The right-wing brigading of Amazon reviews of the essential new book by @Noupside is about the best evidence you'll see of why her work has been so important. We shouldn't countenance the supremely bad-faith attacks that have cost her -- and all of us in the end -- so much.
https://mastodon.social/@Noupside@saturation.social/112654991007362111
Apparently Orbea bikes has been a worker owned co-op for 55 years and I had no idea until just now! I'm very curious about how they're structured and how they handle employee ownership. If anyone in my co-op or bicycle circles has a contact there, I'd love to chat with them.
@ubersoft I've always considered Microsoft Word to be the worst documentation tool I've used. On OS/2, I was using Relish, but on Linux (and Windows at work) I use LyX. Love the What You See Is What You Meant paradigm, and without LyX, I'll just use LaTeX.
Summer's just starting and the climate records are already being shattered. https://brianmcfadden.org/2024/06/14/2024s-climate-records/
Check out the ongoing Purism Differentiator Series! From Our Operating System to baked-in Convergence, Purism has its own way of doing things. Stay tuned as we explore the diverse facets of Purism's unique offerings! #DifferentiatorSeries #PureOS #Purism #Librem5
https://puri.sm/posts/purism-differentiator-series-part-1-summary/
Microsoft knows I'm turning 53 in two weeks and is really committed to getting a little payback for all the comics. :-D
‘It felt like bad news after bad news’: why record numbers are leaving #NewZealand - https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/21/it-felt-like-bad-news-after-bad-news-why-record-numbers-are-leaving-new-zealand amazing: used to be regarded as some kind of paradise...
Britain’s millionaires are fleeing. Good night and good luck, I say - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/21/britain-millionaires-leave-tax-havens-uk good riddance, I say: if all you care about is maximising your wealth through tax avoidance, you poison our society, rather than enhancing it...
@dynamic Are they ever useful?
This take, by @timbray
on Wikipedia, reliability, and sourcing is excellent.
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/06/15/Wikipedia-Pain
It turns out that a five sentence letter to the editor published by the New England Journal of Medicine back in 1980 helped fuel the #Opioid crisis. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/how-a-letter-to-the-editor-enabled-the-opioid-crisis/
@mattblaze The way the Mastodon web UI copies ALT into TITLE is horrible. And the spec specifically says you should not do that. I reported a bug about it that I expect to be given... "all due consideration".
Fossil fuel companies are literally spending billions to try to find any way to suppress shareholder oversight. The current initiative is the absurd claim that the foundational basis of capitalism somehow is a violation of antitrust laws. My response:
"Having failed to persuade anyone last year that there was some improper behavior that might be violating securities laws[1], the same forces have persuaded a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee to try to find a violation of the antitrust laws. At this point, they are just throwing darts at a list of federal legislation to see if they can find a way to explain that it is illegal for shareholders to raise concerns about corporate strategy and conflicts of interest. When the attempt to find a fit with antitrust law fails, they may come back next year with a claim that the FDA should look into shareholder requests for information because they cause queasiness and weak knees in corporate executives."
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/06/20/shareholders-are-not-an-antitrust-problem/
@pluralistic When you boil it down, talking Big Tech is about talking software these days, and not too many in the business are measuring or applying meaningful metrics to software. Capers Jones and e.g., IFPUG have a lot of data and some good methods, but not too many are using their methods and data. This results in a lot of crappy software (apps, languages, tools, OSes, ...) with no empirical measure of its crappiness. #regulation please!
It's not your imagination: tech really *is* underregulated. There are plenty of avoidable harms that tech visits upon the world, and while some of these harms are mere negligence, others are self-serving, creating shareholder value *and* widespread public destruction.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/20/scalesplaining/#administratability
1/
#ShlaerMellor, #FunctionPointAnalysis, #punk, #environmentalist, #unionAdvocate, #anarchosocialist
"with a big old lie and a flag and a pie and a mom and a bible most folks are just liable to buy any line, any place, any time" - Frank Zappa