Sparta heeft de winstreeks niet voort kunnen zetten tegen Fortuna Sittard. Op bezoek in Limburg speelde Sparta gelijk na een krankzinnige slotfase. In de eerste helft zette Sparta-huurling Lance Duijvestijn zijn broodheer op achterstand. Het was debutant Casper Terho die Sparta in de laatste seconde van de wedstrijd naar een punt kopte.

Despite urgent pleas to Americans to save the honeybees, "it was all based on a fallacy," writes Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. "Honeybees were never in existential trouble. And well-meaning efforts to boost their numbers have accelerated the decline of native bees that actually are."

"Suppose I were to say to you, 'I'm really worried about bird decline, so I've decided to take up keeping chickens.' You'd think I was a bit of an idiot," British bee scientist Dave Goulson said in a video last year. But beekeeping, he went on, is "exactly the same with one key difference, which is that honeybee-keeping can be actively harmful to wild-bee conservation." Even from healthy hives, diseases flow "out into wild pollinator populations."

Honeybees can also outcompete native bees for pollen and nectar, Milbank points out, and promote non-native plants "at the expense of the native plants on which native bees thrive."


Bee specialist T'ai Roulston at the University of Virginia's Blandy Experimental Farm here in Boyce warned that keeping honeybees would "just contribute to the difficulties that native bees are having in the world." And the Clifton Institute's Bert Harris, my regular restoration ecology consultant in Virginia, put it bluntly: "If you want to save the bees, don't keep honeybees...."

Before I stir up a hornet's nest of angry beekeepers, let me be clear: The save-the-pollinator movement has, overall, been enormously beneficial over the past two decades. It helped to get millions of people interested in pollinator gardens and wildflower meadows and native plants, and turned them against insecticides. A lot of honeybee advocacy groups promote native bees, too, and many people whose environmental awakening came from the plight of honeybees are now champions of all types of conservation...

But if your goal is to help pollinators, then the solution is simple: Don't keep honeybees... The bumblebees, sweat bees, mason bees, miner bees, leafcutters and other native bees, most of them solitary, ground-nesting and docile, need your help. Honeybees do not.


The article calls it "a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences that emerge when we intervene in nature, even with the best of intentions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last Sunday, Bitcoin had dropped 13% in three days, to $76,790.

By Thursday it had dropped another 21%, to $60,062.

This morning it's at $69,549 — up from Thursday, down from Sunday, but 44% lower than its all-time high in October of $123,742. In short, Bitcoin "is down almost 30% this week alone," reports CNBC:


"This steady selling in our view signals that traditional investors are losing interest, and overall pessimism about crypto is growing," Deutsche Bank analyst Marion Laboure said Wednesday in a note to clients. Growing investor caution comes as many of the sensationalized claims about bitcoin have failed to materialize. The token has largely traded in the same direction as other risk-on assets, such as stocks... and its adoption as a form of payment for goods and services has been minimal... While many in the crypto market have previously credited large institutional investors with supporting the price of bitcoin, now it is those same participants who appear to be selling. "Institutional demand has reversed materially," CryptoQuant said in a report on Wednesday.

But not everyone accepts that answer, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. "The worst part for some of crypto's permabulls is that they aren't sure what exactly caused the crash":


The selloff left many of the market's luminaries — those so well-known that they go simply as "Pomp" and "Novo" and "Mooch" — searching for answers... Ether dropped 24% to $2,052, off 59% from its own high of last year. Both tokens staged furious rallies Friday, but the week remained a historically bad one for crypto. And few seem to know what went wrong. Market theories for the selloff ranged from investors' pivot toward the prediction markets and other risky bets, to widespread profit-taking after a blistering bull run. "There was no smoking gun," said Michael Novogratz, who runs Galaxy Digital, a crypto merchant-banking and trading firm...

"If you ask five experts, you'll get five explanations," said Anthony Scaramucci, who served for 11 days as communications director during Trump's first term and is among the best-known crypto bulls at his firm, SkyBridge Capital.


"No, but seriously: What's going on with bitcoin?" reads the headline at CNN, with a story that begins "Bitcoin is acting weird... "


Crypto is notoriously volatile, and it's gone through numerous crashes that are bigger than this one. What's strange is this: Bitcoin's four-month slump has come at a time when, in theory, it had everything going for it.

Economist Paul Krugman points out the price of Bitcoin is now lower than it was before America's 2024 election, when candidate Trump promised to make cryptocurrency "one of the greatest industries on earth."

CNN seems to agree with CNBC that what's behind this new crypto winter is "Mostly doubts that bitcoin is 'digital gold,' after all..."

Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former culture minister Jack Lang resigns from Arab World Institute in Paris and is also subject of tax investigation

Jack Lang, a former French culture minister, has resigned as head of Paris’s prestigious Arab World Institute after revelations of his past contacts with the disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the launch of a financial investigation by French prosecutors.

Lang, 86, resigned on Saturday night before he was due to attend an urgent meeting called by the French foreign ministry to discuss his links to Epstein.

Continue reading...

The well-dressed alpine town, all art deco and Prada, is watching Mouat and Dodds dominate before the focus turns to Vonn’s daredevil act

The sun rises late in Cortina d’Ampezzo, like everything else in this little alpine town. It’s gone eight o’clock in the morning by the time the daylight has made it over the high peaks to the east, and it’s another two hours from that before the Olympic day gets under way.

It’s slow out, as if everyone’s still sleeping off the night before, when the town was out cheering for the athletes as they made their parade around the square. The police are still packing away all the railings, and the street sweeps are brushing up the confetti. Non c’è fretta. No one’s in a rush. Maybe your bus will turn up, but no one’s making any promises.

Continue reading...

Baldur Bjarnason:

I've stopped trying to debate software developers on LLMs. It's a fruitless debate. Even if the believers in agents and copilots could be budged on empirical grounds, and the past few years have given us plenty of evidence that they can't, this is still a crowd that is explicitly fine with using tools that are themselves deeply unethical. [...]

Somebody who is capable of looking past "ICE is using LLMs as accountability sinks for waving extremists through their recruitment processes", generated abuse, or how chatbot-mediated alienation seems to be pushing vulnerable people into psychosis-like symptoms, won't be persuaded by a meaningful study. Their goal is to maintain their personal benefit, as they see it, and all they are doing is attempting to negotiate with you what the level of abuse is that you find acceptable. Preventing abuse is not on their agenda.

You lost them right at the outset. [...]

Nor do they seem to care, except in a performative way, that "AI" is designed to be an outright attack on labour and education, using the works of those being attacked -- without their consent -- as the tools for dismantling their own communities and industries, all done in overt collaboration with the ultra right. [...]

Going all "but it works great for me" even as the industry burns around you and the "it" is a right-wing political project built on disregarding consent, being applied to dismantle public infrastructure and institutions, is fundamentally a dick move.

And debating dicks is pointless.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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