kersploosh

For example, using absolute numbers from Wikipedia...
South Africa: 27,272
Haiti + Philippines + Ecuador: 28,509

That map would look very different.

You're right that using absolute numbers in the first place is bad practice.

The Catholic press has picked it up, too:

https://www.ncronline.org/news/california-bishops-scramble-tend-catholics-feeling-hunted-ice-agents

There are hints that the current government's actions are widening a cultural rift in the church. Considering how large the Catholic church is, I'm really interested to see how this plays out.

https://www.ncronline.org/news/trumps-immigration-agenda-widening-fissures-catholic-hierarchys-consensus

The choice of regions feels cherry-picked to inflate the blue area on the map. Why else would they include Mongolia, or include only the least-dense regions of the US and Russia while excluding the major population centers?

While South Africa certainly has a lot of murders, both absolute and per capita, this map could easily be draw with a lot less blue on it.

To add all the other good comments here...

As a recording artist, it's nearly impossible to stand out unless you have a marketing machine behind you. That means a record label that can promote your work, get your songs placed on radio stations and streaming platforms, and (in the old days) manufacture and sell physical media through many different retailers.

As a touring performer, you also need a large crew of people working for you: booking venues, marketing your shows, ticketing, managing the logistics of set-up/tear-down/transportation, operating lights and sound during the show, etc.

In both of these scenarios, the musician is only one small cog in a large machine. And there are enough good musicians in the world that they are treated as largely interchangeable.

There is a significant group of conservative Catholics who view any change as a departure from the One True Faith™. You can still find churches that do not follow the modernizations from the Second Vatican Council, which happened back in the 1950s. Pope Francis was seen as a radical by many of these people.

I'll bet the lane is there purely to satisfy some requirement for including non-car infrastructure, regardless of whether it makes sense in this particular location. It's the same way we get fun bike lanes like these:

Good point. I will add that to the long list of reforms we need in the US criminal system.

Mandatory minimums are a problem. Judges lose discretion to tailor the punishment to the specifics of the case. Minimums may be pushed unreasonably high so politicians can claim to be "tough on crime." (This happened big time in the US, starting with the War on Drugs in the 1970s and continuing through the 1990s.) Both of those lead to more people in prison longer than they should be.

Also, at least in the US, not all crimes carry mandatory minimum sentences. This gives prosecutors a new source of leverage:

The use of mandatory minimums effectively vests prosecutors with powerful sentencing discretion. The prosecutor controls the decision to charge a person with a mandatory-eligible crime and, in some states, the decision to apply the mandatory minimum to an eligible charge. Rather than eliminate discretion in sentencing, mandatory minimums therefore moved this power from judges to prosecutors. The threat of mandatory minimums also encourages defendants to plead to a different crime to avoid a stiff, mandatory sentence.

https://www.sentencingproject.org/fact-sheet/how-mandatory-minimums-perpetuate-mass-incarceration-and-what-to-do-about-it/

Mandatory minimums can also lead to significant racial disparities. The linked article cites an example of very different minimum sentences for different drug offenses, leading to a sharp rise in incarceration rates for blacks but much less so for whites.

!noncredibledefense@sh.itjust.works is leaking

"Everything will be better if we just feed a fifth of the population to the alligators!"

Absolutely insane.

Whatever the issue was, it was short-lived. It's now back to normal and only a few minutes behind.

Do you mean in the very short term, or over the last few days or weeks?

At the moment It looks like programming.dev is suddenly falling behind reddthat.com. It's currently ~40 minutes behind and getting worse. @snowe@programming.dev @Ategon@programming.dev, FYI.

I'm not savvy enough to know what causes this, but it has happened before between instances. @MrKaplan@lemmy.world might have some insight.