Notices by James Widman (jameswidman@mastodon.social), page 3

@futurebird maybe we need advisories on publishing companies that ship fake literature?

It seems like something worth teaching in public schools: publishing companies in column A have put some effort into eliminating fake lit, while companies in column B (a much, much longer list) have been known to emit fake lit and are therefore deprecated.

maybe we could have a browser plugin that auto-checks whether a work was produced by a deprecated publisher...?

but also, what if this were just a starting point toward seeing the value in serving other people in general—i.e. regardless of their citizenship.

why must the gaze always be directed inward. It's unbelievably wasteful.

recalling the motives of companies like halliburton, oil companies, and even fast-food chains...

imagine if "serving your country" *actually* meant serving the people of your country (by helping to meet everyone's basic needs), and not investors.

imagine how fast the standard of living could be improved, and how many bullshit industries could just evaporate.

imagine how much free time—how much freedom—we could have.

between fires, sea level rise, and hurricanes, there will be so much loss of real estate that *renting* (let alone "ownership") is going to become non-viable for most people.

either we will abolish "ownership" of real estate, or we will see a scale of suffering that is unimaginable (for now).
https://bsky.app/profile/jameswidman.bsky.social/post/3lfgmrlgsx22j

imagine a version of society where a phrase like "they served their country with distinction" is implicitly assumed to mean:

"they did a fuck-ton of construction work so that their neighbors would be well-sheltered."

...and not:

"they assisted war crimes in the interests of the empire"

In the context of real estate, i put the word "ownership" in quotes because i sincerely think that there was never a time when the concept was valid. It was always one of the tools used to form an underclass and keep people confined to it.

@mekkaokereke i don't often recommendations like, "it's horrible! I'm so mad! You *have* to watch it."

@mcc well, it'll invoke the program named by the option variable 'keywordprg', but 'keywordprg', like other options, can be given a different value for each buffer, and usually this will happen automatically (like, there's an autocmd for it) and set according to the 'filetype' (text, help, c, cpp, rust, etc).

So e.g. if the filetype is 'text', in my config 'keywordprg' is ':Man'; if the filetype is 'help', 'keywordprg' is ':help' (which makes it easy to navigate the help pages).

i would like to live in the timeline where there is a general understanding that some things are public services/goods (e.g. railways; water/sewer systems; public libraries; computer operating systems; internet search engines; web browsers; etc), and where there is a legal framework that notices when society has started depending on such a thing, and guarantees public funding for them so that they don't need to cater to a "market" or investors.
https://mastodon.social/@jwz/112650295543215212

i would like to live in the timeline where we are not ruled by investors.

(re public water/sewer systems: condolences to the UK, whose enshittification problem is quite literal)

@mekkaokereke @staidwinnow @Jorsh oh my god...

so, that thing where white people say, "i don't see racism"...

that's *literally true* on fedi*, even though it's actually there, and in the mentions of black fedi users.

[*] to what extent i don't know yet

@Sablebadger @mekkaokereke @staidwinnow @Jorsh
@Sablebadger Yes, the racism is definitely there and has always been there, but white-people-who-say-they-don't-see-racism have also always been there (for hundreds of years).

the point in earlier posts is: because fediverse *software* makes many reply-posts literally invisible, there are now many instances of racism that we are truly unable to see.