Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Tangentially related to the question about age and job hunting, a friend of mine went back for a second Bachelor's degree somewhat late in life, and after a couple years of solid academic performance, was suddenly notified by the student load company that they were rejecting his request for additional loans unless he got a co-signer.

I know these companies can be predatory, but cutting someone off partway through a degree doesn't seem rational on their part. Is this a thing?

There's a thread on Charlie Stross's Mastodon about ageism and difficulties finding work after you've started to go gray.

I feel certain this is a real thing, but I also find myself wondering...

Yes, #libre software has a record of approach (and sometime exceeding) the capability and performance of proprietary software with hundreds, or thousands of times more resource invested in them. I think that the libre development process is vastly more cost efficient at producing quality software than the proprietary model, often by several orders of magnitude. Something for government policy makers to think about.

What to read at the beach. https://www.dailykos.com/story/2024/7/5/2251033/-Cartoon-Summer-beach-reads

Saw a Facebook post, showing the 120F temperature in a desert city in the American west and saying, "All sensible people have already left town."

There are a lot of people who can't afford to leave town, because they have to work to feed their children and have nowhere else to go in any case.

We have a profound deficit of empathy in America.

I saw a thread earlier which started with a variation on the idea that, on the fediverse, anything that is possible is permissible, and that folks should focus their efforts on changing what is possible.

And then the author suggested that the best way to do that would be to get the "fedi devs" together for a "community engagement" town hall, to take feedback from the community on what should be possible, I guess?

All of this is wrong and bad.

I'm not going to engage in the original post, in spite of the fact that I disagree with it, because I don't actually feel like talking to the author of the original post. I am, however, interested in exploring the ways in which this is wrong and bad, because most of it sounds pretty compelling on the surface.

Brilliant pay off!

I can't believe how useful #interactive messing with SDFs is.

Several transformations chained? No problem, color the data according to whichever transform you want.
Need to see uniformity? Draw a grid.

I did like a hundred iterations within the hour!

Last time I used test-driven #development . Good for conformance, bad for spotting glaring bugs. Visual #debugging is powerful.

#graphics #sdf #tdd

Latest comic: The Supreme Court ruling overturning the Chevron doctrine was largely overlooked in the wake of the debate, but possibly even more apocalyptic. In short, the Republican majority gutted the precedent that gave deference to scientists and other experts at setting regulations for air and water pollution and food safety.

#supremecourt #environment #uspol #cartoon #pollution #science #law

You can't ignore the strength of ActivityPub and the fediverse.

Pixelfed has nothing to gain, and everything to lose, should it change course from its current open/fediverse focused direction to seek VC funding.

I've turned down several offers.

I'd rather be funded by y'all on a shoestring budget than sell out and have @pixelfed lose the very luster that made it shine.

It's your impact that makes our project shine, fuck profits, y'all the shareholders ❤️

#fediverse4Life #peoplePowered

If you build #Debian packages a lot and want to test drive them quickly then "sudo debi" is your friend.

Does your #FreeSoftware project need some help?

Share a link to your #GoodFirstIssue or related labels for others to check out!

An example for #Forgejo: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/?labels=222666&state=open

Good news: In 8 years, electricity generation from non-fossil-fuel sources (including nuclear) rose by 44%

Bad news: In the same period, global electricity output increased 23% and generation by fossil fuels reached an all-time peak.

Got tired of manually cutting and pasting labels from DigiKey pouches to the pages in my SMD sample book.

So I wrote a couple of scripts stringing together a barcode reader app, the DigiKey API and a label printer to easily print labels.

Let's hope this helps to reduce the ever-growing pile of DigiKey bags and brings some order into my parts inventory.

Get it from: https://github.com/carrotIndustries/dk-labels

Such respect for Taraji P. Henson, who used her TV/music platform to warn the public about Trump world's fascist plans.

