Image is of container ships waiting outside the canal. While there is usually some number of ships waiting for passage, the number has increased significantly lately.
In order to move ships through the Panama Canal, water is needed to fill the locks. The water comes from freshwater lakes, which are replenished by rainfall. This rainfall hasn’t been coming, and Lake Gatun, the largest one, is at near record low levels.
Hundreds of ships are now in a maritime traffic jam, unable to cross the canal quickly. Panama is attempting to conserve water and have reduced the number of transits by 20% per day, among other measures. The Canal’s adminstrators have warned that these drought conditions will remain for at least 10 months.
It is unlikely that global supply chains will be catastrophically affected, at least this year. Costs may increase for consumers in the coming months, especially for Christmas, but by and large goods will continue to flow, around South America if need be. Nonetheless, projecting trends over the coming years and decades, you can imagine how this is yet another nudge by climate change towards dramatic economic, environmental, and political impacts on the world at large. It also might prompt discussions inside various governments about nearshoring, and the general vulnerability of global supply chains - especially as the United States tries, bafflingly, to go to war with China.
After some discussion in the last megathread about building knowledge of geopolitics, some of us thought it might be an interesting idea to have a Country of the Week - essentially, I/we choose a country and then people can come in here and chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants, related to that country. More detail in this comment.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week’s discussion post.
I’ve been going over reddit data a bit today and roughly a month or so ago every single subreddit on the site lost around 75% of its activity.
A few comments-per-day samples, look at what happened on July 11th on all of these:
In order - /r/mildlyinfuriating /r/whitepeopletwitter /r/gaming /r/Askreddit
What the fuck happened on July 11th? Some sort of delayed aspect of the API closure? Tokens for a major mass botting operator run out?
75% (or more, up to 95%) is an absolutely behemoth drop in overall site commenting activity.
Was this much of reddit literally fake activity? I don’t think this is just people that stopped using the site, not all simultaneously, this all happening at once points to some sort of major event with automated commenting all stopping sitewide simultaneously. You can check every single god damn subreddit, the same thing happened everywhere.
I knew reddit was botted, you see it a lot on the mod side of things and you recognise a tonne of sus bots going haywire. But if this is the scale of the fake activity that existed on the site it’s wayyyyyyyyyyy bigger than I believed it was and I was among some of the more paranoid people about it.
EDIT: And since it happened, nothing is recovering. Everything is going down, everywhere. The drop in comments is causing a slow drop in comments over time site-wide. This is catastrophic data, worse than what musk has done to twitter in my opinion.
This post on OutoftheLoop also brings it up, seems like it might be the API changes kicking in all at once. Unless I’m misunderstanding what they changed, I don’t know why 75% of comments would stop happening even if you got rid of some (official) bots. Honestly I’ve pretty much ignored the whole thing as it was obvious that Reddit was going to win against a bunch of people who believed that “voting with your wallet/attention/time” is an effective mass protest strategy
API changes blocked all third party apps. Effectively removing all mobile users. The figure is way higher than I anticipated though, which is why I bring up botting.
The strikes may have failed to get reddit to change its position but honestly it kinda looks like they win the long-war by creating the sentiment and atmosphere that is going to kill reddit. Coming back from this requires a community that wants to come back from it and has enthusiasm… That’s uhhh, not happening.
Most internet traffic is mobile, but most mobile users use the official Reddit app. But removing third party apps essentially removed all the mobile power users.
Honestly 75% seems pretty normal, we often forget just how many people view the internet almost entirely through their phones nowadays, something like 50-60% of all internet usage is through mobile phones so while yes some of it is due to bots I could totally see it only being 10-15%, this also ignores the knock on effect that comes from reddit losing it’s network status. Less people using it => less content => reddit becomes less attractive => less users => less content and so on like this move actually could’ve killed reddit since such a huge drop is going to spiral out of control.
It was me. I stopped using Reddit, and I was the one true redditor. Contrary to your silly hypothesis, all other comments remaining now are from bots. They’re still declining because they’re seeing less and less engaging as they realize the dearth of activity left in my absence.
they banned me so this was bound to happen
The drop is getting followed by a further drop across the board.
Is it impossible to just be user bleed because of reduced content submission?
I think user bleed is happening as a result of it yes. Loss of value is causing bleed which is causing more loss of value. This has the makings of a death spiral.
That’s an insane number, I wonder what’s going on. Maybe it was Reddit itself and they pulled the plug to make costs lower to make the site look better the IPO? Cash out and leave scheme.
I’m really curious wether other social networks saw an increase in botting around the same time.
Possibly. Or this is genuinely all because mobile users dropped off. For that to be the case they would also have to be more likely to comment than pc users which I find hmmm. It’s quicker to type a comment and I feel like phones are both annoying to type on and more prone to endless scrolling of content rather than participation. This is partly why I suspect there’s a quite significant amount of botting that was killed by this.
One way or another it’s shocking data.
There’s no way a comments/day collapse like this good for their valuation. I doubt both that reddit is profitable and that it predictable revenue streams, which means they are going to be valued off of the theoretical value of operational metrics like daily users, number of posts, and number of comments.
Good thing that r/Presidents is now active and is carrying reddit on its back.
People that use third party apps comment and interact way more than your average Reddit user, see the amount of API calls an average Apollo user made. It wasn’t because the app was inefficient, it was because their users engaged a lot more
Judging from this data, the average Reddit user isn’t even a human.
deleted by creator
Has the number of daily users gone down? Can you tell that from the data?
We can’t see that information and have no way to really gather it as far as I know
Inside you are two wolves…
spoiler
Neither of them are posting on Reddit.
Goddamn.
I really didn’t think it would be this bad. Like, I’ve been using pre-Musk Twitter and Musk Twitter, and I don’t think Musk running Twitter to the ground is leading to a 75% decrease in activity. I guess it’s a combination of bots no longer working and spez pissing off the Reddit equivalent of gacha whales. But still 75%. Jeez.
where do you get access to this data?
oh i found it, subreddit stats. One thing I notice about the numbers going down right now is that there is some seasonality happening. It looks like Sep-Dec has lower traffic than Jul-Aug.
Forget that drop, what happened just before June 18?
Given that one isn’t consistent across different subreddits I think it’s hard to say. I think it was potentially the date of protests where subs were shut down.