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1 month agoBased on a pass with Google Translate from “The bishop is a chesspiece in chess”, I think that Occitan is l’evesque and Breton eskob.
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023
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14·1 month agoFederal prosecutors allege that Taylor Adam Lee, who is an active-duty service member stationed at Fort Bliss and possesses a very high, top-secret clearance, offered assistance to Russia and sent technical information about the M1A2 Abrams tank online in June.
Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, said in a statement Wednesday that Lee provided the information to the individual he believed worked for Russian intelligence in exchange for Russian citizenship.
The really stupid thing about this is that I seriously doubt that there’s anything significant that Russia wants and doesn’t have on the M1A2 in 2025. I mean, the tanks are all over the place. ISIL captured some. Russia has captured some in Ukraine, though I dunno if those were all M1A1s — I remember that Ukraine asked for M1A1s instead of M1A2s because they’d get them sooner. A ton of people have access to them. Like, you’re trying to give away information that probably has no value to Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_natural_gas
Substitute natural gas (SNG), or synthetic natural gas, is a fuel gas (predominantly methane, CH4) that can be produced from fossil fuels such as lignite coal, oil shale, or from biofuels (when it is named bio-SNG) or using electricity with power-to-gas systems.
So we’ve got “gas” in the US (short for “gasoline”), which is a liquid. There’s liquified petroleum gas (LPG), which is also a liquid. And there’s synthetic natural gas.
EDIT: Bonus: my understanding is that in Germany, an unqualified “gas” tends to refer to natural gas, which Germany is presently importing in liquid form (liquified natural gas, or LNG).
https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1lf63hv/whats_gasoline_called_in_each_asian_countries/
It sounds like it’s not entirely consistent across China and the translation is somewhat-debatable, but a translation for China might be “gas-oil”, “stone-oil”, or “steam-oil”.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports/russia
2021 imports from Russia: $30.8B
2022: $15.1B
2023: $4.9B
2024: $3.7B
The largest 2024 import appears to be fertilizer.
For exports to Russia:
2021: $6.39B
2022: $1.72B
2023: $0.597B
2024: $0.526B
The largest export appears to be “optical, photo, technical, medical apparatus”.
So, yes, there’s still trade, though it’s greatly reduced from 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcha_Real
The Marcha Real (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈmaɾtʃa reˈal]; lit. ‘Royal March’) is the national anthem of Spain. It is one of only four national anthems in the world – along with those of Bosnia and Herzegovina, San Marino and Kosovo – that have no official lyrics.[2] Although many different lyrics have been made for it in the past, it has never had official lyrics as a national anthem.[3]
This seems, as the kids say, sus.
Historically, if you weren’t talking about the bald eagle, the US tended to be symbolized by the bison (which we in the US call the "buffalo). It got pretty clobbered too, though.
This list is probably not a complete accounting of all incidents, but it dates back to the 1780s, and has 88 cases where a brown bear killed a human.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_bear_attacks_in_North_America
Going the other direction:
https://www.fws.gov/species/grizzly-bear-ursus-arctos-horribilis
Prior to 1800, an estimated 50,000 grizzly bears were distributed in one large contiguous area throughout all or portions of 18 western States, including Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.
Grizzly bears were reduced to close to 2% of their former range in the 48 contiguous states by the 1930s, with a corresponding decrease in population, approximately 125 years after first contact with European settlers.
The kill-to-death ratio is pretty favorable to humans.
Context: For those not familiar, the Fallout video game series has a spoofed version of the California state flag:
Oh, we can’t take all the credit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_brown_bear
Brown bears could once be found across most of Eurasia, compared to the more limited range today. General habitats included areas such as grassland, sparsely vegetated land, and wetlands.
Although included as of Least Concern on the 2006 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (which refers to the global species, not to the Eurasian brown bear specifically), local populations, specifically those in the European Union, are becoming increasingly scarce.[16] As the IUCN itself adds: “Least Concern does not always mean that species are not at risk. There are declining species that are evaluated as Least Concern.”
The brown bear has long been extinct in Britain (at least 1,500 years ago, possibly even 3,000 years ago),[17][18] Denmark (about 6,500 years ago),[19] the Netherlands (about 1,000 years ago, although later singles rarely wandered from Germany),[20] Belgium and Luxembourg, with more recent extinctions in Germany (in the year 1835, although singles wandering from Italy were recorded in 2006 and 2019),[21][22] Switzerland (in 1904, although a single was seen in 1923 and since 2005 there has been an increasing number of sightings of wanderers from Italy),[23][24] and Portugal (in 1843, although a wanderer from Spain was recorded in 2019).[25]
The largest brown bear population in Europe is in Russia, where it has now recovered from an all-time low caused by intensive hunting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_California
The Bear Flag is the official flag of the U.S. state of California.[2] The precursor of the flag was first flown during the 1846 Bear Flag Revolt and was also known as the Bear Flag.
