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Seen a bunch of people sharing this one idea that the Iberian orcas are attacking sailing boats because one of them was previously “traumatised”.

I think it needs to be said that this is a fringe theory and widely regarded by lots of people studying this emergent behaviour as implausible.

For a start, orcas swim at 3 times the speed a sailboat travels at. As far as they’re concerned, they are essentially stationary objects. Secondly, orcas weigh more than sailboats, and if they wanted to sink them, they could, easily, but they aren’t doing that.

What the orcas are doing is biting rudders. The sinkings that have happened have been secondary to that: water ingress caused by damage to the rudder stock.

The leading theory is that this started as hunting practice. The Iberian orcas eat tuna, and they hunt them by biting their fins off so they can’t swim away. Sailboat rudders superficially resemble tuna fins, and so are good practice.

The behaviour started with a few young males about 3-4 years ago. It’s now spread and around 15 of them are doing it. It’s nearly all young males.

It appears that what started out as practice has now become the orca equivalent of that atsehole on TikTok walking into people’s houses: they appear to be doing it because their mates do it, and they think it’s funny.

Sadly inaction by, mostly Spanish authorities is leading to people increasingly taking things into their own hands. Sailboat owners share information on orca locations and are increasingly travelling in convoys, WWII style. Initially putting the boat into reverse on engine seemed to work, but they’ve got wise to that, and so an arms race is developing. The current technique which seems to work pretty much all the time is to throw firecrackers into the water.

There starting to move on to other types of boats too. Small fishing boats are increasingly being attacked.

This is not going to end well. Either they will finally kill someone, which will likely result in a cull, or they’re going to fuck with the wrong boat. In a few months the tuna migrate north towards Normandy. The orcas follow them. If they start attacking French fishing boats, I can’t imagine those guys taking any shit. Sail boats are pleasure craft and our response has been to try and avoid them, but that’s not going to be the case with fishing boats, and the French are not known for calm and gentle responses to things that threaten their livelihoods.

Watch this space, I guess. The hope is that this behaviour is a fad that will go out of fashion. If it doesn’t, it’s going to end up in deaths; possibly humans, definitely orcas.

—@goatsarah

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Oliphantasy Star Online (@oliphant@oliphant.social) (Oliphant Social)
People like to reverse this, you know, like the admins who run these servers are the unreasonable ones. Those server admins, who send their free time--on their own dime--for *fun*--to administer a community of people they trust's access to the fedi. And you want to tell them what they *should* do? Fuck off, Gruber. You don't understand this place, starting with the fact it's not "one place" it's "many places" and no one owns the whole thing, not even you. And you should celebrate the right of any server to choose who they associate with. *taps the sign* "Freedom of association is the part of free speech that free speech warriors always ignore." From Elon to half the fucking journalists out there, to this Gruber dork, everyone gets it wrong. Because they see 'freedom of speech' as an entitlement to say whatever you want, and others are expected to just 'grow up' and take it 'real adults' or whatever other demeaning phrases you want to use for people who do the most adult, most empowering activity of all: Assertively saying "No." You don't have freedom of speech without a corresponding freedom of association. Without it, you end up with a shooting gallery for abuse.
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OpenAI’s statement on “governance of superintelligence” is basically “in our humble opinion you should regulate AI, but not *our* company’s AI which is good, but instead only imaginary evil AI that exists only in the nightmares you have after reading too many Sci-Fi books, and the regulatory framework you choose should be this laughably guaranteed-to-fail regulatory framework which we designed here on a napkin while laughing” https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence

—@Pwnallthethings

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If your anarchy or socialism does not include #PandemicMitigations, then you aren’t actually fighting for a better world. This is a hard truth to swallow, I know, but all Leftists MUST face this truth.

And then do better. Why?

Because failure to do pandemic mitigations is acceptance and promotion of eugenics; it is accepting the state’s position that certain demographics deserve death and should be written off as waste.

Stop blindly believing the state’s gaslighting of the pandemic. Believe us #disabled folks and the scientists doing the studies, who have proven again and again how dangerous this virus has become, especially long-term effects.

Masks work. Decades of studies prove this, and shrills funded by the state who try to claim otherwise? Stop blindly believing them. Masks when properly fitted work, and work best when we all wear them together.

The virus isn’t going to disappear just because the US President said the pandemic is “over.” The virus will continue to mutate into worse variants, will continue to spread, will continue to cause long-lasting damage to our bodies, will continue to kill and disable.

We could STOP THAT if we all worked together and make sure we Leave No One Behind.

