One Big Set Of Stuff - November 02022
Dec. 1st, 2022 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptLet's start this with a vision of the next 25 years that suggests a big era of progress has already hit the tipping point, and we are on the rush of the roller coaster going down. It does talk a little bit about the things that could cause setbacks, but it's basically the people who believed they got it right on the last boom predicting an even bigger one, with transformations in energy, biotech, and information tech (mostly augmented by intelligences and machines) to shift the world from scarcity to abundance.
Congratulations to the voters of Oregon who wrote into the state Constitution the right to affordable health care, and the hope that their electeds follow on with this by doing the heavy lifting to make it happen properly and correctly so that the residents of Oregon never have to worry about unaffordable or bankrupting health care bills ever again.
Announcing the January release of The Sad Bastard Cookbook, a CC-licensed cookbook for getting food in your face when the world around you (or your internal state of self) has gone completely to shit (or is on its way there.)
Railroad workers deserve paid sick leave. Giving it to them would mean railroad companies would have to build in capacity and redundancy. So naturally, companies would rather spend their profits on stock buybacks and shareholder dividends and lobbying Congress to impose an unfair contract on the railway union workers. And it looks like Congress and the President are more than willing to go along with it, barring those progressives who are trying to get them to use their power to impose a more worker-friendly contract.
The Church of Latter-Day Saints have put their support behind a law that would require the federal government and all state governments to recognize marriages performed in other states, which is at least an implicit endorsement of marriage equality, even if doctrinally, the LDS church still considers acting on anything other than heterosexual desire to be sinful.
The ways in which the language we use shapes the space we can talk about ourselves. As well as how sometimes people don't even give you the courtesy of using the correct name.
The study of "childlore," the parts of what children know and the games they play that seems so similar, despite the children playing it being from vastly different places. And the part where grownups can mostly be chill about whether or not the children are playing more socially or not, because the games are still happening, and while pop culture can influence, it doesn't dictate what the games are or how the pop culture bits get incorporated.
The virtue of loitering, or, when put another way, of reclaiming your time as your own, rather than subjecting it to someone else's idea of what you should be doing.
A conversation about how the library profession uses "professionalism" as a way of justifying an arbitrary set of whims that are almost always weaponized against someone who doesn't "fit" the idea of the librarian. They identify the two most likely candidates for having professionalism weaponized against them - workers of color (because of the overwhelming whiteness of libraries) and neurodivergent workers (because of the way that vocational awe creates a stereotype of both what a librarian looks like and what their mental state is). Since it's C&RL, the focus of the column will be on academic libraries, but there's a lot in there that applies to public libraries as well (including the kinds of people who make it their business to comment on everybody else's business, including complaints to managers.)
While full literacy of reading and writing might not have been a skill they picked up, several levels of the non-nobility were nonetheless able to make and recognize consistent marks as their own or another's, and that recognition would sometimes be entered as evidence in court cases that property had been stolen, swindled, or otherwise part of a crime's gains.
Also through this sequence of time is the Trans Day of Remembrance, where once again we have to fave up to the reality that a significant number of trans people die at the hands of others, usually people who refuse to accept them as they are. Autostraddle has a non-exhaustive list of aid and assistance organizations, largely for trans people of color. But they also had to report on another mass shooting at a queer club.
Changing consensus on whether a coin long believed to be a forgery, because the emperor mentioned was not in the official continuity, is instead an actual coin from a time period where a part of the Roman Empire was cut off and there were government succession issues in Rome. So the Emperor in that case might have been a commander who declared himself Emperor in an attempt to keep peace, order and good government going in the province until it could be reconnected and evacuated.
The problems of thinking of women in art as gems to be discovered and to be contrasted with men, when, truthfully, they're always there and have been doing a lot of really good work. Sometimes in pushing the edge, and sometimes in making an excellent life for herself without necessarily going to the edge of anything.
A profile of the late Octavia E Butler, a woman who did all the things that an individual is supposed to do to get great success, but who was not taken care of well enough to see the greatest amount of her successes.
