Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

My friend @afeinman (author of _Duplicate_ , _We Were Gods_, and _Philadelphia Story: Roughskin Magic_) is trying to figure out how to connect with readers of his in-development fiction stories.

Does anyone have words of wisdom on how to most effectively share fiction on Mastodon?

https://social.coop/@afeinman@wandering.shop/110199884213890632

I worked in a nursing home about 18 years ago, and even then, when they had no problem filling positions, the place was still "chronically understaffed." On the weekends, some residents had unanswered call lights on for half an hour or more before someone could check on them. The status quo ante was already bad, now it's even worse. 😡

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly/2023/04/13/the-red-lights-are-flashing-in-our-health-care-system-00092004

It's incredibly disappointing to see people I respect even thinking about replacing Twitter with another centralized company funded by right-wing tech bros.

Audience is the only thing that matters, I guess.

It's not complicated: Clarence Thomas, who shits all over the notion of "Equal Justice Under Law" every time he puts on his robes, took undisclosed bribes from the billionaire whose right-wing policies he's been championing through the court for decades. #SCOTUS #crime #GOP https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-real-estate-scotus

The government *always* exaggerates claims of national security "damage" when something leaks. Always.

It's sad so many news outlets who know better have been uncritically repeating this sky-is-falling rhetoric.

https://theintercept.com/2023/04/13/pentagon-classified-documents-leak/

Join us on May 2nd for a conversation about worker-consumer #multistakeholder #coops.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/owning-together-worker-consumer-co-ops-in-conversation-registration-615930553867

Medical crowdfunders for Britons surge amid record NHS waiting lists - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/13/medical-crowdfunders-for-britons-surge-amid-record-nhs-waiting-lists-gofundme just what the tories want: destroy #NHS, drive people to private

‘I’m all for climate change’: Axel Springer CEO faces heat over leaked messages - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/13/axel-springer-ceo-mathias-dopfner-leaked-messages-reported what a vile and stupid individual...

Watching my post (which never mentioned Steve Jobs) spread and mutate into straight disinformation, entirely via Google News search alerts for my name, has been *fascinating*.

I wonder how many tens/hundreds/thousands of $billions Microsoft has received in 'royalties' (another name for coercive junk-software-patent extortion protection rackets)? Last I heard, they were getting about USD15 per handset manufactured by every Android OEM.

Here is a must-read post from children's author Maggie Tokuda-Hall on how Scholastic offered to publish her book — all she had to do was remove all mention of racism.

Sure, they're banning books in Tennessee and Texas. But it's not just the books that get published and then banned from the library. It's all the books that don't get published in the first place.

Those banning books know publishers like Scholastic pull this cowardly bullshit. It's their game plan.

https://www.prettyokmaggie.com/blog/2023/4/11/scholastic-and-a-faustian-bargain

Given all hype about #5G I wrote an explanation that (I hope) doesn't require getting into the technical weeds to see past the BS.
https://rmf.vc/5GHype

A tragedy catches our attention, we point to statistics to show it's an example of a distressingly common problem, and we propose laws to address the issue. Except the event is rarely representative of the larger problem, and so these policy changes won't help much with the issues reflected in the statistics. Instead, we should combine the anger and passion the tragedy evokes with a deeper interpretation of the statistics to identify what changes we most need. https://www.jefftk.com/p/outrage-and-statistics-into-policy

@waldoj @Npars01 @anildash I think part of the problem is thinking of it as "Mastodon" — you don't need a Mastodon server for announcements, you can bolt basic, one-way ActivityPub onto any simple server stack for a fraction of the price. That's enough for people to get updates on their Mastodon feed, wouldn't need any moderation, and there'd be very little point in even the most idealist instances defederating from a glorified RSS feed.

There are lots of nice, kind people at Microsoft (and Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon) - I have friends who work there. But what they're working towards is *all bad*. They work within a largely ethics-free machine (they just laid off their entire 'ethics team' as they were pointless): an autocracy ready to do anything to maximise shareholder value. They are not making the world better (nor will they 'improve it from within'). Their vision is clouded by their association & paycheque.

*chefkiss*

Nowadays it's a common belief in tech circles that copy-pasting an internet address of any kind is too difficult for non-technical users. How can this be true when most of us have typed website addresses, email addresses and phone numbers manually for decades?

My grandmother dialed phone numbers by hand, often from memory, on a rotary phone with no display. She wasn't technical in the slightest, but found phones very easy to use.

Why is the tech industry infantilising people like this?
Is this the aim of commercial tech companies now, to insert themselves unnecessarily into everyday life?

@onepict raised a similar point about the "what three words" location system, which is trying to replace the free open co-ordinate system the entire world has used for centuries with a closed copyrighted monetised system they control.

Why are people letting themselves be conned into thinking easy things they've done for years are suddenly too difficult for them?

Concentrations of capital and political influence like any massive corporation (especially big tech) - all of which are psychopathic autocracies, who will steamroller anything that stands in the way of their single directive - maximise shareholder value, i.e. profit - are inherently abhorrent.

They've nearly finished neutralising the sovereignty of democratic nations (#CPTPPA anyone?), but it'll take ages before most of us realise they're nearly done digitally subjugating our society.

💡 Good to see this #UN Development Programme #UNDP report out, sharing the knowledge we worked hard to seed.

🗨️ #DigitalPublicGoods #DPGs are becoming critical levers for advancing the Sustainable Development Goals #SDGs. This report discusses emerging insights related to their #sustainability, replicability and partnerships based on case studies of four digital solutions (three of which are accredited DPGs) and a digital government programme.

#FreeSoftware #OpenSource

https://www.undp.org/publications/digital-public-goods-sdgs

The "100k" trained people will be trained in MSFT's/AWS' *proprietary* tools which will, in effect, indenture them to those particular monocultures & make them effectively incapable of using anything else. It's part of big tech's anti-competitive practices, tantamount to digital imperialism/colonialism.