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Posting factual information is ... becoming radical. Making it easy to find? Extremist behavior. Not making people look at ads to see it? Downright suspect! How dare you.
in reply to JustAFrog

@justafrog @BruceMirken Of note, an even bigger danger is *displeasing* misinformation. Essentially the tactic the right has used to a shockingly effective degree these past few cycles. They just make up BS left and right, throw everything at the left (or anyone else they don't like) to see what sticks and then when anything doesn't it doesn't matter because they're making something else up already anyway. They have exposed a huge flaw in the mental makeup of a *lot* of humans.

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too few people are willing to stand up to bullies, to call out charlatans, and to say no to money.

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Laken Riley sounds like a dream case for the right wing narrative. Not only does it serve as proof of concept for brown-on-white violent crime, but even for shoplifting (perhaps the most aggrandized news trend of 2024) as a "gateway crime." Sometimes a thorough cherry picking of a police blotter hands your enemies an "I told you so" to beat you over the head with. It would be nice if some nice Democrats could get in touch with their inner opportunists. There's a time and a season for bipartisanship, but this ain't it, chief.

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Lorraine Lee reshared this.


Imagine if the world economy was based on cooperation instead of capitalism?

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in reply to ErgonWolf

similar 🤯 when I was exposed to the notion that we already really could have a "Library of Things" for most things.


What the Democratic Party needs is a hostile takeover by its progressive faction. Think of it as a correction (hopefully not an overcorrection) for the hostile takeover by the DLC. The Republican Party (which, notably, does not have the "superdelegate" system) has allowed itself to be taken over by its more militant faction at least three times in my lifetime, with mixed results, but as we know, nothing ventured, nothing gained. The Democratic Party is extremely resistant to change, and their ship will sink if something doesn't change.

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Lorraine Lee reshared this.


The only #socialmedia I am now left on is Mastodon, Pixelfed and LinkedIn.

After being cyber-flashed on #BlueSky - bombarded by abuse on Twitter where I had blocked 4,500+ accounts - Russian "ladies of the night" trying to follow me on Instagram - bombarded with ads and animal abuse on Facebook, I now feel I'm in a better place.

Maybe my blog article is a bit of a rant but it felt better to clear my head.

stevendrowe.com/state-of-socia…

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Lorraine Lee reshared this.


:parrot_portal_blue: hello new people :parrot_portal_orange:
:NoMeta: fleeing all things Meta :NoMeta:

welcome to web 4.0, where we cultivate our own resilient social media graphs organically
free of ads
free of rage bait algorithms
free of murky VCs seeking ROI
... and... free.. as in beer 🍻

remember it is acceptable to point & laugh at the web 3.0 griftclowns and their enshittification schemes :red_sus:

:fedi_mercury_coin: :fediverse: :fedi_mercury_coin:

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Lorraine Lee reshared this.


I read that Zuckerberg is calling people who leave his platforms, "virtue signalers." Yup. Indeed. I'd also add, "ethics and morality signalers and patriots." We should all signal that we don't support this kind of behavior. With action.

#Zuckerberg #Meta #Ethics #ProtectDemocracy #USPol

in reply to Nomdeb WILL NOT ACQUIESCE

the one thing that keeps me on there really is htat SO MANY restaurants use it as the only place to see their menus or book a seat.
in reply to RJ

@rj i bet they change that when their customers keep calling to book, explaining they don't use fb for ethical reasons



‘As If She’d Have a Crystal Ball’: Supporters Race to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ Defense As MAGA Critics Make Her the Scapegoat for Wildfires atlantablackstar.com/2025/01/0…

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I think Trump is trying to make a political statement. As a protege of Putin, his philosophy of international politics is a post-Westphalian "might makes right" type world order. The Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) case in particular, is a taunt. The island is a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, with ambitions for full independence. To someone like Trump, independence is not a status under international law, but the ability to hold one's own against rivals. If Trump were to annex Kalallit Nunaat, what are its 58,000 inhabitants (or even Denmark) going to do, fight back? He's trying to beclown the system of sovereign nation states, which includes a lot of small and/or weak ones that used to be part of empires, as something only fools or idealists believe in. At least Putin is picking on someone 1/4 his size. Trump is a bully in the most pathetic sense of the term.

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Watching some Americans threaten and others joke about annexing a nation (Greenland) with a 90% indigenous/mixed population like what century is this? Appalling.

