Notices by Sam (samuteki@ohay.ooo)

dear every billionaire,
i hope you get everything you got coming

Real talk: Google, Meta, X and Amazon have been stifling innovation in the tech space, for decades at this point, by eliminating competition via buying or burying them. They're at the top of the pile not because they're the best companies, but because they're the most ruthless.

Serious question: How are y'all maintaining connections with loved ones who may not be computer savvy without using big social?

I don't *need* an Eee PC.
But I really *want* an Eee PC.

Mastodon is not Twitter.
Mastodon doesn't need to become Twitter.
Success for Mastodon will not be the same as success for Twitter.

I had very specific reasons for making this space on Mastodon and I am successful as fuck.

Make no mistake: a bad man died. A bad man was *murdered*. Yes, he was doing his job. And his job was a bad job. His job and his money and his status helped to cover up the fact that his job and his money and his status stank with the blood of sick and injured people who he was happy to take money from, but treated like faceless serial numbers when it came time to give.

A bad man died. A bad man was *murdered*. And no angels wept.

A man shot another man in broad daylight.
A man took a gun, pointed it at the back of another man, and emptied the gun of three bullets into the other man, killing him.

A groundswell of support raced through the country, races through the country even now. The support for the shooter knows no bounds. Members of all races and economic classes and political affiliations are celebrating the shooter for his actions.

And yet I feel profoundly frustrated. Maybe it's because I'm an idealist instead of a realist, maybe because I build up a mental image of the ultimate good and lament what could be where other people simply take the good whenever they can get it, everyone else is celebrating the same moment that I am mourning.

A man who made his fortune by turning a blind eye on the sick and the dying was murdered by one of the sick and the dying. There is no question about the nature of the shooting--the shooter carved words ('deny', 'delay', and 'depose') into the bullets--it was planned, it was personal, and it was passionate.

People have made a hero of this man. There are superficial reasons, there are more substantive reasons. There are emotional reasons. There is anger. Yes: there is so, so much anger.

There's enough anger from enough people from sea to shining sea to force bad men just like the decreased to stop doing bad work, and—maybe because I'm an idealist—I mourn all this pure, beautiful anger, this transformative anger, this moving mountains anger being wasted.

On memes. On playing armchair lawyer on Twitter. On fantasizing about the shooter's physique.

I don't know if my eyes see too much or too little, but when I see one bad man getting taken down, I think about the 99 other bad men standing in line to replace him. I think about the dozens or hundreds of other jealously greedy insurance companies just like his doing the same work his is *still* doing.

The hydra is already growing new heads. They will not easily allow themselves to be cut off the same way. The fight isn't over--the last bell for round one hasn't even rung yet.

Maybe people are looking for a hero. Someone to fight for them, someone to make their problems go away. Very seldom has a single man ever changed an entire system, especially a system as big and monstrous as the US healthcare system. One man can inspire a revolution, but he can't be a revolution.

Maybe some of you are satisfied with memes. Maybe some of you are fine letting someone else's actions speak for you. Maybe some of you want a change. Maybe some of you want a revolution.

You think death scares them? They didn't even bother to stop the meeting the deceased was on his way to. (Is it not yet obvious to you that death—theirs or yours—no longer means anything to these people?) If you want to scare them, if you want them to stay awake at night in the kind of anxiety and terror that they have visited upon you, don't go for their necks, go for their checkbooks. They only speak money. Taking their money away is the only way to really hurt them.

Deny their bonuses. Delay their salaries. Depose their market share.

Do not look for a hero to come and save the day—look for leadership. Look for people with a plan to change things. Maybe come up with a plan on your own.

This is an incredibly precious moment. You don't have to watch it pass by. You don't have to feel powerless anymore. In an era of endless polarization, so many people are in agreement on this thing, on the need to change this thing. You don't need to suffer in silence anymore. You can shake the walls within the halls of power with your voices united.

United.

I get that people want to root for vigilantes that take justice into their own hands against corruption in a system, but you don't change systems with random one-off actions.

Changing system-wide problems is either very long and painful (voting, activism, community organizing etc) or long and very painful (wars, revolutions).

One man with a gun very rarely changes things. It's when people come together and fight (peacefully or otherwise) with common goals in mind that real social progress is achieved.

I used to be a pacifist, I think.
And then I learned how my people freed themselves from slavery.
I stopped being a pacifist after that.

An unfortunate consequence of social media comment boxes is that everyone feels 1) the right to reply to whatever they want (whether they understood it or not) and 2) the need to chime in on complex topics in less than 400-ish characters.

How are you thinking/feeling about Masto/Fedi recently?

It's tempting to describe racism as mental illness (though I know of no voluntary mental illnesses):
racism demands a feverish, desperate adherence to beliefs that drives the racist further and further away from reality while insisting that they are closer to reality than anyone else.

When you witness the lengths to which people will go to protect their racist beliefs, you could even be persuaded that it's the fever of racism that made them say that ugly thing or do that harmful thing—but it's probably closer to the truth to say that the fears of having been wrong all along or having to give up total power are the true driving forces behind all of this inhuman behavior.

"NFT" didn't have any hooks in our cultural consciousness, so that's why when people started kicking the tires, the hype quickly died down.

"AI", on the other hand, is something we've been promised (and warned about) for decades. Also, the term is being misapplied to all sorts of commercial products, some of them that existed before the ChatGPT hype which is confusing the uninformed person because since now "AI" means whatever the company says it is, they can over-promise and under-deliver, as long as they deliver *something* sometimes.

Anybody know of any left-handed keyboards with programmable keys that are budget-friendly?

All you have to do is *be* *Black* *online*.
That's it.
That's all it takes to make a racist angry.
No—that is not hyperbole.
And if you don't get it, it shows.