Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

"Soon after the ACA was passed, Democrats started calling it ‘universal healthcare.’ If it weren’t for the 30% – 40% of claims that don’t get paid because there is no entity with the power to make insurance companies do so, they might have an argument. What is particularly galling about the effort is that the long history of predatory behavior by the insurance industry was available to anyone who cared to look."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12/rob-urie-politics-by-other-means-health-insurance-industry-edition.html

There are not many things in this world that myself and Jamie Dimon agree on, but apparently the reality that WWIII has already started is one of them. Hope you were all paying attention to that Fallout series.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brycehoffman/2024/12/08/world-war-iii-has-already-begun--and-businesses-need-to-take-note/

Monk abused children for decades on Welsh island ‘in plain sight’, review says - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/dec/09/monk-abused-children-for-decades-on-welsh-island-in-plain-sight-review-says "A headteacher raised the girl’s ordeal but the abbot asked the head not to report the matter to the police" oh, look: another one #religion

When asked to vote on who was the country's single "greatest" citizen, Canadians didn't say Wayne Gretzky or some celebrity or even some prime minister - they gave the award to the guy who led the battle for universal single-payer health care. https://buff.ly/3VTTZIb

‘A Valuable And Generous Ally’: How Exxon and Atlas Network Worked to Block Global Climate Action - DeSmog
https://www.desmog.com/2024/12/09/a-valuable-and-generous-ally-how-exxon-and-atlas-network-worked-to-block-global-climate-action/

I am disproportionately sad that the new oven has a clock on it. Don't get me wrong, as an oven it is a huge improvement over the old oven. But, I liked having a kitchen with zero always on displays. *glares suspiciously at the 7-segment VFD*

#luddite

Achieving #DigitalSovereignty is a no-brainer for every country that isn't the US (it's too late for them, plus they're the home of the worst digital colonists).

https://ostechnix.com/german-state-schleswig-holstein-migrates-30000-pcs-to-libreoffice/

Eviscerati Theater Presents: new audiobook podcast!

The Points Between, Episode Four: "The Tower"

https://eviscerati.libsyn.com/the-tower

🚨 Syria: Erasing an Inconvenient Revolution 🚨

After starting in 2011 the Syrian Revolution fell into an all-out civil war.

Read a comic focusing on aspects lost & erased from the discussion of the Syrian revolution like the local councils, Omar Aziz & the Douma 4: https://unicornriot.ninja/2022/revolution-in-every-country-episode-1-syria-erasing-an-inconvenient-revolution/

The best piece of art all year.

[Via @/sugarbombingworld on IG]

On this day in anarchist history, December 9th 1987, we remember the start of the 1st Palestinian Intifada, a years long decentralized uprising of Palestinians against Israeli colonial occupation.

https://kolektiva.media/w/hHQGdmspHY9bw3pj5e6iMA

I recently read that during the period of early contact many Europeans/colonists were known to have absconded from their home societies and joined indigenous communities, often after previously having been abducted/captured and then redeemed or 'rescued' by colonial authorities. There are no records of indigenous people willingly leaving their own societies to join the Europeans. The absconders often said it was because they liked being seen and treated as humans, which they hadn't been at home.

Can Europe Afford Its Energy Transition?

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12/can-europe-afford-its-energy-transition.html

This also seems like a good moment to link to the thread/post by @Dan Fixes Coin-Ops, "Linux is a bit of a shit sometimes": #^https://retro.social/@ifixcoinops/112481957392068239

I'd actually misremembered his post, thinking he'd said that if a feature you want doesn't exist on Llinux it's just because no one has gotten around to implementing it yet (which I don't think is quite right, given my experience with [cough] scrollbars), but then I went searching for my own Mastodon posts about scrollbars, and lo, I had posted about them in response to the thread by Dan Fixes Coin Ops, and specifically because he had recommended Ubuntu Mate as a Linux distro that isn't continually mucking with the interface, so, like, he gets it too.

Here's my subthread about scroll bars, which ends with my discovery of the instructions for how to get scroll bars to (mostly) come back on Firefox:
#^https://social.coop/deck/@dynamic/112486285538221548

Or, if you'd like a cute top-level post re: fixing Firefox scroll bars: #^https://social.coop/@dynamic/111608520145132477

Anyway, Mastodon is definitely a bit of a shit sometimes.  (Don't get me wrong; Hubzilla is too, but in a much more stagnant way.)

2024 will be hottest year on record, with the 1st eleven months averaging 1.6C over pre-industrial levels...

But the article wants to emphasize this hasn't broken the #Paris treaty, we just need a 45% global reduction in emissions by 2030.

Yet year on year emissions continue to rise (with the exceptions of the GFC and Covid) rather than fall.

The scale of #climate action is spectacularly inadequate, but the mainstream just pretends we're doing okay.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/09/climate-crisis-deepens-with-2024-certain-to-be-hottest-year-on-record

@zl2tod @heyrochelle My brother is a surgeon - his colleagues across other specialties are retiring early as the system collapses. He reckons conditions that could be treated immediately in the past on a Friday would need to goto a major centre to be dealt with on Monday - that delay could see treatable problems become a loss-of-function (example - treatable eye injury on Friday, loss of sight in the eye by Monday). This is just in the last few years but building for decades. Its dire.

@stephen Wellington Women’s House! It is also included of trans women. They provide wrap-around support and have amazing staff. https://wwh.org.nz/

NBC News: "Trump campaign paid law firm employing RFK Jr. weeks after he endorsed Trump"

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-campaign-paid-law-firm-employing-rfk-endorsement-rcna183266

Services rendered...

For folks interested in taking part in our monthly '#FOSS' (#libre software & related topics), we're moving our monthly meetings to a new platform as of our next meeting, tomorrow (Tue 10 Dec) at 20:00, to https://meeting.iridescent.nz - that URL will redirect you to the right place each month!

Here's what we discuss: https://nzoss.nz/online-meetups-now-happen-httpsmeetingiridescentnz Hope to see some of you there!

Note: hosting infrastructure is sponsored by https://catalystcloud.nz!!

Watching the Ken Burns documentary on the Dust Bowl, I am struck by how the history of the United States can be traced through a sequence of epic speculations, scams, and crashes.

This country is so much more, but it is forever scamming, forever being scammed, and forever trying to remediate the consequences. The hope and optimism that make us so capable and future-thinking also make us endlessly vulnerable.