Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Worst fall in UK living standards since records began, says OBR - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/nov/17/obr-confirms-uk-enters-year-long-recession-with-half-a-million-job-losses-likely well, there you have it... #brexitreality

Mike Pence is an example of toxic Christianity. We should have freedom of religion, yes, but we must also ensure freedom *from* religion. Your religious freedoms don’t give you the right to deny freedoms or civic participation to others. Period.

ACCESSIBILITY TIP: Adding emojis to your display name is terrible for people who use screen readers.

I was just reminded by someone that when you do this (as I had done), then they have to listen to the screen reader read out all the emojis/icons BEFORE getting to your actual post.

So my name came across as:
----
dan york satellite graphic satellite studio mic graphic studio mic curling stone graphic curling stone
----

Thank you to the person who reminded me of this!

#accessibility

Goodspeed You! Black Emperor is going hard at their gigs. You love to see it.

As Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Stripe, Shopify, Lyft, Netflix, and Microsoft lay off workers, let it serve as a reminder that free snacks, beer kegs, and ping pong tables are not real perks.

Do you know what is? Being part of a union that will defend you.

After people get used to tech without lock-in, companies will need new tech that allows them to rewrite the rules. I suspect VR/AR will be the the technology that will allow companies to lock folks back in. It is the next evolution to make a computer that is even more personal than a smartphone.

This is clearly why Meta is all in on this tech and why Apple is exploring the space as well. Whoever controls this tech controls the portal into the virtual and real world. We will need to be vigilant.

So why did it change? There are a few causes, and this pendulum between open and closed tech is always swinging, but to me the single most important cause was the advent of the smartphone.

Smartphones allowed tech companies to rewrite the rules around standards, software, lock-in and #privacy as Big Tech companies all sought to control the new personal computer with rules people would have rejected on their laptops. The rush to control SMS and news portals killed XMPP and RSS, respectively.

Here's a thought-provoking essay on the very modern premise that all humans are equally educable and how important that idea is for #democracy :
https://www.exurbe.com/educable/

I recommend it.

I really appreciate the thread on the server's CW policy that @tfardet did on behalf of the scicomm.xyz moderators:
https://scicomm.xyz/@tfardet/109352329085337334

In particular:
"- it doesn't mean you can police people on other servers and ask them to use CWs (don't!)
- also don't police people on the server, ping us"

I've seen again this graph showing the proportion of wild mammals/human-managed mammals in the mammal biomass. And of course human managed mammals represent 96% of themv(humans 30-something themselves).
I wonder if this huge proportion of human-managed mammals represents a replacement or an addition of mammals compared to a pre-human animal biomass landscape?
Probably a bit of both. I'd be curious to know if we have estimations of pre-human biomass distribution? #paleoecology #ecology #agro

So I’m getting the #WhyChestnuts question. The first question I get in almost any conversation, date, meeting, interaction.

We're often asked why we place so much focus on planting chestnuts, rather than other trees or crops. We've tried to give a sense of our reasoning below.

- For much of the northern hemisphere, beech-family ecosystems are an important carbon sequestration landscape: oak savannah, chestnut savannah, chestnut forest, etc. Oaks and beeches are not consistent producers and they require some processing. Chestnuts, however, produce nuts annually and often for centuries.

- They are a major food source in Italy, Corsica, Korea, China, and were a major food source in the eastern Americas before the blight.

- If you plant corn or wheat, you have to do it again next year. If you plant chestnuts, you can produce food for the next 5000 years.

- Chestnuts are nutritious. They’re more like a grain than a nut, and can be made into flour, bread, pasta, and desserts. One chestnut tree can provide around half the grain needs of an adult human.

- This means they can replace many other kinds of grain agriculture, which are currently contributing to erosion, soil death, carbon loss, nitrates in groundwater, and dead zones in oceans.

- Chestnuts can spread fast, because they start producing nuts in 2-5 years. They can be cash crops.

- They produce a staple crop with room underneath. Chestnut trees produce the same amount of food as a cornfield when mature, but unlike corn, they tap deep into the ground and all their production is up high. There is room to add other plants, cows, and even sidewalks underneath them.

- This means we can move our food staple system into cities, towns, and suburbs, in a form that is perennial and sequesters carbon. This would allow us to shift the large landscape back to wild systems, grasslands, and return land to Native people.

- Chestnuts are useful as coppice trees, so they can produce construction material, poles, fuel, etc. This also means we can plant a lot and cut most of them back after a few years, and the trees will get bigger.

- Chestnuts can feed activists and community groups, directly producing a little bit of regenerative freedom and directly feeding other kinds of climate action and organizing.

- Chestnuts have traditionally been accomplished through group action, cooperatives, collectives, festivals, feasts, celebrations, and community.

- Chestnuts are also a stand-in. Other places have other trees that would work better; we can’t make a recommendation for every context. And to us chestnut also means an incredibly diverse polyculture that can grow along with the trees.

Am I saying that Chestnuts will save us? NO. Or that they are the ONLY action we need to take? NO.

But we can image a world where we need good food and don’t have the time or energy to run all of the grain agriculture we need. Chestnuts can add real food in the future so we have meetings to attend and food to eat.

It’s less “ONLY CHESTNUTS” and more like the great CHORE WHEEL for a future functioning world includes the task: “get enough tree based food planted to sustain other projects” and I spun the wheel and landed on that.

@joncounts @lightweight Not really human nature, heavily culture based and beyond that has much lower rates in groups that aren't neurotypical iirc! Also probably a bit of something related to learned helplessness

Office365 and Google Suite forbidden in French schools (from France's Parliament) https://questions.assemblee-nationale.fr/q16/16-971QE.htm

#DigitalAutonomy #Cloud #GDPR

hey blind or visually impaired people, I'm beta testing a shareholder activism app and am struggling to give good feedback since the app is hard for me to use with VoiceOver.

Anyone in the US who is a VoiceOver pro interested in giving it a shot?

tags - #blind #accessibility #voiceover #iOS #android

An interesting read for folks in the #FOSS world who use (or are considering) Microsoft VSCode. https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ Note that VSCode is *neither* FOSS nor #OSS. It's proprietary (although MSFT is happy to let you think it is OSS). There's no shortage of good reasons to shun Microsoft and their products. Here's another one.

A History of Recent Twitter Migration to the Fediverse

1 month ago: Mastodon? No thanks. You have to have a Ph.D in Hackerology to use it.

3 weeks ago: I don't like this Mastodon... But if I have to... *sigh*

2 weeks ago: Wait. This does really cool things like let me edit posts. So genius. Is this free?

1 week ago: OMG! There's other apps! Now I know why there's a Fediverse!

Today: Comrades—let's fight for our freedom! Cast off the chains of Big Social!

Do they support Firefox? Nope. Can passwords be longer than 20 characters? Goodness, no. Do they support WebAuthn? Absolutely not. OTPs? Nah.

It's 2022 and the entire finance industry has not yet figured out online security at the level of a 2017 MMORPG.