Google AI television commercial suggests you should ask Gemini how ski jumpers fly so far and I really do hope they've kept its training up to date on current reporting.
People misunderstand that the conservative movement does not occupy the same political-philosophical space the rest of us do, where democracy, science, and human rights are important.
As right-wingers will happily tell you, the project is to abolish modern civilization and reinstate the rule of monarchs, warlords, and wealthy land-owning aristocrats. The goal is for massive numbers of people to die and for the rest of us to become slaves.
The frontmen who run for office are loathe to tell you this because it sounds like supervillain shit.
Trump occasionally says the quiet part out loud when he talks about not having elections anymore and stuff.
But everyone backing them and working on their campaigns and all the think tanks and social media influencer guys know that repealing the 20th and 21st centuries is the entire point.
All throughout the Epstein e-mails, you can see these people recoiling at the idea of a global community and wanting to forcibly return to "tribalism" and authoritarian ethno-states. Undermining democracy and the rule of law and reducing women to a sexual slave caste and impoverishing people to make them totally dependent on neo-feudal overlords is the whole point.
ngl, I don't even live in the US and I am scared about your next election cycle … and if it will even happen. Maybe Trump croaks before that – there is a realistic chance the rest is too chicken to attempt this without their demented supervillain in front of them as a shield (y'know, for "plausible denial" later, as if).
@orangelantern There is a great deal of uncertainty and it's only ignorance and the sense of inertia keeping people from freaking out all over the country. Many have yet to understand how bad things are because day to day life continues to look "normal" even as conditions deteriorate.
Maybe "freaking out" is the thing to do right now. I don't see a "back to normal" even as an option here. It would be such an obvious lie. And that's another thing: This is what Democrats would probably try to go for should they re-take control. And it would be really bad too, because it would prevent all healing and just heat up the charge for the next attempt at open fascism.
They would need to openly go against their right-wing buddies, attack them even. And I really can't even imagine them doing that. They don't even use the limited power they have rn properly. There would have to be *a lot* of structural change within the party to make that happen. It would also lull the conservative governments of other countries around the world into a false sense of security, just to have us fall on our collective asses again once the next madman takes the wheel, after the Dems don't manage to magically fix everything within 4 years. This cycle has to break first.
But on the other hand, more people getting killed and endangered really doesn't seem to be the answer here either. So ofc it would be good short-term if the regime lost power. It is a truly fucked-up situation, this whole thing, with only few (and unlikely) win states.
@orangelantern A national freakout would be healthy and probably productive but I don't see that happening until a lot more people have seen their friends and family members shot in the face by regime forces.
Biden was probably the last chance for a back to normal period and then only if they took major steps to stop these people. They didn't. They enabled them. They supported them. So where does that leave us? Nowhere good.
People I otherwise respect are pissed that "we" didn't elect Kamala Harris when her entire platform was to continue Biden's appeasement and complicity approach to the far right. Yeah, nobody wants THIS. But THIS was always going to happen because nobody in power tried to stop it. And any short-term Democratic victory, however good it feels in the moment, will inevitably circle back around to THIS unless it's dealt with.
@orangelantern And THIS was already happening depending on who you are. It was just quieter then compared to Trump.
But that quiet is all most of these people care about. So they don't have to deal with it or hear about it.
Because every time the Democrats win, they shut down any attempt to change things, causing even greater apathy and disillusionment, guaranteeing THIS will happen again, only worse.
I agree with you on this. Would this have prevented this situation right now? Yes. For a time. And then it would have hit anyway, just with much more force. The only way to prevent this would have been an actual left-wing candidate, presenting a strong and workable counter-point to the lies and violence of the right. Someone willing to fight on the field this battle is actually taking place, not trying to pose as a member of the attacking force. And Harris certainly wasn’t this, just as Biden wasn’t.
I am scared shitless watching our “moderate” conservatives stretching this rubber band to its limits as well. But in your case, the boiler was already running past capacity, needles punching against the limit and the thing giving off shrill whistles and death rattles. And the Dems were like “ehh, it’s just being dramatic, it can take a few more hours running at full throttle.”
@orangelantern Yeah, Biden was supposed to be the "buck stops here" moment.
He campaigned on stopping Trump and then blew it off and swung hard right trying to capture his support. He fed these fucking trolls and Harris did the same. Were we supposed to reward betrayal? Because that's what it was. What's the point of defeating Trump if you do the same things he did?
@orangelantern Trump didn't suddenly become popular. Democrats just cratered. They lost their traditional supporters. That's what happens when you betray people.
I hope that Jeff Bezos' sleepless nights are haunted by the ghost of the Washington Past. It took him barely more than a decade to squeeze the life from a once-great newspaper.
If you're complicit in killing democracy, it doesn't matter whether the death occurs in darkness or in light.
"Federal officials have maintained that the agent acted in self-defense, while state and local officials have disputed that account of the fatal moment, which was filmed from several angles." The New York Times reporter presumably looked at the shooting of Renee Good from all those angles, but is unable to tell you whether she needed to be killed or not.
Until #democrats accept that they have to oppose elites, #republicans will be able to enjoy the political space of anti-elite, while being elite. The only way through this is out. Half measures don’t work any more because the logic is broken, hypocritical, 180. There is no “more reasonable”. #uspol #trump #fascism
ICE having a budget to rival a nation's military is a stark reminder that no right-wing objections to government services are ever about the cost. Money is no object, they are simply deciding what their goals are and your success and survival are never on their agenda.
💯 💙 You cannot trust 𝘼𝙣𝙮𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 the Richt-wing #cancervatives say. They are liars & hypocrites. Anyone who hasn't figured that out yet, that's on you. Do 𝙉𝙤𝙩 trust anything #Repugs say
"A major Somali shopping center called Karmel Mall closed for the day. Daycare centers were forced to close when their staff demanded the day off. Workers forced a major AT&T call center to close. The biggest nursing home in the Twin Cities metro area held mandatory all-staff meetings to threaten to fire employees who participated, but those scare tactics failed and they faced mass absenteeism. The combined population of Minneapolis and Saint Paul is less than 750,000; that Friday, we saw an estimated 100,000 people take the streets in sub-zero temperatures. It is safe to conclude that at least one out of every eight Twin Cities residents took part in the general strike.
