In most jurisdictions, part of the definition of a not-for-profit (of which a charity is a more restricted subset) is that it doesn’t exist for the benefit of the members / shareholders, or a specific person.

So creating a charity / NFP and asking people to pay into it is usually okay, but the purpose of that charity can’t be to enrich you, and it is a separate legal identity (i.e. taking a charity’s funds and giving it to yourself would be embezzling). Many jurisdictions allow for sports clubs to exist as not-for-profits, but they’d generally need to be for the purpose of organising a whole team to practice, compete and so on.

Generally charities can employ people to do work for them and pay them, but (varies by jurisdiction) they generally need to be not paid above a fair market rate for the work they actually do to advance the goals of the charity.

If the goal is to help a legitimate cause, you could also ask them to donate to an existing not-for-profit for the cause.

Disclaimer: IANAL, and anyway all of this would vary by jurisdiction - not legal advice!

Attacking a military ship is generally not a war crime (as defined by international law such as the Geneva treaties, Rome Statute etc…). It is an act of war (same as invasion or bombardment of another country), and is likely to see retaliation by the attacked country.

Aggression (i.e. unprovoked acts of war) is against the Charter of the United Nations, which also includes the International Court of Justice as a dispute resolution mechanism. It is up to the United Nations Security Council (at which the US has a veto) to authorise enforcement of ICJ rulings.

If a nation is acting to protect another nation facing aggression from the US, it would be legal for the attack US military ships. The reason why they wouldn’t would more be that it would likely bring counter-retaliation from the US.

Liberal by itself is an ambiguous term, so it’s generally best to prefix it with another word / prefix to clarify.

e.g. Neoliberal / Classical liberal - aligned to what I think parent post is saying. Implies economic right. Socially liberal - probably what the GP post means, meaning in favour of social liberties. Can be associated with economic left (usually coupled with positive protection of social liberties) or the economic right (e.g. libertarianism - usually believe government shouldn’t trample social liberties, but businesses can). Liberal is also a political party in many countries - e.g. in Australia it is a (declining, but formerly in power) right-wing party.

That said, I believe most wars are started for reasons of cronyism / crony capitalism, to distract from issues or project an image for the leader and/or for reasons of nationalism, and politicians from all sides will give an insincere pretext aligned to the politics people expect them to have.

Is there any evidence that Dayenu has actually said anything supporting the genocide? Their public web presence does not seem to have anything along those lines; if it is solely because they are Jewish, then I kind of think it is reasonable to deplatform PiP over it. Many Jewish people are anti-genocide, and it is not reasonable to try to punish an entire ethno-religious group for the actions of Netanyahu, Smotrich, Gallant, Ben-Gvir etc.; it is the same class of generalisation as trying to punish all Palestinians for October 7th (needless to say, genocide and seeking to exclude a group from Mardi Gras are very different ends of the same spectrum).

So the very first application of a law which is purported to be to stop neo-Nazis / neo-fascists was against anti-fascist art.

This does seem to be contrary to the law itself, which has at least two defences here for anti-facist political art.

Firstly, the artistic defence:

“(9) Subsection (1) does not apply to a person if a reasonable person would consider that: … (a) the conduct mentioned in paragraph (1)(a) is engaged in for a purpose that is: (i) a religious, academic, educational, artistic, literary or scientific purpose; and (ii) not contrary to the public interest;”

Secondly, the defence that it was genuinely exhibited to oppose Nazi ideology or fascism:

“(10) Subsection (1) does not apply to a person engaging in conduct mentioned in paragraph (1)(a) if: … (f) the person genuinely engages in the conduct for the purpose of opposing Nazi ideology, fascism or a related ideology”.

So back in 1994 my neighbours and I agreed that I’d give them my anti-theft fog cannons, as long as they promise not to steal my stuff.

Then in 2014 they sent some buddies in to burgle my place, and got away with a chunk of my stuff - and I know it was said neighbour behind it, because they now openly claim what was taken is theirs (of course, I never agreed with them on that).

Then since February 2022 they’ve started regularly burgling my place - in the first few weeks, they tried to take literally everything, but fortunately I hired good security guards and they only got away with about 20% of my stuff (including what they stole in 2014).

I’ve been trying to make arrangements for a monitored alarm system that will bring in a large external response if more burglaries happen, but the security company doesn’t want to take it on the contract while a burglary is in progress - but they did sell me some gear. I’m still working on getting the contract.

They say they’ll stop trying to burgle my place as long as I promise not to ever get a monitored burglar alarm, to officially sign over the property they’ve already stolen and to stop trying to get it back, stop buying stuff to protect my property from the monitored security company, and that I fire most of my security guards.