The 1911 statute stated:
The bear flag is hereby selected and adopted as the state flag of California. … The said bear flag shall consist of a flag of a length equal to one and one-half the width thereof; the upper five-sixths of the width thereof to be a white field, and the lower sixth of the width thereof to be a red stripe; there shall appear in the white field in the upper left-hand corner a single red star, and at the bottom of the white field the words ‘California Republic,’ and in the center of the white field a California grizzly bear upon a grass plat, in the position of walking toward the left of the said field; said bear shall be dark brown in color and in length, equal to one-third of the length of said flag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_grizzly_bear
Grizzly bear meat became a mainstay on restaurant menus in the San Gabriel area; according to Mike Davis, “The paws from adult bears and the flesh from young cubs were deemed particular delicacies.”[39]
In 1866, a grizzly bear described as weighing as much as 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg) was killed in what is present-day Valley Center, California, in the north-central area of San Diego County. The incident was recalled in 1932 by Catherine E. Lovett Smith, who witnessed the bear’s killing on her family’s ranch when she was just six years old. If its measurements are accurate, this particular bear was the biggest bear ever found in California and one of the largest specimens of any bear species ever recorded.
Extinction
The last hunted California grizzly bear was shot in Tulare County, California, in August 1922, although no body, skeleton or pelt was ever produced. Less than 75 years after the discovery of gold in 1848, almost every grizzly bear in California had been tracked down and killed. In 1924, what was thought to be a grizzly was spotted in Sequoia National Park for the last time and thereafter, grizzlies were never seen again in California.
Apex predators tended not to have evolved the instinct to hide, which served them poorly when Earth’s superpredator decided that they were delicious.
Every time that radial border division map of Europe centered on Vienna comes up, now we’ve got an American answer in the form of a striped border division.
https://bostonraremaps.com/inventory/maas-utopian-european-union/
An extraordinary map of a proposed European Union … in 1920!
A striking, enigmatic and very rare map illustrating a complex utopian scheme for a prototype European Union after the First World War. It was produced by “P.A.M.,” an elusive figure, probably laid in loose to a 24-page pamphlet (not included here) describing his plan in elaborate detail.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/dc2da395-9cf6-4a84-9325-81f8d11bf032.jpeg
cultural wasteland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_historical_population
According to this, Nevada only had 110k people statewide in 1940.
In 1940, New York City had 7.5 million.
Gotta have people to produce cultural output.
These are not official state foods. They are what the source website has decided to appoint as the favorite food for each.
This is a list of official state foods:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_foods
EDIT: Corrected link; source page is down and had originally linked to wrong page. Used archive.org to get to original.
except Norway and Iceland.
I mean, hardly seems fair to blame them for that. This is an EU initiative thing, and they’re not in the EU.
This is like me saying “lots of US states turned out to vote for Harris, but the Canadian provinces and territories have not been pulling their weight at all”.
EDIT:
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2024/000007_en
European Union
European Citizens’ Initiative
Stop Destroying Videogames
2·3 months agoMbin shows only a comm… magazine logo and its name, but instance URL is hidden.
Hmm.
That’s a little annoying, but if you have your mouse hover over the name, it looks like mbin has a pop-up showing the instance.
Anadyr, which lacks permanent road access, is reachable only by aircraft or limited seasonal maritime routes
Hmm.
I’m not sure that that’s such a great idea from Russia’s standpoint. Yes, Ukraine probably can’t just do a repeat of what it did before, which was drive trucks through Russia loaded with drones. But the flip side is that Anadyr Airbase is a mile from the Pacific shore:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/75690390
If Russia has trouble intercepting Ukrainian USVs in the Black Sea, I’m skeptical that they’d be able to intercept USVs dropped off an innocent-looking cargo ship or something, and if those can launch UAVs, now you’ve got all your valuable eggs in one basket in an area that has a lot less buffer to defend. Probably doesn’t even place Ukrainian special operators at risk the way the truck operation did. It’s not that far off shipping traffic from Alaska to Asia:
I’d have put them somewhere remote and inland and put air defenses up there. US Minuteman silos are in the center of the landmass, away from oceans.
Gorelkin concluded the post by assuring readers that “the assets of Lesta Games will soon come under state control and then, most likely, they will be handed over to a specialised Russian company”.
World of Tanks, like other Steam games, does not run in a sandbox the way mobile games do.
This means that anyone who can control the ability to push updates to a game can run whatever code they want on anyone’s system who has the game installed, can access any data on the system that the user running Steam can access. Credentials, email, whatever. All you need is a backdoor or even an intentionally-introduced buffer overflow in the code that talks to the centralized servers.
A publisher’s control of a game on Steam is equivalent to access to the computers that play that game.
Just saying.
Wasn’t Telegram done in Russia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Durov
Ah. So they did make a domestic alternative and then managed to antagonize the creators sufficiently that they left the country.