What's in the News? 2.0

[Xue]

Knitting site manages to do what Twitter and Facebook have said is too hard, and bans white supremacist speech.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/style/ravelry-knitting-ban-trump.html

[Xue]

I apologise for that article, it's horrifically fragile - this one is better.

https://time.com/5613345/ravelry-knitting-trump-ban/

[Oniya]

Remember - we knitters have lots of sharp pointy things. 

[Tolvo]

You could say Ravelry have...a point.

[Sara Nilsson]

Remember - we knitters have lots of sharp pointy things. 

And it is a very tight knit community

[Tolvo]

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-48756370

The BBC has reported that the incidence of transphobic hate crimes in England, Scotland, and Wales, has risen 81% since last year, which is a spike in the general trend of transphobic hate crimes rising in number over the past few years. Scotland and Wales have in general a much smaller number of incidents though they are similarly rising while England's officially recognized incidences per year has gone up nearly 1,000 over a year, which is nearly double(100%). This should be no surprise to those who pay attention to how the media has been platforming various transphobic hate groups and centering their voices in discussions typically especially in the UK. I have been tempted to make a new thread in PROC on discussions relating to trans communities, terminology, concepts, history, and to make things open to people to ask questions to help combat ignorance and hatred even if just a little bit but I don't know that anyone would even respond or care and it'd probably just result in people getting angry at me. Just seeing the numbers is always so depressing, especially considering the number of incidents is likely way higher since many under report especially if they're poor, a poc, an immigrant, etc. It's all so demoralizing.

[Lustful Bride]

An asteroid made out of Gold has been discovered. With an estimated worth of $700 Quintillion.

If that isn't enough motivation to get us to space, nothing will.

[Hades]

A mixed bag pair of rulings from the US Supreme Court today.   On the one hand, the high court ruled against the Trump administration in it's effort to add a citizenship question onto the 2020 census. 

Unfortunately, the court also declined to get involved in gerrymandering cases on essentially a technicality, and says that such matters are for the state court system to handle rather than the federal courts.

[Tolvo]

An asteroid made out of Gold has been discovered. With an estimated worth of $700 Quintillion.

If that isn't enough motivation to get us to space, nothing will.

This sort of thing would just render gold pointless as a measure of currency and crash the world economy if it was easy to attain, if it wasn't, now there's a new series of bloody wars to be had. Gold is useful mostly for electronics and rarity. Increasing the amount of gold we have just destroys its value.

[clonkertink]

True. I propose we just tug it into orbit so we can have a tiny golden moon.

[Hades]

The thing is though, there's not a single currency in the world that is still on the "gold standard".  Meaning, you can take your nation's currency (in the US, a dollar) to a federal bank and trade it in for an equivalent amount of gold.  The US left the gold standard in 1971, other countries have done it since and I believe Switzerland was the last one to do so back around 2000 I believe it was.  It would cause a huge dip in the commodities market that deals with precious metals, but I don't think it would have a ripple effect on the economy at large if it became more plentiful.

[Kurogane]

Actually, I'm not so sure the value of gold would go down as dramatically as you say. "Plentiful" means that many people have access and possess it. This assumes that if one or two entities obtain this asteroid, they will bring it to earth and share it with many/all. I don't believe that will happen. If a wealthy billionaire funds such an expedition, the wealthy billionaire will keep the gold. Therefore, in the hands of one person (or a select few), gold would remain rare and still valued accordingly.

If, on the other hand, some benevolent country(ies) gets a hold of the gold and miraculously shares it with the good people of the world, then yes, the market will be flooded and the value should go down.

[Tolvo]

Kurogane that is what I stated.

Fair Hades I should not have said currency. Though likely it still would crash the world's economy.

[legomaster00156]

The gold economy, yes. The world economy, I'm not so sure.

