alyaza [they/she]

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

  • 319 Posts
  • 45 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • Lukas Müller, the Würenlos school director, attributes the success of the ban to several factors. For one, the school board agreed way back in 2007 to keep phones out of classrooms. “But it led to students using them incessantly in the breaks or taking bathroom breaks to look at their phones,” remembers Müller, who has been at the school since 2004. “That was just at the start of the iPhone boom.” Studies show that requests to turn off their phones while students are allowed to keep the devices with them during class are rarely successful, and up to 97 percent of students can’t resist the temptation to check their emails or apps. So the board decided the following year to ban phone use in the entire school area. “The students are indeed less distracted,” Müller has observed. And because his K-12 school starts at kindergarten and teaches students all the way through senior year, students get used to being phoneless in school long before they become attached to Instagram or TikTok.


    But the solution isn’t as simple as banning all digital devices. The problem isn’t the use of these devices per se, but excessive use and the kind of content students access. Students who spend one to five hours per day on digital devices for learning at school score significantly higher in their mathematics lessons than those who spend no time on such devices, the OECD concludes: “In contrast, students spending over one hour on digital devices for leisure at school score more than nine points lower in mathematics and report a lower sense of belonging at school than students who spend no time on leisure digital activities.”



  • Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

    It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

    The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.


    Though Republican lawmakers who voted for state bans on abortion say the laws have exceptions to protect the “life of the mother,” medical experts cautioned that the language is not rooted in science and ignores the fast-moving realities of medicine.

    The most restrictive state laws, experts predicted, would pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing “irreversible” harm when they intervened with procedures like a D&C.

    “They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned lawmakers in 2019 during one of the hearings over Georgia’s ban.









  • America’s collective decision in the 20th century to make cars and the roads serving them the bedrock of all urban and regional planning will go down in history as just another of our nation’s awful, ruinous ideas that we nevertheless clung to for generations, like slavery or lead paint. Cars, of course, have a way of making themselves very hard to progress away from. Once you build the towns and cities around the road patterns for cars, and allow the interstate highway system to determine development patterns, the entire system gets locked in in a way that is difficult to change. Even as ever-widening highways and air pollution and the immense parking lots destroy ever larger swaths of peace and scenery, they also represent ever larger sunk costs from consumers and governments, which make everyone more reluctant to try to break away from them.

    New cars spawn new roads. New roads spawn new sprawl. It all spawns new debts. To admit that this entire thing was a mistake involves surveying our suburban homes, our paved driveways, our SUVs, our shopping centers, our entire beloved home towns, and saying: Okay, this has all gotten out of control. As all addicts know, this piercing self-criticism can be more difficult than just continuing doing something that is unhealthy, but familiar.









  • When South Korea started tackling this problem 20 years ago, it threw away 98 percent of its food waste. Today, 98 percent of food waste is turned into feed, compost or energy, according to the South Korean Ministry of Environment. It achieved this by banning food scraps from landfills and mandating that all residents separate their food waste from their trash and recycling — and to pay for the service through fees and fines.

    South Korea is one of the few countries with a nationwide system for food-waste management. While France made composting food mandatory this year — and some cities like New York have imposed similar rules — few places match up with South Korea.


  • Since June 10, the campaign has organized multiple disruptive civil disobedience actions every single week. Convened by Climate Defenders, Planet Over Profit, Stop the Money Pipeline and New York Communities for Change (where I am the senior climate campaigner), and endorsed by over 115 partner groups, the protests have been attended by over 4,000 people, and more than 600 have been arrested. Actions have included sit-ins at the biggest banks and insurance companies backing fossil fuel projects, interruptions of Wall Street executives’ public appearances and visits to those executives’ homes. But most of all, they have consisted of numerous blockades of the entrances to the global headquarters of Citi, preventing employees from entering work multiple times a week.


  • Colorado officials are now proposing to go further. In 2023, the state adopted legislation to try something that’s never been done in this country: automatically register tribal members to vote in U.S. elections.

    The program, if implemented, would enable tribes to share their membership lists with Colorado elections officials, who’d then use that information to register every eligible person to vote, while giving them a chance to opt out. Since Colorado already mails ballots to every registered voter, this would necessarily mean getting ballots into the hands of more Native people. “We’ve made real steps forward, and we’re going to continue,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told me recently. “We always try to push the envelope.”


    And yet, Cloud is also keenly concerned that the program could make her community more vulnerable. For U.S. election officials to automatically register tribal members to vote, the tribes would need to share certain vital information about their members, such as full name, address, and date of birth. Cloud is hesitant to hand this data over to a state that has, over a long history that she knows too well, been an agent of violence.



  • “As therapeutic practice, it has become a go-to,” said David A. Langer, president of the American Board of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. In his household, too: “I have 9-year-old twins — we speak about it regularly,” said Langer, who’s also a professor of psychology at Suffolk University. “Inside Out” finger puppets were in frequent rotation when his children were younger, a playful way to examine the family dynamic. “The art of ‘Inside Out’ is explicitly helping us understand our internal worlds,” Langer said.

    And it’s not just schoolchildren that it applies to. “I’ve been stealing lines from the movie and quoting them to adults, not telling them that I’m quoting,” said Regine Galanti, a psychologist and author in private practice on Long Island, speaking of the new film.


  • The rate of stops conducted off-the-books has increased under Superintendent Larry Snelling, even as he has positioned himself as an agent of reform who is moving the Chicago Police Department away from its longstanding strategy of using traffic stops to find illegal guns and tamp down on crime. In June, Snelling reported traffic stops were down by about 87,000 over the same time last year. But behind that reduction is a pattern of thousands of unreported police encounters, which accounted for one-third of all traffic stops over the first seven months of Snelling’s tenure.

