alyaza [they/she]

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she

  • 305 Posts
  • 88 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 28th, 2022




  • Now, we have actual data about the impact of the law. The Shift Project took a comprehensive look at the impact that the new law had on California’s fast food industry between April 2024, when the law went into effect, and June 2024. The Shift Project specializes in surveying hourly workers working for large firms. As a result, it has “large samples of covered fast food workers in California as well as comparison workers in other states and in similar industries; and of having detailed measurement of wages, hours, staffing, and other channels of adjustment.”

    Despite the dire warnings from the restaurant industry and some media reports, the Shift Project’s study did “not find evidence that employers turned to understaffing or reduced scheduled work hours to offset the increased labor costs.” Instead, “weekly work hours stayed about the same for California fast food workers, and levels of understaffing appeared to ease.” Further, there was “no evidence that wage increases were accompanied by a reduction in fringe benefits… such as health or dental insurance, paid sick time, or retirement benefits.”



















  • The Yurok Tribe has released 18 condors into the wild so far, over four rounds of releases. They’re doing great, says Williams. “It’s been really exciting to watch the flock expand and change in their dynamics.” The first couple of cohorts stayed close to home, only exploring within a 30-mile (48km) radius. Now the birds wander as far as 95 miles (152km) away, she adds.

    “It’s awesome to see these young birds who’ve literally never flown in their life because they were reared in facilities with limited flight space, starting to learn the ropes and how to use the landscape to their advantage,” says Williams.


    The tribe has a release and management facility to monitor the birds for the foreseeable future – many challenges remain before they become a fully self-sustaining population. The birds are brought back into the facility twice a year for check-ups to ensure they are doing well, and to check the transmitters they’re fitted with.


    West believes the key to a true, sustainable condor recovery is education. “The only way to combat a lack of information is to reach out to these communities and empower them with that information,” he says. “If [the public] all make the transition to non-lead ammunition, our intensive management efforts could virtually stop overnight.”

    Remedying this single issue should allow condors to “again have a meaningful place in modern ecosystems”, says West.





  • By necessity, Maryam’s reporting process is far from typical—she takes great pains to keep the authorities from knowing who she is, and has to work with a male family member to secure interviews. Sometimes, the process of scheduling an in-person meeting can resemble a game of telephone: she asks her brother to call a male relative of the potential subject to make the arrangements. When she wants to meet with a source in person, she must bring along a man to chaperone. She’ll also ask around to assess if the person she’s supposed to meet can be trusted to keep her identity a secret. “It’s really hard for me,” she said.

    Once the piece is ready to be published, Maryam removes all traces of her reporting from her devices, including deleting every email and call log, except for contacts with her immediate family. “If the Taliban checks my phone [and finds something], it will not be good for me. So, I delete everything,” she said. She only publishes the article after she has confirmed again that her subjects are comfortable with everything they’re quoted as saying. “It’s my job to keep her safe,” she said.


  • How would they even enforce this if the site is hosted in a different state or even country?

    you’re asking a question they don’t care about, which is the first problem here. the purpose is not to have a legally bulletproof regulation, but to cast doubt on the ability of websites like this to operate in Texas without incurring liability and thereby force them to block users from the state or another such action. this is also how most abortion restrictions work in practice: they muddy the water on what is legal, so risk-averse entities or entities without the revenue to fight back simply avoid doing/facilitating the practice in a given jurisdiction or completely move out of state.

    is this dubiously legal? yeah, obviously. but it doesn’t matter if you don’t have the money to pay a lawyer. and the vast majority of these sorts of websites obviously don’t–they’d likely need someone to represent them pro bono, which is not likely.






  • As many as one million black-footed ferrets lived on the continent in the late 1800s, but by the late 1950s, the species was presumed extinct. Scientists discovered a wild population in 1964, but even that group died out, and a captive breeding effort failed. Since a second rediscovery of a wild population in 1981, conservationists have worked hard to conserve the species using traditional breeding programs as well as more innovative technologies, including freezing semen and cloning.

    One of the challenges conservationists face when tasked with bringing back a species from the brink of extinction is limited genetic diversity, which leads to inbreeding and can make offspring more vulnerable to issues, including hereditary abnormalities, poor reproductive efficiency and increased mortality rates.


