Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

It's winter sale time! All my stuff on @itchio is 50% off!

- Cacophony: minimalist MIDI sequencer
- PROCEMON: procgen glitchcore monster collecting
- Neocolonialism: "capitalism is bad actually" strategy game
- No Pineapple Left Behind "if capitalism and schools are bad actually" management sim
- Traitor Nightly: IF/board game experiment
- A Great Miracle Happened Here: Jewish leftist ttrpg
- many more zines and games

https://itch.io/s/113717/winter-sale-2023

#itch #itchio #midi #indiegame #wintersale

The greed of energy companies and supermarkets were the most extreme: Total corporate profits surged 60 per cent from the end of 2019 to mid 2022 — driving Canada’s inflation rate to over eight per cent. Post-COVID inflation was very much a “profit-price” spiral.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/12/21/opinion/excessive-supermarket-profits-boost-inflation

Activists in the town of Baka in Sweida turned one of Al Baath party branches into a community service centre with medical facilities for residents and a gym. They put up slogans saying 'Syria for Syrians' and planted some trees outside ❤️‍🔥

Some recipes for the coming week. https://brianmcfadden.org/2023/12/08/holiday-recipes/ #comics

Temperature departures over the last 3 months... umm

🔴 - warmer than average
🔵 - colder than average

Questions about the data: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/faq/. Code for the data: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/sources_v4/

Remember when we let one far-right dude make up the whole critical race theory panic, and then reactionaries passed "anti-CRT" laws that were really anti-diversity laws, so that teachers were afraid to even teach about civil rights and the Holocaust, and then US students' knowledge of the Holocaust dropped precipitously? And it dropped the most where those anti-CRT laws were passed?

Well, what if we let *the same dude* make up a whole plagiarism inquisition against the Harvard president?

The dominant Europe-centred paradigm in #CooperativeEconomics means the field is working with an incomplete, therefore inadequate, record of the rich diversity of ways people have understood and practised cooperation as an economic strategy. For instance, the #AfricanPhilosophy of #Ubuntu imparts a model in which cooperation is a perpetually sought ideal state and seeking it creates cooperative economic relations.

Read more in my blog from the #AtlanticFellows at LSE: https://afsee.atlanticfellows.lse.ac.uk/en-gb/blogs/how-piecing-together-an-ubu-ntu-cooperative-model-made-me-want-to-write-again

I do have a Cloudron self hosting server of my own I call the #CommonsComputer

If you’re interested in starting a shared international #Castopod server, I’d be open to hosting that.

* looking for 3+ people interested
* we pick a domain name
* 3 people @ $50 for a year should cover things

Read the full write up https://commonscomputer.com/t/shared-castopod-fediverse-podcast-hosting/21 and leave a comment or reply to me here

You should give more money to people, organisations, and companies that enable you to use software, which you are allowed to use, understand, share, and improve than to those who restrict you in those essential rights.

#FreeSoftware #OpenSource #SoftwareFreedom

240 million functioning PCs/laptops will be chucked into landfills.
Because #Microsoft has managed to convince consumers that computers cannot exist without #Windows.

80% of the world's data-centers and infrastructure don't run on Windows. If you're thinking of throwing away a computer, please send it my way.
#ewaste #throwawayculture #linux #FOSS #vendorlockin
https://www.itpro.com/software/windows/windows-10-end-of-life-could-prompt-torrent-of-e-waste-as-240-million-devices-set-for-scrapheap

I wish more articles about Substack would note that it’s not just about the Nazis; Substack has also sought out and monetized some of the worst people in the right wing’s anti-LGBTQ hate movement, and helped them spread their poison much more effectively.

A bunch of people who use Substack for publishing their newsletters asked the company why it's making money from fascists who also use the site.

They were told, albeit politely, to get lost.

It's their move -- and if I may suggest, "move" is the correct word.

Rite Aid was just banned by the FTC from using facial recognition software because of how they abused it (and their customers). I'm hopeful that this will create a precedent that gets applied beyond retail.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/20/rite-aid-facial-recognition/

#privacy

"Familiar pattern" as right-wing extremists launch threats of violence at the Colorado Supreme Court. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/colorado-justices-face-flood-threats-disqualifying-trump-ballot-rcna130720

This is straight out of fascism 101, and it works because people who want to do the right thing get cautious about doing the right thing.

Police doing the bidding of extremists to curb freedom of expression -- this is a trend. It should scare you, and it should prompt you to fight back. https://www.berkshireeagle.com/news/southern_berkshires/great-barrington-gender-queer-book-police-ban-classroom-du-bois-middle-school-aclu-rights/article_14ba4abc-9eb9-11ee-83c9-0b3ff1c1b9dd.html

Anyone looking for a job in #colorado

The farm manager position at Food to Power could be a really strategic position for local food system organizing.

https://foodtopowerco.org/employment

#jobs #farming

1/

DECENTRALIZE YOURSELF.
(Just not in the way Fediverse federation advocates are suggesting.)

Over all of the ecosystem promising an open social web, with decentralization and federation designed to protect user control, falls the shadow of reality.

#fediverse #threads

(Long post, or read in one page on Medium via link)

https://medium.com/@flglchicago/decentralize-yourself-0d904cf74beb

The most evil company in show business -- Warner Bros. Discovery -- is threatening to take over Paramount. Should be an antitrust no-brainer:

Block it.

https://www.axios.com/2023/12/20/warner-bros-paramount-merger-discovery-streaming

Evening thought: the amount of funding Mastodon got this year is probably less than the salary for one of the top engineers working on Threads.
Not sure what to make of it, but maybe it helps understand why things take time to be implemented.

Also a reason why we want to focus on getting more money in 2024 so we can hire more people and iterate more quickly on Mastodon ✊