Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The U.S. slipped to 45th in RSF's global press freedom rankings. One of the main reasons cited was Congress’s failure to pass the PRESS Act despite bipartisan support. It’s time to pass the Act and finally end gov surveillance of journalists. https://rsf.org/en/country/united-states

The Goethe Institute asked me for some thoughts on social media's impact and how we should deal with it. I responded: https://www.goethe.de/prj/zei/en/pdk/24687701.html

Modern society doesn't always match the conditions we evolved for.

On average, what do you think is the best way to respond to this?

(Boosts are welcome. Longer answers in comments are encouraged.)

There's been a lot of talk today about Henry Kissinger's upcoming 100th birthday, but I've yet to see Anthony Bourdain's quote about that war criminal scroll by, and it can't be shared enough.

New on Eviscerati.Org: The Points Between, Chapter 17

https://www.eviscerati.org/fiction/tpb/2023/05/the-points-between-chapter-17/

#AI #machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are | #NaomiKlein | The Guardian

Interesting article and a counterpoint to much of the hype.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein

#LLM

"More than 40 leading scientists have resigned en masse from the editorial board of a top science journal in protest at what they describe as the “greed” of publishing giant Elsevier."

Elsevier's profit margin is around 40%. Claiming that academic publishers prey on researchers, more than forty leading scientists are setting up "a nonprofit open-access journal".

Publicly-funded knowledge should be free.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/07/too-greedy-mass-walkout-at-global-science-journal-over-unethical-fees

#Research #Publishing

Never trust a motherfucker who's afraid to drop the f-bomb.

BREAKING: Starbucks to shut down *all* Ithaca locations as a part of its union busting efforts.

This means that over 30 people will lose their jobs, as a result of Starbucks' illegal anti-union efforts.
Ithaca was the first city that had 100% of its Starbucks stores unionized & now it will the first city to have all of its Starbucks stores shuttered.

The story hasn't broken locally yet (SB did a news dump last night); message me if you want to cover this

#Labor #Union #Unions #Unionization

The essential elements are to include \usepackage{multimedia} in the preamble and then to put a clip in you use
\movie{\includegraphics{still_image.jpg}{moviefile.mp4}}

REI workers in my town - and elsewhere - are on strike.

I’m an REI member. REI is a co-op, owned by members and not by Wall Street. We should respect the employees who serve us, pay them well, treat them fairly.

https://actionnetwork.org/forms/respect-rei-workers-let-durham-vote

At last, there seems to be a tool for embedding #MovieClips into #Beamer #presentations (i.e. #PDF files) for #GNU plus #Linux systems. It’s a previewer called #pdfpc which recognizes the movie and you can start it, pause it, etc with your mouse. If your machine is attached to a second screen, it automatically displays the presentation #Fullscreen on it.

https://pdfpc.github.io/

#LaTeX

@anedroid @LynnC Thank you for asking! Wayland is closer to a "new version" of X than a competitor. In fact, some long-time X11 developers are now Wayland developers. It's a clean break to the protocol, but the end goal remains delivering the best FOSS desktop possible.

At a technical level, Wayland has some architectural advantages over X11. Although thanks to projects like Xwayland, many users rely on both!

...and as long as you're using one of them, we're good 😉

Yup. Ditch MS Office. It's a good idea if you like privacy, sovereignty, and value. The EU is way ahead of the rest of us. But what else to use? I can vouch for OnlyOffice's worthiness as a successor to MSFT's lock-in (or Google Docs'). https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=IXcRLcpUtbY or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXcRLcpUtbY

Google: hey so we're gonna have to lay off like 10,000 people :(
People: wow that sucks
Google: alos we're giving our CEO a huge raise
People: wait why what did he do to deserve that
Google: he laid off 10,000 people

You get the feeling that we're seen only the proverbial tip of the iceberg when it comes to Clarence Thomas' corruption. https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-private-school-tuition-scotus

Goldman Sachs, one of Wall Street's most routinely evil financial manipulators, had a significant role in the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-04/us-reviews-goldman-role-with-silicon-valley-bank-before-collapse?cmpid=BBD050423_MONEYSTUFF

I am thrilled to be recruiting a Demographer to work at the Pacific Community (SPC).

SPC has critical responsibilities in demography for the #Pacific including the region's population projections, demographic analyses in the many Population and Housing Censuses on which we assist Pacific Island countries and territories, and advice on integration of civil registry into statistical population estimates.

https://careers.spc.int/job/statistics-adviser-demography-statistics-noumea-new-caledonia-sh000323/f89ccbdd-ea28-11ed-8f0f-42010a8a0ff7

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/3/23709297/microsoft-edge-force-outlook-teams-web-links-open

Such a dick move!

After the May 1970 student strike against the expansion of the war in Cambodia, which escalated after the May 4 Kent State massacre, a poll found that "within the universities alone, more than a million people considered themselves 'revolutionaries.' In early 1971, the New York Times discovered that four out of ten students (over three million people) thought that a revolution was needed."

Cited in George Katsiaficas, The Global Imagination of 1968: Revolution and Counterrevolution (@pmpress, 2018).

As Katsiaficas puts it:
"Despite its brief appearance in history, the New Left regenerated dormant traditions of self-government and international solidarity. In Europe and the United States, after decades of cultural conformity, the possibility of revolution once again was widely discussed—and acted upon. At the same time, the meaning of revolution was enlarged to include questions of power in everyday life as well as the quality of power won by past revolutions.

If the idea of revolution in an industrialized society was inconceivable for three decades prior to 1968, the kind of revolution prefigured in the emergent praxis of the movement was unlike previous ones. The goal of revolution was redefined to be decentralization and self-management of power and resources—destruction, not seizure, of militarized nation-states embedded in an international web of war and corporate machinations.

By enunciating the desire for a new world society based on cooperative sharing of international resources (not national or individual aggregation), on a communalism based upon enlarged social autonomy and greater individual freedom (not their suppression), and a way of life based on a new harmony with nature (not its accelerating exploitation), the New Left defined a unique stage in the aspirations of revolutionary movements.

A new set of values was born in the movement’s international and interracial solidarity, in its rejection of middle-class values like the accumulation of wealth and power, in its fight against stupefying routines and ingrained patterns of patriarchal domination, and in its attempt to reconstruct everyday life, not according to tradition or scientific rationality but through a liberated sensibility.

In crises generated by insurgencies in 1968 in France and 1970 in the United States, these values were momentarily realized in spontaneously produced forms of dual power."