I don’t know if I know all that much about it, but National Geographic did an article on the growing elver smuggling issue in the US a while back, and that inspired me to read some more material about it.

This is also a big deal for commercial and environmental reasons.

Eels are extremely popular as food. China has aquafarms to grow them, but the problem is getting ahold of young eel to grow, because we can’t get them to breed in captivity. They catch wild ones, then raise them in farms. At first, the Japanese eel got clobbered.

Then what had been happening is that people would catch young wild European eels (“elvers”) then export them illegally to be raised in Chinese aquafarms:

Moreover, the effort is increasingly urgent due to the dramatic decline in European eel populations since the 1980s, marked by a staggering drop of over 95% in the number of glass eels arriving at European coasts. The species is now highly endangered, facing multiple threats that complicate conservation efforts.

https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/law-enforcement-casts-net-over-256-eel-smugglers

Law enforcement casts net over 256 eel smugglers

Europol-led operation finds 25 tonnes of trafficked eels worth EUR 13 million destined for Asia

Then after European eels got depleted, baby eel smuggling started happening in North America.

https://apnews.com/article/business-europe-china-smuggling-nyc-state-wire-baab790064d148b72dc5b1752fab7d39

Baby eels are among the most lucrative fish species in the seafood world. The U.S. fishery for American eels is based almost entirely in Maine. The baby eels are often worth more than $2,000 per pound at the docks.

https://vifreepress.com/2024/03/boaters-caught-trying-to-smuggle-over-110000-live-eels-out-of-puerto-rico-feds-say/

SAN JUAN — Two people are facing charges after the United States Coast Guard found them trying to take over 110,000 eels out of Puerto Rico without proper paperwork, prosecutors said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials noticed a “suspicious” boat about 40 miles off the northern coast of Puerto Rico on the morning of February 21, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico said in a March 1 news release.

The boat was described as “flagless and outfitted for smuggling.” The U.S. Coast Guard approached the boat and, when it refused to stop, had to “neutralize” it, prosecutors said.

Once onboard, officials found two people with 22 bags of live American eels, prosecutors said. Each bag held “over 5,000 eels”, officials said, totaling at least 110,000 eels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshwater_eel_poaching_and_smuggling

Freshwater eel poaching and smuggling have emerged in recent years as a direct response to the sustained popularity of eels as food combined with the eels’ low population, endangered status, and subsequent protections. Freshwater eel are elongated fish in the Anguillidae family of ray-finned fish. The three most commonly consumed eel species are the Japanese eel (A. japonica), European eel (A. anguilla), and American eel ( A. rostrata).

The life cycle for eels has not been closed in captivity on a sustainable level, and any eel farms rely entirely on wild-caught elvers (juvenile eels). These elvers are caught from their native ranges in North America and Europe and are smuggled into East Asian eel farms, where they are often relabeled as the native Japanese eel to subvert legislation. The eels are smuggled disguised as other cargo, such as luggage[1] or other meat products.[2]

If we could figure out how to get eels to breed in captivity, which we currently don’t know how to do, it could resolve the eel shortage. That probably involves a better understanding of their sexual habits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Nick_Benardini

James Nick Benardini is an American microbiologist who serves as the 8th and current Planetary Protection Officer for NASA since 2021.

https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/planetary-protection

Planetary Protection

Planetary Protection is the practice of protecting solar system bodies from contamination by Earth life and protecting Earth from possible life forms that may be returned from other solar system bodies. NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection promotes the responsible exploration of the solar system by implementing and developing efforts that protect the science, explored environments and Earth.

NASA’s Planetary Protection policies and requirements ensure safe and verifiable scientific exploration for extraterrestrial life. The main objectives are to

• Carefully control forward contamination of other worlds by terrestrial organisms and organic materials carried by spacecraft in order to guarantee the integrity of the search and study of extraterrestrial life, if it exists.
• Rigorously preclude backward contamination of Earth by extraterrestrial life or bioactive molecules in returned samples from habitable worlds in order to prevent potentially harmful consequences for humans and the Earth’s biosphere.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2020/652044/EPRS_BRI(2020)652044_EN.pdf

The 150 million pigs reared across the EU represent the largest livestock category before that of bovines, and the EU pig meat sector alone accounts for nearly half of total EU meat production. Germany, Spain and France contribute more than half of the total amount of pig meat produced in the EU.

Bacon.

Context for the uninitiated: in video games in the Legend of Zelda series, there are chickens roaming around. One can normally attack them, and while it doesn’t kill them, they do act upset. However, if one keeps attacking long enough, a flock of chickens will fly in and start attacking the player’s character.

In 2024, most Germans, regardless of age, settled in Switzerland, which was home to around 324,000 German citizens.

That doesn’t seem like the most obvious place, as it’s one of the few places in Europe that isn’t in the EU and to which German citizens don’t have an automatic right to move to.

