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🔗 Wikipedia blackout page
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- "Wikipedia blackout page" | 2012-01-18 | 507 Upvotes 113 Comments
🔗 YIMBY Movement
The YIMBY movement (short for "yes in my back yard") is a pro-infrastructure development movement mostly focusing on public housing policy, real estate development, public transportation, and pedestrian safety in transportation planning, in contrast and in opposition to the NIMBY ("not in my back yard") movement that generally opposes most forms of urban development in order to maintain the status quo. As a popular organized movement in the United States, it began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 2010s amid a major housing affordability crisis and has subsequently become a potent political force in state and local politics across the United States.
The YIMBY position supports increasing the supply of housing within cities where housing costs have escalated to unaffordable levels. They have also supported infrastructure development projects like improving housing development (especially for affordable housing or trailer parks), high-speed rail lines, homeless shelters, day cares, schools, universities and colleges, bike lanes, and transportation planning that promotes pedestrian safety infrastructure. YIMBYs often seek rezoning that would allow denser housing to be produced or the repurposing of obsolete buildings, such as shopping malls, into housing. Some YIMBYs have also supported public-interest projects like clean energy or alternative transport.
The YIMBY movement has supporters across the political spectrum, including left-leaning adherents who believe housing production is a social justice issue, free-market libertarian proponents who think the supply of housing should not be regulated by the government, and environmentalists who believe land use reform will slow down exurban development into natural areas. YIMBYs argue cities can be made increasingly affordable and accessible by building more infill housing,: 1 and that greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by denser cities.
🔗 Lèse-Majesté in Thailand
In Thailand, lèse-majesté is a crime according to Section 112 of the Thai Criminal Code. It is illegal to defame, insult, or threaten the monarch of Thailand (king, queen, heir-apparent, heir-presumptive, or regent). Modern Thai lèse-majesté law has been on the statute books since 1908. Thailand is the only constitutional monarchy to have strengthened its lèse-majesté law since World War II. With penalties ranging from three to fifteen years imprisonment for each count, it has been described as the "world's harshest lèse majesté law" and "possibly the strictest criminal-defamation law anywhere". Its enforcement has been described as being "in the interest of the palace".: 134
The law has criminalised acts of insult since 1957. There is substantial room for interpretation, which causes controversy. Broad interpretation of the law reflects the inviolable status of the king, resembling feudal or absolute monarchs. Thailand's Supreme Court decided the law also applies to prior monarchs. Criticism of any privy council member has raised the question whether lèse-majesté applies by association. Even attempting to commit lèse-majesté, making sarcastic comments about the King's pet, and failure to rebuke an offense have been prosecuted as lèse-majesté.
Anyone can file a lèse-majesté complaint, and the police formally investigate all of them. Details of the charges are rarely made public. A Section 112 defendant meets with official obstruction throughout the case. There are months-long pretrial detentions, and courts routinely deny bail to those charged. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention determined that the pretrial detention of an alleged lèse-majesté offender violated international human rights law. The courts seem not to recognise the principle of granting defendants the benefit of the doubt. Judges have said accusers did not have to prove the factuality of the alleged lèse-majesté material but only claim it is defamatory. Pleading guilty, then asking for a royal pardon, is seen as the quickest route to freedom for any accused.
Since the 1976 coup, coup makers have regularly cited a surge of alleged lèse-majesté charges as a reason for overthrowing elected governments. This was cited as one of the major reasons for the 2006 coup and that of 2014. In 2006 and 2007, there were notable changes in the trend. Those targeted by lèse-majesté complaints included more average citizens who were given longer jail sentences. Human rights groups condemned its use as a political weapon and a means to restrict freedom. The 2014 junta government granted authority to army courts to prosecute lèse-majesté, which has usually resulted in secret trials and harsh sentences. Prior to the law's revival in 2020, for three years the Thai government often invoked other laws, such as the Computer Crimes Act and sedition laws, to deal with perceived damages and insults to the monarchy. The longest recorded sentence was in 2021: 87 years imprisonment, reduced to 43 years because the defendant pleaded guilty. In 2023, the Supreme Court ordered a female politician from the Move Forward Party to be banned from politics for life due to her alleged lèse-majesté posts on social media.
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- "Lèse-Majesté in Thailand" | 2024-01-19 | 16 Upvotes 14 Comments
🔗 List of predictions for autonomous Tesla vehicles by Elon Musk
This is a list of predictions for autonomous Tesla vehicles made by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Inc. The predictions concern Tesla's suite of advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) functions, marketed as of December 2025 as "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" ("FSD"), and provide estimates for when Tesla will achieve fully autonomous driving, requiring no human intervention, which SAE considers Level 5 automation. Tesla does not classify FSD according to the SAE levels of autonomy, but has acknowledged that full autonomy is "dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions".
Musk has publicly stated estimated timelines and intended capabilities of the system since at least 2013. FSD and Autopilot are classified as SAE Level 2 ADAS, as of January 2024. A lawsuit filed in February 2023 by Tesla investors alleging that Musk committed securities fraud by making misleading statements about the development timeline of autonomous Tesla vehicles was dismissed without prejudice in September 2024; the judge ruled that Tesla's legal team successfully argued that Elon Musk's statements were "corporate puffery", i.e., vague corporate optimism.
