bhaugen @bhaugen@social.coop

Why the hell did mainstream media not cover 2nd Amendment gun-carrying no-shots-fired peaceful marchers who headed to Stone Mountain in Georgia? Shouldn't the NRA be all over this in support? It was a large march on July 4th by liberty-loving Americans! Where's the rah-rah patriotism?

Oh, the marchers were all black. They called themselves NFAC (Not Fucking Around Coalition). <Insert history of the Black Panthers and Ronald Reagan>.

We live in a world where Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán, Duterte, Erdoğan, and Johnson lead nations. This is a damning indictment of hierarchical/centralised politics and governance structures. Unless we devolve our means of exercising political agency, expect more of the same.

So Moxie backtracked and says they'll push a fix to make pins optional. Meanwhile if you don't add a pin (which the app still doesn't say will /upload your signal contact list into the signal servers/) you can't get back in to coordinate a platform switch with your secure contacts. Unless you were already using the desktop app which isn't pin locked, or somehow manage to downgrade the phone app.

Suddenly being held data-hostage -- turn over this data or you can't talk to the people, not even to arrange a different means of contact -- without any forewarning is unacceptable and a perfect example of why centralized infrastructure and single-client rather than interoperable systems are a major failure.

RT @betterthemask
Excellent article from Kotaku laying out @Ubisoft’s structural sexism, culture of predatory behaviour and sexual misconduct shielded by HR.
We must keep demanding accountability - our voices matter, we must drive this change as an industry 💪🏾🔥✊🏾
https://kotaku.com/ubisoft-employees-have-grave-concerns-over-toronto-stud-1844277486

"the work of antiracism is becoming a better human to other humans"

~Austin Channing Brown

Fascinating article about Soviet research that allowed them to cultivate citrus fruit in very cold (and sometimes too hot) climates. All of it without using greenhouses or any other kind of "active" processes to keep the trees warm.

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/04/fruit-trenches-cultivating-subtropical-plants-in-freezing-temperatures.html

A great op-ed piece by @jelkner on the need to push back against tech giants taking over public education and instead funding public (ie: free and open source) tool for public schools.

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/public-tools-for-public-schools-stopping-tech-giants-online-education-takeover/

#FreeSoftware

Hey :) This is an account for karrot - an open source community organising platform focused on resource saving and sharing.

We're currently being used by a bunch of groups around Europe who save and share food from being wasted (see https://karrot.world/#/groupPreview), but heading towards general community organising uses too.

We're into stuff like participatory design, democratic process, non/less-hierarchical structure.

We're open source (you can use our main instance, or self-host).

#introductions

@dredmorbius @jaranta There are a decent amount of countries where the yearly minimum wage is less than the cost of one average textbook https://www.minimum-wage.org/international
In my country they only cost about a month's rent at most, so guess I'm among the luckier folk (and we're not talking about shipping yet, or the cost of an e-reader). A Ugandan's yearly wage affords at most _two_ papers.

Fair Trade Agreement

RT @TatianaTMac
This thread blew my mind. https://twitter.com/btanderson72/status/1279507428128718848

@scolobb Thank you for sharing the experience... On refusing to review: https://nofreeviewnoreview.org/

Ah, now I get to the part where I see that Kantrowitz simply believes the broader liberal narratives around how capital drives innovation and "value".

He says: "Less entrepreneurial energy leads to less growth and less wealth to distribute." and "Capitalism is good at creating incentives for people to invent stuff."

I say: citations needed, good sir!

Should have seen it coming. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Third, this fabled automation often has been invented and built by free software and open source communities, by academia and by hobbyists, before making it into big tech "best practices" handbooks.

Fourth, they only automate when it is profitable. Will happily continue employing thousands of underpaid off-shore workers to e.g. do manual QA, if it is cheaper than figuring out how to get privileged software engineers to write automated tests.

It is true that big tech gives some of their employees a some space to come up with ideas. Perhaps it even looks like a lot of space, compared to other industries.

Tech companies also kill ideas that are clearly useful and popular but make "insufficient" money (e.g. Google Reader), and dictate that employees work on unethical projects.

It is always company "leaders" who decide what launches and what gets shut down. And they do so always in the interests of capital, not innovation.

The idea that the tech giants are successful because of "innovation" driven "by employees" is also largely a myth. For example, Google continues to make over 90% of their profits from ads on their search engine: two products, out of the dozens they've built. In fact, Google has struggled to diversify their revenue streams for over a decade now.

For example, Kantrowitz says: "The tech giants are successful largely because they’ve reimagined how we approach work. [...] they’ve figured out how to maximize the time their employees spend coming up with new ideas and minimize the time they spend supporting existing products."

This is simply incorrect. FAANG are successful largely thanks to the increased exploitation that is facilitated by digital products at scale, especially when coupled with lock-in, network effects and globalization.

Just a reminder that the US is celebrating "independence" today while still holding Puerto Rico, the (US) Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands as colonies.