Off-and-on trying out an account over at @[email protected] due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023
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721·1 month agoRelated Stories
- Man in Japan breaks through his own apartment floor to attack woman’s TV
- Osaka man finds stranger eating in his kitchen at night, stranger dies shortly after
- Man in Japan arrested after sneaking into woman’s apartment and washing her lingerie
- Osaka man arrested after sharing futon with dead girlfriend’s body for five nights
- Japanese man arrested for shouting that he studies English (weird) before grabbing woman’s butt (illegal)
I don’t know if I know all that much about it, but National Geographic did an article on the growing elver smuggling issue in the US a while back, and that inspired me to read some more material about it.
This is also a big deal for commercial and environmental reasons.
Eels are extremely popular as food. China has aquafarms to grow them, but the problem is getting ahold of young eel to grow, because we can’t get them to breed in captivity. They catch wild ones, then raise them in farms. At first, the Japanese eel got clobbered.
Then what had been happening is that people would catch young wild European eels (“elvers”) then export them illegally to be raised in Chinese aquafarms:
Moreover, the effort is increasingly urgent due to the dramatic decline in European eel populations since the 1980s, marked by a staggering drop of over 95% in the number of glass eels arriving at European coasts. The species is now highly endangered, facing multiple threats that complicate conservation efforts.
Law enforcement casts net over 256 eel smugglers
Europol-led operation finds 25 tonnes of trafficked eels worth EUR 13 million destined for Asia
Then after European eels got depleted, baby eel smuggling started happening in North America.
Baby eels are among the most lucrative fish species in the seafood world. The U.S. fishery for American eels is based almost entirely in Maine. The baby eels are often worth more than $2,000 per pound at the docks.
SAN JUAN — Two people are facing charges after the United States Coast Guard found them trying to take over 110,000 eels out of Puerto Rico without proper paperwork, prosecutors said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials noticed a “suspicious” boat about 40 miles off the northern coast of Puerto Rico on the morning of February 21, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico said in a March 1 news release.
The boat was described as “flagless and outfitted for smuggling.” The U.S. Coast Guard approached the boat and, when it refused to stop, had to “neutralize” it, prosecutors said.
Once onboard, officials found two people with 22 bags of live American eels, prosecutors said. Each bag held “over 5,000 eels”, officials said, totaling at least 110,000 eels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshwater_eel_poaching_and_smuggling
Freshwater eel poaching and smuggling have emerged in recent years as a direct response to the sustained popularity of eels as food combined with the eels’ low population, endangered status, and subsequent protections. Freshwater eel are elongated fish in the Anguillidae family of ray-finned fish. The three most commonly consumed eel species are the Japanese eel (A. japonica), European eel (A. anguilla), and American eel ( A. rostrata).
The life cycle for eels has not been closed in captivity on a sustainable level, and any eel farms rely entirely on wild-caught elvers (juvenile eels). These elvers are caught from their native ranges in North America and Europe and are smuggled into East Asian eel farms, where they are often relabeled as the native Japanese eel to subvert legislation. The eels are smuggled disguised as other cargo, such as luggage[1] or other meat products.[2]
If we could figure out how to get eels to breed in captivity, which we currently don’t know how to do, it could resolve the eel shortage. That probably involves a better understanding of their sexual habits.
Oh, come on. It’s late at night, you’re really craving some mouthwatering chicken-fried steak and syrup-drenched waffle. You find yourself falling deeper and deeper into the mental image, and then suddenly you feel the world twisting around you and a sharp dropping sensation and, bam, there you are, in a booth at Waffle House. We’ve all been there, at one point or another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understatement
Understatement is an expression of lesser strength than what the speaker or writer actually means or than what is normally expected. It is the opposite of embellishment or exaggeration, and is used for emphasis, irony, hedging, or humor.
Understatement also merges the comic with the ironic, as in Mark Twain’s comment, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
Reporter: “Hello, I’m from the New York Times, and I’d like to ask whether you’re aware of anyone who has teleported to this Waffle House?”
