Labor and the Coalition have had a stronger response to this handful of flags and posters than they have to Israel killing 20,000+ kids.

The designation is particularly ridiculous considering it was the US that ran a campaign of terrorism against Cuba: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mongoose

Ruby:

a || b

(no return as last line is returned implicitly, no semicolon)

EDIT: As pointed out in the comments, this is not strictly equivalent, as it will return b if a is false as well as if it's nil (these are the only two falsy values in Ruby).

FUCK TIPPING.

I was glad to see this bit at the end:

The number of payments with tips has remained stable throughout the last year with 0.52% of payments including a tip in August 2023, according to Lightspeed.

Still, we really do have to be vigilant in our efforts to prevent tipping being normalised. You can bet restaurant owners are going to be pushing it whenever they see an opportunity, so we need to be pushing back harder.

Per-capita beef consumption has fallen by ~40% since 1976 (source) and rates of diabetes have nearly tripled since then (source).

So it doesn't seem like telling people 'eat less red meat' moves the needle on diabetes rates.

Well, if it's shitty things you want: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Matthews_Band_Chicago_River_incident

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

From https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

if this is to protect kids on your network

Sadly, I suspect this is to protect adults on the network...

Broadly: Constructing their hardware so it's impossible to repair or upgrade by anyone but them (or at all), then lobbying against any attempts to legislate the 'right to repair'.

Check out the work of Louis Rossmann for details.

Sorry for bringing the mood down, but this story isn't exactly my idea of 'light-hearted':

The woman claimed McDonald's kitchen workers are under extreme pressure to process drive-thru orders. "We get yelled at and pushed so hard until we beat those times, we sadly can't have a conversation with any customers," she stated.

FYI, there is a community, !nde@lemmy.world, if anyone here is interested in this kind of thing.

Go ask a chimpanzee 😆

Okay, so forgive the glib answer, but yeah, obviously on the macro level our genetic differences with the other apes contribute massively to our difference in intelligence with them.

At the micro level - i.e. between individual humans - my understanding is that the evidence also suggests that genetic variations lead to variation in intelligence (of course, as mentioned by other commenters, the usual caveats of how exactly you define and measure intelligence apply.)

See: https://archive.is/9o5cy

Researchers found that the IQ of children adopted at birth bore little correlation with that of their adoptive parents, but strongly correlated with that of their biological parents. What’s more, this association became stronger as the children grew older.

In fact, hundreds of studies all point in the same direction. “About 50 per cent of the difference in intelligence between people is due to genetics,” he says.

Although each gene associated with intelligence has only a minuscule effect in isolation, the combined effect of the 500-odd genes identified so far is quite substantial. “We are still a long way from accounting for all the heritability,” says Plomin, “but just in the last year we have gone from being able to account for about 1 per cent of the variance to maybe 10 per cent.”

Also: https://www.une.edu.au/connect/news/2022/10/multiple-insights-in-a-decade-of-twins-data

The longitudinal Academic Development Study of Australian Twins (ADSAT) is the first project of its kind in Australia and has amassed revealing data on 2,762 twin pairs, 40 triplet sets and 1,485 non-twin siblings. Using the National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), and regular parent surveys, it has given researchers a unique picture of the behaviours and demography that contribute to educational achievement – and the extent to which our genes influence them.

Genetic differences among students are the single biggest influence on differences in literacy and numeracy standing and growth, accounting for half or more of that variability across tests and across time.