Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

From sltrib:

> Returns as of 9:30 p.m. show that three of the Utah State Board of Education’s 15 seats may move to democrats, if the results stick. That would give democrats a total of five seats on the republican supermajority board.

I believe if this holds, it puts the board in a much better position to contest book bans, and if Ken Ivory, the main force behind the book banning bill is indeed out, this seems like very good news

It's a good time to remember what the politics of the US tech industry have been over the past two years, and to remember the things executives thought they could get away with

Results are coming in, and I’m tracking how crypto and AI super PACs’ bets are faring live on Tech Influence Watch: https://influence.citationneeded.news/2026/results

I’ll thread the industries’ biggest wins and losses tonight below 🧵

#USpol #USpolitics #midterms

Texas is Blue.

Kentucky is Blue.

There’s a Black woman Governor.

A Native American woman Governor.

An openly gay Senator.

The Dems took the House & the Senate.

The people chose hope.

They rejected hate.

Now the work begins.

#uspol

my American friends are explaining the midterms to me, and I am shooting it straight into my veins

local man decides the news is good for your mental health, actually

Hot take: Trump and MAGA are no longer relevant. Their toxic actions have created a huge mess, and we need to do the hard work of cleaning it up.

What matters to me is accountability, reconciliation, and resuming the hard work of building a society that works for everybody. You can totally have different priorities and I will still work with you.

I’m so very tired of pettiness masquerading about as politics.

I'll just put this here

#AI #Dune

I'm so proud of you all.

Why yes I will be partaking in No Nazi November

Instagram deletes post description for DHS Icepick hack story.

Watch on screenrecorder how Instagram deletes Icepick story description from Unicorn Riot's post in real time. Recorded at 5:51 p.m. central time Nov. 3, 2026.

Read the article here: https://unicornriot.ninja/2026/icepick-leak-exposes-thousands-of-homeland-security-personnel-groups-and-more/

“there’s simply no way to tell if the anduril transphobe with haskell accelerationist (hs/acc) in his twitter username will be a good or bad influence on the community so we made him a board member”

for those keeping score at home, that’s at least the second functional programming language that anduril specifically has taken over as part of a fascist playbook move, specifically by installing their employees into the body that controls the language. to my knowledge, the first time they did this was with Nix, and the community and project have both been doing horribly since then.

anduril is turning the functional programming world into urbit, piece by piece

"So, what's your solution then? Would you rather ban [insert random piece of offensive technology here]?"

"Yes."

"What?! But that's impossible!"

"No."

Well this is fucked up. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/doj-monitor-elections-all-50-states-first-time

A follow up to this thread: https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@lightweight/117554943841527164 - we need to break people idea that 'someone being paid to say something' is inherently credible.. or that it's more credible than, say, the view of an unpaid volunteer from within the community.

The latter often have far more knowledge and far better incentives.

If we could unseat that widespread misconception, the world would be a much much better place.

In other news, I'm increasingly compelled by lived experience groups.

I used to support cap-and-trade/carbon credits as a means of controlling carbon emissions, but I now see it as the libertarian-fantasy accountability-laundering mechanism that it has become. It has allowed companies like Tesla to earn tens of billions of dollars by…uh…*not* making gas cars, and it’s allowed companies to dump concentrated pollution into poorer communities by “buying credits” elsewhere.

Basically, it’s the carbon equivalent of paying parking tickets but continuing to park illegally, or gladly paying you Tuesday for a hamburger today: it’s permission at a price; it’s legalized kicking of the can down the line and making it somebody else’s problem.

Treating the globe as a fungible carbon sink doesn’t seem to be working. Local decisions matter, and local destruction cannot be offset by diffuse improvement. I think harsh regulation is the only real way to do this: “You shall not pollute,” not “You shall not pollute without paying someone else to stop.”

I wrote about that yesterday: https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@lightweight/117551373432104733

Note that what I say about 'Big Tech' incentives apply to all proprietary software, because, once purchased, the vendor has effective monopoly for that software over the purchaser. The power balance is the same.

The EU has finally, in 2020, produced this report: https://euipo.europa.eu/tunnel-web/secure/webdav/guest/document_library/observatory/documents/reports/2020_Open_Source_software/2020_OSS_Full_EN.pdf in which they belatedly recognise the value of libre software to the EU. Let's see if they manage to push back the Big Tech/Four lobbyists now. 🤞🏻

10/n

The reason all of this continues to be interesting to me is that solar power fundamentally changes the power dynamics of the state.

The classic definition of The State is an organization with a monopoly on the use of violence within its borders. A societal dependency on supply chains - the power grid, the oil industry - that can be cut off at will is one of and maybe the foremost levers of that violence, more so than police or the military.

Solar+batteries changes that entire relationship.

"Carbon capture" is clearly nonsense. Solar is clearly not.

Where do public service decision makers gain the knowledge and insight they use to make procurement decisions? Few of them are actual IT practitioners. I'm sure most are quite dedicated to their roles & responsibilities though. So they read what they think is relevant. They go to conferences, *all* sponsored by Big Tech. They ask the Big Four. They ask Big Tech affiliate Gartner what's important. In short they develop an entirely seamless, rosy view of the world, with great swag & muffins.

5/n