Despite the relentless narrative that has basically pushed us to the point where only those with enough privilege and accommodating workplaces can actually achieve it, it's still better to try and not catch COVID, and to minimize the amount of risk and exposure that you're getting when you have to interact with other people who might have it. Which sometimes feels like staying in place and hoping the future doesn't arrive until we're ready for it, but the truth is much less in trying to stop time and much more in trying to make our time work for ourselves without withdrawing too far or burning out of compassion.
The word lox is linguistically fascinating, as it's one of the few words from Proto-Indo-European that sounds as it did in Proto-Indo-European. And it has basically held the same meaning over all of that time as well.
In technology, well, there's Twitter. Twitter is Going Great. An ultimatum to either sign up for even worse working conditions or quit, where a lot of people chose quit, including the payroll department and possibly, the information security people. And the communications department, for a total of about half of the already halved workforce. Lockouts of people because of the resignations, the possibility that the company could fail either from engineering failures due to a lack of knowledgeable staff or from financial bankruptcy because of that lack of staff and revenue. Which puts the people on work visas at the most risk if the company goes under, because they can't move as easily as anyone else.
In the face of this reality, a significant number of people are turning toward ActivityPub-based Fediverse nodes, like Mastodon, Pleroma, or Misskey (and their forks) to fulfill their microblogging and social needs.![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
denise posted a set of cautions for those who want to run their own Fediverse nodes about obligations they have regarding the DMCA, child sexual exploitation material, and other potentially applicable laws so that when the relevant laws start applying, there's already a process in place and an agent registered to receive complains and so forth, so that legal liability is most likely only going to accrue to the person who did a thing, and not to the person who is hosting their instance. The likelihood may be small, but the penalties are not, so be safe out there.
On other matters of technology, the popularity and effectiveness of Roman mail all throughout the period where mail was the premier armor for a war-fighter to have combined with the ways in which even a little bit of protective gear rapidly increases the survivability of the wearer against weapons of war. Which is to say, I suspect the "we did our homework" part of the people who made things like the Assassin's Creed games extended to the ways that stealth kills are achieved, even if some of the non-stealth kills are essentially "hack until someone falls down" (but that it's difficult to do that with a sword in an era of plate armor is true, and the finesse of the assassins is that they often block something and then strike a weak point in the armor.)
Taking a computer or phone to a repair shop may have the technicians snooping the data on the computer, according to some research done by University of Guelph academics. The best thing to do, then, is to make a complete backup, then clear off all the data on the machine before surrendering it to the shop, if you can. Of course, if you're the kind of person that can do that and factory reset, you might be able to fix most of your problems, unless they really are hardware-only problems.
Epson, the company, is exiting the laser printer business, claiming that inkjet printers are better for the environment. They're also better for profits from the markup on ink cartridges, whereas laser printers can last and last and last.
Last for tonight, a browser-based infinite driving experience calling itself Slow Roads, which has no destination to reach, no checkpoints to race toward, and no obstacles to attempt to drive through.
And from![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
smallgodsproject, A Void, the small cat of being misunderstood, who is, as is right and proper, a small void of the kind that is most likely to be misunderstood.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
Congratulations to the voters of Oregon who wrote into the state Constitution the right to affordable health care, and the hope that their electeds follow on with this by doing the heavy lifting to make it happen properly and correctly so that the residents of Oregon never have to worry about unaffordable or bankrupting health care bills ever again.
Announcing the January release of The Sad Bastard Cookbook, a CC-licensed cookbook for getting food in your face when the world around you (or your internal state of self) has gone completely to shit (or is on its way there.)
Railroad workers deserve paid sick leave. Giving it to them would mean railroad companies would have to build in capacity and redundancy. So naturally, companies would rather spend their profits on stock buybacks and shareholder dividends and lobbying Congress to impose an unfair contract on the railway union workers. And it looks like Congress and the President are more than willing to go along with it, barring those progressives who are trying to get them to use their power to impose a more worker-friendly contract.