She did what Big Journalism can't be bothered to do: Tell the public, with the urgency this deserves, what's coming if Trump gets back in power.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/bet-awards-2024-taraji-p-194059896.html

I joke but a note about language usage and open source _cultural_ accessibility: Numeronyms are bad, and there's no meaningful distinction between "a884a5f3609f2cca635fed56d4ec5795da56fb970y" and "a11y".

Neither one is recognizable as "accessibility" to anyone new to the field - great work nerds, we've managed to give the word "accessibility" its own accessibility problem - and I gotta tell you, "not typing out long words because they're long words" seems childish as hell to most people.

On punks and reproles

Love and Rage was shaped by its social base of reproletarianized white punks. In a 1994 position paper called ‘Love and Rage in the New World Order’, Chris Day argues that while most members were the children of the middle class, this did not necessarily reflect their economic reality. According to Day, they were undergoing a process of ‘reproletarianization’ driven by changes in the global capitalist system.

Proletarianization is a Marxist concept used to describe the birth of the modern working class through primitive accumulation – separating peasants from land to turn them into wage laborers. Day adapts this concept to explain the effects of post-Fordist economic restructuring. Although white people in the United States had made a deal with capital to become ‘middle class’ in exchange for labor docility and anti-Blackness, this compact broke down in the late twentieth century as neoliberalism produced a generation of downwardly mobile youth. Reproles were what we today might call the precariat: a class defined by its inability to find steady, good paying jobs. They were predominantly white because of the particular historical interplay in the United States between race and class. Because of their reproletarianization, many young white people came to anarchism through the punk scene rather than the labor movement.

As political theorist AK Thompson argues about a similar milieu within the anti-globalization movement, this race and class constellation produced a form of ontological politics that sought a new way of being in the world rather than solely changing the mode of production. This entailed a total rejection of the mainstream world and a commitment to radically reshaping everyday life. Unlike many people of color, these white rebels felt that they had no alternative cultural tradition to draw upon – indeed, their families were the beneficiaries of white supremacy. But the material benefits of white skin did not necessarily lead to happiness.

Their white middle class experience was alienating in a particular way that produced a fear of not being truly ‘in’ the world. As Thompson puts it, these anxieties yielded the ‘nervous injunctions regularly issued by the army of white middle class dissidents striving to really live.’ This type of politics was expressed as ‘dissidence’, which Thompson explains is a form of ‘cultivated distance’, a ‘state of being set apart from others by a sense that something feels wrong.’

Young dissidents found a natural home in the punk scene. Punk offered an intertwined radical lifestyle and politics that appealed to the everyday political orientation of white reproles. Subcultural identity was a way to live one’s politics as a total break from the prevailing order. It is no coincidence that anarchist punks drew heavily on the Situationists, who advocated a ‘revolution of everyday life’ – punks sought to live anarchism. But Thompson cautions that politics based on the particular ontological lack of white middle class existence do not have universal appeal – certainly not to an oppressed and exploited multi-racial working class. This problem lies at the core of the contradictions of whiteness and revolutionary politics for the white middle class.

Read more in my chapter "Smashing Whiteness: Race, Class, and Punk Culture in the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (1989-1998)" in the new edited volume DIY OR DIE! from Active Distribution, available now from @pmpress https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1756

#books #bookstodon #anarchism #punk #race #class

Francis Dupuis-Déri: “The primary objective of a Black Bloc is to embody within the demonstration a radical critique of the economic and political system. Metaphorically speaking, it is a huge black flag made up of living bodies, flying in the heart of a demonstration.”

Read more in Dupuis-Déri's "Who's Afraid of the Black Blocs? Anarchy in Action Around the World" (2014), which @CrimethInc called “a level-headed, carefully researched inquiry into a subject that reduces most pundits to foaming at the mouth.”

https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=703

#books #bookstodon #anarchism

Gitimd'en land defender and Cas Yikh house elder, Janet Williams, was recently in a traumatic car accident. Auntie Janet has played a prominent role in defense of the Yintah, whether facing down RCMP tactical teams, or taking care of Indigenous and Anarchist comrades on the front line.

Please chip in some funds to help her on her path to recovery.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/janet-williams-support-fundraiser