Asset forfeiture, corporate kickbacks, wealthy benefactors. These are just some of the other ways that police find to fund their surveillance efforts. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/09/how-police-fund-surveillance-technology-part-problem

The Onion: It Is Journalism's Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible. "It's about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don't like, then offering misleading evidence..." https://www.theonion.com/it-is-journalism-s-sacred-duty-to-endanger-the-lives-of-1850126997

The Mario, Tetris and Sonic movies are all so good, they should make Goldeneye into a movie.

Periodic reminder of this 1999 review of Google

Helicopter

https://flic.kr/p/2ogP7hX
Helicopter flying just above a …

there's a special place in hell for whoever came up with "separate the art from the artist" as a deflection of individual culpability, because that's all it is. like I don't say "separate my ass from my car" even though I know it's killing the planet. I drive a gas car because I don't want to take the train, and that's bad, and I know that, oh well. if you want to consume the thing from the Bad Person just own it ffs, don't twist your little brain into pretzels that it's morally good, actually

“This is the place” - photo of Desoto Falls Dam

https://flic.kr/p/2oghrm4

#photography #alabama #history #desotofalls #dekalbcounty #mentone #fortpayne
"This is the Place" Before the …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#economics #politics #gdp #auspol #ukpol

Saw a deer running through a field yesterday.

society: damn misinfo at scale is getting a bit out of hand lately. seems like a problem.

tech guys: i have invented a machine that generates misinformation. is that helpful?

Skid-steer sunrise

https://flic.kr/p/2oekEpf

I've migrated this instance from pleroma to #akkoma https://akkoma.social/

Sunset

https://flic.kr/p/2ocvM2w

Layoffs:
Google - 10,000 (market cap $1.3T, Q3 2022 profit $13.9B)
Microsoft - 10,000 (market cap $1.8T, Q2 2022 profit $34.6B)
Amazon - 18,000 (market cap $992B, Q2 2022 profit $16.7B)
Salesforce - 8,000 (market cap $151B, Q2 2022 profit $5.6B)
Facebook - 1,000 (market cap $365B, Q2 2022 profit $22B)

None of those companies are even close to struggling and yet they'll throw people to the wolves.

I’m having trouble understanding the reason for these massive tech layoffs. Twitter—sure. Meta? OK, bad bet on “metaverse” and social network in decline. But what has suddenly changed for Google and Amazon?

One possible explanation here: https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-layoffs-worried/

If you’re looking for a recommendation here, I would urge you to do the following:

1. Use a good password manager with a strong random 6-8 word master passphrase.
2. Write it down (one safe place) and practice entering it from memory on a regular basis. You will eventually remember it.
3. Let the password manager generate passwords for individual sites.

There are no guarantees, but this is probably the safest way to keep passwords online.

Is there a "Mastodon" without the public timeline/explore tab/etc.? One that doesn't download all of these random statuses?

Just the people I follow, does that exist? Like RSS readers, but public (I guess).

Like, I still want my followers to see my posts, and I want my posts to have URLs and everything.

I just don't want to serve complete strangers' posts, and I don't really care about discoverability.

Are public timelines, etc., a Mastodon thing, or are they part of the #ActivityPub spec?

I decided to resize the droplet this instance is on instead of moving away from digital ocean. It turns out I just couldn’t muster up the energy to set up everything on another server.

It appears to have went smoothly…

"I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI – that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster."

- Nick Cave, of all people!

https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chat-gpt-what-do-you-think/

Hello all. On this commemoration of what would be the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 94th birthday (again: just one week after my own grandma's 94th birthday party!), here's one of the most impactful and important, but still most under-read writings of his whole life:

"Letter From A Birmingham Jail"
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/sites/mlk/files/letterfrombirmingham_wwcw_0.pdf

Also available in his own voice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATPSht6318o

And it's ALSO a great time to remember some of the friendships that made his life what it was.

Have a reflective and restorative day.