Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

I previously had all my books marked returnable, but I had to change this because Amazon has been deliberately bulk buying and returning indie books printed through IngramSpark to pressure indie authors to use KDP. (Full info about this here: https://www.lyssachiavari.com/2023/04/21/why-my-books-are-no-longer-returnable-through-ingram/)

2/

Critical thinking fail. 🤦‍♂️

"I flipped this coin 500 times and it came up heads a few more times than it came up tails, proving conclusively that this coin is rigged."

https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/gpt-4-has-passed-the-turing-test-researchers-claim

The plain truth is that capitalism is killing us and we are out of planet. The only way to keep doing capitalism is going to be turning vast swathes of the planet into sacrifice zones and looting folks who can't protect themselves for their resources. If you're a capitalist, and you intend to keep doing capitalism, you're ultimately for genocide because there is no other way to accomplish that. And folks won't politely agree to die for your bottom line, so that means fascism. Balls and strikes.

a fun thing is that Mexicans just elected a nobel prize-winning climate scientist and leftist feminist woman as their president by wide margins

This is the right image to use for a heat wave; not one of children playing in the fountain or people frolicking on the beach.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/well/live/heat-weather-medication-safety.html

Liberals who think protesters are the enemy are actively encouraging the police state that Trump world wants to impose on America.

They should understand this, but they are either willfully dense, or myopic.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/liberal-police-state-campus-protests/

Latest comic: Billionaires Fund Human Intelligence

#ai #cartoon #comic #tech #technology #economy #internet #education

Indeed, if the prices are in a standards-defined, machine-readable form, patients and their advocates could automatically import them, create price-comparison sites, leaderboards, etc. None of this addresses the core problem that health-care is a) a human right and b) not a discretionary expense, but it could help at the margins.

But there's another wrinkle here. The same people who claim that prices can solve all of our problems also insist that monopolies are *impossible*.

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As Robert Kuttner writes for *The American Prospect*, this kind of abuse was predictable from the outset, especially since Health and Human Services is starved of budget for auditors and can only hand out "slaps on the wrist" when they catch a hospital ripping off the system:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-13-fantasyland-general/

10/

The hospital system responded by "upcoding' patients: if you showed up with a broken leg and a history of coronary disease, they would code you as a heart patient *and* someone who needed a cast. They'd collect both lump sums, slap a cast on you, and wheel you out the door:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4195137/

9/

Senate GOP—who unanimously let the child tax credit expire, increased childhood poverty 30%, & cancelled free school lunches—just blocked IVF again because a clump of cells is a child but an actual child can starve.

It was never about life. It was always about control of women.

The massively bad-faith Republican "investigations" -- persecutions to deter truth-telling -- into vital research on right-wing extremism have paid off for the extremists.

In a cowardly but understandable move, Stanford University is dismantling its Internet Observatory, which has been a focus of the Republican lies and attacks.

It's understandable in the way capitulation to Joe McCarthy was understandable in the 1050s before enough people grew spines to stop him.

https://www.platformer.news/stanford-internet-observatory-shutdown-stamos-diresta-sio/

“There’s little transparency” around bossware that employers use to surveil workers, EFF’s @htsuka told @washingtonpost. “Even figuring out what is on your computer can be a huge step to figuring out how you want to deal with it.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/06/13/work-surveillance-tips/

A full-fledged attack on access to public records is underway in the states.

Journalists and the public must fight back.

https://freedom.press/news/states-keep-public-in-dark-with-anti-transparency-reforms/

#Forgejo v7.0.4 was just released! This is a security release.

We recommend that all installations are upgraded to the latest version as soon as possible.

Check out the release notes and download it at https://forgejo.org/releases/. If you experience any issues with this release, please report to https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues.

Note that Forgejo v1.21.11-2 was also published with the most important security fix for the benefit of the instances not yet upgraded to v7.0.

Everybody knows that the 13th Amendment didn't technically end slavery, right?

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, **except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,** shall exist within the United States...

https://alabamareflector.com/2024/06/10/inmates-challenge-motion-to-dismiss-in-alabama-forced-labor-federal-lawsuit/

When it comes to international relations, I swear there really is very, very little difference between Dem and Repub agendas. Unhinged, the lot of 'em.

https://fair.org/home/nyt-ramps-up-venezuela-propaganda-ahead-of-elections/

Pride month means an unapologetically #queer reading list. First up, Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies. Get 20% off this title - no code required. https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1296

Right wing extremists (I know, redundant at this point) are pushing people to drink raw milk. If a bird flu pandemic erupts, millions will probably die. And those vile know-nothings will have helped kill them.

https://www.mediamatters.org/turning-point-usa/turning-point-usa-promoting-drinking-raw-milk-amid-bird-flu-outbreak