To understand why some people still support Trump. Why many Russians still sincerely do support Putin, I reintroduce you to a really excellent book by Robert Altemeyer - #TheAuthoritarians
Reading it made the world a lot more coherent for me. You can download it free
I want to think that the Alberta separatist thing is the absolute dumbest shit that has no chance of ever coming to fruition...
BUT, having seen that playbook succeed wildly in Crimea and with Brexit...
I am not able to be normal about it.
Sona masoori rice was ~58 bucks just three months ago, and now the cheapest variant in my local supermarket is 80 a kilo.
We’re in for some really rough times.
It has been brought to my attention that Netflix are making a reality TV series that is a redo of the 1971 Stanford prison experiment.
The experiment that had to be shut down because participants' mental wellbeing was being hurt.
The one that is used as the example in every first year undergrad course for why ethics approvals need to be stringent when designing a psychology experiment.
And a multinational US-based company things this will get them ratings worth the known, predictable damage it will do to participants.
I think I've just stepped beyond not wanting to give Netflix my money (I am no longer a subscriber) and into the territory of wanting streaming services much more heavily regulated.
At some point, lines have to be drawn about what we consider acceptable entertainment in reality TV. If we don't set boundaries, someone will get the idea that live-streaming public executions by firing squad is worth it for the ratings.
Israeli police have detained 10 people in a rare raid against settlers, after a weekend of extreme violence in the occupied West Bank including an attack on US photojournalist Heidi Levine.
t-shirt that says "I SOMETIMES ❤️ NUANCE DEPENDING ON THE SITUATION AND ITS CONTEXT"
In a world where the biggest companies in the world are getting away with not even respecting the most basic copyright license requirement of attribution, imagine thinking that the solution is a new copyright license.
Saying "nobody should be forced to use LLMs" is like saying "if you don't like tobacco, don't smoke it" on an airplane where people are smoking tobacco.
Got some headphone practice in with my jacked up meteor hammer made from paracord and plant hangers.
They are heavy enough and I can tell that once I get the chain clip version going with the wicks and the kerosene there will be an impressive amount of whang at work.
As in, it will make the audience nervous.
(a good thing)
I'll preface this by saying I spent the first 24 years of my life in Alberta...
And I am absolutely sick of the narrative that Alberta has somehow been mistreated and misunderstood.
Albertans have been fed a century of anti-Canada bullshit by mostly right-wing provincial politicians seeking a scapegoat to fear-monger against and secure their power.
One of last night’s bizarre dreams: I accidentally shut down the Jira instance at work (instead of a web service in the QA env), panicked, went to Slack to ask for help, then panicked further because I didn’t know if I should post in the ‘atlassian’, ‘help-atlassian’ or ‘it-atlassian’ channel
I will say this; I am cis, hetero, male, white and various other flavors of problematic.
But I believe that trans rights are human rights.
And that if trans people are denied medical care including gender affirming care; that puts my own dignity at risk.
:trans: ⚧️
…In my view this is a fragile moment for more reasons than Richard admits, though.
A traumatic collapse of the house of cards that is neoliberalism does not overnight or even over years change the expectations that neoliberalism has created.
All money is a claim on future expenditure of resources and energy and those claims have been destabilising Earth systems in ways that people are led to believe is normal and ok but is not
A lot of cis people still think that HRT medication is something that trans people do for fun, like it's recreational drugs or something.
Instead you should really think about it like insulin for people with diabetes or L-thyroxine for people with thyroid deficiency.
First, the MAGANazis came for Ilan Omar. And I knew exactly what that meant because I've read the rest of the fucking poem.
a girl at the bar night last night told me her cis roommate said the police raid was justified because they were ALLEGEDLY distributing hormones and people should go through the system. look at my allies dawg we’re cooked.
RE: https://openbiblio.social/@hipsterl0s/117472085824167682
Direktlink zum (OA) Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-02985-8
"The billion-dollar case for sustaining palaeontology’s digital databases
We show that approximately 85% of all community-curated databases have lifespans of less than 15 years, putting decades of investment at risk. We show that database creation effort has increased in the past 30 years, with peaks in database loss related to 5-year funding cycles. We advocate for strategies to enhance database longevity [...]"
"Rooney could freely roam around any English city in a balaclava protesting immigration, disrupting traffic while singing songs about the superiority of the white race – as masked men did in Dover only a month ago with not an arrest reported. But dare to endanger profits as climate activists have done or to criticise Israel and its holocaust of Gaza, and the law becomes a different beast"
Fatima Bhutto