Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Some folks might be thinking, “Unlike the Fediverse, Substack gives writers an opportunity to get paid.”

Not so fast.

When @TexasObserver was nearly shut down because they lacked funding for operations, they turned to the Fediverse for help.

Within 48 hours, we helped them raise $250,000 in funding—and now that 70-year-old newspaper still lives.

As a result 17 journalists still have their jobs.

Substack is not a suitable alternative to Twitter.

If Elon Musk can buy Twitter, he can buy Substack.

However, Elon Musk cannot buy the Fediverse. No one company owns it. It is not for sale.

You do not need a billionaire or a VC fund to use social media.

They are just middlemen opportunists trying to insert themselves between you and your friends.

The Internet was built to make it easy for you to connect with others, and that is getting easier with protocols like ActivityPub.

You don’t need Elon Musk. You don’t need Mark Zuckerberg. You certainly don’t need any Silicon Valley tech bro to let you use social media.

Successive gov'ts have been bamboozled by Microsoft and AWS. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/487836/microsoft-and-amazon-sign-memorandums-of-understanding-with-government What I can't work out is why these folks can't understand that big tech is *the enemy* not our ally. They are the problem, not the solution. And these MOUs are just 'TrickleDownEconomics', i.e. fundamentally flawed.

My email flow has dramatically improved ever since I created a macro and folder hook in mutt so that by default I only see new, unopened, or flagged messages. I don't move opened emails from my INBOX elsewhere so no INBOX 0.

Now I only see emails I need to take some sort of action on. I can filter messages other ways, then press '.o' whenever I want to resume this view.

If you are a mutt user, use these two options to your .muttrc:

macro index .o "l(~N|~O|~F)\n"
folder-hook . push '.o'

#mutt

UK still well off track on pledge to cut methane emissions, study says - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/12/uk-off-track-on-pledge-to-cut-methane-emissions-study-30-per-cent-2030 it's probably being emitted by all the sewage in our rivers and seas... #pollution #tories

🚨Job alert!🚨 We’re hiring an Operations Assistant / Office Manager to handle critical administrative tasks in support of our programmatic work and maintenance of our NYC office. Details here: https://grnh.se/f636e3135us

#Road-building spree will derail #UK’s net zero targets, warn campaigners | #Environment | The Guardian

The #Road and #MotorVehicle #lobby is too powerful.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/12/road-building-spree-will-derail-uks-net-zero-targets-warn-campaigners

#Pollution #GlobalWarming #ClimateChange #Congestion #Traffic #Transport

Hard to pick the most reprehensible company in the tech industry (other than the spyware outfits, like NSO, that should be burned to the ground on general principle).

But Clearview AI -- which has scraped billions of photos and sold them to police who hold the Constitution in contempt -- deserves a special dishonorable mention: https://www.businessinsider.com/clearview-scraped-30-billion-images-facebook-police-facial-recogntion-database-2023-4

Our report on Kristina Karamo, the new chair of the Michigan GOP, who has accused music stars like Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Cardi B, Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish of being tools of Satan. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/11/politics/kfile-michigan-gop-chair-kristina-karamo-comments/index.html

Insurance (CVS): "We only cover medication bought at CVS pharmacies."

Pharmacy (CVS): "We're out of that medication. It's a nationwide shortage."

Insurance (CVS): "Ask your doctor about a different medication."

Me: "Here is a prescription from my doctor for a different medication."

Insurance: "We don't cover that medication because your regular medication is cheaper."

Unsurprisingly, #HealthInsurance working as intended to steal money from me in exchange for nothing. #ADHD

The extremist right, which now totally controls the Republican Party, is on the offensive everywhere -- curbing women's healthcare, censoring books, banning dissent, encouraging violence, flouting racism, rigging the election system, and ultimately threatening democracy.

Journalism is covering all of this piecemeal -- noting the individual brush fires but never, ever warning the public that the entire forest is ablaze.

Journalistic business as usual is malpractice.

And time is short.

Not content with banning ideas they fear from school and public libraries, the extremist right (aka Republican Party) is now looks to kill the libraries. See this from ever-more-retrograde Missouri: https://heartlandsignal.com/2023/04/11/missouri-house-republicans-vote-to-defund-libraries/#:~:text=Missouri%20House%20Republicans%20voted%20to,the%20GOP%2Dcontrolled%20state%20Senate

EFF's @jgkelley talks with Politico about Utah's law to restrict access to social media for minors and require parental monitoring: "Parents don’t need to be listening over the shoulder for every conversation that a young person has." https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/11/social-media-privacy-parents-kids-00091400

Like protesters, journalists write lawyers’ numbers on their arms not because they intend to commit crimes but because they know they may be wrongly arrested. Letting prosecutors infer criminality from this common practice would reward cops’ bad behavior. https://freedom.press/news/reject-unconstitutional-efforts-to-criminalize-legal-support-numbers/

‘The Saint’ leaves Italian town after case opened into statue’s ‘tears of blood’ - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/11/the-saint-leaves-italian-town-after-case-opened-into-statues-tears-of-blood "blood stains on statue of Virgin Mary come from a pig". no, really? I shocked, shocked...

Let's be real: none of us authors could even get away with naming a shady billionaire "Harlan Crow," much less him tampering with elections, building a Garden of Evil, and owning Hitler's teapot.

Basically:

🔹 AI doesn't reliably give useful results, but even if it did
🔹 AI rampantly perpetuates existing harms, but even if it didn't
🔹 AI proponents are not being honest or acting in good faith, but even if they were
🔹 People don't understand the limits of LLMs or how they work, but even if they did
🔹 AI cannot maintain a complex system because it's fundamentally a task of understanding the system, but even if it could

Humans still need opportunity to learn how to make sense of those systems, and we do that by making them. Giving all the work that's most conducive to learning to a computer is selling out our futures. Even if there was some present benefit, which I'm not convinced there is.

https://jenniferplusplus.com/losing-the-imitation-game/

@xor The owners of Uline are massive funders of the right wing ideologues https://refuseuline.com/