Interesting. Seems like the DOD has been aware, but just can’t do much about it. They can control how emails get sent from military/government accounts, but they can’t influence or filter what others send to them. I imagine it would be diplomatically problematic for the US government to take control of certain sites under the .ml domain without negotiating with Mali.

Worth noting is that some entities are legally contesting the notion that a nation can have jurisdictional rights to a domain.

Reading russian cursive is a truly mind melting experience.

I’m still convinced I’m looking at one.

Putin is in a tight spot. He has everything to lose geopolitically in Africa and militarily in Ukraine by removing Prigozhin/Wagner from the equation. But I believe the current situation is untenable and will burst at the seams soon, one way or another. I wonder whether the loss of Wagner’s influence would be a stabilizing or destabilizing event in Sub-Saharan Africa.

I’d be surprised if there was ever a time the admins cared about the opinions/rights of mods or users. It’s always been about freedom until freedom threatened their ‘bottom line’.

Glad to have you with us! This place feels more like a real community. I’ve commented more on kbin this past week than on reddit the past two years combined.

Reddit admins aren’t even pretending to try to explain their decisions. The gloves have come off and they don’t care about justifying their actions to the mod communities they’re wiping. It’s a matter of time until every subreddit has either fallen in line or been ‘reset’ unfortunately.

Reddit isn’t the first online community I watched outgrow itself into the grave. I guess it’s just the cycle of social media. Here’s hoping this time’s different.

I fully expected Reddit to fight dirty, but it’s still surreal watching the iron hand come down against the community. Silver lining, I hope this helps accelerate the migration to the fediverse.

Not OP, but I’ve asked myself this as well. I think it depends on where you live and what you want out of your language learning experience. If your goal is to learn something more useful in everyday life and you live in the southern US, Spanish is a great option. If you’re from Canada, French is probably the most useful. German and Mandarin are useful in the business world, but the latter is significantly harder to learn. If you’re not worried about maximizing the utility of what you learn, Norwegian is considered one of the easiest languages for English speakers, and let’s be real, Norway is awesome.

It’s more important that you stick with whatever you choose though. That’s the part I’ve struggled with.

• P.S. edit: Looks like you might not see this since I’m on kbin. Maybe someone on my side of the Fediverse finds this tidbit of wildlife knowledge!

I’ve had some experience with seabird and waterfowl nesting research so this caught my attention. I haven’t come across anything like this personally, but I’ve only ever worked with larger birds with higher nest building costs and greater territorial behavior across seasons.

Apparently this is a common behavior with some bird species, and it’s baffled scientists for a while.

I managed to find a specific explanation for American Robins (excerpt below). I can’t guarantee the validity of this author’s ‘supernormal stimuli’ explanation, but it’s a compelling one:

A. This is a question we hadn’t been asked before, so we wrote to Len Eiserer, the author of The American Robin: A Backyard Institution. Len answered:

"Building multiple nests simultaneously happens every now and again with robins. One started 26 different nests on roof rafters of a garage under construction; another built 8 on successive steps of a fire escape. Support from underneath is the primary site selection factor for the female robin — it’s more important than concealment. Because some human structures provide repetitive sites with strong support, the female can get seduced into building multiple nests.

This is an example of “supernormal stimuli” — artificial stimuli that are even more effective than those provided by Mother Nature (tree limbs). Animals have a hard time resisting supernormal stimuli. There are many examples. Your robin will probably settle on one site and just lay eggs in that nest, or else just incubate eggs in that nest after laying, say, one egg in one nest and two in the other. She won’t lay two complete sets of eggs and try to incubate both of them at the same time."