[Tolvo]

A large enough space rock's worth of quite a lot of materials either being mined and put into circulating or getting to Earth would crash the world economy. It is also full of iron and nickel allegedly. With as I mentioned people possibly hoarding said materials, or fighting over them, also being capable of contributing to various problems. I made an offhand comment about how an asteroid made of gold and iron and nickel would likely crash the world economy, not for how long, not beyond repair, and that it would devalue gold since it would then be plentiful if harvested or present on Earth. In response to an article that opens with stating that it would make everyone in the world rich when it wouldn't. I understand the criticism over my saying "currency" but this seems like a strange amount of contention to the point that I'm getting PM's over staying a huge influx of space gold, iron, and nickel, would crash the economy.

[Kitteredge]

I don't understand economics enough to really know, but the influx of gold from the New World wound up doing the same -- it drove inflation up greatly in Spain over the following century or so, and then (I believe) they crashed. The English were able to steal a huge wad through piracy and pay of many of their debts, strengthening that throne, and I believe the Spanish Armada was generated in part as a way of spending all the new Spanish specie. (Which got caught off the coast of Britain and swirled mostly down the drain.) As usual, normal people got chewed up while nobles mostly skated.

Ironically, for those Libertarian types, this amount of gold could 'solve' their infatuation with going back onto the gold standard. They are supremely irked by fiat currency (i.e. money not attached to anything except 'due faith and credit'; it used to be that you could take a dollar and be assured you could get a dollar's worth of gold from the government). One of the key arguments against their ideology is that there's nowhere close to enough gold to return the world economy, and not even the U.S. economy, back to gold. This asteroid contains far, far too much gold to return to a gold standard -- hyperinflation like crazy -- even if the notion was good at all.

[Oniya]

I was thinking more of T-Rump acting like Auric Goldfinger.  Can you imagine how many toilets he could plate with that thing?

[Tolvo]

The worst part is I think we'd end up with Gold Member.

[TheGlyphstone]

The worst part is I think we'd end up with Gold Member.

There are two types of people I simply cannot stand. Those who disrespect foreign cultures, and the DutchMexicans.

[Sara Nilsson]

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/450555-woman-indicted-for-manslaughter-after-miscarrying-when-shot

An Alabama woman was indicted for manslaughter after she was shot and her unborn child died because a grand jury said she initiated the confrontation, according to AL.com.

Alabama is the new Florida

[Skynet]

/r/the_donald, one of the most popular pro-Trump platforms on social media (with 700k subscribers) has been quarantined on Reddit due to a long history of the mods turning a blind eye to their userbase calling for incitement to violence.

For non-Redditors in the audience, a quarantine prevents a subreddit's contents from being casually viewed by non-subscribers. Its terms will not manifest in search results, highly-upvoted threads will not hit /r/all which is the site's front page equivalent, and can no longer generate ad revenue, and users will receive a warning on offensive content when first visiting the URL. These restrictions are all at minimum for a quarantine; additional penalties can apply.

[clonkertink]

/r/the_donald, one of the most popular pro-Trump platforms on social media (with 700k subscribers) has been quarantined on Reddit due to a long history of the mods turning a blind eye to their userbase calling for incitement to violence.

For non-Redditors in the audience, a quarantine prevents a subreddit's contents from being casually viewed by non-subscribers. Its terms will not manifest in search results, highly-upvoted threads will not hit /r/all which is the site's front page equivalent, and can no longer generate ad revenue, and users will receive a warning on offensive content when first visiting the URL. These restrictions are all at minimum for a quarantine; additional penalties can apply.

About. Fucking. Time.

[TheGlyphstone]

The comments are comedy gold.

[Cirus]

Illinois, Legal, next?

[Tolvo]

https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/27/us/illinois-expunging-marijuana-convictions-trnd/index.html

It is neat to wake up and see my state putting into motion something that will legalize weed for those 21 and up(I think it should also be decriminalized for those who are younger), that sets free many in prison for smoking weed, removes from the records that they were even convicted which is very important for things like seeking jobs, includes a social equity program to help those convicted open their own businesses, and money to help weed selling startups.