Security services use things like airgapping, but our politicians talk to each other using WhatsApp…

I remember reading that they get extra suspicious of you don’t have social media profiles active on your phone…

Github was bought in 2018. For all we know, OP could have been 10 at the time

So now that is in the hands of the folks who use the OSM data. It’s in a somewhat exotic tag, so by default any map that uses OSM will still show Gulf of Mexico, unless they actively intervene to show Gulf of America. So if you see an OSM based map showing the latter, you know they made that choice consciously.

OpenStreetMap also needs to deal with this kind of thing. In this case, several people already tried to add it to the map in some form of other, but generally not as something to actually be shown. There is a looong discussion about it here https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/gulf-of-america-gulf-of-mexico/124571 . General opinion is that it is (or will be) “the official name that the US says it has”. In OSM you can invent tags for anything, so an object can have many names. Done like this, anyone using the data can still choose to give precedence to any “official US names that are not in common use yet”. Later it may be upgraded ased on if it becomes a common alternative name, just in the US, or maybe beyond. All those options can have their own special tag. And only very motivated data users will ever show it to map users. But if you do a search for Gulf of America, you will be able to find it.

Colombian

How would making states, towns or neighborhoods look richer cause outrage? For income statistics, median us a much better measure in most cases, because it reflects “the average experience” much better. If you want to highlight income inequality, there’s plenty of other stats you can use, e.g. the percentage of all income going to the top 1%.

Made me wonder: how likely would it be that a modern ginkgo could not reproduce with an ancient one?

Someone should invent a game, that while playing demonstrates how much monopolies suck for everyone involved (except the monopolist)

That’s a short but touching poem.

I did, and enjoyed them!

Popped to mind immediately upon seeing the word Portia

“Made unusable”: that’s not how it works. Even with occasional vandalism, there’s so much more people positively contributing, that overall the map just keeps on getting better and better.

While we should absolutely use our backyards to make some space for nature, there’s going on more than this. Even in nature reserves, insect counts seem to be going down. Last I heard, it’s still not entirely clear what’s going on, but probably related to certain types of pesticides.

Ancient AI proven

IIRC, this actually happens. When the balance is disturbed, the mushrooms go wild and destroy young sapplings. Could be I recall incorrectly and it’s actually other species. I cannot recommend The Mother Tree enough, it goes into great detail of the history of research into this

And we are still increasing the rate at which we are making it worse…

It’s a laughing stock here in Belgium