For your convenience, now five months earlier! From an email received today, 2/13/24

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It was fun while it lasted. The recent addition of PGP support was very welcome, and I thought that such support might have been a sign that they were in it for the long-term with the email product, but I thought wrong.

Dear Skiff Community,

We are excited to share that Skiff is joining Notion.

Skiff's mission is to bring freedom to the internet by helping people collaborate and communicate with freedom and privacy. We see a deep alignment with Notion’s vision to build a connected workspace and enable everyone to build tools that reflect their values.

We’re extremely excited to accelerate our mission by joining forces with Notion’s world-class team. We sincerely hope that the Skiff community will join us for this next stage of our journey. We’re pursuing big plans for making all of our online lives freer and more empowered, and these plans will carry forward directly the ambitions we’ve strived for alongside the Skiff community.

As we begin to shift focus to our shared efforts with Notion, we will be closing down Skiff's product suite after a 6-month sunset period We are deeply appreciative of the trust users have extended to us, and we are committed to honoring that trust by ensuring that all data on Skiff is easily exportable. For the next 6 months, Skiff services will continue to operate without disruption, and users can freely duplicate, migrate, or export data. You can now also set up a forwarding address to redirect mail to any other provider.

Our commitment to privacy and security is unchanged. All user data remains end-to-end encrypted, and Skiff products will never monetize your data. Accounts and data on Skiff will not be converted into Notion accounts.

We encourage you to export your data and migrate custom domains within the next 6 months. We’ve prepared this guide to make that process as easy as possible. For any other questions, our support team is readily available via the in-app “Send feedback” option or at support@skiff.org.

The Skiff community has lifted, inspired, and energized us at every step. We are humbled by your support and we apologize for any disappointment or inconvenience this change may cause you. We remain as committed as ever to bringing about the vision for a better internet that brought us together. Thank you for being part of the Skiff family, and we look forward to continuing to serve you with our future efforts.

Sincerely, Skiff Team

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/11686099

A scientific paper that raised concerns about the safety of the abortion pill mifepristone was retracted by its publisher this week. The study was cited three times by a federal judge who ruled against mifepristone last spring. That case, which could limit access to mifepristone throughout the country, will soon be heard in the Supreme Court.

The now retracted study used Medicaid claims data to track E.R. visits by patients in the month after having an abortion. The study found a much higher rate of complications than similar studies that have examined abortion safety.

Sage, the publisher of the journal, retracted the study on Monday along with two other papers, explaining in a statement that "expert reviewers found that the studies demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor that invalidates or renders unreliable the authors' conclusions."

It also noted that most of the authors on the paper worked for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of anti-abortion lobbying group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, and that one of the original peer reviewers had also worked for the Lozier Institute.

Mary Ziegler, a law professor and expert on the legal history of abortion at U.C. Davis: "We've already seen, when it comes to abortion, that the court has a propensity to look at the views of experts that support the results it wants," she says. The decision that overturned Roe v. Wade is an example, she says. "The majority [opinion] relied pretty much exclusively on scholars with some ties to pro-life activism and didn't really cite anybody else even or really even acknowledge that there was a majority scholarly position or even that there was meaningful disagreement on the subject."

“Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,” an anonymous Latin treatise that declared the best policy in religious matters to be “allowing every man to think what he likes, and say what he thinks.” In the preface, the author gave thanks for the “rare happiness of living in a republic, where everyone’s judgment is free and unshackled, where each may worship God as his conscience dictates, and where freedom is esteemed before all things dear and precious.” But the fact that the author withheld his name, and that the book’s Amsterdam publisher claimed on the title page that it had been printed in Hamburg, told another story. The author and the publisher were well aware that their unshackled judgment could put them in shackles.

These feints couldn’t stop readers, or the authorities, from quickly figuring out that the “Tractatus” was the work of Baruch Spinoza. Although Spinoza, then in his late thirties, had previously published only one book, a guide to the fashionable philosophy of René Descartes, he was one of Amsterdam’s most notorious freethinkers. As a young man, he had been expelled from the city’s Jewish community for his heretical views on God and the Bible. (He published under the name Benedictus de Spinoza, Benedictus being the Latin equivalent of Baruch, which means “blessed” in Hebrew.) Living a quiet, solitary existence, supporting himself by grinding lenses for microscopes and telescopes, Spinoza developed his ideas into a comprehensive philosophical system, which he shared with a circle of friends in letters and conversations. When Koerbagh was interrogated, he was asked whether he had fallen under Spinoza’s malign influence. He acknowledged that they were friends, but insisted that they had never discussed ideas—even though what he wrote about God closely resembled what Spinoza had been saying for years.

Ministers in several cities immediately forbade booksellers to carry the “Tractatus,” and, in 1674, it was officially banned in the Netherlands, along with Thomas Hobbes’s “Leviathan.” Under the circumstances, Spinoza’s praise of Dutch freedom might well sound sarcastic. But the truth is that, compared with most of Europe in the seventeenth century, the Netherlands really was a haven of tolerance. In Spain or Italy, a book like Spinoza’s could get its author burned by the Inquisition; as it was, the attacks were aimed at his ideas, not his life. His praise of his country is better seen as a kind of appeal: Perhaps no country in Europe was truly free, but the Netherlands might be if it tried.

For Ian Buruma, a writer and historian and a former editor of The New York Review of Books, it is Spinoza’s dedication to freedom of thought—what he called libertas philosophandi—that makes him a thinker for our moment. In his new book, “Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah,” a short biography in Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, Buruma observes that “intellectual freedom has once again become an important issue, even in countries, such as the United States, that pride themselves on being uniquely free.”

