Notices by Tattie (tattie@eldritch.cafe)

Capitalism is tearing itself apart, with stunning speed. Many businesses close down early. Some try to stay open, taking paper money for payments, recording transactions manually. But there's a shortage of cash to go around-- ATMs hold such a small float these days that they're cleared out in short order, and who has more than fifty quid stashed away in an envelope for emergencies?

Prices begin to skyrocket, and it's barely past noon before the first reports of looting begin.

You decide not to go into work this afternoon. Because yes, you can just about scrape together enough physical change for the bus, but can you trust that public transport is going to still be running by the time you need to go home?

You consider of the paycheck that your work issues every month, incrementing figures in your bank account. Figures which today are rendered abstract and useless, without any way to turn them into actual currency. It's all a mirage, you think giddily, all of it.

You start to wonder what you might barter, and to whom, for tomorrow's dinner.
4/4

"A fix is imminent", the press release from Google says; "we've got our best programmers on it."

And they have. But the programmers in question have never touched this system before. It was vibe-coded on the cheap by a contracting company which has since dissolved. All the function names look helpful, but do something slightly different to what they claim.

A simple rollback to the previous version of the code was the first suggestion, of course. But the last deployment was a month and a half ago. It was working fine, until it wasn't.

"We could just rip this whole module out," someone suggests. But it needs to correctly encode the TLA details in the WTF wrapper, otherwise everything five steps down will break. And none of this is documented anywhere.

Do they continue trying to trace the source of the problem, or do they just rewrite the whole damn thing? Tensions are rising. Management is throwing a fit, obviously, and the programmers are not immune to the affects of the outage themselves. They have friends and family-- some of them vulnerable-- who are starting to worry about how long they'll have to go without vital goods and services.
3/4

You turn to the socials, and learn it's not just you. It started overnight-- a few scattered payments started to stall, and then more and more frequently. At a certain critical point, the entire system ground to a halt as it tried to cope with endless timeouts and retries.

"Why every payment system is affected", reads an article posted by your techy friend Jen. It's some arcane verification module deep within Google. "That's bizarre", reads the first comment. "I don't even have an Android phone!"

Ah, but everything is interlinked, these days. So many steps, so many parties desperate to get a finger in every pie. Once upon a time it was a customer, a merchant, each party's bank, and a single intermediary managing it. Now nobody can tell how many steps a transaction's going to go through.

"You'd have thought if there was anything capitalism wouldn't break, it'd be taking money off people," another comment reads. "Shut up and take my money"; the meme with Fry from Futurama.

Ah. But it has. Capitalism breaks everything, eventually, even capitalism.
2/4

Capitalism has broken.

You're not aware of it until you put in your weekly online shop of a Friday morning. It all works fine until you come to pay, and then the spinner spins indefinitely, neither accepting not rejecting your card details.

You cancel and try the payment via Apple Pay instead. The same thing happens.

"Wow. Some programmer at ASDA is in hot water", you think to yourself, as you head to Sainsbury's site instead with a tired sigh. Why does everything not work so frequently these days?

Only, Sainsbury's site does the same thing. Fuck. Your heart sinks. Must be a bank problem.

You load up your banking app, and click on the chatbot which is what passes for customer help these days. "Online payments not working", you type, tersely. You jump the usual hoops -- no, the card isn't expired, yes, you're using your correct CV2 number.

"Please wait while we check the source of the issue," the bot relents. Then: "hold on, this is taking longer than usual." And: "thank you for your patience while we continue to check the source of the issue". You leave the app open, and make yourself the second cup of tea of the day, wondering what you can put together for dinner with what little you've got in. Tuna pasta bake it is.

The chatbot stops responding. You reload the app, ask to chat to a human instead. "We are experiencing an unusual load", it informs you. "We will aim to message you back within six hours."

Capitalism has broken. It cut too greedily, and too deep. Bots are programming, bots are manning the help desks. Nary a human to be seen, to be accountable. The system has chugged to a halt.
1/4

Beltane Beltane Beltane!

Cis people: I've heard more than one of you tell me that it's "not entirely safe" to go round wearing a trans flag pin, which is why you don't.

And you're right, it's not entirely safe.

But.

If I can go around existing as a very obviously trans woman for four years, then it's safer than your fears are telling you.

When I first started transitioning, I was terrified. Even at the very first step; painting my nails a clear gloss. Would people laugh at me? Would they shun me? Step by step I discovered: no. I started getting supportive comments and compliments. Women started to treat me with trust and openness.

The vast majority of people are kind, decent, supportive

So I challenge you to start wearing that pin that you're scared of. It's just a pin. See how people react to it. You might see some smiles.

Because trans people might be a single percentage of the population, but what about their families? Friends? Co-workers?

Go ahead and take a pocketful of spares, as well. Offer them to your friends, or anyone who asks.

In this darkest time, when every message from the media tells us that we should hate and mistrust those around us, you deserve to discover, like I did, that this mistrust is a lot less well-founded than you might think. So be brave, and wear that empathy on your sleeve. Or lapel. :heart_transgender:

Ugh. I hate waking up in the morning to some patronising bigot telling me my late wife was an "abnormality" and her biological existence less real than others' due to her inability to reproduce.

