Andy Lee Robinson 

Linux devops, CGI/CAD/Printing, drones, batteries, ebikes, pianist, degus. Langs: EN,HU,DE,FR
Creator of Arctic Death Spiral
@[email protected]

[Andy Lee Robinson  @ahaveland]

Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Volumes 1979-2025 https://t.co/twmDNOo1Dn
#Arctic sea ice volume for Sept 2025 in 2nd lowest place ever with 3,874 km³.
That's a *quarter* of what it was just 40 years ago at 16,855 km³.
#ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #dataviz

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Two seconds. Two seconds is how long it takes MAGA to whip out the GDP number. Two seconds is also how long it takes them to read their own constitution, cover to cover, and still get it wrong.

Ah, the GDP list. The last refuge of a man losing an argument. Works right up until the football does the talking.

Here is the bit they leave off the laminated card. GDP is the nation’s number, not yours. It measures how much money moves through the country, not whether anyone inside it is alright. You could be face down in the gutter, pissed on nightly, and still be there in the country with the world’s highest GDP. The number would not flinch.

And on the stats that measure actually being alive, America is not 45x anyone. It is scraping the bottom, borrowing a spade to go lower. Europeans outlive the MAGA heartland by nearly 15 years. An extra chapter of your life, handed out free because GDP doesn’t save you.

It is the company posting record profits every quarter. Share price up, founder on a yacht, annual report gleaming. And the staff are on their third double shift, peeing in bottles because a toilet break costs the line thirty seconds. Worth a fortune. Worth nothing to it. That is America’s GDP: a beautiful number floating on a workforce quietly falling apart.

So keep the list. Frame it. Read it at parties. Just do not be surprised when the rest of us glance up from our longer, cheaper, calmer lives and ask whether the number was ever really the point.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Taiwan solved tax evasion in 1951 with a trick so cheap it should embarrass every tax authority on the planet.

The problem was an all-cash economy full of small shops. A merchant pockets the cash, skips the receipt, and the sale never existed. Auditors can't catch what was never recorded, and hiring enough of them to watch every noodle stand costs more than the missing tax.

So finance chief Ren Xianqun flipped the incentive. Print a lottery number on every receipt. Draw winners every two months on live TV. Top prize today: NT$10 million, about $310K.

Suddenly the customer and the shopkeeper want opposite things. The merchant wants the sale off the books. The customer wants the ticket. And there are millions more customers than merchants. Every transaction now carries a built-in witness demanding the paper trail.

Year one, reported tax revenue jumped 75%, from NT$29 million to NT$51 million. Seventy-five years later, roughly 70% of Taiwanese still play. Convenience stores redeem the smallest NT$200 prizes at the register, so even a coffee receipt feels like a scratch card.

The elegant part is what the audit force costs. The prize pool runs about NT$7 billion a year, roughly $20 million. In exchange, the government gets 23 million unpaid auditors working every checkout line in the country, forever. No inspector general on earth delivers that coverage at that price.

Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Slovakia all copied it. The most effective compliance tool ever built looks like a game, and that's exactly why it works.

[Abier @abierkhatib]

Fox News aired this to scare the American public.

On God 😱

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

I will be taking out all 1 million hundred dollar bills in my bank account and redacting Trump’s name from this new $100 bill like he redacted the Epstein files.

[Willie Ross Jr. Knee Deep @RossKneeDeep]

By David Abbruzzes:

This Australian's reply to Trump's rant about “NATO not being there for America” is perfect.
"Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.
And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.
And you're calling Greenland poorly run?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.
'NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.
And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.
So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your f----- mouth."

Very well stated.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

A follower told me they watched a hawk grab a released doves out of the air at a funeral, right in front of the grieving family. "It wasn't inspirational."

Wildlife rehabbers will tell you that's not an unusual outcome.

The white birds sold for wedding and funeral releases aren't doves. They're domestic pigeons bred for appearance with no survival instincts outside a coop. When released, they have a poor ability to navigate, little to no predator awareness, and no way to find food. Hawks, cars, windows, and starvation take most of them within days.

Even professional releases using trained homing pigeons kill birds. Homing pigeons can navigate, but they get picked off by raptors in flight, hit by cars when they land exhausted, and exposed to disease on the trip back. Wildlife rehabbers receive them regularly, emaciated, injured, and sick.

There is no version of this where the birds fly away and live happily somewhere. The reality is a 15-second photo moment that required traumatizing a domestic animal with no ability to survive what comes next.

Bubbles, sparklers, dried flower petals, and ribbon throws all photograph beautifully. None of them end up in a hawk's talons in front of a grieving family.

If someone you know is planning a release, tell them. The tradition sounds meaningful, but the bird's experience of it is not.

[😱 Scary Larry 😱 🇺🇦✊🏻🇺🇸🗽 @aintscarylarry]

A Nazi eagle at the White House. 88 foot flagpoles. Nazi salutes. Third Reich slogans such as “One Homeland, One People, One Heritage” & “One of ours, all of yours.” These aren’t parallels or coincidences. They’re turning America into Nazi Germany 2.0 and rubbing our faces in it.

[ArchaeoHistories @histories_arch]

"When you come to power, will you abolish the constitution of the German Republic?" It was 1931, and American journalist Dorothy Thompson was permitted only three questions during a rare interview with Adolf Hitler that many considered impossible to secure. The leader of Germany's rapidly ascending far-right Nazi party gave her a chillingly candid reply.

"I will get into power legally," Hitler told her. "I will abolish this parliament and the Weimar constitution afterward. I will found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below."