The leaderless character of the resistance to ICE in Minnesota is precisely what has made it effective. The decentralized nature of the rapid response groups has made them durable and agile. The initiative of autonomous fighters in the neighborhoods has enabled people to rise in revolt every time they have shot or murdered our neighbors. The horizontality of our mutual aid networks makes them opaque to the feds while enabling them to feed, clothe, and care for vulnerable families. No official organization would ever dare to call for the countless acts of bravery by which individuals have collectively propelled this movement forward. The everyday anarchism of the Minneapolis revolution is its greatest strength.
To the extent that we allow top-down forces to take control of the movement, we will compromise its structural integrity and set ourselves up to lose. With so much on the line, we can’t afford to let that happen."
Participants in the resistance to ICE in the Twin Cities reflect on the lessons of the strikes of January 23 and January 30, looking for ways to expand and strengthen the movement.
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“Kindergarten teacher wants to deport their students” sounds monstrously unbelievable but I knew someone whose wife was a teacher and apparently complained about all the ESL students in her school. I don’t know what those students’ immigration status was but she and her husband definitely *thought* they were undocumented.
@spreadthetruth @MisuseCase I don't want to steal-man this horrible behavior, but I do wonder about the under-funding of public schools and teachers and how much it contributes via a scarcity / 'taking up resources' angle. Like, is this evidence how austerity breeds hate or somesuch, I guess
I teach at a school with a bunch of grants and things and some of the brightest most neurotic kids in the city HOWEVER I have all kinds of teacher friends at all kinds of schools. Schools without nearly enough staff or supplies and lunches that someone should build a little fence around and hang up a "Superfund" sign.
The worst thing I ever heard a teacher say about students was this veteran NYC public school teacher in the Bronx who said "well you know they are from the crack baby generation that's why they can't concentrate"
No. They can't concentrate because they are 6th graders in a class with 32 students.
That is too many sixth graders. Have you met one? I have. Under 20 ALWAYS.
@spreadthetruth @MisuseCase I known a few teachers more from smaller towns in the midwest, and while generally less racist /conservative than others in that zone, I could definitely still see some of them falling into taxpayerism type thinking where that metality fuels their latent racism
@aeischeid @spreadthetruth @MisuseCase I had 17 x 7th graders in a really rough place. That was hard enough. I honestly can't imagine 32?!?!?! Jeeeeeez.
This is so important. We know who the people who ran the Nazi camps were: school masters, shop assistants, public servants. People like you and me. But we call them monsters to avoid having to face the fact that we could have been them.
@edgeofeurope Or maybe we keep calling them monsters, because that's what they are. We *couldn't* be them, we *wouldn't* try to have a pre-school child deported. We shouldn't tolerate their poison amongst us.
We just have to recalibrate our intuition about how many monsters there are, is all. Just because they do normal jobs and wear a normal face doesn't mean they are us.
@petealexharris The monsters are humans, and we are *not* better than they are. That is my point. They come from among us, they have been raised in our societies, they are monsters of our own making.
@edgeofeurope I've heard the cliche before, I understand it, I just reject it.
You're better than someone who wants to deport a child, or I don't know what to tell you. People who wouldn't are better than people who would.
Did something in our society make them that way? Maybe. Are the people who don't want to deport small children responsible for the ones who do, somehow? Absolutely fucking not.
They are monsters of each other's making, perhaps, not ours.
@edgeofeurope @petealexharris the problem with that attitude is that it makes people start thinking that bad people are easy to spot, or far away. It makes them blind to what their family, friends, or neighbors do because they're obviously not monsters. People are very quick to dismiss accusations of being a nazi or fascist because they genuinely can't wrap their head around that being a possibility.
Maybe you're not susceptible to that bias but the average person sure is.
@jonoleth @edgeofeurope That's not what I said tho. The trouble with saying "they are like us" instead of "they act like us socially to get what they want" or "any of us could be like that" instead of "you can tell who is like that by what they support" is it makes monsters harder to spot; it denies they even really exist (or gives them space to hide behind that phrasing).
And people being quick to dismiss accusations is not, in fact, a reason to avoid accurate accusations.
@petealexharris @jonoleth @edgeofeurope Monsters are just humans without humanity. They're not another species, they're not "those kinds of people", they're people that avoid self reflection on how their actions affect others. The second YOU say "I could never be like that" and internalize it, then you are already half way to being a monster yourself. Congratulations.
@jhooper @jonoleth @edgeofeurope Why do you think you could choose to be like that? What would make you do such a thing? Does entertaining the idea of pointless cruelty as an option make you more or less monstrous?
Saying "I would never do that" isn't supposed to be wishful thinking about how nice a person you are, it's supposed to be a foundational moral choice. It's not like the weather or something.
It's crazy how much hate there are in America. The rhetoric being passed around in the United States is unreasonably close to 1939. (maybe switch Hitler out for Trump, and pick different groups to target)
This woman desperately wants to believe she is the victim of something--being taken advantage of by foreigners or being mistreated by a hotline employee. She is sadistically aching for somebody, somewhere to be punished for something no matter whether her life is materially affected in any way or not. She's like a frustrated toddler lashing out at anything within reach. A raging racist toddler with a cell phone, a job overseeing children, and voting rights.
What disturbs me is the total lack of urgency and confidence in these “reporters” as soon as Ben simply describes what they are doing “so you are reporting this person so they will be removed from the country” they put all of the responsibility on him (one caller says “isn’t that what we are doing?”)
