Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

This Washington Post story demonstrates how completely routine it has become for journalists to use the word "conservative" to describe right-wing extremist.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/05/abortion-pills-texas-lawsuit/

The fact that right-wing extremism is now the the center of the Republican Party doesn't make it "conservative," but Big Journalism can't be bothered to explain any of this.

Our media's normalization of extremism accelerates.

Leaked video footage of ocean pollution shines light on deep-sea mining - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/06/leaked-video-footage-of-ocean-pollution-shines-light-on-deep-sea-mining deep-sea mining is clearly going to be the next mega environmental disaster... #extractives

Big Journalism grossly downplayed the accomplishments of the Biden administration and Democratic-controlled Congress in 2021-22.

Now, Big Journalism is puzzled that the public isn't aware of those accomplishments.

(Not a hint of this in the Post story, of course...)

(begin quote)

"Let's get something straight. Growing old doesn't make people #conservative. In fact the more marginalized identity statuses a person has, the LESS conservative they grow over time.
The reason we equate "old" with "conservative" is that #marginalization kills people off younger.

Some of the most radical people you know are old.

It's just a lot of others died before they could get there, so there's a diminishing proportion. (2/5)

Plastics produced from plants are often considered less environmentally damaging than plastics made from petrochemicals. But scientists are warning that we should be careful making such assumptions.

Written by Michael Allan

https://hakaimagazine.com/news/dont-overestimate-bioplastics-benefits/

#plastic #plasticpollution #oceans #sustainability #waste #garbage #recycling

Fixed an index corruption bug in Debian Code Search 😱

https://github.com/Debian/dcs/commit/5065495e59011fa66d8ae0e9b5d8e9ad7119fba7

The impact was that some queries might have lacked results within a fraction of packages (estimate: ≈2000 out of ≈35342).

If you are relying on any Debian Code Search queries for an important analysis since November 2022, you should re-run them just to be sure!

#debian

An abolitionist designed the statue. A group of abolitionists paid for the statue. There's a plaque at the feet telling everyone what it's for. They named it the Statue of Liberty. It's arguably the largest anti-racism monument in the US, and the most recognizable anti-racism monument in the world...

Except people don't even know it's an anti-racism monument. They think it celebrates the huge influx of white immigrants from Europe that came to the US.

Reminder: A few top editors at Big Journalism companies claimed outrage that their reporters had been targeted for suspensions -- some still in force -- by Musk and minions. In fact, they demonstrated a pathetic weakness because their companies kept posting on Twitter, and kept advertising on the site.

It goes without saying, of course, that Big Journalism is not interested in covering the implications of this mercantile cowardice.

Why does Kerala top many rankings of educational attainment in India?

https://www.mutualinterest.coop/2023/02/key-facts-about-why-kerala-is-the-flagship-of-indian-education-system

New article on Mutual Interest Media, a no-paywall coop owned by readers and writers.

We use participatory budgeting to decide how our funds are allocated.

Our decisions are made on Loomio, a tool developed by a worker coop. Instead of Patreon, we use Open Collective hosted by a coop. And our website is hosted by a coop too!

Consider joining here:

https://opencollective.com/mutual-interest-media

A new paper by Prof Dan Ho of Stanford shows racial bias in tax audits - black Americans are 3-5x more likely to be audited

I'm saddened, but not especially surprised: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/us/politics/black-americans-irs-tax-audits.html

Janet Holtzblatt & I wrote a Tax Policy Center primer about the emerging use of machine learning by IRS for audit selection.

We raised these specific concerns, especially that lower audits rates and reduced IRS budget would increase the likelihood of bias: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2022-06/Machine%20Learning%20and%20Tax%20Enforcement.pdf

In fact you know what? Let's make this thread about cool projects not hosted on Microsoft GitHub.

Any self-hostable repo system instance counts (yes, that includes GitLab in my book) counts.

Respond with a link to a repo and a paragraph-two of a description of the project, and I will boost it (unless for whatever reason I consider the project meh; it's my thread, sorry :P ).

@lightweight Electronic Frontiers Australia. When I pointed out how using Google Docs was directly contradictory the principles of EFA and suggested we maybe use a wiki I was told that it was just easier to use Google docs. I just lost respect for the organisation and had to withdraw.

If you just upgraded to #PHP 8 and found all your email sending is broken, it's probably because you're using PHP_EOL ("\n") as the email header delimiter.

Either change your code or change your sendmail_path ini setting to use the dos2unix trick outlined at https://github.com/php/php-src/issues/8086

Instead of: no one wants to work anymore. Try: no one wants to be exploited anymore.

Were you laid off from the tech industry in the last few months? Do you want to talk about your experience and thoughts on the industry for a Wash Post story? Hoping to talk with people who held any roles. Dm or email me: Rachel.lerman@washpost.com.