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in reply to Alistair Davidson

"Don't worry, 100 years from now we'll have a culture war about acknowledging your existence and we'll make a sad movie about you"

Lorraine Lee reshared this.


I wonder if a family of squirrels will adopt me? They seem to be more "with it" than my own species.
This entry was edited (2 days ago)

Lorraine Lee reshared this.


i will die on the hill of closure isn't a group axiom

closure is a requirement of a binary operation

and a group is definitionally a set under a binary operation

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Today I'm going to start building a new website from scratch using Guile Scheme!

The goal is to create a production website that could get a fair amount of traffic. This ongoing project should be a good example of real-world Scheme hacking!

Join us here at 07:30 UTC (in around an hour):

- youtube.com/live/jpYROJ9_W2E
- twitch.tv/SystemCrafters

#gnu #guile #scheme #webdev #programming

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I don't do volunteer work for for-profit entities.

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Lorraine Lee reshared this.


Esp. under Project 2025 & Agenda 47, the end result of the disinformation, smears, and legislative attacks on libraries & their support structures is their privatization, theocritization, or obliteration. These ppl fear community support, intellectual freedom, and accurate information. 2/2

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Lorraine Lee reshared this.


Who doesn't remember webportals is doomed to repeat webportals.

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If Merrick Garland can release the Robert Hur Special Consel report which was a political hit job on President Biden, then he can release the Jack Smith Special Counsel report.

If he doesn’t release the report, then he’s not just a coward, he’s complicit.


Lorraine Lee reshared this.


It was probably not a great idea to collapse the whole Canadian healthcare system by pretending the pandemic is over. Unless you're someone who wants to privatize or the politicians employed by them.
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Lorraine Lee reshared this.


A while back I read that the best way to teach a puppy how to behave is to do so in the presence of an adult dog who has already been trained to behave the way you need to. The adult dog will teach the puppy.

As I read this, I was amazed!! Dogs teach their young human behavioural expectations!!!

Then I realized: everything I know about how to behave around dogs I learned as a child, from an adult human.

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in reply to Impudent Strumpet

everything you learn you get from older yourself, that's called inheritance
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in reply to Impudent Strumpet

this is also the big problem with animals in captivity. The issue isn't the breeding every time, sometimes it's that the captive population fundamentally can't survive the wild because they don't have an adult to teach them "street smarts".

And unfortunately to bring the tone down a bit, the reverse: destruction of context without destroying life happens with slavery or with (in Australia's case) with the stolen generation.

This entry was edited (3 days ago)

Lorraine Lee reshared this.


Elon Musk’s European political meddling is ‘worrying,’ says Norway’s PM

European backlash grows against billionaire ally of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.

After buying the US President and a place in the Oval Office, Musk looks for world power and influence for his right-wing whack-a-doodles.
#AureFreePress #News #press #headline #GOP #Politics #uspolitics #uspol #Breaking #BreakingNews #Musk #Twitter #x #Fediverse #socialmedia #Mastodon

politico.eu/article/norwegian-…

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Giorgia Meloni vuole regalare i dati sensibili di milioni di italiani al suo Elon Musk gayburg.com/2025/01/giorgia-me…

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Lorraine Lee reshared this.


Most of the accounts that I read at Bluesky are trans people's accounts and I read them from outside the system without an account.

I don't feel particularly motivated to delve into that platform any deeper than that, given its safety issues and general corporate fuckery. I'd rather not.

I just saw someone say, "I'm putting a lot of interesting stuff on my Bluesky account but not here. Read my stuff over there, too! I might bridge it if the mood strikes me." (not a direct quote)

Eh, no.

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in reply to timberwraith

Got a Bluesky account myself, with another username. It's just because there are some who aren't here, that I want to see their stuff. It's entirely read only for me, though, and I have no plans to bridge either way.

Lorraine Lee reshared this.


Dell is making a bad decision.

Killing XPS is like Lenovo killing off ThinkPad: if you want a quality Dell, that’s what you get.

Without XPS, I don’t know if I would ever consider a Dell.

theverge.com/2025/1/6/24325799…

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Looks like NPR's "The Daily" is normalizing fascism, trying to paint a human face on DJT's "hostages". The walls keep closing in around me. Keep reminding me that I have allies.

#NPR #jan6 #jan06

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Lorraine Lee reshared this.