People scoff at insects following pheromone trails but the average ant puts more thought into her next action than some of these people. “The government says report these people better do it”
Is not like they call in, crying and in distress having been menaced by some horrible gang— no it’s a literal child trying their best to learn the damn alphabet— and this lady is like “oh he’s kinda different better call the government”
I listened to the first half of this, and the caller used school resources to look up the ethnicities of the child's parents so she could report them. Don't report any data to school!
If you work with a database and are asked to alter the table structure to comply in advance for citizenship or gender categorizations it's really important to NOT do it.
"The governor is concerned about all this stuff they want us to update our record keeping so we store both gender AND biological sex."
"We need fields to store the country of origin of people's parents."
If you don't have the power to rebuff this yourself, ask for help. At minimum ask for help online anonymously.
@HeatherMJ @Su_G She particularly didn't like him saying that she didn't sound happy to hear that the people were there legally. Which was not only true, but also putting it mildly. If anything, she sounded slightly disappointed.
but it's a great idea, a honey pot for fascists - to make them realize what ugly attitude they have. It might work with some people to reflect what they've been thinking, doing.
I almost called the police once. I was anxious and wanted to visit a public park. There were people different than me playing soccer and hanging out. I had heard that some cars were broken into. I noticed a guy walk up to my car and look in the windows. He seemed to be looking in other cars. I think he clocked me and walked back to the group. I drove away. I thought about calling but: * looking in cars is not a crime * I was afraid, my judgement was cloudy * I don't trust the police.
It’s probably a good call. If I see someone like that I try to ask someone “do you know who that is?” (eg. ask some of the checkers guys if it’s summer or maybe the postman in winter)
If I’m not intimidated by the person I say hello to them.
There much less risky was of being nebby— and in the US at least cops are not very helpful or effective at investigating crimes that impact regular people— they are happy to use any noise you make to justify their own ends.
these are great suggestions of better solutions! Your analysis is spot on.
As a kid, we had police come to our summer camps with their dog to talk to us and tell us if we see something, say something for people acting suspicious in the neighborhood. Kids have to hear other adults explain to them the nuances, or they might blindly trust the "good cop" authority, and not recognize their own biases.
I can just imagine what spurred on this teacher to do this, it wasn't her rigid application of the law or her moral obligation. It was something even more simple... like she seen the mother or father turn up in a car that she couldn't afford or else she seen the child get better care taken of than she ever got. Envy is a powerful motivator on the weak minded and insecure.
it's things like these that make me despise our species. I mean seriously 😳.
Can you imagine a gazelle in Tanzania calling a lion hotline saying "can you go eat this gazelle", it has a kid but I don't think it's from here. I think it crossed from Kenya. I don't like it.
Chilling. The one where a guy wants to get his ex-wife deported because she divorced him may not be the same sheepish suburban voice but is a very casual cruelty that so many women experience.
It seems like as soon as there's a number to call or address to write to for the purpose of "tipping off" the authorities about whatever, people cannot wait to start denouncing their neighbours. Doesn't matter if they've got no evidence of wrongdoing, that person gave them a funny look once, or they don't trim back their trees, or they let their dog bark too much, or they're just being wilfully foreign. And if they know the authorities don't care about evidence either, why not call?
Wasn't the US defining principles that all men were created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, including Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness? When was this swept under the carpet to bring in behaviours familiar in Nazi Germany, where people were encouraged to report on family, neighbours and friends to the Gestapo? How long will normal folk in the US put up with this shite?
I've watched quite a few of his videos on this, and other things. And the number of people who threaten him either legally or illegally is truly astonishing.
I'm sure they all consider themselves "Good Christians," too.
what’s most surprising to me is seemingly so many people are shocked by maga being made human like this.
The Karen meme exists because it’s making fun of reality because what else can you do? Completely average ass suburban white women are sometimes filled with as much hate and anger as that swastika neck tat skinhead selling meth at the gas station.
This shouldn’t at all be a surprise to anyone. People really need to get out their bubbles.
These people are deranged and not only are victims of the propaganda, but lack any sense of compassion. They don't realize that they can become the "illegals" in the next phase of this insanity.
This is how authoritarian states work. You get one neighbor to call the state about another neighbor. Welcome to the United States of Russia and North Korea.
Want to be a lawyer? A reporter? How about a multi-millionaire mega-church pastor? Or the City of Atlanta? Ben Palmer says you can be any of these things.......
@smattymatty @kitkat_blue Based on many of the comments it's pretty obvious many folks haven't heard of him or what he does. I can't speak for him, but it seems to me with this project he's trying to expose horrible people for who they are and throwing their awfulness back in their faces. The teacher in this video is completely tone deaf and seems to think it's just fine to deport a child's parents separating him from them.
You can bet this find upstanding piece of shit expresses her racism in other ways too. You'd almost certainly find kids of color get worse grades and more reported problems in her class.
This is the CORE of racism. Some sick evil ADULT bullying 5yr olds. Making it clear to them they are hated, that the system will destroy them, that they shouldn't even bother competing because some scum will always have their finger on the scale. So fucking sick and evil.
Most of my sympathy goes to the kid & parents. If the teacher reports to a real hotline, at best, that family has a very unnessicary amount of explaining to do. At worse, their taken from their home.
But I have some sympathy for the teacher who has been influenced enough to inflict either on the family. Convinced to shed her sympathy. But to be clear, I want, and believe, she can regain that sympathy. But might not if she is singled out like this. And prob double down.
I'd be more interested if he asked "Now we need to be sure. Cause this is tax payer money that goes into this. But also, this could mean a difficult time for this family if you are wrong. Are you confident you want to place this report?" I wonder if the actual hotlines include anything like this. That ask the reporting party to consider the reported.
By I might have the least sympathy for this video maker. This has a good chance of being fraud. But is also bias enfocing human slop. Cops, but for liberals' enjoyment. To get progressive clicks. I get he wants to expose this. But there are better ways.