Waffle House employee: Thinking “there are some real weirdos who come in here”. “Uh, no.”
‘Toad-proofing’ farms could help stop the march of invasive pest
Australia’s most damaging invasive species
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad
Because of its voracious appetite, the cane toad has been introduced to many regions of the Pacific and the Caribbean islands as a method of agricultural pest control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia
Native to South and mainland Middle America, imported cane toads had been used in Puerto Rico to control sugar cane pests since 1920, and an influential 1932 research paper by Raquel Dexter showed that they largely ate beetle larvae that in turn ate sugar cane.[3] Based on her findings, they were introduced to Hawaii by Cyril Pemberton in the early 1930s, and then introduced to Australia from Hawaii in June 1935 by the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations, now Sugar Research Australia, in an attempt to control the native grey-backed cane beetle (Dermolepida albohirtum) and French’s beetle (Lepidiota frenchi).[4] Those beetles are native to Australia and they are detrimental to sugarcane crops, which are a major source of income for Australia.
The sudden inundation of foreign species has led to severe breakdowns in Australian ecology, after overwhelming proliferation of a number of introduced species, for which the continent has no efficient natural predators or parasites, and which displace native species; in some cases, these species are physically destructive to habitat, as well.
Sounds like all we need is to introduce something that preys on cane toads. That’ll do 'er!
Apparently they’re Simulium vittatum.
Residents in the San Gabriel Valley (SGV), to the east of Los Angeles, are battling unusually high numbers of black flies, also known as Simulium vittatum.
https://www.glamosquito.org/black-flies
Control Agents Used to Combat Black Flies
Black fly management is accomplished by applying a natural soil bacteria called Bti to water sources where black flies breed. Bti stands for Bacillus thuringiensis israeliensis. Bti is a special formulation of common soil bacteria that is highly effective in controlling black flies and mosquitoes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis_israelensis
Bacillus thuringiensis serotype israelensis (Bti) is a group of bacteria used as biological control agents for larvae stages of certain dipterans. Bti, along with other B. thuringiensis products, produces toxins lethal to various species of mosquitoes, fungus gnats, and blackflies but which have negligible effects on other organisms.
Nuclear terrorism might be a thing, but I seriously doubt that the easiest way to do it is nuclear suicide vests. Miniaturizing nuclear warheads is a pain. If you were going to do something like that, you’d be better off doing something akin to a truck bomb.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/forbidden_fruit_is_the_sweetest
Proverb
forbidden fruit is the sweetest
- Forbidden things seem more appealing; people desire things more if (or, in some way, because) they can’t have them.
I mean, it’s politicking.
There is a segment of the population that considers Trump to sound authentic, not pretentious, academic, or egg-heady. He sounds like the people they talk to.
What I’m less concerned about is Trump in particular doing it and more about it becoming the new norm. If politicians decide that it works, the world might see a lot more insults, dishonesty, and such.
My hope was “Trump leaves office, this gets toned down”. But…it might not. And it might spread to other places, if they find that it works in the US.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/09/democrats-tone-cursing-casual-trump/
Democrats try a new tone: Less scripted, more cursing, Trumpier insults
Party leaders are swearing more, recording more direct-to-camera videos and trying to project an authenticity many voters have come to associate with Trump.
There are gentler forms of this. For example, I remember an interview with a senior British translator (this was pre-Brexit) working at the European Commission who said that they’d made a conscious decision not to codify an “EU English”, because they were concerned about the political impact of European Union politicians sounding different from the public — more distant, elite. “Sound like the people who you want votes from” isn’t new. But…I’d hoped that we could keep a higher bar than something like Trump’s stuff.
But, well, we live in a new era in terms of media, where social media is how a lot of people communicate. It’s gonna have effects. Fifty years from now, I suppose we’ll see what norms have been established.
deleted by creator
He just wants to appeal to the collection of people who do like that sort of thing being said.
I remember an incident a bit back where the White House Press Secretary said “your mom” to a journalist’s question, followed up by Trump’s communications director saying the same thing. Those are not people who are going to let that idly slip, much less at the same time — their full-time job is using speech to politically influence people.
