Oregon to rename "Swastika Mountain"
The name of a mountain south of Eugene will soon be changed.
The Oregon Geographic Names Board confirmed Wednesday that Swastika Mountain, which refers to a symbol of the German Nazi Party, will be changed, KOIN-TV reported.
A final decision on the new name for the mountain outside Cottage Grove will be made in December. So far, two name change proposals — Umpqua Mountain and Mount Halo — have been submitted to the Oregon Geographic Names Board.
I only hope the mountain got named for a shape similarity, though given Oregon's history with white supremacy I would not be surprised if it was the worse reason. Glad it's being rectified.
Edit (8/26): My brother got curious and sent me a bit more of the mountain's history
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Wired looks at the best RSS Feed Reader options out there
I currently use a self-hosted instance of FreshRSS, which is pretty dang good. Because I use a cheap web host it isn't always lightning fast, but it does everything I want well enough. And it is included in the cost for hosting I'm already paying for. That said, I did give a few of these another look.
I've also considered building my own RSS feed reader. I codenamed it Behemoth because the project kept growing and growing in scope. I still might pursue it sometime, but it's a... monster.
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Coding for flexible scheduling
This morning's back-of-my-mind coding puzzle I'm trying to figure out. How to best handle flexible scheduling of things. I want to do a rotation of posts that are of a similar format: "What I'm Reading," "What I'm watching," "What I'm listening to," and "What I'm working on" - these would rotate through books, tv, podcasts / audiobooks, and the things I'm spending my time on.
But I'd like to add it as a feature in Glowbug as a scheduled prompt sort of thing. But I need to figure out how I store it flexibly so I can say "First Saturday", "Second Saturday", etc.
Right now my idea is to make use of PHP's strtotime() function which works on the above, but doesn't handle "every Monday" etc. So I'm trying to wrap my head around this puzzle and figure out how to tackle it.
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On the politics of education loan forgiveness
A Facebook post from a friend, who gave permission for it to be shared without credit:
A reminder on student loans: there is a conservative media strategy to keep you fighting over making the education system accessible. Here’s why:
- Student loans were implemented by conservatives to reduce access to education in the first place; educated masses are bad for power structures
- The current loan forgiveness efforts, paltry as they may be, get a ton of coverage because they need you to fight against making education more accessible
- It’s not about taxes. Mostly millionaires got nearly two TRILLION dollars in free tax money from spending programs in the pandemic and the conservative media has said fuck all about it. Why? Because they want your tax dollars going to millionaires but NOT to people who might learn how messed up the current system is.
You’re being encouraged to turn on one another intentionally for a specific reason. Don’t fall for it.
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The US gets caught with sock puppet social media against China and Russia
Not exactly surprising.
The data analyzed came from 146 Twitter accounts (which tweeted 299,566 times), 39 Facebook profiles, and 26 Instagram accounts, along with 16 Facebook pages and two Facebook groups. Some of the accounts were meant to appear like real people and used AI-generated profile pictures. Meta and Twitter didn’t specifically name any organizations or people behind the campaigns but said their analysis led them to believe they originated in the US and Great Britain.
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