Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

This is how much the decision-makers at for-profit companies respect your privacy folks...

“We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.”

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1589700721121058817.html

#DataFarming #Privacy #Surveillance

Turns out that PostgreSQL and Mastodon overall respond remarkably gracefully to a full disk. Very nice to see it :)

Simon Rosenberg was one of the few people who saw through the red mirage and accurately predicted that the Democrats would make a strong showing in the midterms.

He said we don't have a data problem. We have an analysis problem.

I think this sums up the entire problem with our current social media and cable news and information disruption.

The data is there, but we're too easily distracted and manipulated.

Droplets of facts get lost in the information downpour.

Portugal's infrastructure minister gets it:

“If we simply replace all combustion cars with electric cars, we will end up with the same kind of congestion, the same huge amount of lost time in traffic, the same unsustainable levels of road accidents, and the same struggle for public space."

“The car overwhelmed city life and it is something that must change.”

https://www.euractiv.com/section/electric-cars/news/shift-to-electric-vehicles-will-not-solve-urban-transport-woes-says-portuguese-minister/

I will post more about this on here later, as away... but in a nutshell, for those (especially farmers) in Aotearoa moaning about being "forced" to care for our country, I have just been digitising a book of 318 pages over the last week - from early 1900's, explaining all the rules & regulations of how you were required to farm the land, raise livestock and restrictions on forestry in our country... I can't believe these restrictions were ever lifted, as they were to "preserve for perpetuity"...

To make used servers fit for Codeberg, we could likely make use of the following #HardwareDonations:

- up to 6x 2.5" SAS drives (HDD or SSD, up to 4x other 2.5" drives might also be ok)
- up to 8x 3.5" SAS drives (some SATA might be ok)
- 4x Dell R710 front caddy 3.5"

The theory behind "if you're not paying for the product..." is that old economist's saw: "incentives matter." Companies that monetize attention are incentivized to manipulate and spy on you, while companies that *you* pay just want to make you happy.

This is a theory of corporate behavior grounded in economics, not power, a creature of theory and doctrine that never bothers to check in with the real world to see how that theory and doctrine map to actual events. Reality is a lot uglier.

2/

Appalachia's only "bad for farming" if you use a very narrow idea of what farming is: plantation crops.

Since the mountains are such a bad fit for *that type* of farming, they've been forced to be innovative for hundreds of years.

I mostly post art here, but in my professional life, I helped found a technology cooperative with some amazing and talented people.

We did a little post about the process of becoming a legally recognized worker-owned co-op in New York. If you've ever been curious about alternative ways of organizing your business, give it a read!

https://blog.emma.coop/andy/forming-a-creative-code-and-technology-co-operative

Interesting to see that in a recent Fediverse poll, Linux was the most widely used desktop among those who voted... I'm afraid that we're losing our majority. It felt really good for such a long time not to have to explain to people why we feel bad for them in their digital cages.

Firefox is trialing consent dialogue handling https://community.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/firefox-cookie-banner-handling/ Says will auto-click "Reject All" if that's an option, otherwise will click "Accept All". I think the second option - auto accepting everything, is EXTREMELY problematic. I get that we're all annoyed, but first Brave and now Firefox taking the lets bury our head in the sand approach is unfortunate. Its not solving the actual problem at all!

Is anyone else having a hard time getting their prescriptions filled because of the Walgreens pharmacy closures?

After multiple calls, online requests and visits to our local Walgreens, them being closed during regular hours several times, then transferring the prescription to another store

I finally got my partner's meds after insisting I wait there until they fill it (they had said it would be ready 2 days earlier). /1

This week's blog post is in two parts.

First I offer some reflections on the midterms (I wrote it last night right after we knew that Catherine Cortez Masto won in Nevada🎉)

Part II: I dunk on entitled rich white MAGA men.

Sometimes I just wanna have fun🤷 .
https://terikanefield.com/reflections-on-the-midterms-arrogant-and-entitled-white-maga-men-and-more/

Next up: I'll figure out how do to a Mastodon thread the right way.

Simia ->
Homo erectus ->
Homo sapiens ->
Stultus simia nudus ... 🙄

#lernresistent #Klimakatastrophe #Habgier #Krieg #Überkonsum #evolution

The “#fedified” thing really seems like a lot of people are missing the point. The #fediverse gives you legitimate, no middle broker, ability to verify yourself. Keeping obtuse and easily lost lists of “verfications” seems like a really bad idea, especially since many of these minor celebrities already have actual DNS verified websites.

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.