Horrible, fascist bullshit.

Which one of you Fedi weirdos* was at the Edinburgh trans rights demo holding the sign saying:

private String gender
not
public const bool gender

* affectionate

@mycrowgirl

The absolute certainty that nobody with tits could possibly like or know anything about whisky was breathtaking.

With a face like she'd been sucking lemons for the last three months.

@goatsarah bland meat in a bland carbohydrate. It can only really be rescued by serious amounts of hot sauce.

@halotroop2288 then she has picked her side. But there are a vast amount of cis women, especially in the UK, who think of themselves as feminist but "don't know what to think" about trans rights.

If they don't figure it out soon, they'll be scratching their heads as to how they lost their rights, when all they did was stay silent as the forces of fascism targeted their political dialogue at trans people.

@BugFajita is this Jólaköttur?
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/yule-cat-jolakotturinn-iceland

Reminder to all feminists

If you accept trans people being defined by their reproductive role...
Then men can define all woman by their reproductive role

If you accept that trans teenagers are too young to make decisions about their bodies...
Then men can decide teenage girls are too young to make decisions about their bodies

If you accept medical gatekeeping of trans people's access to hormones...
Then doctors can restrict any woman's access to HRT and birth control

If you accept stripping trans people of legal protections...
Then men can strip women of legal protections

This is the truth of "trans rights are human rights"
Regardless of your personal feelings on whether trans people are "really" the gender they say they are, the exact same human rights protecting us also underlie women's liberation-- bodily autonomy, dignity, equality of opportunity, and protection from harm.
And so many men are desperate for those rights to disappear.

@RickiTarr it's terrifying whenever a video game comes out with a female main character, incels will be screaming into every comment section they can get their keyboards on "I will be cheering for this to fail!" They review-bomb the game, they harass the people who made it, they create fake screenshots and rumours to make it look bad, they try to kill it in every way they can.

And they call themselves "video game fans". 🙃 They don't seem to like the medium at all, or at least not nearly as much as they love hating women.

"Why don't I ever see TMEs talking about transmisogyny?"

Oh, I dunno, maybe because reducing trans men and transmasculine folks to a dehumanising three letter initialism like fucking TERFs do means that not many of them actually want to speak to you?

Because the trans guys I know and follow are painfully aware of transmisogyny, and talk about it way more than I ever do. I see transmascs tying themselves in knots trying not to offend brittle transfems as they speak about their own experiences and battles.

Crying about "the invisibility of transmisogyny" the minute the trans community dares to talk about transmasc or enby issues is really telling about how you expect the narrative to always and only centre you.

I want to stop hearing bickering about who has it fucking worst. I want to hear trans stories whatever gender you were assigned at birth, however you identify now, whatever other privileges or oppressions you have. I want to see things from so many different trans viewpoints.

Listening to someone else's story is not fucking oppression.

Rant ends.

"To save costs, we could replace our wine tasters with AI"
"But... how would that work? AIs can't taste things."
"It doesn't matter! Human wine tasters have written reams on similar wines, all the AI has to do is to extrapolate."
"But... we'd be lying to our customers. The point of a wine tasting is that something is tasted. The AI cannot in any sense of the word experience the wine it's purporting to know about. We'd just be underhandedly copying humans who are doing the actual job."
"And all that is different to any other use of AI how, exactly?"

@broadwaybabyto "well of course I personally am not the problem", I told myself. "Why, if I ever encountered a rapist..." I imagined myself meting out violence for violence.

The men around me would echo such sentiments. Rape was an unthinkably horrific crime, we told each other, and it was unthinkable that any of us would commit it.

It wasn't until many years later that a friend told me that she had been raped. By a man who at one point I had counted as one of my best friends.

It was easy to believe her. By the time she told me this, he had devolved into a visibly horrible person, an anti-feminist incel with a bitter streak a mile wide. I'd blocked him ages ago on all social media.

But back then, what were the signs? A "dark sense of humour" that came out when he'd had a few pints. A suspiciously young girlfriend. And a slowly increasing list of women who would refuse to be at the same parties as him.

I enabled this asshole. I put in good words for him, told people he was "trying to be better". My naive, well-meaning awkwardness he used as camouflage for his ill intent.

I was the problem, after all. Exactly because rape was unthinkable to me.

Here is the sobering truth: there is no social group in which women and people of marginalised genders do not have to worry about rapists. Guys, if you want to be part of the solution and not the problem, match their vigilance with your own. Think the unthinkable.

@babe this is Misty, doing a good line in "when will my true love return from the war?"

@geekylou ok so this is interesting, if it isn't a coincidence: JKR and Glinner both have history of first being criticised from the right. JKR for "promoting witchcraft", Glinner for "mocking the church".

It's almost as if they fell into a trap of thinking "well, at least the left will support me no matter what I do", and then when they actually get (correctly) criticised from the left, they feel betrayed. And not coincidentally, a lot of their cope seems to be strawmanning their critics to make it sound like right wing rather than left wing criticism.
@goatsarah