Notices by Pete Ashton (pete@social.coop)

As someone who has been employed as a janitor I’m always struck by how the handwringing over the sanctity of gendered toilets never seems to consider the men who clean women’s loos and women who clean men’s loos. I suspect because cleaners are not considered real people.

@ntnsndr If they're Birmingham-local, https://birminghambikefoundry.org/ or https://loaf.coop do vouchers. (disclosure - I'm a member of Loaf)

Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’

A nice, meaty but very accessible interview. I always find Butler clear and to the point. https://english.elpais.com/culture/2024-12-15/judith-butler-philosopher-if-you-sacrifice-a-minority-like-trans-people-you-are-operating-within-a-fascist-logic.html

@anna I was involved with an artist exchange a few years back hosting a cartoonist from Kenya and the first thing he wanted to do when he got to the UK was go to an art supplies shop to stock up on pens. So yeah, all kinds of tech.

@ntnsndr Thanks for writing this. I think chunks of it could apply to the "longing for days of Empire" mentality in the UK too, as espoused by the likes of Boris Johnson. I've often found it interesting that the heroes of that tribe tend to be explorers (Shackleton, Livinstone, Scott, etc) creating an analogous mythology to the wild west. Plenty to ponder.

Landlord has a derelict building, community enterprise takes it on peppercorn rent, fixes it up and runs a pay-what-you-can restaurant employing feeding the community and employing 22 people. With the building now fixed up, landlord evicts community enterprise and sells building.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/22/radical-pay-what-you-can-restaurant-faces-eviction-from-mill-it-refurbished

This could be easily avoided if derelict and unused buildings were simply confiscated from landlords and given to the community. They should have no rights of ownership here.

@J12t @katanova @tchambers I see this as analogous to autonomous towns which have their own rules but, critically, engage with the wider world, because to do otherwise would be insane.

I also think the current Mastodon model is no where near finished and needs a lot of work if it’s going to map onto actual human needs. (It doesn’t have to, but if that’s the goal…)

@J12t @katanova @tchambers I honestly think we need to get away from these monolithic ideas of single-purpose networks. The ideal fediverse is small pieces loosely joined. The protocol allows (but doesn’t ensure) connectivity but doesn’t dictate how that should operate. As a (co-op) business person I’d like a network that augments our activities, both commercial and social. As an individual I want something quite different and nebulous. I’m sure we can have both, and more.

I dunno how new this is but The Guardian seems to have stripped all social media cruft from their byline header stuff and replaced it with a “Copy Link” button.

Rather than change the Twitter buttons to Xs they just got rid of the whole farce. Nice to see.

@tchambers Yeah, but I’m looking to do less setup and maintenance this year, not more. :)

I knew Substack was problematic when I set up The Aerobic Digest there, but I wanted to see how the most popular service worked and play in that arena a bit. And every fucking big service with reach on the internet is run by problematic assholes so what’s the difference. But they had to go and explicitly say they don’t have a problem making money from Nazis, and now I’m looking to move.

https://substack.com/@hamish/note/c-45811343

Thankfully TAD only has 70 subs so I can go somewhere for free. Yay for obscurity!