I get that shit is fucked. And this can feel cathartic, in the short term. But I ask if it is more harmful in the long term. And if there is better catharsis.
This reminds me of something I read about the Gestapo in Nazi Germany. They were quite a small organisation with not enough resources to carry out their work. So they relied on ordinary people to tip them off about neighbours and colleagues. Mostly based on secret grudges and unfounded suspicion. This teacher is a rotten human being and shouldn't be allowed near children.
It's so difficult to understand what is driving someone like this. How was it harming her life or anyone's life that the child's parents were in the same country as her?
Watching the rest of these videos on the same channel, they're all horrifying 😞
They're talking in such a calm bored way about wrecking innocent people's lives. They sound like they're ordering furniture or something, banality of evil is absolutely right.
@ersatzmaus @FediThing it isn't about making their own lives better, it's about dragging others down. They cannot stand the thought that others are less miserable, especially when they perceive said others as "lesser."
@FediThing It's the idea that because they're here "illegally", she thinks that they and their child are "undeserving" -- note her "taking up resources from the county" line.
She's one of those people that think that educating a child is an "expense" rather than an investment.
you know what? it seems like pedonald DOES represent a goood chunk of gringos, this lady is more worried about a five yrold working parents than the pussy grabbim sexual predator they got as president.
Before even considering moving to a new neighborhood or doing business with a new company, I create a Nextdoor account using the new address or an address near the business owner to scope the scene. It's remarkable how openly brazen the racists are, but I always make sure to leave several messages warning others to avoid the dangerous neighborhood or business.
Ben Palmer is a national treasure. If you've never watched his videos or if you're not familiar with what he does, it's worth it to take some time and look him up.
does anyone still wonder, how the 3rd Reich was possible? With people, doing the righteous, lawful thing? With millions and millions of murder victims. Ending in a bloody global war, WWII.
ask any German that lived thru the 3 Reich or the DDR/GDR, these types of people are everywhere. Feared by both, supporters and opponents of the regime. Because they could ruin everyone’s life
she (the teacher in the video) does not sound very bright. as if she's just picked up this horrible idea somewhere and accepted it without examining it.
@dannotdaniel Is there any chance that Ben Palmer is not actually representing what really happened but creating something for our consumption? Do you know him? Can you verify him in someway?
The casual assumption that the parents must be undocumented because they were born in other countries ... do these people not know about green cards? They talk about "doing it the right way" but don't even consider that someone with an accent might be here legally, that there is such a status as permanent legal resident. And they let someone this ignorant be a teacher 🤦🏽♀
First, downoad the clips before they are taken down. Then, somebody keep checking on Ben Palmer every once a while, so he is not disappeared. Finally, bring him here!
Having said that, start preparing for denazification of the US society. It will not be soon, it will not be nice, but there is no future for the US without the deep purge.
Wow, so flashing Graphene OS on the Pixel 6 Pro was actually quite easy, just plugged the device in and followed the guide at grapheneos.org/install/web. By now I'll just update this thread with any new discoverysI make, and yes I do plan to write a detailed blog post about that as soon as I can and know more, I really can't wait to explore this honestly. #GrapheneOS
Flashing the OS itself is possible without sight, setup isn't so I'm waiting for someone to help me. Since the bootloader GUI is that simple though, using a tool like Seeing AI or Envision to read out the menu options which you change with volume up and down, and confirm with the power button, works quite good.
Holy moly dude, installing e-speak on there took me about half an hour, longer than even flashing the thing. Had to guide my non techy mother through the stuff, firstly tried to get it through the F-Droid site, but according to my mom the browser wouldn't let her select a download location so I pulled out an USB C stick and put the APK on there. And after surely 10 minutes of idling and apparently loading voice data, E-Speak finally came to life and started speaking. Now it's time to customise this. Not sure whether a simpler option would've been the installation through ADB, but I think you have to enable all that first so the stick route was probably the easiest.
You can confirm for yourself downloading an APK via Vanadium is very straightforward. It opens a prompt for confirming the download since we change confirmation to be enabled by default in Vanadium. Only the Downloads directory can be used by default which is completely normal and is perfectly usable for installing an APK. The confusion seems to be the fact that it's not possible to select another directory there by default which is the same as Chrome. It's a standard Chromium UI.
We've built our own text-to-speech implementation since none of the existing options met our requirements. It's not quite ready to be bundled into the OS but we're planning on publishing it in our App Store soon. We trained our own model with fully open source training data to provide the high quality people expect from text-to-speech today while also performing well enough to be very usable with TalkBack. We plan on having that bundled in the OS and enabled by default very soon.
I am finding it very interesting that when pushing back on the idea that renewables aren’t the magic bullet everyone has been told that they are, the respondents immediately resort to accusation of Luddite or the dichotomy without proof that the alternative means living in caves and using candles.
This is an expected response. But I think it’s rather funny because I live almost entirely car free.
And because of this, I don’t spend money on gas I could get rid of the car and avoid all the other expenses of insurance and storage, but I also don’t suffer wear and tear on the vehicle. Necessarily the manufacturing for fuel and car parts for maintenance plus the waste consequences of driving a car I don’t produce.
Kev Polk as proposed urban designs that are car free and largely ecologically self-contained.
In one of YouTube videos, he talked about his paper napkin calculation that a city built around these principles would save 90% of the existing expenditure on transportation.
This would include not only vehicle operation costs, but the infrastructure costs born by the city.
Because the global industrial economy will always choose economic pathways it profits from and always argue that there is no alternative, it is very important to communicate that there are alternatives and what those alternatives look like.
Because an urban design like this would be orders of magnitude less expensive than all the money being thrown into renewable. And if you’re talking about dropping the cost of a comfortable standard of living by 90% that’s kind of a big deal.
Beyond this, I tend to like to watch down to earth, which is a YouTube channel produced in India. One of their bread-and-butter topics is housing construction from local materials, typically or frequently packed earth designs.
