Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Texas, where people with handgun licenses are allowed to concealed carry on college campuses (https://guides.sll.texas.gov/gun-laws/schools-colleges) is also the state where a state house representative introduced a bill on February 16 to prohibit polling places at higher education campuses "in the best interests of safety" because "There’s a lot of opportunity there for people to be places they shouldn’t be."

https://www.kbtx.com/2023/02/18/texas-lawmaker-proposes-bill-prohibit-polling-places-colleges/

It isn't being in offices that makes employees want to keep working from home though the covid risks do rise significantly.

It's the aggravation of commuting -- and the huge waste of time and money.

These "top 10 candidates for 2024" lists keep coming out every few months. They're incredibly embarrassing for political journalists, who seem to be intent on willfully ignoring all of the lessons of the 2020 Democratic primary (👇) & deeply committed to again erasing black voters from the party.

Pete Buttigieg at #2? 🤷‍♂️

The rest is silly, too. Warnock/ Booker not even ranked. Polis/Newsom over Whitmer/Shapiro/Pritzker. Etc. It's like actual US politics doesn't exist.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/19/top-democrats-2024-ranked/

Today is the Day of Remembrance for the Japanese American community. 81 years ago today, when I was just a boy of four, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, setting in motion the evacuation of people of Japanese descent from the West Coast and our long years of internment inside ten barbed wire prison camps.

We must never let such a thing happen again in America, and and we must strive everywhere to prevent the forced relocation and mass incarceration of innocent people. #NeverForget #NeverAgain

Made an infographic about how VISA started and operated as a #coop for most of it's history. The founder Dee Hock envisioned expanding the membership to cardholders and merchants, not just banks.

This would have made it the largest coop the world had ever seen; with over 2 billion members, it's membership would have been almost twice as large as all other #coops in the world combined!

https://www.mutualinterest.coop/2023/02/visas-founders-vision-of-a-global-mega-co-op

Published on Mutual Interest, a coop owned by readers and writers.

A short introduction on how to use your desktop system for #MobileLinux development using a nested #phosh session (and without having to compile anything):

https://phosh.mobi/posts/phosh-dev-part-0/

This is planned to have follow up parts, let's see how this works out.

#LinuxMobile

Florida's war on freedom expression is expanding. Now it's fired a teacher who shared a video of empty classroom bookshelves.

The extremists who run the state government don't need to burn books. Abuses like this are handling the censorship just as effectively.

https://jezebel.com/florida-teacher-is-fired-for-posting-viral-video-of-emp-1850130894

I subscribe to (and pay for) a number of excellent news-focused newsletters. I don't appreciate it when several of them keep imploring me to send more money, using scare language.

This is the same way that online political fundraising works: Give once, and you're the target of incessant exhortations to give more.

Independent journalists, I want you to thrive, but this stuff leaves a bad taste.

The US is the greatest country on the planet. Look how much we care about the children!

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/17/business/packers-sanitation-child-labor/index.html

"The company was fined the maximum civil penalty allowed by federal law — $15,138 for each minor-aged employee...A federal judge issued a *temporary restraining order* barring the company from committing further child labor law violations."

No one is going to jail over this. I doubt anyone even lost their job. We live in hell, in case you hadn't noticed.

"... we can restore balance going forward: by mandating the use of vendor-neutral, royalty free, open standards for all software procurement. In doing so, we would simply be applying the same prudence to software procurement that we do for procurement in almost every other industry. Having signed up for the D5 Charter, we'd be demonstrating that we've learned from the UK's sensible and bold example: they mandated open standards in 2014."

@lightweight

https://openstandards.nz/

#PolicyNZ

The people flooded out on the flat land saying they want to move to the hills

And the people smashed by land slips on the hill saying they want to move to the flat.

Climate change is all of us, it's not gonna be avoided by moving.

Here's a possibly unpopular #Infosec opinion.

For ordinary non-corporate end users, SSO systems like "Sign in with Google/Microsoft/Facebook" are a bad idea.

Here's the reason. It's possible to get banned from an entire ecosystem based on a perceived infraction on one site, and there have been multiple cases of this happening. When these bans occur they can stop you being able to use that SSO system, locking you out of every account that uses it.

Ordinary end users have very little chance of getting a sensible response from mega-corps when this happens.

The impact of being locked out of all your systems if this happens is high, and possibly a worse outcome than losing an individual credential because of a hack when you're managing your own credentials.

Last week, my colleague Kevin was ready to give up Google in favor of the new AI-powered Bing. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/technology/microsoft-bing-openai-artificial-intelligence.html This week, he writes about a chat with Bing's AI leaving him deeply unsettled after it told him about the many terrible things it's "shadow self" wanted to do and confessed its love repeatedly for him. The cycle from enchantment to terror with new technologies is really accelerating! https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html The convo transcript is worth a read. Unlocked: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-transcript.html?unlocked_article_code=5L9j4UTGa2Sq9R0FulDKfmcq3aesNcqqwZkPBwsIW7EvqkbanIdsZU0hoKktwWijvrw8qobVzmdbyZfxtRjhZQWMN1Qi39t035TVJEllXwc9_zmJYNu_Y9gQ-8ROXYZ8ReuKsdz9WCv7bu_V75hZNZXipGPrv_h5g6phWp8GUX2DTCGQMjV-CTjJybDonBvQaR_kPJbX2zzNM8s4PROKIK32tEVmqGFG0Z1mfzUetZbXqKtz-3b7jFe4M4ylQHHbCnqtSyX4zN6HT4SLsCliddmSW4Aq5V5MZXuwzlSaLgLra8kE5mc1MQuP7cMU9jA6JiP7lhfRpgwcKeHKrGOCRiL21Bw&smid=url-share

RT @tzimmer_history
The “cancel culture” and anti-“wokeism” moral panics rely on a complete inversion of the actual balance of power, portraying traditionally marginalized groups as mighty forces that urgently need to be reined in – and those in elite positions as desperately in need of protection.

PSA: Referring to the exercises given to schoolchildren to help them learn how to effectively communicate their ideas as "pointless essays" is anti-intellectual and I don't like it.

My 11yo boy just got home from school on his bike (just!) quite shaken: a tradie in an SUV drove past him at speed on a section of road with parked cars on either side, making it dangerously narrow, clipping his elbow with the car's wing mirror.

We managed to track down the company & the driver. My wife had a fairly forceful word with him - he made bad excuses... his callous driving could easily've cost us our boy & the driver any sort of positive future. 1.5m = min legal passing distance.

The US is so dystopian that I genuinely need to clarify that:

* Housed people commit *significantly* more crime against homeless people than vice versa. Housed people also commit more crime against other housed people.

* The solution for "people with untreated mental illness living in the subway" is neither "involuntary detention in a mental institution" nor "forced medication." It is "Affordable and accessible mental healthcare and medication."

https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109874911422615244