Notices by Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐 (gcvsa@mstdn.plus)

@skinnylatte When we went to visit our family in the Philippines, that was the first time I ever tasted mangoes the way the universe intended them to be experienced, and it was mind-blowing. We get two varieties of mangoes in the US, and neither are very often in prime condition by the time they get to us.

@skinnylatte @Andres4NY @meganL COBRA is paid for by the employee, by the way, not the employer. What it does is allow you to retain your previous coverage for up to 18 months *at your expense*.

If anyone is requiring an NDA, then that must be in order for them to pay for it. COBRA is a government program, not an employer program.

https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/health-plans/cobra

@skinnylatte Don't get me wrong, as a Filipino American, I'm sympathetic to this idea, but that doesn't make Korean Japanese food the same thing as Japanese Japanese food.

@skinnylatte this is wisdom. work out more to eat more

@skinnylatte I got my Panasonic SR-3NAL rice cooker, because I heard it's popular with Japanese airliner cabin crews, since it fits in a suitcase and can be used to make fresh rice in a hotel room overseas in places where access to rice might not be easy. It's designed for up to 270 mL (1.5 gō) of uncooked rice. I actually have two, and kept one at my office, when I still had an office on the other side of town. Perfect for lunches!

https://shop.panasonic.com/products/rice-cooker-1-5-cup-uncooked-capacity

"#Punk" doesn't mean "cool", it means "fundamentally disrupting the systems of oppression that brought us to where we are right now."

#PunksNotDead #DIY

@steter My father was a physician (MD) who also played chess, classical guitar, and piano. My mother was a nurse (RN), who didn't play any instruments, but who loved classical music. I started classical piano lessions at age 5.

I remember that one of my greatest musical regrest was when my piano teacher asked me at age 7-8 or so, if I wanted to study classical or jazz. Not knowing anything about jazz, and knowing my mother liked classical, I chose classical.

I should have chosen jazz.

@steter My father's cousin is Michael Dadap, a classical guitarist and composer, who is married to Yeou-Cheng Ma, who is the elder sister of a cellist you might have heard of, Yo-Yo Ma.

Yeou-Cheng is herself a physician (a pediatrician) and violinist. Their daughter Laura is also a musician (and a bassist!), but she probably spends more of her time running the family hot sauce business, now (Djablo Filipino Hot Sauce).

I didn't pick up guitar until my late teens, totally self-taught.

RE: https://mastodon.stevesworld.co/@steter/116467573312988627

Ellen is awesome, so I'm excited for her debut album! She makes me wonder how different my life might have been, if my parents didn't push me into classical piano. I didn't start playing bass until I was about 25.

John Gruber fawning over Tim Cook's reign at Apple was something I didn't think I'd see today, and it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Tim Cook's legacy at Apple will be seen in the future as a profoundly cynical period in Apple's history.

What Tim Cook did to Apple was transform it into a company that primarily made insanely great products, and turn it into a stratified luxury lifestyle brand that makes very pretty products that don't work as well as they look from the outside.

There has long been a mistaken assumption in #Georgism circles that #landlords cannot pass on the cost of higher #LandValueTax onto #tenants, but that has never been true.

Landlords do not pay #LVT unless they have no tenants. The land user is the one that pays, not the land owner. The landlord merely acts as intermediary.

#Taxes are always and only ever paid by the only entity who cannot shift them—the end user.

We have not yet begun to discover how high land rents can rise. …

#Housing, #utilities, #transportation, #food, #clothing, #healthcare, #education, #communications, #pensions—all essential sectors of our economy have been completely taken over by the #neoliberalism #neofeudalism wage #slavery extraction mindset. Without alternatives, the #ownership class is empowered to demand more and more very year.

Each monopolist cares not a whit for how much each other monopolist is demanding.

Each individual and family, is forced to make terrible choices to survive.

The reason why our economy is so stagnant and fragile is because #rentseeking is extracting so much of our productivity that end users are sacrificing their futures to pay the demands of rentseekers today, just to stay alive and viable.

Something has to give. Savings have plummeted, debt has ballooned, essential costs of living have skyrocketed, due to the rapacious avarice of the #ownership class, the neo #aristocracy.

People are now commonly paying over 50% of their wages in housing costs. …

Americans have forgotten already, in 1-2 generations more or less, just exactly how polluted and dangerous our environment was in the 1970s, until the EPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, OSHA, the CPSC, etc, changed everything. This was all done under Nixon, by the way. Although, so was the "war on drugs".

We are headed back to those dark, horrifying days. Those are the days that gave rise to 1980s #cyberpunk and #dystopia fiction, like #BladeRunner and #ChungKuo and #Neuromancer.

The thing that Americans in particular need to understand is how wealthy we really are compared to so many other people on this planet.

We have so far that we can fall into misery and poverty that we cannot really even begin to imagine it.

Look up Bangladeshi shipbreaking. That will be us, before long.

We are on the verge of a new Dark Ages, literally "the road to serfdom", forced into submission by a ruling class who idolizes the man who wrote the book by that name.

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

We are being slowly strangled to death, and we are being told it is our own fault.

And far too many people on the putative "left" are telling us that the use of force to defend ourselves from this manifest evil is a moral wrong.

#neoliberalism #neofeudalism #psychopathy #sociopathy #aristocracy #economics

I'm tagging #Linux here because #pCloud is one of the only cloud storage providers with a Linux client, so there's a good bet that a lot of Linux users are using it.

I only discovered this issue because I was trying to edit a file on Linux, and I don't think Bluefish is up to the task, so I switched to my Windows system to use Notepad++, and when I opened my pCloud, the file wasn't synced.

I went back and forth between both systems, trying to get the file to sync, when I noticed foreign files.

I don't have an account on Reddit, but there are reports about this all over r/pcloud, and it looks like this issue has existed since at least Jan 19, 2026, with no communication from #pCloud.

Recommend immediate file backup, data deletion, and account deletion. This is the most egregious user isolation #privacy #security #breach I've ever seen in my life.

I have no idea if my data was compromised, but I definitely saw someone else's data in my account on Windows, but not on #Linux, or web.

Major #privacy #security #error in #pCloud, and I recommend an immediate halt to using their services until the problem is audited and corrected.

When I log in to pCloud for Windows 5.0.12, someone else's data is showing up on my mapped P: drive, intermingled with my own.

(UPDATE) I am now seeing that I am not the only one seeing this problem. I am deleting pCloud from all my devices as soon as I back up my files via #Linux, and then requesting account deletion.

DELETED.

At least one other #pCloud user in r/pcloud reports seeing foreign files on pCloud for macOS (unsure what version).

I have screenshots of someone else's data files appearing on my computer. Many other people have posted screenshots. This is not a hoax.

I'm not going to open a Reddit account and wade into the cesspool that is Reddit, not even for this. It's enough for me to see multiple confirmations of the problem I personally experienced to know that it's real and widespread.