There are a couple of techie channels that show housing produced this way, you know with all the technological bells and whistles on it so people think it’s very clever
But the most interesting thing about this is that these are not mud hut, hovels. They are very lovely modern houses where the bulk of the materials to construct the house came from the ground.
Insert here the commentary about buildings with a very large thermal mass to them, and the automatic environmental conditioning this provides for the building interior
I spent several years of my life building such houses. Because they are designed for climates with temperature differences between winter and summer, but without extremes, a typical cross-section of the wall looks like this, from the inside: Facade made of wood or sand-clay mortar. Alternatively, diffusion foil. Wooden supporting structure filled with straw as insulation. Inside, again, sand-clay plaster. Total thickness around 50 cm.
@plsik Kind of construction used documented by down to earth is a lot less complicated. In India, for instance, the thermal mass helps moderate and insulating the interior from extreme heat outside.
They have one particular episode where they contrast, traditional building with the shelters, most of the urban poor have now which are tin roof shanty. There are lots of simple measures that could be used even for those kinds of dwellings such as painting the roof white
Yes, I learned a lot about building physics directly from practical experience, so I understand that in a climate with high temperatures, it is excellent to have solid walls. Ideally made of rammed earth. This is how houses used to be built in our country too. These methods were used because of poverty and the availability of local materials and because it was possible to do it yourself. Even today, there are many houses made of unfired clay bricks in my area.
@lori Kev Polks is an interesting character and if you can tolerate YouTube, it's useful to watch his videos. He may provide some alternative access on his site, but he has an engineering background I believe in the communications or satellite engineering. He also has a large body of real experience living. He's also done the off the grid self-sufficient thing so he is very aware of the demands.
He also invites people to critique and or improve any plans he's so far published
One of the key difference between a monopoly market and a competitive market is the fact that in a monopoly market entry and exit costs are high, while in a competitive market they are low. By entry costs they mean how much it costs to set oneself up in a certain line of business. Exit costs, I think, have something to do with closing shop, selling or tearing down plant and facilities, environmental cleanup, and the like. Here, I am applying the concept not to entering or exiting being in business for oneself, but to exiting or entering the automotive lifestyle, which is to say entering or exiting the car-free lifestyle. Let’s say you attempt to pro-rate (per daily commute, say) the multiple financial burdens of the automotive lifestyle–car price, loan interest, loan gotcha clauses, insurance premiums, insurance deductibles (probabilistically pro-rated, I guess), tax, title, registration, part$, $ervice, police $itations, turtle wax--the whole ball of whacks. Let’s say for the sake of argument that your best guesstimate turns out to be more than bus fare. At first glance, it would appear to be a no-brainer. But there’s a catch. If you stop driving your car you stop paying for gas and probably most of wear-and-tear (since you have an unstuffed garage to put the car in, riiiight?). You should also qualify for one of the lower mileage brackets for insurance purposes. But you still need to keep your plates etc. current; the lion’s share of that cost, of course, being that insurance is a prerequisite for registration. The obvious solution is simply to sell your car. The catch this time is that now you’ve taken the plunge and committed yourself to a 100% car-free lifestyle. By forking out $ on keeping your car “legal” you “keep your options open” for eventualities ranging from road trips to bus driver strikes to J.O.B. interviews not within walking distance of a bus stop.
@lori All very true. Being able to dump the car completely is contingent and some degree on being able to rent what you need when you need it.
Zip/CityCarShare offered those alternative and I think enterprise and GM also offers things like this, but circumstantially that's not necessarily available to everyone.
In this case, the possible alternative would be to have a community vehicle share system in the same way farmers share equipment
I guess the pushback comes from hearing so much oil/car bought "experts" explaining how renewables are a poor substitution and will end in ecological disaster. Renewables alone won't cut it. An electrical car is still a car. Re-designing cities around public and light electric transportation, regenerative agriculture, eco minded construction...Having what all of us really need, in full, within planetary boundaries, is possible. Scarcity is manufactured.
The thing to notice about the contest between big oil and big renewable so to speak is that both of their industries are extremely damaging and in order to dig up the copper and aluminum to build out a new grid requires exponential growth in that extraction. These processes have permanent ecological consequences and all of them are bad.
I say big renewable because the chief industry benefiting from the explosive growth in renewables has been international mining.
Neither of these factions care at all about devoting any resources and research to figuring out how to live really comfortably from local environments. They ask us to continue living in the global supply chain in the global economy is destroying the planet you can do nothing else
We should not fall for a false economy of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin saying pick my side because my side is better.
Given that specific ores are not found everywhere, mining can hardly be local. Having said that, I fully agree that minimizing consumption is key.
What triggers me the most is that solar energy has the most potential to be decentralized, reducing infrastructure costs (there's also copper in there!) and adding resilience and autonomy, but for some reason solar power plants destroying small ecossystems are allowed to and do exist.
@olivetree @dacig PV itself is a high-tech product of a long supply chain. The crazy thing that China is chopping down old growth forest in order to burn the wood to manufacture PV is insane to learn about.
PV in one sense can be decentralized because you can generate energy at the point of use, but its manufacture and our dependence on them would be anything but.
The creative and engineering challenge before us is to rethink how we get the things we need and what we need
PV panels are mainly composed of sand, phosporous and a bit of conductors (but it's electricity, you need conductors everywhere), these are easily sourced materials. So, if you make glass from high-voltage instead of high-temperature (which is possible), their own manufacturing can have minimal impact in the environment and not have supply chain dependency. Sodium ion batteries are a step in the right direction in that regard as well.
Of course, more research is still needed to fully achieve that, but much more importantly, commercial justification is needed. Why spend more, when you can spend less? Numbers on excel sheets >> environment, always... @dacig @gerrymcgovern
@olivetree @dacig I would recommend reading the PDF because silicon wafers are not made from sand they’re made from quartz dot with rare earth, toxic chemicals, and old growth forest. Generally, the carbon human and ecological footprint of PV is not properly accounted for.
=
Why do we burn coal and trees to make solar panels?
Of course it's not literally sand, but it's extractable from sand, I was talking about the ubiquity of the thing. Very interesting and I wish I had found that in my earlier attempts to learn how PV is made. I just wish they'd expand on the rare earth and toxic elements part, there's no reason for it (or maybe I missed it, I only had time to skim, for now). And interesting question is now is if a PV can generate more electricity than the one used to produce it. We might just be importing cheap unecological electricity, in the end. @dacig @gerrymcgovern
@olivetree @dacig I think PV probably can produce more power than the power used to go into it although the analysis would be very interesting to see what the net power is whether positive or negative. But more central to this or all the other things used to manufacture them.. like all the carbon, a good chunk of which is sourced from trees or is processed coal.
Again, we’re talking about net byproducts of their construction and use.
@olivetree @dacig I am at a point Gerry’s book where he talks about the maintenance I needed for the solar farms. They get dusty and it takes water to keep them clean. So besides exterminating desert life that often lives for centuries or thousands of years, the solar farms being put out in the Mojave, for instance, or draining the water table, which threatens the local population that they’re losing the water they need.
@olivetree @dacig Of the uses that PV is put to some are sensible, but the solar farms can’t be seen as “green” just because. We still need to look at costs and consequences to make any rational judgment.
@olivetree @dacig In my long piece I look at this, particularly research on the extended EROI of different energy sources. PV comes out poorly, especially in northern latitudes. Link to the fully referenced report at top of this short summary article. degrowthuk.org/2025/08/01/rene…
Article originally published at North West Bylines, 31 July, 2025 Based on a longer, fully referenced pamphlet, jointly published by Steady State Manchester and DegrowthUK available HERE as pdf or …
@markhburton @olivetree ln the tropics makes PV makes more sense. One other tech making an impact at least in Mexico is solar water heaters. We used to have to refill big gas bottles, now most people just install a heater.
@dacig @markhburton @olivetree But even beyond this, I would like people to entertain the idea of heating water or just heating in general as a byproduct of composting.
There’s a spa out here in California that uses the heat generated by enzymatic breakdown of saw dust instead of hot spring mud. That stuff gets really darn hot.
@dacig @olivetree A Frenchman named Jean Pain devised a system where he heated water via coils of piping running through large heaps of composting tree brash. For solar and wind it's worth avoiding intermediate use of electricity (and losses, critical mindrals..) where feasible. Solar -> heat, wind - motion.
Check this link cleantechnica.com/2026/01/26/l… Less extraction. How much mass you need per MWh of energy produced favours renewables by factors of 1000's: oil can be burnt once, but a solar panel lasts years.. Burning Carbon produces diffuse residue, wind and solar mostly solid, contained residue, might be recycled. Renewables can still improve in efficiency, oil has hit its limits. Locality of production also has implications in energy sovereignty and imperialism...
So , you’re not showing renewables comes at the cost of mountains reduced to toxic slurry leeching into ground water or a river of toxic sludge from resource refinement.
In order to transition, which can never be 100% and could never be 100% recycled requires exponentially more mining and refining with exponentially more toxic shit poisoning the living skin of the planet that creates our climate.
Before throwing so much money into yet another planet killing supply chain, it behooves us to look into alternatives that eliminate the need for all this energy and all this mining.
The cheapest cleanest energy is the stuff we never burn and the stuff we never dig up.
One thing I will tell you is that the giant corporations aren’t going to throw anything into it because that pathway that completely separate economic pathway does not profit them
Alberta's gift to Canada isn't just killing everyone with climate change, but also wanting to kill the poor throughout Canada via American-style medical care.
I would be a lot less worried if Mark Carney didn't want to tongue-touch Danielle Smith's private parts so badly that he would suicide the country for some oil money. But let's face it, the Liberal Party of Canada wouldn't be sad to see Canada's health care system end either.
Despite its name, Alberta’s Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2025, is not health care legislation. The purpose of the law that was granted Royal Assent on Dec.
That's the problem with Canadian healthcare. Too many private parts. Take it from this USian, you do NOT want what we've got. It's an impoverishment machine hoovering up the people's resources for the private equity funds. Please tell your PM to stop sucking private parts.
@lori We most definitely do not want the American system here, except for the people who would really stand to make a lot of money from it they really want the American system here very badly.
Welcome to the 19th sorry 20th sorry 21st Century! As long as there are empires, there will be imperial fun and games.
Smash the empires. ✊ (n.b. "smashing" can also take the form of making the authoritarian impulse wither and die by identifying psychopaths and preventing them having a role in governance.)
"Burdensome regulations" corporations got good at making their grievances sound relatable. Like the HOA won't let them plant the type of grass they want, when what they wanted is to put uranium in your taquitos
We've built our own text-to-speech system with an initial English language model we trained ourselves with fully open source data. It will be added to our App Store soon and then included in GrapheneOS as a default enabled TTS backend once some more improvements are made to it.
We're going to build our own speech-to-text implementation to go along with this too. We're starting with an English model for both but we can add other languages which have high quality training data available. English and Mandarin have by far the most training data available.
Existing implementations of text-to-speech and speech-to-text didn't meet our functionality or usability requirements. We want at least very high quality, low latency and robust implementations of both for English included in the OS. It will help make GrapheneOS more accessible.
@tchambers It's not really platform specific. It currently runs on the CPU but we plan to add TPU support for Tensor and NPU support for Snapdragon in the future. It's made for GrapheneOS and we're not interested in doing any significant work on use outside of GrapheneOS. It will be possible to install it from our App Store on other Android 16+ operating systems but it's not our focus. We're focused on making GrapheneOS better and haven't gotten much out of making stuff available elsewhere.