Me: [tap-taps Command key to invoke Apple Intelligence prompt]
Me: Which countries have banned Minecraft?
Apple Intelligence: Five countries have reportedly banned Minecraft: Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.
Me: Why did Mexico ban Minecraft?
Apple Intelligence: Do you want me to use ChatGPT to answer that?
Me: [clicks Use ChatGPT button]
ChatGPT: As of January 6, 2025, there is no credible information indicating that Mexico has banned Minecraft. If you have heard otherwise, it might be due to misinformation or rumors.

just... fuck.

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Donald Trump’s attempted coup of 2020 was so successful that four years later a majority of the American electorate either voted for it or were indifferent to it.

‘Justice delayed’ wasn’t merely ‘justice denied’. It was the triumph of injustice.

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Some folk infer from the fact that Earth had single-celled organisms for three billion years before multicellular life finally arrived, that the leap from single- to multi-cell is the “Hard Step” that explains why we do not see a universe teeming with intelligent life.

Those people were about half correct. The hard step is having all the supervisor drones installed on a farm planet to keep the biosphere generating fossil fuels (and not, say, evolving any life that would consume those fuels) break down.

We worked this out after we dug up a broken supervisor. But not, alas, before we repaired it.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

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in reply to Kit Bashir

Your proof-reader says it should be "Those people are..." unless you change " infer" to " inferred".
in reply to ChookMother 🇦🇺🦘

@anne_twain yeah fairy nuff, good spot. That next sentence is a trainwreck tho, work cut out fixing that one.
in reply to Kit Bashir

@anne_twain
That sentence is not great as it stands (hence my tripping up on the "break down" which I DM'd you about) and this toot is, imvho, otherwise your best tootfic, period. The challenge of keeping the twist working as well as it does, retaining the callback, meeting the character limit, and making parsing it easier on the reader... is unenviable.
in reply to Jay Stephens

@jaystephens @anne_twain v2 incorporating your lovely feedback aus.social/@Unixbigot/11378564…


Version 2 of this #Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot with thanks to the RetroProofing gang!

Some folk inferred---from the fact that Earth had hosted single-celled organisms for over three billion years before multicellular life finally arrived on the scene---that the leap from single- to multi-cell is the “Hard Step” that explains why we do not see a universe teeming with intelligent life.

Those people were about half correct.
On a farm planet, the Hard Step is avoiding the notice of the strikebreaker drones; machines tasked with ensuring that the planetwide bacterial soup produces petrochemicals and feedstocks and
not, say, us (or anything else multicellular).

Any phenotypes that show signs of unionising - forming cellular collectives that benefit themselves rather than the Bosses - get stomped down HARD by the Strikebreakers. Complex life only got going hereabouts when an unlikely catastrophe broke the breakers.

We worked all this out only after we dug up a broken drone. But not, alas, before we repaired it.


in reply to Kit Bashir

Can I suggest having that also in past tense - " The hard step was ..." Jumping between tenses makes it harder to follow the narrative.

You might also consider capitalizing Hard Step, to link it to the previous paragraph.

in reply to Kit Bashir

Version 2 of this #Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot with thanks to the RetroProofing gang!

Some folk inferred---from the fact that Earth had hosted single-celled organisms for over three billion years before multicellular life finally arrived on the scene---that the leap from single- to multi-cell is the “Hard Step” that explains why we do not see a universe teeming with intelligent life.

Those people were about half correct.
On a farm planet, the Hard Step is avoiding the notice of the strikebreaker drones; machines tasked with ensuring that the planetwide bacterial soup produces petrochemicals and feedstocks and
not, say, us (or anything else multicellular).

Any phenotypes that show signs of unionising - forming cellular collectives that benefit themselves rather than the Bosses - get stomped down HARD by the Strikebreakers. Complex life only got going hereabouts when an unlikely catastrophe broke the breakers.

We worked all this out only after we dug up a broken drone. But not, alas, before we repaired it.

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Lorraine Lee reshared this.


"MD Anderson is one of the best cancer centers in the nation, offering cutting-edge treatments that attract patients from around the world. But that treatment is likely out of reach for millions of people covered by health insurance plans through the Affordable Care Act.

MD Anderson for years has not accepted any individual health plans offered through the Affordable Care Act marketplace..."

It's not just insurance companies.

