Notices by Mitch Wagner (mitchw@mastodon.social)

@cstross What is "continental cheese"? Is that cheese that's wearing a beret?

From a New Zealand local newspaper: “Police responding to reports of a racist flag being flown from a Wānaka property found the home was instead flying the colours of the Klingon Empire from Star Trek." https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/wanaka/racist-flag-w%C4%81naka-actually-klingon-insignia

Stephen King quit Twitter and joined Threads. His last tweet: “I’m leaving Twitter. Tried to stay, but the atmosphere has just become too toxic. Follow me on Threads, if you like.” Here he is on Threads. https://www.threads.net/@stephenking

Trump will use Xi Xinping's "anti-corruption" playbook — @pluralistic https://mitchw.blog/2024/11/13/trump-will-use.html

Outstanding post from Cory Doctorow @pluralistic calling for a general strike in 2028

"Trump is a scab, the Dems need unions, and the Dems are not faithful friends to unions. Harris campaign advisor – her brother-in-law Tony West – is Uber's chief legal officer ... The fact that when the eminently guillotineable union-buster Howard Schultz tries to win a presidential nomination he does so in the Democratic party speaks volumes."

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/11/rip-jane-mcalevey

Why Cory Doctorow @pluralistic doesn't use Bluesky: "I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will."

....

"Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I've entered into community with there."

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact

Bluesky and enshittification: No one is the enshittifier of their own story

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic:

"I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will."

…

"Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to ... https://mitchw.blog/2024/11/02/bluesky-and-enshittification.html

Of course we can tax billionaires:

"Taxing the ultra-rich isn’t like the secret of embalming Pharaohs – it’s not a lost art from a fallen civilization. The US top rate of tax in 1944 was 97%. The postwar top rate from 1945-63 was 94%, and it was 70% from 1965-80. This was the period of the largest expansion of the US economy in the nation’s history. These are the “good old days” Republicans say they want to return to."

— Cory Doctorow ... https://mitchw.blog/2024/10/16/of-course-we.html

Canadian sci-fi writer Robert Sawyer has released a free version of the venerable word processing program WordStar. It includes a DOS emulator so the app can run on modern Windows. Sawyer says it also supports Mac and Linux.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/06/wordstar_7_the_last_ever/#:~:text=Before%20WordPerfect%2C%20the%20most%20popular,it%20still%20has%20admirers%20today (1/2) 🧵

The true, tactical significance of Project 2025 — Cory Doctorow @pluralistic: Despite its legitimately scary and terrible proposals, the Project 2025 document reveals schisms in the conservative coalition, which can be exploited by a Democratic party led by workers. https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/

Exxon CEO Darren Woods says the quiet part out loud: The problem with renewable energy sources is that they “don't generate above-average returns for Exxon's shareholders.” — @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/06/exxonknew/

The sun generates virtually limitless and free energy, with much of it available in the form of wind and tides. And we’re already well underway to harnessing that energy.

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic : Companies like Tesla, Amazon and Cruise that claim to have replaced human workers with AI are often outright lying. Often, they’re instead replacing local employees with remote workers paid peanuts in India and other developing countries.

“So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: ‘AI stands for “absent Indian.”’”

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/

Bruce Schneier: It’s easy to think of generative AI as a friend rather than a service, making us vulnerable to profit-seeking corporations. “AI models, controlled by large corporations, inherently prioritize profit over ethics.” https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-trust.html

@Gargron What's great about container tabs?

I'm trying out Firefox the past couple of days. Looks good, but as a Mac user, I find Safari to be a good choice too.

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic: “The idea that creative workers aren't workers is bullshit.“ Why creative workers get screwed in labor negotiations (until very recently) https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/25/huzzah/

“Creative workers are part of a class of workers who suffer from ‘vocational awe,’ the sense that because your job is satisfying and/or worthy, you don't deserve to get paid for it.” (1/3) 🧵

@tinfoilhat @waderoberts @pluralistic Copyrights and patents lead to hairy ethical and philosophical issues. All ideas are built on other ideas. If I write a detective novel, how much of that is really original?

Treating payment as a labor issue sidesteps a lot of that difficult philosophy. If you spend a year writing a detective novel, and I read it, I have gotten benefit from your labor and you deserve to be paid for it.

H/T to Cory for thinking that led me here but Im not speaking fr him.

Verizon shutters BlueJeans, three years after buying it for $400M, the latest in a long series of failures for the company. Cory Doctorow @pluralistic calls it “repeated incompetence and waste on an unimaginable scale.” https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/10/smartest-guys-in-the-room/#can-you-hear-me-now

I’m having difficulty visualizing how this would work. If it’s attached to your head, wouldn’t turning your head also move the ovals of amber glass?

Jews, Christians and Satanists are taking legal action to protect reproductive freedom, claiming—rightly—that abortion bans are imposition of religious beliefs by the state.

@pluralistic: “Jewish religious texts clearly state that life begins at the first breath, and that the life of a pregnant person takes precedence over the life of the fetus in their uterus.”

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/11/wilhoitism/

The Republican-dominated North Dakota state senate voted to increase their own meal reimbursement after rejecting a bill to expand free school lunches for low-income students.

Republicans: The party that cares about children. https://www.inforum.com/news/north-dakota/north-dakota-senators-boost-their-own-meal-reimbursements-after-rejecting-free-school-lunch-bill