We can’t build a better world without normalizing pandemic mitigations in all of our work and organizing. A better world should NEVER adopt the eugenic strategies of the state, and that’s what the failure to do pandemic mitigations does – it adopts the state’s horror.

So stop doing that! We have the studies and science that prove the virus is still mutating, still causing tremendous harm to our bodies, and still killing thousands in the USA every week. Those people deserved life, and we could have saved them if we all collectively worked together to do pandemic mitigations:

1.Check wastewater data to see if Covid particles are on the rise to help assess risk. Demand data for Covid Transmission rates everywhere.

2. #MaskUp at all your events at all times. Demand all healthcare facilities and workers mask at all times.

3. Do #Testing for Covid before and after (PCR tests currently the best for new variants).

4. Buy or make Air Filtration units and install them in all rooms. @cleanairkits has some good options and instructions on how to do CR boxes. Make extras to share with others so they too can have clean air.

5. If possible, hold the event outside to allow people to spread out better.

@PeoplesCDC has an amazing toolkit called “See You Safer” that documents various ways we can safely organize, meet up, and fight against the rising tide of fascist eugenics.

So if you want to live out your truth, to truly build that better world that Leaves No One Behind, then get your asses in gear and DO PANDEMIC MITIGATIONS.

Please stop falling for the state’s gaslighting eugenics.

Instead, FIGHT against that with people like me.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. Link to my database of studies I’ve collected since 2020: https://bit.ly/AidansCovidDatabase

—@TheBird

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Why are so many climate scientists so scared and so angry?

Maybe it’s because they know better than most of us how bad our situation today truly is, and how horribly we’ve been betrayed by our so-called leaders.

Here’s an excerpt from an excellent piece on this subject by Alan Urban…
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Even if the planet stopped getting warmer right now, we would still be in big trouble. The ice caps would keep melting and sea levels would keep rising.

Look at what’s happening at a mere 1.2°C of warming. We’re already seeing some of the worst heat waves in human history, not to mention record-breaking floods, droughts, wildfires, and water shortages.

But of course, warming isn’t going to stop at 1.2°C. Because of the heat we’ve already trapped in the atmosphere, and because we continue to emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases every year, the climate is warming exponentially.

All of these climate-related crises are stretching farms to the limit, yet this is just the beginning. As crop yields decline and the population grows, we will see food insecurity get worse and worse until we’re in a global famine.

And that right there is why climate scientists are scared. They understand that human civilization was born during the Holocene, when global temperatures were very stable and stayed within a range of about 1°C.

As we push the planet out of that range and raise the temperature about 50 times faster than would occur naturally, it will become harder and harder to produce enough food to feed everyone, and this will lead to social instability, political upheaval, the worst migration crisis ever, and wars over resources.

Disasters that weren’t supposed to happen until we reached 1.5°C are happening now, so we can only imagine what will happen when we hit 2° or 3°C.

This is why top scientists from around the world are warning us that we face a ghastly future filled with untold suffering. They’ve been telling us over and over, year after year, summit after summit, that we have to stop burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible. But as you can see [below], the world keeps ignoring them.
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FULL ARTICLE — https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fmedium.com%2F%40CollapseSurvival%2Ffaster-than-expected-why-climate-scientists-are-so-scared-985db6579f2e

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #CO2 #Emissions #Capitalism

—@breadandcircuses

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It’s like this: my sib Tidy just called and told me that a significant portion of the population of Austin is up in arms because Dell Children’s Hospital just shut down its entire adolescent medicine dept over fallout from this anti-gender-affirming care crap.

The only MD in the city doing trans youth medicine also happens to be, by all accounts, the best MD in the city for cis girls with other complex stuff. Both of my cis nieces with weird issues are among her patients. This poor doc just said “fuck it” and quit, she couldn’t take the relentless bashing. My nieces and countless other Austin girls are now without the medical care they need and deserve. And for what? The governor’s MAGA street cred?

My point is this: even if your kids aren’t trans, this anti-trans bullshit can and will still fuck them up.

Protecting trans kids protects ALL kids.

#ProtectTransKids

—@iBlame

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People balk at app subscriptions which can in some cases aid in development costs etc, but they’ll happily pay for Netflix, favourite coffee shop or whatever.
I’m not starting beef with anyone, but I’m just here to ask a simple question. Why?
If someone works hard on something and updates multiple times a year, is an app subscription so terrible?
Your electricity doesn’t change month on month, it doesn’t exactly get better unless you live in one of these places that gets powercuts every 15 seconds, but otherwise, you still have to pay it to stay on the grid.
Is an app subscription such a terrible thing? Genuinely curious.

—@FreakyFwoof