🎁: houstonchronicle.com/news/hous…

#healthcare #insurance #hospitals


Lorraine Lee reshared this.


Look who are having a chitchat together in two days!

(Now completed)

@pluralistic

youtube.com/watch?v=I0kvjNh7cz…

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in reply to GhostOnTheHalfShell

Ehm... all the "follow the speakers" links in the event description are from x.com? Even for @pluralistic ?
in reply to GaMe

@game @pluralistic
Yeah, I hadn’t looked at that but bad dog no biscuit to the both of them?

I’m scandalized personally. 😅


Lorraine Lee reshared this.


Public service announcement:

There is no N in the word ‘restaurateur’.

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Lorraine Lee reshared this.


I HATE "customer service" chats on websites.

You know you're talking to an AI when you start. And there's a good chance you're still talking to an LLM when they "connect you to a live representative".

Even if it IS a human, they are clearly not paying attention.

And all this because of bad UI design in the first place. All I needed was a stupid "I didn't receive this shipment" check-box.

But NO-Ooo-OOO, that would make too much sense. Instead we have to do an overcomplicated hour-long chat.

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in reply to Space Catitude 🚀

It's working as intended. They know if they make it a big enough hassle, plenty of people will just give up.

Lorraine Lee reshared this.


uh unfortunately apparently people need to hear this but if a trans person hasn't referred to a body part of theirs in a specific way you referring to that body part in that way especially body parts related to secondary sex characteristics is a big no

mirror their language

don't be a creep

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Ban on Firing Employee Because of Reproductive Health Decision May Violate Religious Employer's Expressive Association Rights

buff.ly/3W2Es8R

So employers may be able to fire you because you had an abortion

Once again, Christians attacking an anti-discrimination law

Awful

#Law #FediLaw #Religion #abortion #discrimination

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in reply to Prof. Caroline Mala Corbin

is this a path to a workplace only employing people of a certain religion? Religious charities have been in court for that before. Does this enable that?

Lorraine Lee reshared this.


I suspect a lot of US trans folks who started transitioning in the last decade don't realize how big the Affordable Care Act has been in our access to care.

Almost no insurance companies were covering HRT or other care before the ACA - it was out of pocket or treated as a pre-existing condition, potentially blocking us from all medical care. I don't know that we would have the lively and open trans community today if it wasn't for that. It's also the reason people can access it for cheaper in other settings and why Medicare/Medicaid covers it.

I know it seems stupid, but we might need to do what we can to muster a defense of the ACA (which I hated when it passed because I was advocating for single payer, universal healthcare). It might be one of the most important levers and wedges against efforts to destroy our ability to embody ourselves in the next 4 years.

#trans #transgender #queer

in reply to Joscelyn Transpiring

I think your last point about how you initially disliked the ACA is a really powerful thing to demonstrate to people. Now more than ever we cannot let perfect be the enemy of good. I worry that the trans community in particular is at risk of self-immolating before forming a broad political coalition, which will be necessary to weather the next four years and regain legislative footholds into the future.
in reply to Xavier

@xavier_ftm yeah, I’m very much of this approach - I will put most of my energy into grassroots mutual aid and community organizing, but we gotta be tactical in the years to come. There are some fights that will be worth having despite being below the basement of suboptimal, much less ideal. It’s easier to make progress than to rebuild after losing ground. And with something that has this scope of impact, we gotta be ready to not give an inch if we can.

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Feeling 'hoodwinked' erodes trust in employee relations, observational study reveals

phys.org/news/2025-01-hoodwink…

"Otherwise, it basically winds up eroding trust and they feel like you don't have their best interests at heart."

TBH, I've never expected an employer to have my best interests at heart.

I'd be astonished if they did. A corporation doesn't have a heart.

Remember, "employ" means "use".

An employer uses employees.

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in reply to Eric Lawton

But... At my work that's exactly like everyone else's work we're a _family_.

(Which has _never_ been the positive management thinks it is.)

in reply to Eric Lawton

I have definitely had employers who had my best interests at heart - but these were small businesses where we worked side by side every day, not corporations. Also, I choose my employers with great care, though that isn't always an option.

Either way, It's not like it's impossible to use (!) someone's skills & pay them for it without exploitation or disrespect - those things are a choice, which in my view makes it even worse.



Black and Decker is the #vim of microwave ovens. Would recommend.
#vim

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