Do you think this is really their end game, or if I agree, do you think they’ll just be back burgling more as soon as I make those promises, with fewer security guards and stuff to protect my house? After all, I did have an agreement with them back in 1994 and they didn’t follow that.

That doesn’t work as a defence in common-law jurisdictions (at least), because all participants who deliberately participate in a crime are considered equally guilty of it.

I’d say this is not a strategy to avoid prosecution, but more the brazen acts of individuals who don’t fear prosecution.

I suspect anything about heaven was likely to manipulate religious voters into voting for him.

Most likely, he is envious of other US presidents like Obama who were given a Nobel Peace Prize. For the whole ‘Board of Peace’ thing, he likely also sees it as a way to manipulate into becoming something of a world dictator who sits above world leaders.

There is a thing called the ‘Dark Triad’ of personality traits, consisting of Psychopathy (lack of empathy for others / celebration of others suffering / impulsive), Narcissism (thinking of oneself as superior) and Machiavellianism (manipulating others, seeking revenge etc…) - and they often occur together in the same person. The dark triad is correlated positively with jealousy - and dark triad people consider themselves superior to peers (even when evidence points the other way) and deserving of recognition. They are vindictive towards people who get in the way of what they think they deserve.

Unfortunately, scams are incredibly common with both fake recruiters (often using the name of a legitimate well known company, obviously without permission from said company) and fake candidates (sometimes using someone’s real identity).

No or very few legitimate recruiters will ask you to install something or run code they provide on your hardware with root privileges, but practically every scammer will. Once installed, they often act as rootkits or other malware, and monitor for credentials, crypto private keys, Internet banking passwords, confidential data belonging to other employers, VPN access that will allow them to install ransomware, and so on.

If we apply Bayesian statistics here with some made up by credible numbers - let’s call S the event that you were actually talking to a scam interviewer, and R the event that they ask you to install something which requires root equivalent access to your device. Call ¬S the event they are a legitimate interviewer, and ¬R the event they don’t ask you to install such a thing.

Let’s start with a prior: Pr(S) = 0.1 - maybe 10% of all outreach is from scam interviewers (if anything, that might be low). Pr(¬S) = 1 - Pr(S) = 0.9.

Maybe estimate Pr(R | S) = 0.99 - almost all real scam interviewers will ask you to run something as root. Pr(R | ¬S) = 0.01 - it would be incredibly rare for a non-scam interviewer to ask this.

Now by Bayes’ law, Pr(S | R) = Pr(R | S) * Pr(S) / Pr(R) = Pr(R | S) * Pr(S) / (Pr(R | S) * Pr(S) + Pr(R | ¬S) * Pr(¬S)) = 0.99 * 0.1 / (0.99 * 0.1 + 0.01 * 0.9) = 0.917

So even if we assume there was a 10% chance they were a scammer before they asked this, there is a 92% chance they are given they ask for you to run the thing.

Maybe they figure if you can’t fix the form to make it submit, you wouldn’t be up to their standard :-)

I think there is some value to MBFC, even though there are also cases where it is problematic - I don’t think a blanket rule would be right.

The issues (& mitigating factors):

• Some of the ‘mostly analytics’ sources still have ‘bias by omission’ problems or misleading headlines, even if the facts in the articles are accurate. But I think on the fediverse, we aren’t beholden to algorithms or their editorial choices in terms of the balance of what we see, so the impact of this is limited.
• Opinion pieces have a place, although arguably not on World News. At the very least, factual pieces from outlets that also publish opinion have a place. But MBFC downrates outlets for having an opinion at all even when clearly labelled as such.
• The attempt to categorise every bias on a left to right scale when really there are so many dimensions any bias could be along isn’t as helpful.

So I’d suggest:

• Only mentioning it when an outlet has a history of publishing things that are factually incorrect (or there is reasonable doubt over it). Not every fact can be verified from first principles (and sadly often articles don’t name their primary sources - in a better world having no source would reduce credibility, but it is often hard to find articles that meet the well-sourced bar). People deliberately muddying the waters create think-tanks to cite with fake facts, fake scientific journals, and cite other unreliable sources - fact checking often requires on the ground investigation, asking reliable experts, and so on; it is simply impossible to be in expert in everything you read in the news to spot well-executed fake news. I think of the approach like a tree - there are experts in an area who can genuinely apply critical analysis to decide if something is fact or bogus. But there are also bogus experts. Then there are aggregators of facts (journals and think-tanks, etc…) that try to only accept things reviewed by genuine experts. But there are also bogus aggregators. Then there are journalists and outlets that further collect things from genuine aggregators and experts, and refine them. But there are also bogus outlets. Sites like MBFC try to act like a root to the tree and help you identify the truthful outlets, who have a good record of relying on truthful aggregators, who rely on truthful experts.
• The left / right bias part means very little - I’d suggest ignoring it if you’re looking at a single article.
• Any of the higher tiers of factual reporting should be fine and not worth a mention.