Thompson believed he was telling the truth about his dictatorial ambitions, yet she couldn't fathom that he would be successful. The very idea struck her as absurd: "Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights."

As one of America’s most respected foreign correspondents and the first American woman to head a foreign news bureau, Thompson had been tracking the Nazi movement since 1923. At the time of the interview, she was deeply familiar with Hitler, having watched his speeches, read Mein Kampf, and interviewed numerous German politicians and Nazi supporters.

"When I walked into Adolph Hitler's salon in the Kaiserhof hotel, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany," Thompson later reflected. "In something like fifty seconds I was quite sure that I was not. It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog."

She recognized that Hitler was a masterful propagandist and orator in front of a crowd but she wasn't prepared for how pathetic he appeared one on one. "He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man," she wrote after their meeting. Thompson found the interview nearly impossible to conduct: "One cannot carry on a conversation with Adolph Hitler... In every question, he seeks for a theme that will set him off. Then his eyes focus in some far corner of the room; a hysterical note creeps into his voice, which rises sometimes almost to a scream. He gives the impression of a man in a trance. He bangs the table."

Following the interview, in numerous articles and her book "I Saw Hitler," she warned about the threat Hitler represented to democracy and highlighted Hitler's embrace of racial prejudice, noting that persecution of the Jewish people was among the first planks in his program. But ultimately, she viewed an outright Nazi victory in the upcoming election as "unlikely," not believing that German citizens would embrace such an extremist demagogue in an election.

Within a year, Thompson learned the devastating lesson of how easily democratic citizens could be persuaded to relinquish their rights to a would-be dictator who channeled their anxieties into hatred of a demonized 'other' while promising national greatness. After he came to power in 1933, Hitler began to crush his political opponents, rapidly militarize German society, and persecute targeted groups. Thompson quickly became one of the most vocal chroniclers of Hitler's growing brutality, warning a world that was largely oblivious. “It must be said, it must be re-iterated,” she wrote, “that there has been and still is a widespread terror, which extends throughout the whole of Germany.”

Hitler was sufficiently threatened by Thompson's work that he reportedly demanded the creation of a "Dorothy Thompson Emergency Squad" to rush translations of her articles to him. In August 1934, Nazi government expelled Thompson from the country, making her the first American journalist banned from Nazi Germany.

© A Mighty Girl

#archaeohistories

[Danny Boy @Care2much18]

Quote: "This is how USAID spent your tax dollars"

I think people have lost the will to try fact-check this guy due to the volume of lies he spreads.

Also it's actually pretty difficult with this image and quite time consuming.

It just happens I had nothing better to do. /1

[Magyar Péter (Ne féljetek) @magyarpeterMP]

All records have been broken. Hungary has never experienced such extreme heat.
A temperature of 42°C was recorded in Szécsény.

[Kate 🕊 @affleckquine]

Police in London holding up a blue-light ambulance to allow 'VIP's to pass. In what world should this ever be allowed to happen?

[Andy Lee Robinson  @ahaveland]

@laurimyllyvirta Not reducing emissions is a greater health risk. We can't air condition our way out of this & manufacture a completely artificial environment without which humans would just die! How do you air condition fields, forests, oceans that enable life? Reduce emissions now, drastically

[Andy Lee Robinson  @ahaveland]

@MrMatthewTodd I'm just waiting for the deniers to start whining "why didn't you warn us?"!

[Rev. Justin Berkobien @JustinBerkobien]

If you owe a woman 5 million dollars for sexual assault you also owe the country your resignation.

[Andy Lee Robinson  @ahaveland]

@RHarrabin Even better, use an aluminised Mylar survival blanket, or aluminised bubble wrap.

[Jürgen Nauditt 🇩🇪🇺🇦 @jurgen_nauditt]

The Ukrainian girl who lost her life in Kharkiv had traveled to the city for her graduation ceremony. 😢😢😢

Russian murderers turn life's milestones into death.

[Vatnik Soup @P_Kallioniemi]

Elon is now trying to shift the blame for dismantling USAID, America's greatest soft-power tool, by endorsing claims that he was "just an adviser."

Yet when USAID was being dismantled, Musk proudly declared: "We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper." The man even posed with a chainsaw on stage afterward.

A new Lancet study estimates that USAID programs prevented nearly 92 million deaths between 2001 and 2021, including more than 30 million children under five.

If the 2025 cuts continue, researchers project more than 14 million additional preventable deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children. That's a death toll on the scale of the First World War, driven by cuts to humanitarian aid rather than a global war.

These broligarchs are completely detached from reality. They have zero accountability, and seem unable to grasp that their decisions have real-world consequences measured in millions of lives.

[Jake Broe @RealJakeBroe]

Crimea has declared a state of emergency. The peninsula is without fuel and power and the civilian population is trying to flee back to mainland Russia.

[Mike Hudema @MikeHudema]

"Leave fossil fuels in the ground. It's so simple.This is the most important predicament humanity has ever faced and by design as a result of the enormous oppressive power of the fossil fuel industry, we're flunking it." George Monbiot.

No time to waste. #ActOnClimate

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

I can't with these videos of Russians standing in fuel lines whining, "But why are they bombing us? What did we doooooo?"

​You invaded a sovereign state. You destroyed the peaceful lives of 40 million people. You leveled our towns and cities. Your scorched-earth bombings turned a once-blooming land into a wasteland visible from space. Most importantly, you are actively killing us right now, and you dare to ask that question?

​Life is a boomerang, babe. What karma fails to deliver, our armed forces will. Unless you all pack up and go home.