Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

I spent a lot of time in Nepal in the years immediately preceding and following their first election following the abdication of the king, so I got a pretty good look at what political discourse is like over there. And my take away is this: American political discourse is embarassing. Nobody in Nepal ever talked about a political party or politician in any but the most cynical terms (with a very few exceptions). Here, otoh, we talk about 'vibes' and believe whatever pols say.

This looks like the kind of thing we need in every country in the world... Public $ funding public (#libre!) code. Well played Germany: https://fossforce.com/2024/08/germany-to-fund-open-source-software-maintainers-through-new-fellowship-program/ I suspect they'll find that the net return for Germany (and the rest of the world) is massive compared to what they're throwing away on #bigtech's colossal margins.

Vaccinating #badgers more effective than culls in stopping bovine #TB, study finds - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/06/badger-vaccination-cull-eradicate-bovine-tuberculosis-btb-farmers-cornwall-study-zsl-aoe stop the cruel and ineffectual slaughter

So much of what I care about in computing boils down to: Can we please stop capitalists from being the ones to shape our technological reality? Can we please stop living in a cyberpunk world?

As such it goes beyond computing! I'm an anti-capitalist, a degrowther!

Let alone the injustice of requiring us to work to earn a living, the people who can afford to pay a living wage repeatedly prove to be terrible judges of what work needs to be done. So can we workers please judge it for ourselves?

Undocumented immigrants paid $97B in taxes in 2022.

They paid a higher state/local tax rate than the top 1% in a majority of states.

They contributed $26B to Social Security, which they can't benefit from.

Remember this the next time the undocumented are called "freeloaders."

Court rules that Google illegally monopolized the online search and advertising markets for 10+ years.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/doj-states-win-google-search-191541412.html

As a Blind person i never thought i would be on social media savoring photos. But the communal Mastodon alt text game is so strong that sweet, poetic or silly descriptions abound on my timeline. Thanks to legions of people who take time to write a meaningful description of the ephemera they post, i learn so much about insects, plants, buildings, memes — all dispatches from a dimension of the world that i otherwise wouldn't experience. If you're wondering whether anybody reads these things: YES.

#writerscoffeeclub 5 Aug:If AI created a genuinely good story, would you read it?

This one is starting to have strong energy of "But what if I was the last man on Earth? Would you have sex with me then, huh?"

So, I'm not going to answer it.

#Librem5 users waiting for #PureOS Crimson: Giving money to Purism is not the only option:

https://liberapay.com/devrtz-PureOS_crimson

I (Peter) for one definitely trust @devrtz more than a company distracted by building a robot ;-)

Prosecuting journalists is characteristic of authoritarian regimes, not American democracy — especially in New Mexico, where the state Constitution expands on the First Amendment.

https://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/opinion-dismissed-cases-show-unm-should-not-have-arrested-journalists-during-encampment-clearing/article_f0b38138-49f8-11ef-8cd0-5f495cc2c53c.html

"We should all be concerned when we hear about unproven technologies like Rapid DNA being promoted for criminal justice purposes, especially given how few protections currently exist around DNA collection in the U.S.," EFF’s Hudson Hongo told @Salon https://www.salon.com/2024/08/05/as-a-lobbyist-dave-reichert-pushed-dna-technology-that-could-enable-mass-surveillance/

There is a hidden history in the US.

It is the history of ordinary people standing up to fight the injustice of a capitalist system that is willing to use extraordinary violence to protect profits.

In the early twentieth century, strikes and union battles were common in industrial centers throughout the US. But nothing compared to the class warfare of the West Virginia mine wars.

The origins of this protracted rebellion were in the dictatorial rule of the coal companies over the proud, multiracial, immigrant and US-born miners of Appalachia.

Help us publish Black Coal and Red Bandanas: An Illustrated History of the West Virginia Mine Wars on Kickstarter here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wrkclasshistory/black-coal-and-red-bandanas-a-graphic-novel

#books #history #labor #Appalachia

This is a wild story that says a lot about right-wing evangelicalism:

1) Matt Bevin, the Republican former Kentucky governor, adopted a boy from Ethiopia for PR purposes
2) Bevin and his wife decided they don't like the boy so they ship him off to an abusive "troubled teen" facility in Jamaica
3) Jamaican government shuts down the horrible group
4) Bevin family abandoned the boy in Jamaica after the facility was closed

https://kentuckylantern.com/2024/08/04/former-ky-gov-matt-bevins-adopted-son-reportedly-removed-from-abusive-facility-in-jamaica/

Hey @Matt_Noyes, is this something your Farm Club peeps have discussed?
https://coloradosun.com/2024/08/04/lower-arkansas-valley-water-rights/

So the Free Market galaxy brains of the coalition didn't just guarantee Rio Tinto a rock-bottom price on our cleanest electricity (thereby making it harder and more expensive to decarbonise the rest of the grid), they gifted them a whole bunch of carbon credits that had been taken away for really good reasons.

We pay double for this level of corruption. The bills will come due when we fail to meet our Paris commitments.

https://newsroom.co.nz/2024/08/02/smelter-sought-assurances-about-46m-carbon-subsidy-before-signing-power-deals/

SCAM ALERT: Data centers bring practically zero local jobs. They are a tax break scam everywhere they operate.

"Washington lawmakers approved a tax break for data centers to create more jobs in rural Washington, but they can’t say how many jobs the state actually got. Repeated expansions turned a modest program to bring a budding industry to rural areas into one of the biggest corporate tax giveaways in the state."

https://www.propublica.org/article/washington-data-centers-tech-jobs-tax-break

I am proud to annouce that the Gstreamer GTK4 plugin is now available in #Debian. This will allow to directly offload the load of video decoding to hardward via dmabuf, thus greatly reducing CPU load.
#Gstreamer #Rust #Debian

Becoming a nudist only to reduce the amount of laundry I'm sweating through this summer.

ABC No Rio, a Home for Anarchist Artists, Rises Again on the Lower East Side

Years after its demolition, ABC No Rio will get a new energy-efficient headquarters on the same site of its famous Rivington artists’ hub.

Long live ABC No Rio! https://blog.pmpress.org/2024/08/03/abc-no-rio-a-home-for-anarchist-artists-rises-again-on-the-lower-east-side/