- Notes
🔗 Werckmeister Temperment
Werckmeister temperaments are the tuning systems described by Andreas Werckmeister in his writings. The tuning systems are numbered in two different ways: the first refers to the order in which they were presented as "good temperaments" in Werckmeister's 1691 treatise, the second to their labelling on his monochord. The monochord labels start from III since just intonation is labelled I and quarter-comma meantone is labelled II. The temperament commonly known as "Werckmeister III" is referred to in this article as "Werckmeister I (III)".
The tunings I (III), II (IV) and III (V) were presented graphically by a cycle of fifths and a list of major thirds, giving the temperament of each in fractions of a comma. Werckmeister used the organbuilder's notation of ^ for a downwards tempered or narrowed interval and v for an upward tempered or widened one. (This appears counterintuitive - it is based on the use of a conical tuning tool which would reshape the ends of the pipes.) A pure fifth is simply a dash. Werckmeister was not explicit about whether the syntonic comma or Pythagorean comma was meant: the difference between them, the so-called schisma, is almost inaudible and he stated that it could be divided up among the fifths.
The last "Septenarius" tuning was not conceived in terms of fractions of a comma, despite some modern authors' attempts to approximate it by some such method. Instead, Werckmeister gave the string lengths on the monochord directly, and from that calculated how each fifth ought to be tempered.
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- "Werckmeister Temperment" | 2024-10-21 | 21 Upvotes 26 Comments
🔗 D. B. Cooper
D. B. Cooper is a media epithet used to refer to an unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in United States airspace between Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, on the afternoon of November 24, 1971. He extorted $200,000 in ransom (equivalent to $1,278,000 in 2020) and parachuted to an uncertain fate over southwestern Washington. The man purchased his airline ticket using the alias Dan Cooper but, because of a news miscommunication, became known in popular lore as D. B. Cooper.
The FBI maintained an active investigation for 45 years after the hijacking. Despite a case file that grew to over 60 volumes over that period, no definitive conclusions were reached regarding Cooper's true identity or fate. The crime remains the only unsolved air piracy in commercial aviation history.
Numerous theories of widely varying plausibility have been proposed over the years by investigators, reporters, and amateur enthusiasts. $5,880 of the ransom was found along the banks of the Columbia River in 1980, which triggered renewed interest but ultimately only deepened the mystery. The great majority of the ransom remains unrecovered.
The FBI officially suspended active investigation of the case in July 2016, but the agency continues to request that any physical evidence that might emerge related to the parachutes or the ransom money be submitted for analysis.
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- "D. B. Cooper" | 2023-05-05 | 30 Upvotes 8 Comments
- "D. B. Cooper" | 2021-11-25 | 18 Upvotes 5 Comments
🔗 City officials attempt to doxx Wikipedians
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- "City officials attempt to doxx Wikipedians" | 2023-08-01 | 183 Upvotes 90 Comments
🔗 Master suppression techniques
The master suppression techniques is a framework articulated in 1945 by the Norwegian psychologist and philosopher Ingjald Nissen. These techniques identified by Nissen are ways to indirectly suppress and humiliate opponents. In the late 1970s, the framework was popularized by Norwegian social psychologist Berit Ås, who reduced Nissen's original nine means to five, and claimed this was a technique mostly used in the workplace by men against women. Master suppression techniques are defined as strategies of social manipulation by which a dominant group maintains such a position in an (established or unexposed) hierarchy. They are very prominent in Scandinavian scholarly and public debate, where the expression is also used to refer to types of social manipulation not part of Ås's framework. Master suppression techniques are sometimes called domination techniques.
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- "Master suppression techniques" | 2025-01-01 | 17 Upvotes 2 Comments
🔗 Bribery of Senior Wehrmacht Officers
From 1933 to the end of the Second World War, high-ranking officers of the Armed Forces of Nazi Germany accepted vast bribes in the form of cash, estates, and tax exemptions in exchange for their loyalty to Nazism. Unlike bribery at lower ranks in the Wehrmacht, which was also widespread, these payments were regularized, technically legal and made with the full knowledge and consent of the leading Nazi figures.
🔗 Hallucinogenic Plants in Chinese Herbals
For over two millennia, texts in Chinese herbology and traditional Chinese medicine have recorded medicinal plants that are also hallucinogens and psychedelics. Some are familiar psychoactive plants in Western herbal medicine (e.g., Chinese: 莨菪; pinyin: làngdàng, i.e. Hyoscyamus niger), but several Chinese plants have not been noted as hallucinogens in modern works (e.g.,Chinese: 雲實; pinyin: yúnshí; lit. 'cloud seed', i.e. Caesalpinia decapetala). Chinese herbals are an important resource for the history of botany, for instance, Zhang Hua's c. 290 Bowuzhi is the earliest record of the psilocybin mushroom xiàojùn 笑菌 (lit. "laughing mushroom", i.e. Gymnopilus junonius).
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- "Hallucinogenic Plants in Chinese Herbals" | 2023-07-24 | 49 Upvotes 6 Comments