Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Mozilla have published an update to this:
> "UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice."

I want to break this down.

https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/114072293410465140

The sound you're about to hear is the economy seizing up, grinding people and companies into the ground as Trump-mandated uncertainty about...well, everything becomes the central reality.

We'll be lucky if it's only a bad recession.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/atlanta-fed-shock-sounds-trumpcession-warning-mcgeever-2025-03-03/

Today's threads (a thread)

Inside: Ideas Lying Around; and more!

Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/

#Pluralistic

1/

We live in what Karl Polanyi called a "market society," in which commercial market exchanges have almost completely supplanted non-market exchange. Gone are the great pillars of pre-capitalist economies: domestic household production, reciprocity, and redistribution. In their place are buying and selling. To access virtually any resource, including basic sustenance, we must first sell (usually ourselves).

1/15

"Donald Trump’s plan to impose #tariffs on #Canada, #Mexico and #China could force American consumers to pay an average of $1,200 more per year, a prominent economic thinktank warns." - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/mar/03/us-politics-live-news-donald-trump-tariffs-canada-mexico-announced-commerce-secretary?page=with%3Ablock-67c5ab998f08962cd47bea34#block-67c5ab998f08962cd47bea34 pity trump voters didn't understand that...

#Mozilla rewrites #Firefox’s Terms of Use after user backlash - https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/03/mozilla-rewrites-firefoxs-terms-of-use-after-user-backlash/ good, but maybe this should have been caught before it was published... #privacy

Some good news:

https://montanafreepress.org/2025/03/01/montana-right-to-work-legislation-fails-twice-in-one-day/

The #REI #union is asking members to vote in the board election that opened up today. They are asking members to vote to withhold.

Please boost! I have this guess that REI members are a fair slice of who is here on Mastodon.

https://vote.escvote.com/REI/

(Edited to fix link)
#unions

You love to see it.

"President Trump's online base is splintering over the administration's handling of two major news stories related to sex trafficking, which converged this week in dramatic fashion."

https://www.axios.com/2025/03/01/trump-maga-epstein-files-andrew-tate

@dynamic The first rule of UI design should be "if it ain't broke, don't go fiddling with it." This is the problem with having techies making all our tech - they love fiddling with things just for the sake of it! Nasty catch-22 there...

🏆 Congratulations to the @Blender project for its role in the "Flow", which just won the Best Animated Feature award at #Oscars2025.

Open Source has won, indeed!

https://www.blender.org/user-stories/making-flow-an-interview-with-director-gints-zilbalodis/

#Oscars #Flow #Blender #FOSS #FLOSS #OpenSource #FreeSoftware

@leighelse
It's a tough one. What Mozilla probably needs is a community-led takeover / reset of the corporate side to try to realign its priorities and fix all the bad decision making going down.

Maybe a good starting point is moving HQ away from SV (and out of USA for that matter) to gain some distance from the grifter bubble that now exists there, to have a hope of getting the right people in place. 😜

Every year, millions of books are destroyed by the publishing industry—pulped, recycled, or trashed.

Last month, we intercepted another pallet of “damaged” books before they could be destroyed.

Some books look brand new. Others show signs of survival—a bent corner, a scuff, a trace of a label. But every book is intact, and every idea is still powerful.

Use code REJECT at checkout. Sale valid until 4/1/2025. See the link in our bio.

@lightweight @virkon42 @arinbasu1 @futuresprog For a chunk of my IT career I wrote native apps for Windows. It was a living, and I'll always be grateful for that.

But the environment was not a stable one. Security changes with each iteration of Windows was prone to break installers, third party dependency updates broke other functionality ... moving to web apps saved me a lot of pain.

Looking at today's Windows environment, I'm grateful not to be dependent on it.

Ever since adding the `Haptic` API to #feedbackd for games I wanted to make the `VibraPattern` available to feedback themes as well as this allows for more nuanced feedback.

This allows us to e.g. use more subtle feedback for OSK button presses than for 📢 of incoming SMS.

Opened MRs to make that possible and
while at that I made the maximum strength for all events confiurable too. It's a bit hard to 👂 in the 📽️ but it's there. Hopefully this makes it into #phosh 0.46:

#LinuxMobile

If you want clear-eyed political analysis of the US foreign policy scene (and by extension the domestic political moment), this is about as good as your likely to find, imho.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03/the-empire-rebrands.html

Dear Western friends, allies and partners, the US has never been a champion/defender of democracy, it has always been an unreliable ally and bully, and the West, serving its own interests, has always helped them to practice global terrorism, destabilize countries, kill and murder millions of people all over the planet.

So don't pretend to be innocent, angry and betrayed, enough with the hypocrisy and double standards.

This is from the executive director of the !8F, the digital services agency within the General Services Administration (GSA) that develops open-source tools to improve digital services across the federal government.

"I am the Executive Director of 18F and 18F’s longest running employee- I have been at 18F for 10 years. You may not have heard of us, but last night proved that we are powerful. The way the administration ran to get rid of us under the cover of night and shut us down without warning proves that they were scared. They are too afraid to even speak to us.

We, like our many allies, had the “radical” idea that the government should be responsive to the needs of real people. We assembled amazing teams of technology professionals from different specialities who could work together and learn from each other. We shared what we learned with everybody.

I saw, time and time again, where we stood up for partners who were getting taken advantage of by vendors, or just needed help turning a vision into reality. We could make a simple website or a complicated system, we would do what we needed to best serve the mission and the public. We didn’t upsell anyone, we tried to teach our partners how to do what we did. I see them still prospering years after working with us.

We have proven methods that could be replicated, so we helped even more people through guides and writing. Those people are still going. And I am cheering them on.

We were living proof that the talking points of this administration were false. Government services can be efficient. You can work with agencies as they are now and work with them to better manage their services.

This made us a target. People who own skyscrapers are afraid of 100 people who made websites better. Not because of the latest tech fad, but because we proved that the government can be fixed, the government can be made better and the government can work for the people."

https://fedscoop.com/gsa-shutters-18f-possibly-leaving-agencies-in-the-lurch/

In some way the firing of gov tech workers is also about scaring others from taking alternatives paths other than exploitative tech work.

So many of us looked at big and mainstream and ad tech and surveillance tech today and said nope, and took our skills elsewhere.

This plants the seed of ‘do you really want this instability?’ Unsaid of course is that the people who are apparently thankful they said no to federal tech jobs to avoid such treatment, don’t feel empowered to also speak up about their poor treatment in the private sector. If you’ve been laid off by Meta the expectation is you’re still supposed to say thank you, I’m looking for new opportunities.

Federal government employees who have been treated poorly still have far more support than any private sector employee who has been laid off. Almost everyone is in a union, and there are lawyers that specialize in federal employment law.

This whole thing is about suppressing the power of labor.