Headlines often change after publication. Everyone's A/B testing these days.

The teacher was selling prints of the art for hundreds of dollars. The article doesn't say how much profit they made, but it could be substantial. There's also the privacy violation, and split amongst ten kids it's $160,000 per victim. Don't get me wrong, that's not nothing, but it seems reasonable for such a wilful and knowing violation of copyright, rights to one's image, and privacy rights. (Assuming all alleged facts are true.)

That's not how statistics works. You can have a significant effect with a tiny effect size, or a large effect size that on analysis turns out to be insignificant.

There was an attempted coup after the 2022 election. That is was incompetently executed doesn't mean it wasn't an attempted coup. If the insurrectionists were better-organized and less stupid, there could have well been a civil war.

In terms of the trust problem, one easy way to solve it would be to just require real names. Instance admins (maybe also moderators) must post an address, a name, and a (redacted) ID. A registered corporation would also work. Then, they would provide escrow, taking the payment but only giving it to the seller once receipt has been confirmed. The concern would be fraud on the part of the purchaser. There's no foolproof way to fix that, but if both buyers and sellers have "reputation" scores it would be pretty easy to tell if someone's lying.

The admin could also skim 1-2% off every transaction, and then put that into a fund to pay buyers in the case of complaints. That way both the seller and buyer are satisfied, and reputation scores can be used to boot probable fraudsters.

Either way, the system would also allow buyers and sellers to arrange payment in-person, in which case there would be no guarantee needed and the admin wouldn't take a cut.

This system centralizes power in a small number of people who can be sued. Everyone else stays anonymous, and if they're bad actors the admins deal with them. If an admin is a bad actor, their name and address is posted publicly for the world to see. Obvious problem here is that fewer people would want to be admins, but maybe it would be possible to set up a corporate structure where the owner's identity is revealed only if they're being sued -- I'm not a lawyer and you'd have to talk to one. Maybe there could also be a way for them to post records of every transaction in a verifiable yet anonymous fashion, to prove they aren't skimming anything off the top (beyond whatever they say they're taking for server fees).

The staffer has two jobs. Their first job is to send a useless mollifying email. Their second job is to make a tally mark next to the words "PORN AGE GATE -- OPPOSED". (Or these days, probably they click a button on a spreadsheet.)

Writing your MP is like voting. It's useless individually, but in aggregate it will change their behaviour.

We actually got more energy out than we put in recently, but that was in a research reactor and it will take some time to make it actually large-scale feasible. Fission would be completely sufficient on its own if not for the politics. Greenpeace has more blood on their hands than the captain of the Exxon Valdez.

Maybe just because we don't understand it, but the ancient Sumerian bar joke:

A dog entered into a tavern and said, 'I cannot see anything. I shall open this one.'

Rimworld is awesome. But I guess I was thinking in terms of "all crops" being one type of food source. In Rimworld, you can't get multi-year droughts that make growing anything almost impossible. In real life, you can.

The Romans were really, really good at making concrete. Like most "ancient secrets", it's been overblown by sensationalist pop-historians, but they were still really good at it. IIRC they figured out that if you mix volcanic ash in with your concrete, it becomes stronger when exposed to water, not weaker.

edit: exposed, not exposed

The CNN article says that he was selling horns to people in Manhattan. Jurisdiction for international crimes is complicated and I don't know anything about it really, but my guess is that even if he never personally visited the States, he's still considered to have committed crimes there -- if a drug smuggler used a catapult to launch packages of drugs across the border, it would make sense for them to be charged in the US even if they didn't ever step foot on American soil.

Why? In a non-artistic sense it's just a pretentious way to say "stuff you own". (Unless you're saying owning things at all should be criminalized, in which case... can't really argue with you there.)