Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Public Money, Public Code 🇪🇺

Why is software created using taxpayers’ money not released as Free Software?

We want legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. If it is public money, it should be public code as well.

Code paid by the people should be available to the people!

https://publiccode.eu

#FOSS #OpenSource

Hey friends who post #wordle results and other emoji-based graphics, do our visually-impaired screen-reader friends a solid and post your results behind a CW so they don’t need to listen to their screenreaders struggle to narrate a bunch of boxes 😁

@hdm

"the #AGPL license limits how much I can contribute"

That's not a limitation of the license, just a limitation of one's unwillingness to share their modifications to a public good.

#copyleft #FreeSoftware

@docwho76

Something that will probably surprise few of you is that worker-owned cooperatives are, broadly speaking, more productive than their privately owned competitors:

“The largest study comparing the productivity of worker co-operatives with that of conventional businesses finds that in several industries, conventional companies would produce more with their current levels of employment and capital if they behaved like employee-owned firms.”

(https://www.uk.coop/resources/what-do-we-really-know-about-worker-co-operatives)

This makes intuitive sense, because capitalists do not play any role in production but do collect income from production, serving as dead weight on any firm.

This raises an apparent paradox: if capitalism is competitive, then shouldn’t these more-productive coops out-compete the less-productive capitalist firms?

This is where we bring in a key insight by Shimshon Nitzan and Jonathan Nitzan, author of “Capital as Power.” Capital, in their theory, is an abstract quantification of power to order and reorder society.

“To earn a profit, corporate owners must exert their power over society. And to provide the liquidity needed to price this power, they must be confident that society will continue to obey them – because if it doesn’t, future profits will falter along with prices.”

(https://capitalaspower.com/casp-forum/topic/confidence-in-obedience-or-confidence-in-liquidity/)

I can think of no clearer example of this than Eli Lilly’s recent loss of billions of dollars in value after someone fake-tweeted that the pharmaceutical firm would stop charging for insulin. (See the bottom of this post for an illustration of the loss.)

Eli Lilly earns huge rents by a) selling a drug critical for the daily survival of diabetics that is b) protected by a government-issued monopoly parents. The “announcement” on twitter that the firm was forgoing those rents was, in other words, a repudiation of the firm’s ability to compel obedience by both diabetics and potential competitors. The firm was worth less because it was less powerful, or was at least perceived to be.

(https://www.thestar.com/amp/business/technology/2022/11/11/eli-lilly-loses-billions-in-market-cap-after-verified-twitter-impostor-promises-free-insulin.html)

Worker-owned coops have not replaced capitalist firms, then, because they are not as powerful as capitalist firms; they cannot compel obedience the same way capitalists can via the coercive state. They are more productive but not more *profitable* because they are less able to assert their will on society.

Capitalist competition, then, is not primarily about productivity, except perhaps at the lowest scales of small-to-medium sized enterprises, those firms too small to exercise meaningful control.

For the rest, though, competition for profits is a function of power: can the firm throw up barriers to entry into its market, like licensing requirements; can the firm afford to sway courts in its favor; can the firm secure ownership of patents and copyrights; can the firm secure subsidies from local governments by threatening to withdraw employment from their jurisdictions; can the firm secure preferential access to credit-issuing entities; can the firm hire death squads to murder labor organizers in Latin America; etc.

As @KevinCarson1 has noted, executives are often rewarded for increasing control even at the cost of lower profits:

“Costco’s stock fell in value, despite the company’s having outperformed Wal-Mart in profit, in response to adverse publicity in the business community about its above-average wages. Deutsche Bank analyst Bill Dreher snidely remarked, ‘At Costco, it’s better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder.’ Nevertheless, in the world of faith-based investment, Wal-Mart ‘remains the darling of the Street, which, like Wal-Mart and many other companies, believes that shareholders are best served if employers do all they can to hold down costs, including the cost of labor.’”

(https://fee.org/articles/economic-calculation-in-the-corporate-commonwealth/)

The firm’s value is lower, despite higher revenue, because it exercises less *power* over its workers in the form of lower wages.

This is why you see capitalists try to force workers back into centralized workplaces, even though working from home is often more productive, or, failing that, impose remote monitoring software on workers even though this reduces morale and incentivizes workers to inefficiently work to satisfy the software rather than actual production.

(https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivity-statistics/)

Capitalism is ultimately one in a long line of systems designed to empower the few over the many. Like Oxymandias commanding armies of laborers to build his gargantuan statues in the desert, capitalism is a system of control, of power, of obedience. Other systems might threaten you directly with violence, or compel you to labor as a religious obligation. Capitalism mediates and distributes that control through alienating systems like the market and wage labor, but it’s still control.

My number one recommendation to all new (and old) fediverse server administrators is: make your registrations closed, however your software allows for it. For Mastodon I think "registration with a review step" is the minimum level you should be locked down. Open-registration instances are

1) going to get overwhelmed with computing needs
2) likely to break down socially, you have no guarantee that the people signing up are a good fit for your existing people
3) going to host spammers

Do I reach anyone who has experience using #SPARQL with #SemanticMediaWiki #MediaWiki ? I have an endpoint set up but I truly do not know how to secure it or what best practices are at all. documentation seems very very slim.

