Michael @mchlmc@social.coop

A call for #solidarity to the international #Cooperative community from the people of #Rojava

https://mesopotamia.coop/message-to-the-ica/

A worker owned taxi #coop in Southend has grown from 6 to 70 drivers.

They repaid all their investors and returned £3000 to their members last year. The same year Uber left the area after failing to compete with them.

We need this in every town and city!

https://www.thenews.coop/138486/topic/development/southend-taxi-co-op-launches-operations-neighbouring-rochford/

Gah. I've been notified I'm being made redundant. One month to go. #Breakshit #Edinburgh

Therefore: I will be renewing my search for co-op software opportunities.

And/or going freelance if that fails.

Or perhaps returning to employeedom if that fails.

Any leads appreciated!

So Swiss regulators want to turn the two largest retailers in the country from coops to capitalist companies.

They also question "whether a cooperative structure is appropriate for banking"?

Coop banks were less likely to go bust and lend more to SMEs than other banks. Coop retailers are shown to be better for customers especially under monopoly situations.

WTF is wrong with Swiss regulators?? This is making me more angry than it should... Seriously who the hell are these idiots??

Months ago I started writing a blog post about why I quit Facebook & Instagram, but it got too long and boring. Their record on privacy is well known. The main thing for me: I'm not going to use a service where I'm not in control of what I see.

"Austerity is the idea that the global financial crash of 2008 was caused by there being too many libraries in Wolverhampton."
Alexei Sayle

#politics #austerity

Facebook: Remember how we promised we weren’t tracking your precise location? Sike, can't believe you fell for that... again https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/10/facebook_location_tracking/

Reading about latest iOS #Firefox’s advanced tracking protections and notice that I can try it out on the #Mozilla site telling me about it. Surprised to see this. Thanks Firefox for blocking Google Analytics, on the Mozilla site!

Facebook Messenger still scans all messages, even with end-to-end encryption. Scanning is done locally on the device before text messages are sent and after received messages are decrypted.

Facebook privacy lol

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/07/26/the-encryption-debate-is-over-dead-at-the-hands-of-facebook/#3e1668c45362

"Trump's administration has told Britain it will not get a trade deal unless it drops plans to tax tech companies such as Google, Facebook & Amazon, [designed] to create a fairer tax system".

If only we were members of a 28 state trading union hey?

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-usa-tech-tax/u-s-tells-britain-to-drop-tax-proposal-on-u-s-tech-firms-for-trade-deal-the-telegraph-idUKKCN1US2K0

The lovely folks at @Framasoft translated – and wrote an introduction for – the article I wrote I for Kulturstiftung des Bundes (The German Federal Cultural Foundation) titled Slavery 2.0 and how to avoid it: a practical guide for cyborgs:

Nous sommes déjà des cyborgs mais nous pouvons reprendre le contrôle: https://framablog.org/2019/07/09/nous-sommes-deja-des-cyborgs-mais-nous-pouvons-reprendre-le-controle/

In German: https://www.kulturstiftung-des-bundes.de/de/magazin/magazin_32/sklaverei_20_und_wie_man_sie_vermeiden_kann_eine_praktische_anleitung_fuer_cyborgs.html

Original: https://ar.al/2019/05/02/slavery-2.0-and-how-to-avoid-it-a-practical-guide-for-cyborgs/

"It doesn’t have to be this way. We can call a halt to the madness – throw a wrench in the juggernaut. By de-enclosing social goods and restoring the commons, we can ensure that people are able to access the things that they need to live a good life without having to generate piles of income in order to do so, and without feeding the never-ending growth machine"

Degrowth: A Call for Radical Abundance —
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/10/27/degrowth-a-call-for-radical-abundance

"In 1957, Johannes Juul – a student of Paul La Cour – built the three-bladed Gedser wind turbine (...)The blades were built from steel spars, with aluminium shells supported by wooden ribs. (...) It ran for 11 years without maintenance, generating up to 360,000 kWh per year, but was not repaired when a bearing failed. When the turbine was refurbished and tested in the late 1970s, it performed better than the first wind turbines with fiberglass blades."

#Solarpunk FTW

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines.html

This passage from Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism just got a +100 relevance bonus in the wake of the #EU #copyright vote.

RT @openstreetmap
The EU Copyright Directive threatens OpenStreetMap. Find out more and how you might be able to help! https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2019/03/21/the-eu-copyright-directive-threatens-openstreetmap/

Big heckin' thanks to @wu_lee for all his work on getting the new infrastructure in place for accepting new #SocialCoop members. :)

Got a few process things to finalize, and if the proposal in the CWG passes, then we'll be on track to start getting in touch with the list of folks who've said they are interested in joining starting next weekend...

Age of Surveillance Capitalism: “We Thought We Were Searching Google, But Google Was Searching Us” #capitalism #facebook #democracynow #google #surveillance -->> https://www.democracynow.org/2019/3/1/age_of_surveillance_capitalism_we_thought

The digital world is a steady march towards a new kind of feudalism in which nothing is "sold" to us, only rented, making us tenant farmers of everything that was once our property.