Vincent Cloutier @vincent@librem.one

When a car is repaired after a crash, the GDP goes up.

When a fruit or vegetable is grown only to be thrown out by a supermarket as food waste, the GDP goes up.

When you replace a phone that still works because of planned obsolescence, the GDP goes up.

When you throw out a perfectly good coat because it's no longer fashionable, and buy a new one in this season's style, the GDP goes up.

When a bridge has to be replaced because it wasn't built right, the GDP goes up.

When a piece of packaging is manufactured only to be thrown away straight away, the GDP goes up.

When a site needs to be decontaminated because chemicals weren't stored correctly, the GDP goes up.

In each case, society has no more usable wealth than it would have had if the car didn't crash, the vegetable wasn't grown, the phone wasn't replaced, the old coat was still being worn, there was less packaging, or the chemicals were stored correctly. Yet the GDP goes up.

Meanwhile, most of the wealth that is generated ends up in the top one percent's pockets.

The truth is that GDP isn't a useful measurement. It's just a convenient one.

#economics #politics #gdp #auspol #ukpol

This is the kind of librarian I work to be every day. From the Unshelved comic strip.

"I love the sound policy makes when I break it."

#librarians #books #reading #literacy

Ah yes, this clearly sounds like someone who is mentally stable right? Elon continues to be a 🤡

“Elon Musk fires a top Twitter engineer over his declining reach”

https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

i applied for a botsin.space account for infinite bees

an important part of being an admin of an instance that you may not immediately realise is that your users may rely on your instance being up during an emergency.

That's a heavy responsibility.

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I think the main thing holding back GNOME mobile (for my usage) is a lack of reliable native apps for sites like YouTube, Reddit, Discord, or even federated services like Mastodon. It's unlikely we'll ever see official clients for these services, so it falls on dedicated users to create applications for them. Too bad most of the proprietary services actively kill third-party applications.

Bing and Edge + AI: a new way to search starts today https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-search-with-a-new-ai-powered-microsoft-bing-and-edge-your-copilot-for-the-web/

People tell me they're afraid of AI and computers taking over the world but if it helps: I'm really not.

For the last few decades since Terminator came out, we've been hard at work building in a dead man's switch to every major system on Earth to prevent this from happening. I guarantee you that if computers try to take over the world, somewhere, within a month, a certificate for some critical dependency no one ever considered will expire and take all the machines out at once. We've done a few dozen trial runs of this to make sure the system works. 100% success rate so far.

i can’t stop listening to this radiohead cover of in rainbows with Mario64 sound font; pure joy:

https://youtu.be/B2JHChJpG_A