walking back from the metro, some kids had constructed a ski slope down the public stairs around the corner from my flat and were practicing skating tricks along the railing. winter in oslo.
"Rules forbidding insults about a person's appearance based on race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease have also been scrapped.
Expressions of hate against a person or a group on the basis of their protected class are also no longer banned on the platform, and neither is referring to transgender or nonbinary people as 'it."
@iraantlers yeah. in scandinavia, public infrastructure and basic citizenship functions are increasingly mediated through smartphones that run on operating systems controlled by one of two competing US tech giants. it's stupid af.
was planning to keep using my recycled iphone until it physically fell apart but I checked the settings, "enhanced visual search" had been enabled and it might be time to fire the whole thing into the sun.
@iraantlers fairphone with one of the degoogled OS is probably my preferred option. although to be fair I only got a smartphone in 2021 to play pokémon go: I'm always weighing a possible future in which I don't have one.
nice. yeah, that combo is one of the options on my list. the fairphone scores well for repairability though, which as far as I know pixel isn't that great for?
there's a quote that lives rent free in my head these days—nazi Reichsminister Martin Bormann, on suppressing education in the conquered eastern territories: "Jeder Gebildete ist ein künftiger Feind."
we have five fully salaried PhD researcher positions available at my institute, at the University of Oslo.
projects are individual, topic and discipline(s) open but they must connect to research we're already doing at the institute (and we do quite a lot of cool stuff).
apply with a short proposal (3-5 pages), deadline Feb 24, 2025.
I think for me as for many others, the full horror of what life must be like living under the US "health insurance" system is something inaccessible, beyond imagination.