Our full time developer working on this already built their own Transcribro app for on-device speech-to-text available in the Accrescent app store. For GrapheneOS itself, we want actual open source implementations of these features rather than OpenAI's phony open source though.
@rebel1725 It's too slow which results in poor usability especially for blind users depending on TalkBack where it adds a lot of latency to every request. We already have an all around better implementation.
This is great news! I'll be interested to find out how well your English speech-to-text model copes with non-rhotic accents. (Think of a posh British "received pronunciation" accent, or anyone from southeast England, or Australia or New Zealand.) Currently, if I want something like Dicio to understand me, I have to put on an American accent, which my wife says is "creepy".
For those who do not have neither GitHub accounts or crypto, do y’all have plans to set up funding channels through the likes of LiberaPay, OpenCollective, etc?
@moshimotsu We have a bunch of donations options including local bank transfers with very low fees via Wise or sending money via Wise itself which has no fee if it's a matching currency. We already have a lot of options and adding more results in higher costs for managing it and handling accounting. We have to spend a huge amount of money on accounting and also auditing. The more complex the finances, the more money we'll need to spend on that. Why not use bank transfers or Wise?
@moshimotsu GitHub Sponsors provides credit card donations with 0% fees for donations from individuals which isn't something we can get elsewhere. The fees elsewhere are often over 5% when currency conversion is taken into account. We don't want to move more of the donations to high fee platforms. We have PayPal as a donation method but our donate page tries to make sure people understand the high fees and that it's better to donate another way such as GitHub Sponsors, Wise or bank transfers.
Truth be told, I’ve never heard of Wise until this very moment, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many others haven’t either. But really the reason I ask is because, for many, these are very recognizable channels through which supporting a project “just makes sense.” When onboarding friction is lower, more people usually donate because they can just use a familiar system. I only asked because I felt having those might lead to more donos, rather than personal need!
@moshimotsu LiberaPay isn't used much based on en.liberapay.com/explore/recip…. GrapheneOS likely receives more monthly donations than the total amount going through LiberaPay based on past numbers they've given on the total going through it. We were setting up Open Collective at one point prior to having our non-profit but ended up just using our own non-profit instead of needing a fiscal host to handle it. We're on Benevity already because some people can only donate through that but we prefer Wise.
Both parties, still not the same. Despite stupid troll accounts trying to tell you they are. Trump expands policy banning aid to groups abroad that discuss or provide abortions: npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-56832…
Dear friends from outside the Twin Cities: Did you know that when the Feds detain you without cause at Whipple--protesters, observers, citizens, non-citizens, doesn't matter--they release you into the cold with no coat, no phone (they keep your phone--why???), no way to get home. You could freeze to death out there. But fortunately a group called Haven Watch is waiting, a bunch of volunteers who usher released detainees into their warm cars, give them coats, burner phones mprnews.org/episode/2026/01/26…
Y’all! Personal friend of Kristy PuppyKiller #Noem, a completely unqualified #infosec wannabe, who couldn’t pass pen testeing, or a polygraph saying he didn’t want to sell data; the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (#CISA), Madhu #Gottumukkala, uploaded sensitive information to a public version of #ChatGPT, because of course he fucking did.
The info leaked was marked “for official use only.” That designation is used within #DHS to identify information of a sensitive nature that, if shared, could adversely impact a person’s privacy or welfare or impede how federal and other programs essential to the national interest operate.
There’s now a concern that the sensitive info could be used to answer prompts from any of ChatGPT’s 700 million users. Critics have questioned whether Gottumukkala knows what he’s doing.
Corporate media’s complicity in the normalization of state violence is often framed as incompetence or oversight. A generous and inaccurate framing.
Billionaire owned corporate media has learned under this administration that challenging power brings retaliation and compliance protects profits. When journalism accommodates power, it ceases to serve the public.
This is precisely why independent media has become a necessity. Let’s Address This.
It's not just the disinformation, but the censorship, that risks undermining our republic
There are moments when the most important question is not what is happening, but why so many people are never told that it is happening at all? We are liv…
Doug Ford’s frivolous yet mean-spirited attacks on people who cycle in Toronto is dangerous and divisive. But it’s certainly had its intended effect of distracting from his shady deals with property developers.
“Ahead of Wednesday's hearing, Longfield said the case was about ensuring the government respected the rule of law. ‘The Ford government is wasting time and public money on a bad-faith culture war, against the advice of its own experts, at a moment when Ontarians need leadership focused on real solutions for real challenges,’ he said in a statement.”
Unfortunately, the number of Belgian MEPs on X has risen from 55% to 86%. Thanks for the information, Christopher. There are seven more Belgian MEPs on X:
- Johan Van Overtveldt - Gerolf Annemans - Assita Kanko - Olivier Chastel - Bruno Tobback - Kathleen Van Brempt - Elio Di Rupo
At least one more Austrian politician has left X at the EU level:
Copilot enterprise appeared (again) in Outlook even though I keep closing the Copilot sidebar every time
It helpfully suggested that I use it to “save time by setting up a meeting”. That IS something a personal assistant would do…
Well, once you give it a time, date, title, and whether it’s IRL or Teams it will then tell you “I can’t directly create meetings in Outlook” and tells you to set it up yourself using Outlook
Microsoft really pumped 30 billion dollars into something that tells me it can schedule a meeting and actually can’t
Truly, we are at the pinnacle of technology when a PDA running Windows Mobile 6.1 has more capability than whatever the hell this is
I can imagine use cases where you actually want picture this big, but these are corner cases. Yet I'd totally expect both sides to handle it somehow (resizing, linking to original, whatever).
Thinking the #python community needs a python package manager manager.. Some system that would streamline the installation and versioning the 5 different package managers needed for a typical code base...
Use Snowflake to give censorship the slip in places where Internet is blocked.
Snowflake allows you to connect to the Tor network in places where Tor is blocked by routing your connection through volunteer proxies located in uncensored countries.