    The current population of black-footed ferrets—thousands of which have been reintroduced across the western U.S. since the 1990s—is all descend from just seven individuals, except for a few clones and Antonia’s new offspring. That’s a recipe for genetic bottlenecks that threaten the longevity of the species.

    Cue cloning. In 1988, scientists had the foresight to collect tissue samples from a black-footed ferret named Willa after she died and preserve the material in the Frozen Zoo at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. Willa never reproduced, so her genetic material was not included in the modern ferret population. Her preserved genes contain three times more genetic diversity than living black-footed ferrets do.



  • With no voices in support in the original post and currently the only two voices in support here being the mods themselves.

    bluntly: this is not a democracy, we don’t pretend it is, and we’ve never run it that way so this is not a particularly relevant consideration for us. democracy at the scale of communities is an incredibly fraught issue that requires a lot of time and energy to administer we don’t have. in any case none of our referendums in the community (which we’ve done before) have been majority votes, they’ve solicited feedback that informs our judgement. our judgement here is this is a good idea regardless of how the community feels about it, and that even if we didn’t implement the moratorium we’d be cracking down on posts, handing out bans, and doing sweeping removals because we’ve been more permissive than our usual moderation on the subject and let behavior we’d normally step in on go.

    in short: even if the moratorium were removed, that’d just mean heavier-handed enforcement from this point forward. if people really want no moratorium then they should be prepared to start catching 30-day bans (or permanent bans if they’re off instance) for any unkind behavior.



  • If one takes that attitude, you’re right, you won’t change the world.

    i think you’re conflating “having value” with “changing the world” when these are two essentially independent qualities. at no point have we ever sought to “change the world” with this (because we’re five people running this in our spare time, that’s not in our capabilities as people), and from the beginning we’ve said we’d be content with only a handful of people using this place as long as they get something out of doing it (because that’s what we consider valuable, not whether or not this can have sweeping social impact or importance).


  • because you can play meaningless “what if?” games like this forever. at the end of the day you don’t have to be a pessimist to realize the odds of something here changing the world are so minute that it’s fine to put a moratorium on certain kinds of posts. you’re not going to convince me otherwise. and even in the optimistic scenario: virtually all of what’s discussed here, while interesting, is designed to be fleeting and buried. conversations on link aggregators tend to have a shelf-life of no more than a week, and that’s not really where you’re going to find ideas that make change. here the conversations usually die down after an even shorter period (about two days).

    frankly: if the next Lenin or whatever is actually on Lemmy, i’d tell them to get a blog instead of hashing it out in link aggregator comment sections. it’s a better use of their time, it’s a better place to test and hone their ideas, and they have actual editorial control over everything.


  • A lot of people are understandably upset right now, and yes, all the facts of the election are not in yet. But do you really want to have a moratorium on election posts for a whole month?

    yes, the mod team is in more-or-less unanimous agreement on the subject. and if we were moderating to the exact same standard we usually do we’d likely be removing, locking, or severely pruning nearly every thread posted in the politics section on the subject in the past few days. maybe we’ll shorten if it need be but moratorium itself is not controversial and i do not anticipate us reversing course on it. please remember that this cannot be a day job for any of us.



  • Because these are literal sky scrapers. Fire on a wood structure is a recipe for catastrophic failure. A fire in a large structure could have similar effects to those large high rise condos that collapsed in Florida from poor maintenance.

    i think you’re operating under 1) an extremely 1800s understanding of how fire-resistant a wood skyscraper would be and 2) a misguided understanding of where fire safety problems tend to come from in most contemporary buildings

    wood is not uniquely flammable,[1] and the vast majority of the problem in a fire is not going to be with the actual wood itself (as is true of steel, concrete, etc.) but moreso with the fact that we make nearly everything that isn’t the building itself out of extremely combustible materials and we probably should not do that? as i recall that was the entire problem at Grenfell, where the cladding used was a flammable plastic that rendered any airgapping measures between flats useless and allowed the fire to spread uncontrollably. the fire at Grenfell also reportedly began from a refrigerator that was plastic-backed.


    1. it can rather trivially be treated to be fire-resistant–and as the person you’re replying to notes has already been tested extensively and implemented in existing buildings to that end, and in multiple locales, just from a brief search on the subject ↩︎