The Church of Latter-Day Saints have put their support behind a law that would require the federal government and all state governments to recognize marriages performed in other states, which is at least an implicit endorsement of marriage equality, even if doctrinally, the LDS church still considers acting on anything other than heterosexual desire to be sinful.
The ways in which the language we use shapes the space we can talk about ourselves. As well as how sometimes people don't even give you the courtesy of using the correct name.
The study of "childlore," the parts of what children know and the games they play that seems so similar, despite the children playing it being from vastly different places. And the part where grownups can mostly be chill about whether or not the children are playing more socially or not, because the games are still happening, and while pop culture can influence, it doesn't dictate what the games are or how the pop culture bits get incorporated.
The virtue of loitering, or, when put another way, of reclaiming your time as your own, rather than subjecting it to someone else's idea of what you should be doing.
A conversation about how the library profession uses "professionalism" as a way of justifying an arbitrary set of whims that are almost always weaponized against someone who doesn't "fit" the idea of the librarian. They identify the two most likely candidates for having professionalism weaponized against them - workers of color (because of the overwhelming whiteness of libraries) and neurodivergent workers (because of the way that vocational awe creates a stereotype of both what a librarian looks like and what their mental state is). Since it's C&RL, the focus of the column will be on academic libraries, but there's a lot in there that applies to public libraries as well (including the kinds of people who make it their business to comment on everybody else's business, including complaints to managers.)
While full literacy of reading and writing might not have been a skill they picked up, several levels of the non-nobility were nonetheless able to make and recognize consistent marks as their own or another's, and that recognition would sometimes be entered as evidence in court cases that property had been stolen, swindled, or otherwise part of a crime's gains.
Also through this sequence of time is the Trans Day of Remembrance, where once again we have to fave up to the reality that a significant number of trans people die at the hands of others, usually people who refuse to accept them as they are. Autostraddle has a non-exhaustive list of aid and assistance organizations, largely for trans people of color. But they also had to report on another mass shooting at a queer club.
Changing consensus on whether a coin long believed to be a forgery, because the emperor mentioned was not in the official continuity, is instead an actual coin from a time period where a part of the Roman Empire was cut off and there were government succession issues in Rome. So the Emperor in that case might have been a commander who declared himself Emperor in an attempt to keep peace, order and good government going in the province until it could be reconnected and evacuated.
The problems of thinking of women in art as gems to be discovered and to be contrasted with men, when, truthfully, they're always there and have been doing a lot of really good work. Sometimes in pushing the edge, and sometimes in making an excellent life for herself without necessarily going to the edge of anything.
A profile of the late Octavia E Butler, a woman who did all the things that an individual is supposed to do to get great success, but who was not taken care of well enough to see the greatest amount of her successes.
Despite the relentless narrative that has basically pushed us to the point where only those with enough privilege and accommodating workplaces can actually achieve it, it's still better to try and not catch COVID, and to minimize the amount of risk and exposure that you're getting when you have to interact with other people who might have it. Which sometimes feels like staying in place and hoping the future doesn't arrive until we're ready for it, but the truth is much less in trying to stop time and much more in trying to make our time work for ourselves without withdrawing too far or burning out of compassion.
The word lox is linguistically fascinating, as it's one of the few words from Proto-Indo-European that sounds as it did in Proto-Indo-European. And it has basically held the same meaning over all of that time as well.
In technology, well, there's Twitter. Twitter is Going Great. An ultimatum to either sign up for even worse working conditions or quit, where a lot of people chose quit, including the payroll department and possibly, the information security people. And the communications department, for a total of about half of the already halved workforce. Lockouts of people because of the resignations, the possibility that the company could fail either from engineering failures due to a lack of knowledgeable staff or from financial bankruptcy because of that lack of staff and revenue. Which puts the people on work visas at the most risk if the company goes under, because they can't move as easily as anyone else.
