Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

“To say California has always had wildfires, that they’ve always had extreme events, is a classic form of climate denial,” Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and the co-founder of the Pacific Institute, told Yahoo News. “For years, those of us in the climate community have heard, ‘The climate has always changed. We’ve always had floods, droughts and heat waves.’ And that’s just totally disingenuous. Of course we’ve had those things. The question is whether climate change is making those things worse, and the answer is yes.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/yes-wildfires-have-always-happened-in-california-but-climate-change-is-making-them-worse-223447766.html

It's early yet, but tickets to the HOPE "Hackers On Planet Earth" conference this August are on sale now. By "hacker," they mostly mean the old-school definition of creatively hacking at something until it works.

I attended this conference virtually last year for the first time, and it's got an accessible humanities/geek vibe, but there's something for everyone.

https://www.hope.net/tickets.html

Hey! If you care deeply about the open web, I hope you’ll consider joining our team at Fastly. We get to support open source and good internet projects ranging from Scratch to Kubernetes, Watch Duty to Mastodon, Python to Perl, Ruby to Rust, and many, many more. We’ve committed nearly $100M in resources to making the Internet better, and helping to build healthy, sustainable communities. And we haven’t wavered one bit in our inclusive hiring policies. https://www.fastly.com/about/jobs/apply?gh_jid=6523073

I talk about how the Fediverse is currently monetized because people have this idea that all servers are run by lone enthusiasts who are just eating up thousands of dollars in monthly server costs.

This is simply untrue.

RE: https://atomicpoet.org/objects/0af07956-e9ef-45f6-b689-766c4177b614

More scumbaggery from Meta, blocking links to a "competitor" so tiny that it's a rounding error on a rounding error of FB/Insta/etc traffic.

https://www.404media.co/meta-is-blocking-links-to-decentralized-instagram-competitor-pixelfed/

Those maps showing Greenland as a HUGE place are -- like most of the maps you still see in common use -- wildly misleading. They inflate land mass in the global north, and that was a political decision.

Read this from @dailykos --

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/1/11/2296062/-Trump-s-Greenland-delusions-of-grandeur-are-based-on-a-deceiving-map?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source=

“Anarchism’s central focus has always been the only meaningful goal social revolution can have—the remaking of the world so that human beings will be ends in themselves and human life a revered, indeed a marvelous, experience. Either revolution will create an ecological society, with new ecotechnologies and ecocommunities, or humanity and the natural world as we know it today will perish.” –Murray Bookchin, born on January 14, 1921 in the Bronx, NY

(AP) Biden administration will move to lift Cuba's state sponsor of terror designation in final days of term.

State Supreme Court rules the state fails to protect citizen's rights to a clean and healthful environment...Federal gov't fails to get the message.

https://montanafreepress.org/2025/01/13/feds-look-to-expand-montanas-largest-coal-mine/

This has been a long time coming.

https://montanafreepress.org/2021/02/04/federal-judge-blocks-expansion-of-montanas-largest-coal-mine/

Many have riffed on the tradition of using playing cards to help troops recognize the enemy. While social media accounts selling “Gaza’s Most Wanted” and “Covid's Most Wanted” cards remain online, a user selling “Most Wanted CEO” cards was quickly banned. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/platforms-systematically-removed-user-because-he-made-most-wanted-ceo-playing

“In order to create it, she says laws from 50 countries were broken, which, among other things, prohibit women from producing alcohol, working night shifts, cleaning machinery, lifting heavy barrels, or driving trucks.” 🍻

https://english.elpais.com/lifestyle/2025-01-14/the-beer-that-is-brewed-in-violation-of-the-misogynistic-laws-of-50-countries.html

To amplify: I will periodically read a newsletter published on the odious Substack platform. But I won't subscribe to or pay for anything there.

If Jennifer Rubin and Norm Eisen had chosen any other newsletter platform, I'd already be backing them with my time and money.

Incredibly frustrating to watch a shitbird company like Substack rolling up the newsletter space, because creators choose convenience over integrity, or don't even check out alternatives.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/13/media/jennifer-rubin-norm-eisen-contrarian-washington-post/index.html

"Drupal's upgrade cycle is impossible to manage so I'm switching to WordPress" feels pretty weak compared to "apparently the guy who's leading the WordPress charge is a fucking batshit crazy lunatic"

I don't want to migrate again, goddamn it, but seriously, fuck this guy.

We talk a lot of big game about general strikes on social media, but maybe we should get on that pretty quick. After Severance premieres, or maybe after the Super Bowl. Unless you have Valentine's plans, so March?

Help me out!

What is your favorite #XMPP / #Jabber client and why?

(boosts welcome)

Industry using ‘tobacco playbook’ to fend off ‘forever chemicals’ regulation - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/14/industry-using-tobacco-playbook-to-fend-off-forever-chemicals-regulation "Industry-funded research and exaggerated claims litter arguments against stricter regulation" don't they all?

In many places like Britain, people must waste huge amounts of time proving the are entitled to benefits.

UBI would solve this.

Trump gets an "unconditional discharge" for shit he definitely did. Hunter Biden gets pardoned for shit he definitely did. But my man Leonard Peltier is still locked up for shit he DID NOT do. What's the lesson here? That if you have power you are unaccountable and can operate with impunity, but if you dare to challenge Power, it will destroy you. #democracy

I keep reading about devs being amazed by how good AI coding is, and I don’t know if the bar is low on what people expected, if their code is hilariously simple or if I’m doing something wrong.