    Records obtained by Bolts and Injustice Watch show police department officials know the traffic stop data they report to state regulators are an undercount. Internally, the department tracks stops using police radio data that doesn’t rely on officers filling out the state-mandated forms.


  • Mayoral candidate Victor Miller, a bespectacled librarian with an AI obsession, stood between an American flag and a Wyoming flag, preaching what he sees as the untapped potential of artificial intelligence in government.

    Miller made this pitch at a county library in Wyoming’s capital on a recent summer Friday, with a few friends and family filling otherwise empty rows of chairs. Before the sparse audience, he vowed to run the city of Cheyenne exclusively with an AI bot he calls “VIC” for “Virtual Integrated Citizen.”

    AI experts say the pledge is a first for U.S. campaigns and marks a new front in the rapid emergence of the technology. Its implications have stoked alarm among officials and even tech companies.


  • stepping in here to say: you are not making a very good impression in this thread. people are trying in good faith to explain why you are mistaken here—and how even biological sex is better understood as bimodal rather than binary—and you keep going to somewhat eyebrow-raising, contrarian places and not really engaging with their arguments. we are permissive to a degree of ignorance/lack of knowledge/genuine curiosity that might be prickly for some people, but your current conduct in this thread is pushing the line and likely to get you removed from at least this section if you continue.


  • […]government policies and movement tactics could work in tandem. Ending subsidies cuts into profits, as does blockading, occupying, or sabotaging physical plants; in the face of compounding action, desperation might weaken fossil fuel’s resistance to state takeover—and would certainly lower the price tag of compensation, should policymakers decide to soften the blow. (Or they could go Salvador Allende’s bold route: when the democratically elected socialist leader nationalized U.S.-owned copper mines in 1971, he deducted “excess” profits from their valuation, effectively canceling out any expected compensation.)

    Such coordination between radical movements and their allies in the state might seem far-fetched at this moment. But the same could be said about all transformative processes before they took hold. Six months ago, I would not have predicted that an unprecedented, months long mobilization in solidarity with the cause of Palestinian freedom would bring well over a million Americans into the streets, including most recently nearly 400 demonstrations on college campuses. While the protests have not yet secured their immediate goal of a permanent ceasefire, they have certainly had an impact. Relentless organizing has finally pushed Biden to threaten to withhold U.S. weapon shipments, helped shift public opinion, pressured some institutions to divest, forced politicians to choose sides, and, most dramatically, called into question the president’s reelection in November.


  • I am not understanding what you want from me

    i think the basic confusion people are having is that, when you phrase it like “I use it/its in spaces where I do not plan on engaging with people as individuals” and “This space is not a chat room and there is no reason to treat it as such. It is a forum.”, how that comes off to some people is you are kind of treating this place like a dumping ground for what you want to talk about and then ignoring other people jumping off of your posts. that may or may not be what you intend to do; so that’s why people are trying to clarify the intent of your posts.



  • In discussing Trump’s plan to carry out the largest deportation in US history – which the former president has called for publicly – Vought said the expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants could help “save the country.”

    Once deportations begin, “you’re really going to be winning a debate along the way about what that looks like,” Vought said. “And so that’s going to cause us to get us off of multiculturalism, just to be able to sustain and defend the deportation, right?”


    In preparation for Trump’s potential return to the White House, Vought said in the meeting that he had a team of staffers working to draft regulations and executive orders that would translate Trump’s campaign speeches into government policy.

    “We’ve got about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature that are, we’re planning for the next administration,” he said.

    For example, “you may say, ‘OK, all right, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation,’” Vought said. “What are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it? Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos. Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not, you’re not having to scramble or do that later on.”


  • Mutual aid groups established themselves across Sudan after the war erupted. They drew members from a vibrant pro-democracy movement and brought ideas rooted in a rich heritage of social solidarity, best represented in the tradition of nafeer (“a call to mobilize”).

    The Greater Khartoum kitchens follow two different models. Under the takaya system, religious and community leaders feed people on the streets, in houses, or under trees; however, more structured kitchens are run in defined spaces by the emergency response rooms.

    Hassan, who helps coordinate assistance across Greater Khartoum, said over 350 communal kitchens have been set up, assisting 500,000 families with at least one meal a day. “We aim to save people’s dignity,” he said. “Everybody should be able to eat and not feel shame. We, as Sudanese, are still helping each other. We survive together.”


  • The only thing that makes an evil “lesser” is that there is less energy going towards supporting it. By putting it into power you make it the greater evil.

    this just seems categorically untrue, unless you think that there are no meaningful differences in outcomes even between “lesser evils” and “greater evils” (in which case i would argue your distinction does not exist here and therefore is not useful for the purposes of this argument). the idea that energy and power alone/even primarily determine “evil” in this context also seems deeply reductive–just because Nick Fuentes, for example, is not at serious risk of running the country does not mean his ideas are a lesser evil to the regular liberalism currently in power and only become a greater evil once he is.


  • Again, this may not be that, but I think it’s a mistake to pretend that Beehaw is somehow immune to this technique that the right is demonstrably using on other platforms.

    nobody here is pretending that it is, the issue is this is clearly not an example of this so you are functionally asserting the OP is an asset for any number of foreign disinformation and division campaigns. also the framing of “derail the Democratic party” presumes it’s not correct to do this, but that’s also a thing people can disagree on. for example: i’m a socialist–so yes, i support doing that in the long term.