In the face of this reality, a significant number of people are turning toward ActivityPub-based Fediverse nodes, like Mastodon, Pleroma, or Misskey (and their forks) to fulfill their microblogging and social needs.
denise posted a set of cautions for those who want to run their own Fediverse nodes about obligations they have regarding the DMCA, child sexual exploitation material, and other potentially applicable laws so that when the relevant laws start applying, there's already a process in place and an agent registered to receive complains and so forth, so that legal liability is most likely only going to accrue to the person who did a thing, and not to the person who is hosting their instance. The likelihood may be small, but the penalties are not, so be safe out there.On other matters of technology, the popularity and effectiveness of Roman mail all throughout the period where mail was the premier armor for a war-fighter to have combined with the ways in which even a little bit of protective gear rapidly increases the survivability of the wearer against weapons of war. Which is to say, I suspect the "we did our homework" part of the people who made things like the Assassin's Creed games extended to the ways that stealth kills are achieved, even if some of the non-stealth kills are essentially "hack until someone falls down" (but that it's difficult to do that with a sword in an era of plate armor is true, and the finesse of the assassins is that they often block something and then strike a weak point in the armor.)
Taking a computer or phone to a repair shop may have the technicians snooping the data on the computer, according to some research done by University of Guelph academics. The best thing to do, then, is to make a complete backup, then clear off all the data on the machine before surrendering it to the shop, if you can. Of course, if you're the kind of person that can do that and factory reset, you might be able to fix most of your problems, unless they really are hardware-only problems.
Epson, the company, is exiting the laser printer business, claiming that inkjet printers are better for the environment. They're also better for profits from the markup on ink cartridges, whereas laser printers can last and last and last.
Last for tonight, a browser-based infinite driving experience calling itself Slow Roads, which has no destination to reach, no checkpoints to race toward, and no obstacles to attempt to drive through.
And from
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
no subject
Date: 2022-12-02 06:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-02 07:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-02 09:14 am (UTC)Ruh-roh.
More specifically, I feel like the article is very US-centric, underplays the role of exploitation and colonialism in previous booms, and underestimates the growing problems around energy, transport and food production. (We absolutely should not be using fossil fuels to produce ammonia (nitrogen), for example, and then literally flushing away all the nitrogen our bodies excrete, using drinking water to do it.)
I think the area where I sortof agree is around labour shortage as a force for change, which is going to hit very hard once we stop (...if we stop) using fossil energy to replace muscle energy. Labour shortage did happen some after both the Black Death and the 1918 'flu pandemic, but both of these had much lower numbers of people to start with than we are dealing with now, and we weren't augmenting human labour with exogenous energy sources anywhere near as much. In the case of the Black Death, labour shortages brought major innovations in agriculture and a move toward mercantilism (and arguably drove the Reformation and a good deal of colonialism); in the case of the 1918 influenza, the expansion of the fossil era was already well under way and picked up the slack.
I do think it is a grave mistake to think that ending the use of fossil fuels necessarily means we must "go back" to a pre-industrial existence. Civilisations do change and some rise and fall, but not all of their knowledge is lost when this happens. We don't quite know how the Romans made cement but we do know, pretty much, how they built roads and plumbing. But it is just as grave a mistake to think that we can replace all or most of our current fossil energy use with renewable sources and then proceed with economic expansion as usual. I'm also not happy to hold my breath and hope for fusion; I'd love to be wrong. The switch to fossil energy was partly driven by deforestation, but resulted in a net increase in available energy. I don't know that renewables are up to that magnitude of increase.
So yes: a transition is upon us, but I am less than optimistic about how smooth it will be.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-02 05:57 pm (UTC)I'm not sure how much renewables can pick up the fossil fuel slack, and I'm also unsure about how much renewables the world could produce and transmit if the willpower and the resources for it fully materialized. Fusion is a nice dream, but better to work toward goals with what you have now instead of hoping for a good future.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-03 02:43 am (UTC)I definitely had to read this again to solve my confusion as to how they were using letters as protection, hahaha.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-03 05:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-03 07:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-03 02:03 pm (UTC)