Notices by Matthew Merkovich (mattmerk@mastodon.social), page 3

@blogdiva "BILLIONAIRES CANNOT EXIST
WITHOUT OUR POVERTY," should be a war cry! It's a brilliant turn of phrase. Perfect, I think. It is going into high rotation in my day to day conversations.

And hey #VFX workers, check out this part:

"You're a worker, even if you're well-paid. Tech workers are just figuring this out, after a generation-long con in which bosses convinced techies that they were temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who definitely didn't need a union."

Sound familiar?

"But they'll just send all our jobs to India! 😭"

Which is exactly what they did anyway.

A Sincere thank you for this one, Cory, @pluralistic

@phaedral Enemy or woefully worse enemy. Your choice. This is what we all get when the people are wholesale abandoned, Robert.
@pluralistic

TIL in the @pluralistic newsletter:

"[T]he Dems are not faithful friends to unions. Harris campaign advisor - her brother-in-law Tony West - is Uber's chief legal officer and the architect of Prop 22, California's scab law that formalized "gig work" labor violations."

Yikes! This issue is a good one.

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

Sure seems like the Lutheran church is a path to Christofascist evangelicism, much like liberalism is a well paved road to political fascism.

I’ll let Martin Luther begin this conversation with his treatise titled, “The Jews and Their Lies.” 👀
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/martin-luther-quot-the-jews-and-their-lies-quot

#WTF

@AnarchoNinaWrites That’s at least some comfort. If we can’t laugh, all that’s left is feeling miserable.

But I’ve been on those marches over decades of time, and yet here we are. At this point I simply feel like they are well-designed placebos.

@AnarchoNinaWrites Are you telling me that pink pussy hat marches through Manhattan aren’t going to restore abortion rights?

@AnarchoNinaWrites I feel absolutely no joy from being able to say, "I told you so."

@pluralistic I felt a little bothered that your care in California had so many bumps, mostly because I loved my life in The Golden State. And I hate to see what you had to deal with, no matter how not-that-bad it was.

I'm glad to see you are doing better, though. I'm NOT glad that you too now have years of hitting your insurance deductible for all the followup visits.

This insurance-company-CEO-pay-care system we have really needs to go!

@pluralistic Sorry to hear all this, Cory, but you've been hearing that a lot lately. I know because I just ended treatment a year ago for my also very treatable form of cancer. All my friends live in Southern California, and a couple of them said I needed to go to UCLA for the best care, but here in Boulder County, CO, I got world-class care, with next day appointments, an Oncologist from MD Anderson, and a wonderful care team. 1/

#Linux I think I have tested out nearly every popular Linux distribution over the last couple of months, and the latest was Mint, which at first glance looked great. But then I tried my true metric: Fallout 4. I just couldn't get it running well at all.

What I've been looking for was a Linux distro that just worked with little or no effort, and it looks like Ubuntu wins for me. Everything just works, with little user intervention.

If any Linux fans out there want to set me straight, please do!

@molly0xfff "Something we are doing is clearly not working."

@CStamp Meh. This is the same tired argument that democrats in the US keep resuscitating over and over. It's Ralph Nader nonsense, version 2.0. Instead of attacking the right, neoliberals always go after anyone to their left, and will fabricate whatever "facts" they need to support their assertion. Only Hillary cost Democrats votes in battleground states in 2016.

Gary Johnson's scant numbers beat Jill Stein's by a good margin, and yet ...
@br00t4c

@AnarchoNinaWrites But thank you for inventing the term "Pig Empire," right? 😂

Oh wait, that was "noted antisemite*" Abbie Hoffman.

* Written in my most sarcasmy sarcasm voice with my most sarcasmy sarcasm face.

@AnarchoNinaWrites I just can't even with these people ... as the kids say.

And Hunter S Thompson is my model for people I don't agree with all the time, but who have some great ideas and who I'd love to hang out with.

#VFX #AI Just had someone sincerely suggest that the SynthEyes user manual could be re-written by Chat GPT. 🤣 I am still laughing!

@AnarchoNinaWrites "You aren't a capitalist because you don't have capital." I laughed out loud!

https://mastodon.social/@MattMerk/112413455610652763

Shout out to everyone else who doesn’t celebrate Mother’s Day, for whatever reason you don’t .

I just had a conversation with a guy who said, “Yeah, well I’m a capitalist.”

So I asked, “Okay, how much capital do you have?”

Boy, oh boy, does that question put things in perspective. He became a caricature of an old Warner Brothers cartoon character, trying to compose himself as he fumbled for words, all while he avoided actually answering the question.

So I simply repeated the question. I highly recommend.

@LeftistLawyer And we should stop calling it “profit seeking,” when it’s just “rent seeking,” which is often the case.