With all that fame, zoo director Narongwit Chodchoi said they have begun patenting and trademarking “Moo Deng the hippo” to prevent the animal from being commercialized by anyone else.

Trademark, sure. But what exactly are they trying to patent?

A closer US parallel might be getting appointed to the Supreme Court.

The way to push them left is to actually push them left—protesting, calling your representatives, donating to campaigns you support, voting for candidates in local primaries where your vote is exponentially more influential, et cetera.

But voting in a presidential election doesn’t push anyone anywhere. For one thing, pushing is a continuous, incremental feedback process, while the outcome of a presidential election is a discrete binary one—there’s no map between the two. But more significantly, this buys into a narrative that the media has constructed over the past few generations, in which voting is a semiotic process with the people signaling their desires with their votes and politicians signaling their response with legislation. This leaves the media in full control of the political process by interpreting for each side what the other “means”: because the votes and bills in themselves are devoid of meaning beyond their real effects, the media is free to insert whatever meaning suits them.

Voting is a direct act of endorsement

endorse | verb [with object]
to declare one’s public approval or support of.

Your vote is expressly not public—you’re prohibited from keeping or sharing any proof of your vote. In part this is to prevent people from using their votes as signals of anything outside the immediate issue.

There aren’t only two candidates.

In the event that your vote actually decides the election, it does so by giving the winner one more vote than the runner-up; at that point those are the only two candidates at issue. And that’s the only event in which your vote matters.

Voting for a third party, like trying to walk through a third door, is an indication of intent. Going through the door would be getting them elected to office.

And yes, supporting a party would be endorsing whatever evil policies the party supports—but voting isn’t an act of endorsement. Nobody knows how you vote; it has no meaning as a personal statement. Its only meaning is in the differential effects of the policies of the two candidates your vote decides between, in the most likely scenario in which it is the deciding vote.

You absolutely should support and endorse a party you believe in, but don’t mistake voting in a presidential election for either of those things.

At least Oracle Weblogic is being useful for someone.

The presence of minor parties on the ballot doesn’t “place immense pressure on the duopoly”—it just tips the balance toward one or the other component of the duopoly. Which is why either party will actively encourage it when it suits them.

Edit: There’s a historically-proven method of forming new parties in the U.S., which is why we don’t still have the Whigs or the Federalists. In the past, distinct factions would form within one of the dominant parties, until the parent party imploded and two or more new parties emerged. That process of internal fission was suppressed after the Civil War, and that’s how the “duopoly” now maintains its power.

Of course, a different voting system would serve the same purpose (arguably better), and the suppression of alternate voting methods is also duopolistic. But the existence of minor parties under the current system just reenforces the duopoly by channeling dissent away from internal factions.

It applies to any house that isn’t designed to infer your intended goal and automatically rebuild itself to suit.

I’m not familiar with every client, but on mine it only hides the domain for users on my own server. (Early email used to work exactly the same—you could send an email addressed to just a username with no tld and it would go to the user with that name on your own server by default.)

It should work the same as email: you can trust it’s them if the user account is hosted on their own site, or their employer’s, or if they link to it from another confirmed source.

Morocco is currently the only African nation with an operational high-speed rail system.

I would have thought Egypt would be the perfect country for high-speed rail, with practically all of its population living along one line.

See my comment here.

When cats meow, there’s a one-to-one correspondence between the aural qualities of the sound and the communicative intent of the cat—the same meow doesn’t have different meanings depending on the preceding and following meows. That’s how animals normally use sounds to communicate.

There are two common exceptions, where animals string arbitrary sounds together in longer sequences in which the individual components don’t have distinct communicative intents in the way animals usually interpret them: songbirds and humans. (Another possible exception might be cetaceans.)

(For example: If I said “pass the butter”, “don’t eat all the butter”, or “I need to get more butter”, the word “butter” would have different communicative intents even if I said them the exact same way—like a note of a bird’s song, and unlike a cat’s meow.)

Animals are good at interpreting other animals’ nonverbal cues, and can often pick up a human’s general intentions without understanding their speech. But the speech itself probably seems like a bad attempt to create an accompanying musical score.

Buying recommendations as in a list of products provided on request, rather than intrusive narratives that disrupt what you’re trying to watch.

Or perhaps an AI that blocks ads and then gives you buying recommendations based on products from their competitors.

This user’s name is displayed in Arabic, although the characters in the URL are Latin.

AFAIK, the only practical thing in the way of having a separate server that just hosts identity accounts for all types of fediverse content (while the content itself is hosted on other servers) is that your host server is responsible for presenting the interface through which you view the rest of the fediverse, and the interfaces are specialized for a particular content type. You could have a server running a variety of fediverse software (mastodon, lemmy, etc.) which automatically generates similar accounts for each user on each service, so users could sign up once and then switch interfaces; but I think the rest of the fediverse would still treat them as separate identities.

“Hannibal’s advances in Italy prompt public criticism of Scipio’s Africa push”

• The taller a tower is, the more memorable its collapse tends to be.
• Taller towers tend to be located in bigger cities.
• The biggest cities tend to occur in the heart of culturally and politically dominant states.
• Big cities in dominant states tend to have inhabitants from multiple regions who speak different languages.

It’s no surprise that these tendencies should lead to historical and mythical correlations.