Trump announced Thursday that he will soon meet with Putin in Budapest, Hungary, to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine. The choice has raised questions, because Putin is wanted by the International Criminal Court. However, Hungary appears unlikely to cooperate with the warrant and is in the process of leaving the court, the Associated Press reports.
When HuffPost asked the White House who chose the location for the meeting, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt replied, “Your mom did.” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung also followed up with, “Your mom,” the outlet reports.
In a release posted to X on Thursday, March 5, Fishback shared a statement saying that “this morning, Waffle House abruptly revoked our permission, and criminally trespassed us from all of their Florida locations.”
They don’t…“criminal trespass you”. They tell you that they don’t want you on their property. At that point, you need to leave. If you enter after that point, then you might be charged by the state with trespassing.
I feel like we should expect at least the occasional sí or señor in there for flavor too. C’mon guys. Hollywood can manage it.
The Democrats already had four years to prosecute and convict this sack of shit
The Democrats would require a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate to convict without at least some Republican senators. They have not had that and are unlikely to get that.
The homes run as small as 350 square feet.
Mata, who says all the 12 tiny homes he repped sold in less than a year, tells Realtor.com that the typical buyer was a single individual, often a college student or downsizing older person.
That’s small relative to US houses today, but even the smallest size they have there is 60% larger on a per capita basis, if there’s an individual resident, than houses were in 1900 in the US.
https://www.windermere.com/blog/how-the-american-home-has-evolved
Owning a home has been an American tradition from the start. But the home itself has changed dramatically over the years.
For example, you may be surprised to learn how much the size of the average American home has increased since the turn of the 20th century—especially when you compare it to the size of the average family during the same time period.
In the year 1900, the average American family was relatively large with 4.6 members, but the average home featured just 1,000 square feet of usable floor space. By 1979, family size had shrunk to 3.11 members, but the floor space they shared had expanded to 1,660 square feet. And by 2007, the average family size was even smaller still—just 2.6 members—while the average home size had increased by the largest amount yet—this time to 2,521 square feet.
In 1900, 217 square feet per capita.
this is how you get more olympians.
If enough people are in the market, have egg or sperm donor companies call people who medal.
considers
Looking down the road, because my expectation is that sooner or later, we’re going to be doing human genetic engineering, a company getting Olympian genetic material like that might be — as long as they can operate in a legal jurisdiction that doesn’t prohibit human genetic engineering — better off just calling up medalists and licensing their DNA. I don’t think that you can copyright DNA under current US case law, though it might be patentable.
investigates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_genetic_sequences
As of 2016, genetic sequences were not recognized as copyrightable subject matter by any jurisdiction.[3] The United States Copyright Office’s position is that “DNA sequences and other genetic, biological, or chemical substances or compounds, regardless of whether they are man-made or produced by nature,” are ideas, systems, or discoveries rather than copyrightable works of authorship.[15]: 23
You might not need to copyright or patent it, though, if you can just keep the changes you make secret. I mean, you get sperm/egg from Random Person, you do your proprietary modifications, you generate an embryo, you implant. I’m not sure how hard it would be for some other company to reverse-engineer the changes by looking at people’s DNA relative to background noise in the DNA.
searches
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33095042/
A large majority of countries (96 out of 106) surveyed have policy documents-legislation, regulations, guidelines, codes, and international treaties-relevant to the use of genome editing to modify early-stage human embryos, gametes, or their precursor cells. Most of these 96 countries do not have policies that specifically address the use of genetically modified in vitro embryos in laboratory research (germline genome editing); of those that do, 23 prohibit this research and 11 explicitly permit it. Seventy-five of the 96 countries prohibit the use of genetically modified in vitro embryos to initiate a pregnancy (heritable genome editing). Five of these 75 countries provide exceptions to their prohibitions. No country explicitly permits heritable human genome editing.
