Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Google: hey so we're gonna have to lay off like 10,000 people :(
People: wow that sucks
Google: alos we're giving our CEO a huge raise
People: wait why what did he do to deserve that
Google: he laid off 10,000 people

You get the feeling that we're seen only the proverbial tip of the iceberg when it comes to Clarence Thomas' corruption. https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-private-school-tuition-scotus

Goldman Sachs, one of Wall Street's most routinely evil financial manipulators, had a significant role in the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-04/us-reviews-goldman-role-with-silicon-valley-bank-before-collapse?cmpid=BBD050423_MONEYSTUFF

I am thrilled to be recruiting a Demographer to work at the Pacific Community (SPC).

SPC has critical responsibilities in demography for the #Pacific including the region's population projections, demographic analyses in the many Population and Housing Censuses on which we assist Pacific Island countries and territories, and advice on integration of civil registry into statistical population estimates.

https://careers.spc.int/job/statistics-adviser-demography-statistics-noumea-new-caledonia-sh000323/f89ccbdd-ea28-11ed-8f0f-42010a8a0ff7

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/3/23709297/microsoft-edge-force-outlook-teams-web-links-open

Such a dick move!

After the May 1970 student strike against the expansion of the war in Cambodia, which escalated after the May 4 Kent State massacre, a poll found that "within the universities alone, more than a million people considered themselves 'revolutionaries.' In early 1971, the New York Times discovered that four out of ten students (over three million people) thought that a revolution was needed."

Cited in George Katsiaficas, The Global Imagination of 1968: Revolution and Counterrevolution (@pmpress, 2018).

As Katsiaficas puts it:
"Despite its brief appearance in history, the New Left regenerated dormant traditions of self-government and international solidarity. In Europe and the United States, after decades of cultural conformity, the possibility of revolution once again was widely discussed—and acted upon. At the same time, the meaning of revolution was enlarged to include questions of power in everyday life as well as the quality of power won by past revolutions.

If the idea of revolution in an industrialized society was inconceivable for three decades prior to 1968, the kind of revolution prefigured in the emergent praxis of the movement was unlike previous ones. The goal of revolution was redefined to be decentralization and self-management of power and resources—destruction, not seizure, of militarized nation-states embedded in an international web of war and corporate machinations.

By enunciating the desire for a new world society based on cooperative sharing of international resources (not national or individual aggregation), on a communalism based upon enlarged social autonomy and greater individual freedom (not their suppression), and a way of life based on a new harmony with nature (not its accelerating exploitation), the New Left defined a unique stage in the aspirations of revolutionary movements.

A new set of values was born in the movement’s international and interracial solidarity, in its rejection of middle-class values like the accumulation of wealth and power, in its fight against stupefying routines and ingrained patterns of patriarchal domination, and in its attempt to reconstruct everyday life, not according to tradition or scientific rationality but through a liberated sensibility.

In crises generated by insurgencies in 1968 in France and 1970 in the United States, these values were momentarily realized in spontaneously produced forms of dual power."

The cops don't want you to know the names (Bryland Myers, Jerry Parrish, Jonathan Salcedo, Mark Jonathan Lamb, Ronaldo Kegel, and Royce Zah) of the cops that killed Tortugita. They DEFINITELY don't want people to know that they have homes and addresses.

https://theintercept.com/2023/05/02/cop-city-activists-arrest-flyers/

#StopCopCity #Tortugita #ACAB

Journalists: please understand if Julian Assange can be prosecuted for receiving classified docs from a source, holding on to those docs, asking for more info, and publishing those docs, SO CAN YOU! https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/may/04/julian-assange-us-justice-department-wikileaks

When major policy changes are voted on immediately after exiting a closed meeting it's a safe bet the meeting shouldn't have been closed in the first place. https://co.chalkbeat.org/2023/4/28/23703421/denver-school-board-executive-session-police-school-resource-officers-lawsuit-open-meetings

What's the difference between a biogas digester and a septic tank?

This isn't the setup for a joke! It's a question I've been pondering because the bacteria in home biogas digesters can only work in warm conditions. (Recap: Digesters passively turn compost and excrement into fertilizer sludge + cooking gas.) So why not put the digester underground? But then... isn't that just a septic tank with a balloon on the vent to capture the methane?

...has anyone already built something like this?

Grain trader Cargill faces legal challenge in US over Brazilian soya supply chain - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/04/cargill-faces-legal-challenge-us-over-brazilian-soya-supply-chain-deforestation Cargill’s “shoddy due diligence raises the risk that the meat sold in supermarkets across the world is raised on so-called ‘dirty’ soy”. about time...

🧵 [1 / 15]

So, we jumped from #Twitter to #Mastodon, after a man with a sink showed us how fragile centralized platforms really are. And now there's #Bluesky wanting to convince us that their AT Protocol is even more robust than #ActivityPub. But is it really superior and would it have been better to build the #fediverse on top of this protocol, instead?

Thread time!

So the "nonpartisan" No Labels got a big gift from Clarence Thomas sugar daddy Crow.

https://newrepublic.com/article/172059/no-labels-took-100000-clarence-thomas-buddy-harlan-crow

The logical reason for this is that No Labels wants to ensure a Republican win in 2024, by siphoning off votes from Democrats.

As one WaPo commenter put it: "I am sick and tired of articles that seem to absolve the Republicans of their own idiocy and then blame the Democrats for not protecting us from the harm caused by Republicans." https://presswatchers.org/2023/04/republicans-threaten-to-tank-economy-media-blames-biden/

Let's be clear about what the Republicans are doing. They're holding the economy hostage, and are perfectly happy to kill it. They seem convinced that tanking the economy will give them control of government in the 2024 elections.

Given Big Journalism's eagerness to turn this into just another both-sides-have-a-point issue -- yet another staggering failure of journalism -- the Republicans may well pull it off.

We live in disheartening times.

@dogriley It did finish, eventually. Job done. Sadly, though, my faith in MariaDB is shaken by recent insights into their current corporate operation...

Wow, I'm really tiring of the breathless hype about 'AI' being tacitly encouraged by our media hiring endless 'pundits' to talk about AI. So, of course, that's what they talk about, shedding little if any light. Worse, they don't push back against the misleading use of the term 'AI' to describe ChatGPT and other LLMs (Large Learning Models). The slightly informed hired by the blind to editorialise for the even blinder.

Looking for a job where you can contribute to #FreeSoftware projects? Check out @fossjobs! They list technical and non-technical positions exclusively for paid free and #OpenSource jobs.

You can use this opportunity to work with organizations that improve and involve FOSS or open hardware projects.

Do you know some missing opportunities? Submit it.

https://fossjobs.net!

#opensourcejobs #techforgood

Got this month's literary loot from @pmpress

The Cargo Rebellion: Those Who Chose Freedom
https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1288

"A powerful graphic tale of the Robert Bowne Rebellion of 1852 in one of the darkest moments of human trafficking: the coolie trade. Fearless and visually striking, "

#grapicNovel #slavery #imperialism

Writing update: today I finished writing a draft of chapter four: writing a draft. I have to say, writing a book about writing a book is very meta.

#writing