#Disabled people and #spoonies, a lovely and very organised-sounding group of people on Mastodon have set up http://disabled.social - if you've been considering Mastodon, this might be for you.

More info here: https://mastodon.social/@PanickedFoodie/109326287778497457

They have a whole accessibility TEAM!

Attention #union friends, members, and allies! Courtesy of @aurynn 's inquiry, I have decided to start a union-oriented Mastodon instance to give union people a home on the #fediverse.

union.place is coming soon - I am not at all artistically inclined, though, so I could use help with a server thumbnail (1200x630px), a mascot image (though one of my schnauzers may work :)), and (optionally) a hero image (at least 600x100px)

Reach out if you're interested in helping!

@tchambers @Gargron @atomicpoet @leolaporte @elipariser @profcarroll We could also make sure to mention that the instance size is not everything. What's the point in switching to something decentralized which basically runs on 5 big clusters?

I mean... that's not what Mastodon and co are about.

Even though this is a super fun thread reading Trump's latest legal filing in his Special Master case, I will try the CW function so that the whole thread doesn't pop up at people.

If I did this wrong, please tell me.

Trump's lawyers filed their response to the DOJ's 11th circuit appeal in the Judge Cannon special master case.

Here's Trump's response: …https://docs-cdn-prod.news-engineering.aws.wapo.pub/publish_document/f36d85e3-6ea5-4df2-add1-1903f07f832b/published/f36d85e3-6ea5-4df2-add1-1903f07f832b.pdf…

Shall we read it together? 🤓

1/

👮🏻 🔎 New report from UK research group No Tech For Tyrants unveils how #police use #surveillance technology to abuse power around the world.

#privacy #SurveillanceCapitalism

https://notechfortyrants.org/2022/11/07/new-report-surveillance-tech-perpetuates-police-abuse-of-power/

Be still my heart, @Teri_Kanefield has joined us <3

For those unfamiliar, Teri Kanefield has been a powerful force for sanity in the U.S. as we struggle to protect democracy from fascism.

She draws on her own legal expertise, on the political psychology literature, and on historical examples of how other countries have dealt with fascism and demogoguery, to explain what we need to do to stay strong.

The solution is... more democracy.

Dr. Stephen Mullen is one of the best historians of slavery on this side of Atlantic. His new book ‘The Glasgow Sugar Aristocracy: Scotland and Caribbean Slavery, 1775–1838’ was published this week and is open access which means that the PDF is free to download.

https://humanities-digital-library.org/index.php/hdl/catalog/book/glasgow-sugar-aristocracy

Just had some folks around for a BBQ & I didn't know a couple of them all that well. One woman was asked what she did for work & turns out she managed a few project teams who were all working on Microsoft Dynamics 360 implementations. I totally tried to look enthusiastic, but not sure I managed. And when I was asked the same question, I explained about the free (beer & freedom) university & because we weren't using Microsoft, it cost about a 1% as much. She thought I was joking.

A few years ago I made this flow chart of which Mastodon posts end up in which timelines!

So, you can see how each instance will have a different local timeline, and even a slightly different federated timeline - and you can see why the federated timeline moves so much faster than the local one, too.

This is why it's important to boost good posts and use hashtags - the fediverse is fragmented and harder to search by nature.

[ #mastodon #meta #tootorial #howto #mastopedia #mastotip ]

So, my grandma is full native. Not many people can tell, because she's pale.

I'm Ojibwe. We're a paler tribe. And she spent her whole career indoors, and so, why would her skin not be pale. I'm actually the same skin tone as her. We're just a pale group. We're great lakes folks, we didn't need the extra melanin. We can get to that stereotypical native skin tone. But it isn't the only tone we can have.

She's 100% (though blood quantum doesn't matter), a tribe elder, etc etc. There's a place in Detroit named after her maiden name.

But because she was pale, after she finished at the residential schools and knew to not speak Ojibwe and to be scared of admitting she was native, she was then just given to a white dude. My genetic grandpa. Nice German dude. Told to make white families. Because she was pale enough to assimilate, here's a white dude for you. She had some kids with him.

But, she refused to give up, she wrote all her kids down as native. Signed them up as Ojibwe tribe members.

All but my mother were sterilized at birth for that. My mother only was spared because she was born like a month after the IHS was caught sterilizing native babies. And so she was able to have kids (me and my brother)

My genetic grandpa died when my mom was real young. And my grandma married her childhood sweetheart. Who grew up down the street from grandma in Detroit and it's cute as hell. They're still together now, nearly 50/60 years later.

But because of what happened to my grandma growing up, she's still afraid to talk outside the house about Ojibwe culture. Once I said out loud in public something about being Ojibwe and she literally froze in fear. It's terrifying. The stories I've heard. The relatives that ha e "disappeared"

Anyways, all that to say. That my anger is very real, my relationship with the government is fury. And my generational trauma is real.

I don’t know if this will help anyone, but:

Mastodon: Help for the Frustrated User!
https://youtu.be/EQLfMLtqWEw