The thing is that in practice, if you want in vitro implantation, you can probably just travel abroad to a jurisdiction that doesn’t prohibit it, unless countries assert extraterritorial jurisdiction that attaches to their citizens. If someone wants an Olympianized kid, I imagine that traveling abroad isn’t that much additional barrier. Extraterrorial jurisdiction exists, but it is very rare; prohibitions on child sex tourism are one notable example that a number of countries do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterritorial_jurisdiction
EDIT: Replaced the text and citation for the legal overview, as it looks like the earlier link was to a spam site that copied it.
Well…I’m agreeing that it happened and was a factor, but also pointing out that the “don’t let black people have guns” practice predated the Black Panthers stuff by a considerable amount of time.
EDIT: Basically, a major concern in the US in the runup to the American Civil War was the prospect of a slave uprising. There were a lot of black people in the US who had been kept as slaves and were not super happy about the fact.
At about the same time, in Haiti, there had been such an uprising.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution
Shortly after the revolution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haitian_massacre
The 1804 Haiti massacre was carried out by Haitian rebel soldiers, mostly former slaves, under orders from Jean-Jacques Dessalines[1][2][3][4] against much of the remaining European population in Haiti, which mainly included French Colonists.[5][6] The Haitian Revolution defeated the French army in November 1803 and the Haitian Declaration of Independence happened on 1 January 1804.[7]
Throughout the early-to-mid nineteenth century, the events of the massacre were well known in the United States. Additionally, many Saint Domingue refugees moved from Saint-Domingue to the U.S., settling in New Orleans, Charleston, New York, Baltimore, and other coastal cities. These events spurred fears of potential uprisings in the Southern U.S. and they also polarized public opinion on the question of the abolition of slavery.[9][10]
At the time of the American Civil War, a major pretext for Southern whites, most of whom did not own slaves, to support slave owners (and ultimately fight for the Confederacy) was fear of a slave uprising similar to the Haitian Revolution.[34] The perceived failure of abolition in Haiti and Jamaica were explicitly referred to in Confederate discourse as a reason for secession.[35] The slave revolt was a prominent theme in the discourse of Southern political leaders and had influenced U.S. public opinion since the events took place. Historian Kevin Julius writes:
As abolitionists loudly proclaimed that “All men are created equal”, echoes of armed slave insurrections and racial genocide sounded in Southern ears. Much of their resentment towards the abolitionists can be seen as a reaction to the events in Haiti.[9]
In the run-up to the U.S. presidential election of 1860, Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, wrote “I remember the horrors of St. Domingo” and said that the election “will determine whether anything like this is to be visited upon our own southern countrymen.”[10]
Abolitionists recognized the strength of this argument on public opinion in both the North and South. In correspondence to the New York Times in September 1861 (during the war), an abolitionist named J. B. Lyon addressed this as a prominent argument of his opponents:
We don’t know any better than to imagine that emancipation would result in the utter extinction of civilization in the South, because the slave-holders, and those in their interest, have persistently told us … and they always instance the ‘horrors of St. Domingo.’[36]
Lyon argued, however, that the abolition of slavery in the various Caribbean colonies of the European empires before the 1860s showed that an end to slavery could be achieved peacefully.[37]
John Brown attempted to induce such a slave revolt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown's_raid_on_Harpers_Ferry
From October 16th to 18th, 1859, American abolitionist John Brown attempted to initiate a slave revolt in Southern states by raiding an armory[nb 1] in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). The raid is frequently cited as one of the primary causes of the American Civil War.[3]
And you had Nat Turner’s Rebellion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Turner's_Rebellion
Nat Turner’s Rebellion, historically known as the Southampton Insurrection, was a slave rebellion that took place in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Led by Nat Turner, the rebels, made up of enslaved African Americans, killed between 55 and 65 White people, making it the deadliest slave revolt for the latter racial group in U.S. history.
So you have the situation after the American Civil War where you have a lot of now-free black people who the US Constitution guarantees the right to arms…and a lot of white people really worried about what happens if they get ahold of said arms. They went out and tried to figure out whatever loopholes they could to make sure that blacks didn’t have access to firearms.
Stephen Miller?