Similar to VPNs, which help users bypass Internet censorship, Snowflake disguises your Internet activity as though you’re making a video or voice call, making you less detectable to Internet censors.
We knew this was coming, but now the clock is running. From Privacy International:
"Yesterday the Trump Administration announced a proposed change in policy for travellers to the U.S. It applies to the powers of data collection by the Customs and Border Police (CBP)."
"If the proposed changes are adopted after the 60-day consultation, then millions of travellers to the U.S. will be forced to use a U.S. government mobile phone app, submit their social media from the last five years and email addresses used in the last ten years, including of family members. They’re also proposing the collection of DNA."
PI linked to and summarized a Federal Register entry describing the proposed requirements:
-All visitors must submit ‘their social media from the last 5 years’
-ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization) applications will include ‘high value data fields’, ‘when feasible’ ‘telephone numbers used in the last five years’ -‘email addresses used in the last ten years’ -‘family number telephone numbers (sic) used in the last five years’ -biometrics – face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris -business telephone numbers used in the last five years -business email addresses used in the last ten years.
I feel for anyone in the travel, tourism and hospitality industries, which make up ~ 10M jobs and ~ 3 percent of the nation's GDP. From the U.S. International Trade Administration (trade.gov)
"Inbound international travel to the United States plays a vital role in the Nation’s economy and promotes cultural exchange and understanding. Travel and tourism is the largest single services export for the United States, accounting for 22 percent of the country’s services exports and 7 percent of all exports in 2023. The travel and tourism industry contributed $2.3 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2022 (2.97 percent of the country’s GDP), supporting 9.5 million jobs."
Prior to February 2016 I typically visited the USA 3 times a year for up to six weeks.
Since February 2016 I have visited the USA twice in a decade, for a total of 10 days.
Entering the USA as a foreigner, with a Republican POTUS in the White House, *never* felt safe, but under Trump it looks diabolically dangerous. (And to a glance I resemble "one of them": I'm not female or dark-skinned.)
@cstross Honestly even returning from international travel as a US citizen doesn’t feel safe if you don’t check the right boxes in your personal profile. If I absolutely had to enter the US right now I’d pre-clear in somewhere like Dublin, but the whole thing feels like a crapshoot.
@cstross Living here is not a walk in the park at this point...
I'd never ask anybody to travel here now. I'm glad I'm no longer in the events-organizing part of tech -- I couldn't host anything anywhere in the U.S. if it required people to come from outside.
Not our largest problem right now, but it's a fairly nasty symptom.
The US have been fingerprinting for over twenty years. Each time I complained about it, Canadians and Americans looked at me like "what are you talking about". And no reciprocity either because Europe is a bunch of cowards.
and coupled with immigration law having provisions that classify any kind of omission on an immigration, visa, or entry form as potential immigration fraud and grounds to disqualify the individual from ANY future status = anybody that forgets one email address or social media account they’ve had years ago is suddenly easily turned into an “illegal immigrant” and passed into the jurisdiction of ICE for deportation and potentially a permanent life ban from the US.
@mariyadelano being deported by ICE is the least worst option. Its the in country shootings, death camps or illegal rendition to el salvador that would not be ideal because you forgot to include your microsoft online account that was force made when you attempted to log into your laptop with a local account.
So given you have to go through US immigration/customs even if just transiting through the US, this is also going to impact US Airlines, as who wants to turn over all that data even if just spending a few hours air side on the way to some where else?
It's almost as if all that hero-worshipping of North Korea in Trump's first term of office led him to decide to close the US border and only allow the US citizens he's deporting out and Nigel Farage in.
Whose going to remember all of that anyways? Seems like an excellent way to pick out people they want to harass and claim its because they lied. Presumably they already have this data thanks to big tech
@Lazarou @troy Makes sense, facts don't matter to these people. It's not about finding out facts about anything but to show everyone who is the hammer and who the nail ..
1. Other countries may, and I think probably, will impose similar requirements on US people trying to enter those counties. In other words, the US would approach becoming a closed kingdom, like N. Korea.
2. Just wait until someone remembers Little Bobby Tables (image below).
The US have been fingerprinting for over twenty years. Each time I complained about it, Canadians and Americans looked at me like "what are you talking about". And no reciprocity either because Europe is a bunch of cowards.
@AAKL If the German football federation decides to either boycott the WC entirely or boycott matches in the US the rest of Europe will do the same. Mexico and Canada can handle the extra matches and tourists. FIFA can adjust quickly to cut the US out. The US matches will have low ranked teams playing in near empty stadiums.
@BLTpizza That's right. The doofus who made this deal doesn't care about the implications: they are not his cross to bear. But what is the criteria that will be used? Who will be banned from entry? Who will be punished? Based on what? Gender? Immigration? Opinion? Are visitors seriously considering handing over their DNA and entire family, email, and social media history for a decade to the people who just murdered another civilian in cold blood?
@AAKL @BLTpizza If the US doesn't want us to visit anymore, we won't visit. TV is nice for watching football. If the US doesn't want to buy from us, we won't buy from them. Sorry, not sorry, Amazon. It's that simple.
If I was going to submit feedback it would be to enthusiastically recommend that they go ahead. The more people that are deterred from visiting the US, the better. It’ll be hard on a lot of industries and individuals, but it’ll hasten the collapse of the regime.
IMO the only sensible way to enter the US is, and has been for some months, either via parachute or landing boat. Think "Operation Overlord." @craignicol
no-one has ever gathered my PII for the purposes of giving it to an enemy government, so I'm just going to assume that anyone complying with this will be contravening the GDPR 😉
But in your case, the boiler was already running past capacity, needles punching against the limit and the thing giving off shrill whistles and death rattles. And the Dems were like “ehh, it’s just being dramatic, it can take a few more hours running at full throttle.”
Grinning Cat 🚫👑
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •mossyrua
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •If that was a real country like Ireland or France, the riots would start in the morning and the government would be finished by Monday.
Fact.