If there are reliable sources countering some facts, posting those instead of (or as well as) complaining about the source is probably better.

I think the DNC-ignoring callers are likely scammers imitating the real installers trying to get card numbers. If you paid one, you’d lose your money and not get the system.

The US for years kept the screwworm from spreading back into Panama by maintaining a virtual wall of sterile flies across the Darién Gap, which was a cheap way to protect all of North America.

But then stupid MAGA politics came along, put idiots in charge, and they decided that they’d rather try to protect the Mexico-US border and not give Mexico and Panama the incidental benefit, rather than protecting a smaller border that happened to help other countries. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/we-once-rid-the-us-of-this-nasty-parasite-now-it-could-be-coming-back/ar-AA1DKRSV has some information about how it became a problem again.

The terminology in Aus / NZ is pet (owned by people) vs stray (socialised around people but not owned) vs feral (not socialised to people).

Generally speaking, pets & strays like people - they’ve been handled as a kittens. Pets can become strays and vice versa. But feral cats (past being a kitten) will never become stray / pet (and vice versa) - it is only the next generation that can be raised differently.

While the article is defining feral cats as any cat that isn’t a pet, in reality the vast majority of what it is talking about are truly feral cats - nothing like a house cat.

With the added complication that it’s unlikely that Mangione actually killed anyone - someone killed someone in favour with the Magats, so by their logic, someone has to be killed to send a message.

Like how likely is the story that someone (who looked nothing like the surveillance photos released at the time) was called in by restaurant staff, and despite having allegedly travelled a long distance from the scene of the crime, and many opportunities to destroy everything, had a manifesto confessing to the crime, and the murder weapon still on him? Despite him having no prior inclination towards that sort of thing even?

Hopefully any jury has good critical thinking skills and can see through an obvious set up.

That’s a false dichotomy though. There are ways to prevent cheating that don’t rely on the security of the client against the owner of the device on which the client runs (which is what both of what your ‘ways’ are).

For one thing, it has long been a principle of good security to validate things on the server in a client-server application (which most multi-player games are). If they followed the principle of not sending data to a client that the user is not allowed to see, and not trusting the client (for example, by doing server-side validation, even after the fact, for things which are not allowed according to the rules of the game), they could make it so it is impossible to cheat by modifying the client, even if the client was F/L/OSS.

If they really can’t do that (because their game design relies on low latency revelation of information, and their content distribution strategy doesn’t cut it), they can also use statistical server-side cheat detection. For example, suppose that a player shoots within less than the realistic human reaction time of turning the corner when an enemy is present X out of Y times, but only A out of B times when no enemy is present. It is possible to calculate a p-value for X/Y - A/B (i.e. the probability of such an extreme difference given the player is not cheating). After correcting for multiple comparisons (due to multiple tests over time), it is possible to block cheaters without an unacceptable chance of false positives.

Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan described it as “obsolete” and said it “completely misrepresents Amazon’s current water usage strategy”.

Interesting that they don’t say in which direction it misrepresents (is it saying it is too high or too low). Maybe they are hoping the reader will infer from what they are saying that they’re using less now, without them having to say that.

They are not wrong that Israel is radicalised. However, peace is a process, and what will lead to an enduring peace is actually more important than what is just.

If Israel was actually willing to reconcile and treat Palestinians as equals, the South African model of truth & reconciliation (including amnesty for abuses in exchange for full disclosure of what happened), it wouldn’t be just for the victims, but it would allow both sides to move on peacefully.

The real problem is that Netanyahu, Smoltrich, Ben Gvir etc… don’t actually want peace, so even a neutral truth & reconciliation is currently unlikely to happen without their backers (especially the US) forcing them.

What jurisdiction is she in? And (if she knows) what jurisdiction is he in? (Jurisdiction as in country, and if the country has them, state / province). That will make a big difference to next steps.

The whole “crime capital” thing being tacked on to the story is ridiculous. Never let facts get in the way of a good story I guess! According to the ABS, Victoria has the second lowest rate of offenders per capita of any Australian state or territory (order is ACT, VIC, TAS, SA, WA, NSW, NT).