10·
2 days agohttps://presidentialtermclock.com/
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023
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40·2 days agoThis 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.
2·2 days agoI think that if you aspire to regulate the political positions that AIs should recommend, you…okay, I think that that’s probably not a great idea, but setting that aside, it seems pretty odd that you’d want to do that, but not regulate the political positions of webpages that search engines return or the political positions that news media may take, which would be what I’d consider alternate information sources.
1·2 days agoI assume not, given its size, but I mean…it’s just a mile from San Francisco.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Nick_Benardini
James Nick Benardini is an American microbiologist who serves as the 8th and current Planetary Protection Officer for NASA since 2021.
https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/planetary-protection
Planetary Protection
Planetary Protection is the practice of protecting solar system bodies from contamination by Earth life and protecting Earth from possible life forms that may be returned from other solar system bodies. NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection promotes the responsible exploration of the solar system by implementing and developing efforts that protect the science, explored environments and Earth.
NASA’s Planetary Protection policies and requirements ensure safe and verifiable scientific exploration for extraterrestrial life. The main objectives are to
- Carefully control forward contamination of other worlds by terrestrial organisms and organic materials carried by spacecraft in order to guarantee the integrity of the search and study of extraterrestrial life, if it exists.
- Rigorously preclude backward contamination of Earth by extraterrestrial life or bioactive molecules in returned samples from habitable worlds in order to prevent potentially harmful consequences for humans and the Earth’s biosphere.
1·3 days agohttps://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2020/652044/EPRS_BRI(2020)652044_EN.pdf
The 150 million pigs reared across the EU represent the largest livestock category before that of bovines, and the EU pig meat sector alone accounts for nearly half of total EU meat production. Germany, Spain and France contribute more than half of the total amount of pig meat produced in the EU.
Bacon.
Context for the uninitiated: in video games in the Legend of Zelda series, there are chickens roaming around. One can normally attack them, and while it doesn’t kill them, they do act upset. However, if one keeps attacking long enough, a flock of chickens will fly in and start attacking the player’s character.
1·3 days agoI don’t presently block any instances, and my home instance has a “no defederation” policy.
I think I’ve blocked about three users, all of whom were spamming content to try to make threads unreadable.
That being said, I don’t subscribe to communities on lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, or lemmy.ml, and I normally browse subscribed.
On the other hand, what the U.S. president calls a “lovely stay” in the Gulf is so unpopular with American voters that he may quit without restoring the free flow of tankers. Trump said on Tuesday he will finish the war in two to three weeks even if there is no deal
I doubt that that’s because Trump is concerned about the popularity so much as that if he doesn’t get an AUMF from Congress, that’s about how much time he has left.
So he’s going to want to declare victory, regardless of what the situation is, at that point.
3·3 days agoNot happening until after the next Elder Scrolls game is out.
60 days, and it’s not a review.
Seems like it’d be pretty easy to test.
In 2024, most Germans, regardless of age, settled in Switzerland, which was home to around 324,000 German citizens.
That doesn’t seem like the most obvious place, as it’s one of the few places in Europe that isn’t in the EU and to which German citizens don’t have an automatic right to move to.
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.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump-class_battleship
In a press conference in December 2025, U.S. president Donald Trump announced a United States Navy guided-missile warship, to be called the Trump-class battleship.[5][6][7][4] The class is also known as BBG(X)[a] in some Navy documents,[1] and is intended to initially consist of the lead ship USS Defiant (BBG-1) and an as-yet unnamed other vessel. If and when commissioned, the class is envisioned as adding a nuclear-capable cruise missile option to the U.S. Navy surface fleet.[8]
The Trump administration intends to revitalize shipbuilding in the United States alongside the construction of the Trump-class. Analysts have expressed skepticism about the Trump-class battleship, citing its lack of funding, unprecedented design, and high development costs. Its classification as a battleship is debated, as it lacks the heavy armor and large-caliber guns typical of historical battleships. The naming of the class after an incumbent president has also broken traditional conventions.
The U.S. Navy has not had a battleship in commission since the retirement of the last Iowa-class battleship USS Missouri in 1992.[9] There have been no plans for new ones since the cancellation of the Montana class in 1943.[10]
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/USS_Defiant_BBG-1_graphic_1.jpg
It’s not just a battleship with guns, it’s a battleship with pre-dreadnought-style armament, a secondary non-centerfire battery, in 2026.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-dreadnought_battleship
These battleships were abruptly made obsolete by the arrival of HMS Dreadnought in 1906. Dreadnought followed the trend in battleship design to heavier, longer-ranged guns by adopting an “all-big-gun” armament scheme of ten 12-inch guns.
Yup!
apparently a net-zero carbon goal by 2030
I also looked up a couple articles. The Rivian order of 100k is supposed to complete in 2030, but it says that the Amazon net-zero goal is for 2040, not 2030.
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.