This article points the finger almost exclusively at Liam Kavanagh and almost ignores Sean Clark, Thurrock’s Finance Director.
A bit of digging turned up this much longer article published a year ago and while Liam Kavanagh and his companies feature in it there’s also quite a bit more about Sean Clark’s role in all this.
15 years, reddit gold charter member, Secret Santa, all that stuff. And longer than 15 really, if you count the browsing I did before I made my account (I remember before subreddits were even a thing, when reddit was literally just a front page).
Are you me? This is exactly where I’m at. 15+ years with the same trophy list as you. I still use desktop for a couple of communities but my mobile use died with RiF (Golden Platinum).
I’m 15+, but I’m also still bouncing back and forth. Lemmy is my mobile usage and increasingly my desktop usage but I helped build a couple of communities over there that I just can’t quite let go of.
Even if the project is verifiably hacked the instant that remake becomes available on the web Disney will sue the shit out of them. It’s just how Disney is.
Could be 10,000 Wagners and NATO wouldn’t be concerned. They’d be destroyed by air power in a matter of hours.
“Bases”, when the majority of them are an office building with 20 people or less in it. Then there’s the ones like “Corinto (Nicaragua)” with no information listed and when click the base location turns out to be in the middle of the water with literally nothing there. Seriously, show me where this supposed base is. Perhaps its hiding in that little tiki hut on the beach or maybe it’s packed away in someone’s backyard shed?
The US has a lot of bases, there’s no denying that, but there are most definitely not 850 of them. That database is pure propaganda.
Native population growth is ALREADY curbed in nearly all Indusrialized Nations and places like the US are only growing due to immigration.
The global population keeps climbing because of under and still developing countries…and even in those places their rate of growth is slowing.
Globally the population will hit max around the year 2100 but many rich nations already heat peak population and are now declining.
Gallium and germanium can be had as byproducts of the refining of aluminum and lead IIRC.
It’s really NBD, we have the ability to make our own and so do many Euro countries. We just didn’t bother because it’s a dirty process and China did it cheap.
Why would they face any legal consequences any more than any other social media?
Instance location. Content comes at you from all over the Fediverse but once its in your instance it’s actually located on your server. It’s obvious how even regular NSFW stuff can be a problem if your instance is sitting in a ME country but perhaps less obvious (and more troublesome) is text based content.
For instance if a user is enrolled on an instance located in Germany and then subscribes to Neo-Nazi content from an instance located in the United States. That NN material is now on your instance but much of it is probably illegal in Germany. What happens when the German Authorities find out and come knocking?
Even “Child Porn” isn’t nearly as cut and dried as most people think. Things like /c/tinytitties or /c/flatchested from lemmynsfw are arguably illegal in a place like Australia since the person can be perceived as under-age due to their physical characteristics. It gets worse when you toss in the AI Generated stuff.
Big Tech does a lot of juggling trying to stay clear of these problems and they have large legal teams to help them when they run into trouble. I rather doubt that most instance admins have the resources for it.
I recommend you stay away from anything that requires any kind of portal to setup. If you have to download an app and create an account in order to pair the device or get it setup then don’t use that equipment. There’s a near endless array of sensors and things you can get now that work using Z-Wave, ZigBee, and even HomeKit that work DIRECTLY with HA, meaning that they don’t require commands to be sent up to the cloud via the Internet and then come back down to your device.
There’s an easy answer to that…don’t use IoT devices. I recently rebuilt my HA setup into a VM running on Proxmox, added a Zoos USB to ZWave dongle and then replaced every device that needed a network connection with a Z-Wave device. I have nothing left that needs, or can even connect to, the Internet and all of my routines / automations are fully local. I can turn my Router off and the only thing it will impact is remote access and voice control.
Turtle was active on Reddit about 16 HOURS a day so it was certainly possible. Of course they didn’t actually do much of anything in those subs, they just collected them.
The surprise of no one.
In other longer articles you find out that it’s nowhere nearly a billion. The Solar Farms used to underpin the investments do exist and are productive. They have value in the hundreds of millions of pounds, but its apparently not quite enough to satisfy all of the bonds when they come do in 2025 and 2026.