Oh, come on. It’s late at night, you’re really craving some mouthwatering chicken-fried steak and syrup-drenched waffle. You find yourself falling deeper and deeper into the mental image, and then suddenly you feel the world twisting around you and a sharp dropping sensation and, bam, there you are, in a booth at Waffle House. We’ve all been there, at one point or another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understatement

Understatement is an expression of lesser strength than what the speaker or writer actually means or than what is normally expected. It is the opposite of embellishment or exaggeration, and is used for emphasis, irony, hedging, or humor.

Understatement also merges the comic with the ironic, as in Mark Twain’s comment, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

Reporter: “Hello, I’m from the New York Times, and I’d like to ask whether you’re aware of anyone who has teleported to this Waffle House?”

Waffle House employee: Thinking “there are some real weirdos who come in here”. “Uh, no.”

What if the cat is born on a Norwegian-flagged ship in Italian territorial waters?

It is a joke.

I figured that this was going to be the wedding parable.

A quarter-century back…

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3676

World domination. It’s a powerful and faintly sinister phrase, one you might imagine some B-movie mad scientist muttering as he puts the finishing touches on some infernal machine amidst a clutter of bubbling retorts and crackling Tesla coils. It is not a phrase you would, offhand, associate with cuddly penguins.

When Linus says he aims at world domination, it seems as if he wants you to laugh at the absurd image of a gaggle of scruffy hackers overrunning the computing world like some invading barbarian horde—but he’s also inviting you to join the horde. Beneath the deadpan self-mockery is dead seriousness—and beneath the dead seriousness, more deadpan self-mockery. And on and on, in a spiraling regress so many layers deep that even Linus probably doesn’t know where it ends, if it ends at all.

The way Linux hackers use the phrase “world domination” is what science-fiction fans call a “ha-ha-only-serious”. Some visions are so audacious, they can be expressed only as ironic jokes, lest the speaker be accused of pomposity or megalomania.

PC gaming is still only a bit over 5%, but it’s one of the last remaining computing environments where Linux hasn’t become the dominant OS choice, as it’s displaced embedded systems and servers and suchlike. Things have changed a lot.

Yes. Now try 0177.0x1.

I’m pretty sure that IPv4 address formats are more complicated than IPv6 forms, if you are actually doing RFC-compliant validation.

The paradox could be called the tyranny of the 10%: if 45% of voters in a multiparty system want a government to the left and 45% want a government to the right but 10% vote for parties that want to govern from the centre, it will be very difficult for the old blocs to form governments.

And thus, compromise.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m dubious that Congress is going to give him an AUMF — he didn’t actually go to them first, just hauled on in, and there have been decidedly unencouraging statements on the matter from both sides of the aisle in Congress — which he’s probably going to need if he wants to continue the conflict using the US military for more than eight weeks, and he’s burned through a bit over half of that window already. He’s got kinda limited options.

Even if one agreed with him, he’s not actually doing, in this post, what he proposed there, which is linking to the source:

Linking to the source should be the primary way of attribution.

Like, setting aside the whole question of whether-or-not stripping out the artist name is reasonable or not, what we’re actually getting is the comic with no artist name or source link. @JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social had to dig up the original by doing a reverse image search and linked to the original himself.

It looks like it’s a free image hosting service, and given that and that @AntiBullyRanger@ani.social also said that they couldn’t reach it directly, my guess is that there’s probably a number of people who upload content that violates someone’s requirements and get the host blacklisted by folks of a censorious nature.

EDIT: @over_clox@lemmy.world and @AntiBullyRanger@ani.social: A Lemmy instance can be set up to proxy images for remote sites. This has some privacy benefits (someone can’t harvest IP addresses of Lemmy users by just submitting images and waiting to see which IP addresses load them) and also the incidental benefit of bypassing restrictions like this, as long as your Lemmy home instance is accessible on the network that is blocking the image host. The home instance I use, lemmy.today, does this, and I’m sure that there are others. You might consider setting up another account on a second home instance that does that to work around this, if it’s common for you where you are.

https://lemmy.today/post/50406412 is this post on lemmy.today, for example.

The link that my browser actually loads is https://lemmy.today/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ibb.co%2FG3CVVyq2%2Fgghhhh.jpg

The downside is that your lemmy home instance has to spend the extra bandwidth and storage space to serve the images, so it requires the admin to be able and willing to expend the server resources on it.

Formally, no, but he’s in Putin’s inner circle, so he might have considerable influence on that decision.

So, I don’t know how things work in specifically Russia, but in general, I think that it’s not so much the level of taxation as it is loopholes.

For example, can the companies that he controls be directed to lend him money on terms that he directs without it being taxed by the Russian state?

More-broadly, I’d guess that it would be exceptionally difficult to impose taxes on specifically him, because he’s buddies with Putin and tied up in control of the country. If the system is actively interested in avoiding taxing you, it’s likely going to find ways to not do so.