Notices by mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social), page 2

I say again: the US dollar’s unique position as a global-norm fiat currency means that Americans are buying real physical goods from all over the world with tokens made of nothing more than the Federal Reserve's notion of stability and the abstract idea that America is worth something, and they’re tearing this down because it’s somehow grievously unfair, and what they’re tearing down is the Federal Reserve's notions of stability and the abstract idea that America is worth something,

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

- Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark."

( @grimalkina ...)

Incredible to think that this is all happening within the institutions that control a global-norm fiat currency.

The US, without exaggeration, is buying real physical goods from all over the planet with printed tokens made of nothing more than the Federal Reserve's notion of balance and the abstract idea that America is worth something.

And their government wants to throw that all away because somehow it's "unfair" and a "bad deal."

“We’re firing all the people who weren’t working on important things. We’re keeping everyone who told them what things to work on. This means we will move faster and make better decisions. This is so difficult for me personally.”

- every layoff announcement.

Relatedly: don't forget that office and networked printers aren't really "printers" and haven't been for decades; they're networked servers that happen to output printed media. They store userID and datestamped logs of everything anyone prints on them, and nobody throws out logs.

Stay safe out there.

In case this is useful to somebody:

Because of corporate collusion with law enforcement dating back to the 80s, all colour printers put tracking information on their printouts, whether you're printing a colour document or not, encoding information that ties printouts back to the specific printer used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

In 2018, scholars at TU Dresden created a tool to re-anonymize color-printed documents by obscuring that data:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3206004.3206019

The tool: https://github.com/dfd-tud/deda

How many dangerous turning points in a row do people need to see before they realize they're looking at a death spiral?

My daughter tried to drop Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien on me just now, but I was prepared and counterattacked successfully with George Reorge Rartin Martin. The situation may yet escalate.

@jrconlin @dalias @jwz

Fail2ban with timeouts set to weeks it is then.

@jrconlin booooo. But thanks for the link.

If I, as an engineer, saw a some process or pipeline where half the oil or water or widgets or who cares what just unaccountably fell out the side for unclear reasons, and I proposed fixing it by pushing more stuff into the front end, I'd rightly get laughed out of the room and then fired.

Except, we do that all the time, from food scarcity to minorities in STEM.

We have abundance. We have enough. What's needed is justice and equity.

Why are we calling them spam when we could be calling them Fediverse Chick Tracts

During COVID we learned that we could run conferences remotely, making a lot of conferences accessible to people in less affluent countries and much of the global south. And when the risks of COVID waned and vaccines made travel tolerably viable again, we learned how many people - often people who claim to champion diversity and inclusivity - saw conference travel as a job perk they didn't want to give up, even if it cost less affluent countries and the global south that access.

I understand that in person has a lot going for it. I understand that the hallway track was great. I get it. But hear me out. My counteroffer is this:

Fuck your hallway track.

"But my unscheduled meeting with no goal, no plan and random strangers, that's important", how about no. If I put that on your calendar you'd decline it and try to get me fired. Let's be real about what that was: it was socializing. That's what you miss, and "meeting people on the internet"? We know how to do that.

Now - unsurprisingly - the situation has escalated, as it does whenever mobility is a function of privilege. In-person conferences in the US means not only no less-affluent countries and no global south, it means nobody who wants to risk spending a month in a cage because they objected to an ideology or a genocide on the internet or have an X on their passport or filled out a form wrong five years ago or or or.

We know what to do and how to do it, because we've done it before.

Yeah, well.

@mattblaze In retrospect I wonder if windows UAC notifications ended up doing more harm than good, in convincing a lot of humans that these warnings were reasonable things to click past to get something done.

I believe that in our lifetime we can win the war on golf.

https://archive.md/dgPhy#selection-817.188-833.300

Health care.
Dental care.
College education.
Career security.
Food security.
Addiction treatment.
Literacy and numeracy.
Equal protection under the law.
Equal access to the franchise.

Sometimes, shelter.
Sometimes, clean running water.
Sometimes, clean air.
Sometimes, bodily autonomy.

But sure, TVs are cheap now so inequality is solved.

Fuck, man, this is not a short list, go outside.

I've told every student I've taught in the last decade that you should read the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, not just so that you are able to commit these small acts of sabotage, but more importantly so you can recognize these things as deliberate sabotage, when they're being done to you.

https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf