Futurology Today

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from dismantling Voice of America, the government funded broadcaster, at least temporarily. It's a dramatic turn in a series of legal cases revolving around the limits of executive power and the strength of the Constitution's protection of free speech.

On Saturday morning, downtown residents awoke to a grisly murder scene. A dozen trees had been massacred in the dark of night. The damage was widespread and indiscriminate. A grove of majestic Ficus microcarpa that had cooled a busy bus stop for decades were all sawed cleanly in half. A row of Chinese elms that created a canopy for street vendors were lopped off parallel to the street, draping a gruesome pattern of leafy right triangles along the sidewalk. Entire blocks of shade had been eliminated overnight. It was, literally, a tree emergency.

I know the term because I've filed more than a few such requests on the city's 311 app. (Yes, there's a new app, and I'll be writing about it soon; I've been inputting some more challenging service requests to test how well it works.) In the last few weeks, I've reported a dead purple orchid tree shedding limbs on the sidewalk, a block of freshly planted desert willows that were leaning precariously after their stabilizing stakes had been removed, and perhaps most troubling, a set of three ficuses with their trunks layered in graffiti. I honestly don't even know how you triage that type of tree emergency. But I may not get to find out. So far, none of these tree emergencies have been addressed by city workers.

And then, on Monday, the mayor dropped her 2025 budget that included dramatic reductions in tree funding. The entire city's urban canopy is facing deep cuts.

In its attempt to close a $1 billion deficit, the mayor's budget is bleak, recommending the layoffs of 1,647 workers and the closure of entire departments. As Frank Stolze reported at LAist: "It's the most austere budget since the city was wracked by the 2008 recession." If you talk to anyone who works with trees in our city, they'll talk about how the 2008 recession decimated LA's urban forest. As budgets tighten, tree planting is reduced, but so is tree maintenance: watering, trimming, and pruning roots so they don't turn sidewalks into rubble. And that's exactly what happened after 2008. The situation got so bad that the city planned to cut down 12,000 trees so the ruptured sidewalks below them could be repaired — until a judge ordered the city to keep the trees and find a better way to fix the sidewalks.

Or it's another type (additive, subtractive, phase-based, etc.)

New animations, voices re-recorded, etc.

Every year, the U.S. National Civilian Community Corps, better known as AmeriCorps NCCC, organizes teams of volunteers to help communities across the U.S. with environmental work, including habitat restoration, emergency response and wildfire mitigation. It’s also the latest federal agency on the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) chopping block. Most of the staff have been placed on leave and volunteers abruptly sent home.

archived (Wayback Machine)

cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/32712724

Hungary launched an anti-EU campaign featuring Zelenskyy and EU leaders, vetoes Ukraine military aid, blocks declarations, and spreads disinformation about Ukrainian migrants.

Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/04/20/eu-considers-stripping-hungary-of-voting-rights-over-ukraine-obstruction/

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

https://archive.ph/fqSv1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BallonKathedrale01_edit.jpg

Does anyone self-host any recipe/meal planner/shopping list software? I've been looking at Tandoor or Mealie but I am not too sure which one will best serve my needs. I would really like to be able to go through my saved recipes, easily plan out a weeks worth of meals and have that exported to a shopping list of some kind.

Most of the discussion I could find online appears to be somewhat dated (2-3 years) and I know that can be a long time for some projects. Does anyone host either if these two programs and if so, which one did you choose and why? I'm open to any other projects that may be better for my use case. It would only be used on my located network and maybe accessed via tailscale occasionally. I'm fairly new to self-hosting but this is one thing that my partner was excited about. Thanks in advance!

I'm so sure that this will happen...

European Union watchdogs fined Apple and Meta hundreds of millions of euros Wednesday as they stepped up enforcement of the 27-nation bloc’s digital competition rules.

The European Commission imposed a 500 million euro ($571 million) fine on Apple for preventing app makers from pointing users to cheaper options outside its App Store.

The commission, which is the EU’s executive arm, also fined Meta Platforms 200 million euros because it forced Facebook and Instagram users to choose between seeing ads or paying to avoid them.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29055663

By Simon Hooper
Published date: 23 April 2025 13:51 BST

"Mark Etkind, co-organiser of a network of “#Holocaust survivors and descendants against the Gaza genocide”, whose members have regularly attended pro-#Palestinian protests in London, said it was imperative too for campaigners in the #UK to keep up pressure on the #British government to end its support for Israel and to halt arms exports to the country.

“There’s just an absolutely massive burden of responsibility on everyone, especially those of us with a Holocaust survivor background, to speak out. I can’t think of a better commemoration for the six million,” said Etkind."

Ukraine’s cyber army collaborates closely with Anonymous, the once-countercultural online hacker collective whose work now tracks closely with the objectives of the C.I.A

This proposed rule change is open for comment until May 19.

My comment was:

I urge the rejection of this proposed rule.

I think we can be very thankful for the definition of harm as currently defined. If we were talking about the human species there would be no doubt that significant degradation of our ability to feed, shelter, and produce offspring would indeed be considered harm.

From only an economic perspective this proposed rule change is extremely counter productive. We learn an enormous amount from animals and that knowledge creates enormous economic value.

An example is the horseshoe crab. The Virginia Institute of Marine Science estimates the value of horseshoe crabs to the medical research industry at $100M per year. In 2023, the US Fish and Wildlife Service began work to aid their reproduction and support this industry. If harm is no longer defined as a significant decline in ability to reproduce, will we be able to protect this industry?

As our technology advances we are always learning more from animals, so we don't know which animals will give us our next billion dollar industry. After we decimate a species, we may not get to choose if it goes extinct, and with each extinct species we inflict immense harm on current and future generations of humans.

Deep but light.