Why are peaceful protesters treated like terrorists, while actual terrorists (especially on the far right, and especially in the US) often remain unmolested by the law? Why, in the UK, can you now potentiallyreceive a longer sentence for “public nuisance” – non-violent civil disobedience – than for rape or manslaughter? Why are ordinary criminals being released early to make space in overcrowded prisons, only for the space to be refilled with political prisoners: people trying peacefully to defend the habitable planet?

There’s a simple explanation. It was clearly expressed by a former analyst at the US Department of Homeland Security. “You don’t have a bunch of companies coming forward saying: ‘I wish you’d do something about these rightwing extremists.’” The disproportionate policing of environmental protest, the new offences and extreme sentences, the campaigns of extrajudicial persecution by governments around the world are not, as politicians constantly assure us, designed to protect society. They’re a response to corporate lobbying.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/11577936

NPR interviews the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate about the new strategies being used online by those with interests in denying anthropogenic global warming. Audio (~12min) + transcript.

“The three major families in the new denial are: that climate solutions won’t work, that the impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless, or that the climate science and the climate movement are unreliable. Because let’s be absolutely frank about this: This has never been a debate about the science. This has been a debate between scientists and those who want to stop action being taken on climate change because that would destroy the oil and gas industry.”

NPR interviews the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate about the new strategies being used online by those with interests in denying anthropogenic global warming. Audio (~12min) + transcript.

“The three major families in the new denial are: that climate solutions won’t work, that the impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless, or that the climate science and the climate movement are unreliable. Because let’s be absolutely frank about this: This has never been a debate about the science. This has been a debate between scientists and those who want to stop action being taken on climate change because that would destroy the oil and gas industry.”

A new study, published in the journal Science Advances, Wednesday, finds that hot droughts have become more prevalent and severe across the western U.S. as a result of human-caused climate change.

"The frequency of compound warm and dry summers particularly in the last 20 years is unprecedented," said Karen King, lead author of the study and an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

For much of the last 20 years, western North America has been in the grips of a megadrought that's strained crop producers and ecosystems, city planners and water managers. Scientists believe it to be the driest period in the region in at least 1,200 years. They reached that determination, in part, by studying the rings of trees collected from thousands of sites across the Western U.S.

Cross-sections or cores of trees, both living and dead, can offer scientists windows into climate conditions of the past. Dark scars can denote wildfires. Pale rings can indicate insect outbreaks. "Narrow rings [mean] less water," said King, a dendrochronologist, who specialized in tree ring dating. "Fatter rings, more water."

Scientists have looked at tree ring widths to understand how much water was in the soil at a given time. King and fellow researchers did something different. They wanted to investigate the density of individual rings to get a picture of historical temperatures. In hotter years, trees build denser cell walls to protect their water.

King collected samples of tree species from mountain ranges around the West, road-tripping from the Sierra Nevada to British Columbia to the southern Rockies. She and her co-authors used those samples and others to reconstruct a history of summer temperatures in the West over the last 500 years.

The tree rings showed that the first two decades of this century were the hottest the southwestern U.S., the Pacific Northwest and parts of Texas and Mexico had experienced during that time. Last year was the hottest year on record globally.

By combining that temperature data with another tree-ring-sourced dataset looking at soil moisture, the researchers showed that today's hotter temperatures – sent soaring by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities – have made the current western megadrought different from its predecessors.

It also suggests that future droughts will be exacerbated by higher temperatures, particularly in the Great Plains, home to one of the world's largest aquifers, and the Colorado River Basin, the source of water for some 40 million people.

"As model simulations show that climate change is projected to substantially increase the severity and occurrence of compound drought and heatwaves across many regions of the world by the end of the 21st century," the authors wrote. "It is clear that anthropogenic drying has only just begun."

scientists led by archaeologist Prof Mark Collard of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver say the truth may be far more gruesome. “There is compelling evidence that these people may have had their fingers amputated deliberately in rituals intended to elicit help from supernatural entities,” said Collard.

We’ve heard our users loud and clear - interoperable end to end encryption (E2EE) across email providers is critical for privacy and security online. We have taken this feedback to heart. We are proud to announce support for PGP encryption inside Skiff mail starting today for all users across all tiers, including Free.

The latest helpful guidance from Mr. Deity. If like so many of us you hear voices in your head, but aren't sure it's God, this vid's for you.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/8715846

Much more in the linked article (NPR), worth a read if the topic concerns you.

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McIntire is 69, part of the baby boomer generation that is entering older age amid a historic affordable housing shortage and rising wealth inequality in the U.S.

She wishes she'd known earlier how difficult things could get.

"I think that's the main thing people need to know," she says, "that they need to be prepared beforehand for what's coming down the road."

A newly released report from Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies sounds a loud warning about what's ahead as the country ages rapidly, and how unprepared the U.S. is as boomers start to turn 80 within the next decade.

Nearly a third of households headed by seniors are considered cost burdened, which means they pay more than 30% of their income for housing. Half of that group pays more than 50%. And as the boomers have aged, households in this group reached an all-time high of 11.2 million in 2021.

That's likely to grow further as the number of households headed by someone aged 80 and over doubles by 2040.

"Their purchasing power is going down, at a time when rents are rising and other costs are rising, food and health care and all of that," says Jennifer Molinsky, project director of Harvard's Housing and Aging Society program.

Even for many moderate income seniors, Molinsky says the dual burden of housing costs and caregiving needs will be too much.