've been looking for that post recently, but haven't had any luck.

Thanks to antagonistic for finding it! I guess it was less of an "exploit", and more of a "please don't touch the loaded foot-gun"

When politicians redraw congressional district maps to favor their party, they may secure short-term victories. But those wins can come at a steep price — a loss of public faith in elections and, ultimately, in democracy itself.

Completely disingenuous article claiming at first that Mamdani is unpopular outside of NYC followed by stats that show that many Americans don't even have an opinion on him.

Guess what?! Not many people in Missouri or California are going to give a damn about a local election in another state!

For starters, Mamdani is clearly not popular outside of New York City.

A Siena College poll this week showed statewide New York voters disliked him 37%-28% – and that’s in a left-leaning state.

A recent Yahoo News-YouGov poll, meanwhile, showed a relatively similar verdict among Americans nationwide: 31%-22% negative.

While those aren’t good numbers, they don’t exactly suggest he’s a pariah who could be used effectively as a bogeyman on the national stage – at least yet. In the national survey, 46% didn’t even have an opinion of the Democratic mayoral nominee, underscoring the room that exists for him to define himself — or be defined by others. (Even in New York, 34% of voters didn’t have an opinion about him.)