I have had to fight for months to be able to survive from bad people and try to find a safe home, I have not had much luck, I have suffered a lot these last few weeks and I have not been able to eat or sleep well, please could someone help me get the funds to Can I spend Christmas safely?
Given all the Threads discussion there is one short thing I need to say.
The simplest tech-world thing I learned from the whole Meta in Myanmar project is that Meta is WAY more callous, deceptive, and incompetent with the life-or-death things that matter the most than even most of their critics understand.
This corporate callousness is a direct result of the debt-based monetary system of the entire world, and of the specially constructed debt hypothecation system in the USA. As the monetary systems have grown less diffuse and more centralized the callousness has increased.
For many centuries, the central tenet of fascism has been a mandatory tax on all property of the poor, and requirement to pay the tax in a monetary unit controlled by the rulers. Nobody actually owns their home. They rent it from the state and must pay the ad valorem and land tax, or be forcibly ejected. This tenet of tax fascism holds true in feudalism and market economies, and under socialism. If the monetary unit is not a currency, then the monetary unit is the productive labor of the serf. By taxing homestead real estate and employee wages, all serfs are forced to participate in the economic and tax structure by running an endless rat race to keep from having their homestead confiscated by the state. Abolition of the homestead real estate tax on any primary domicile up to 40-80 acres, depending on annual precipitation, and abolition of the income tax on EMPLOYEE wages (not officer or executive), would liberate hundreds of millions of souls from the rat race. If you don't work in the job and pay the taxes, the fascist courts take your home and render you homeless. This is a crime against humanity and nobody is speaking out against it.
This property tax and income tax system is the FOUNDATION of Western imperial fascism. All political movements will fail and will only increase the reach of fascism into every aspect of human life. As economies grow more centrally planned and monopolistic, the control over everyday activities grows increasingly centralized.
If you are not moving to abolish the tax on homesteads in your country, you are hacking at the branches of evil rather than at the root. A people secure in their property and homes and wages are a free people. A people insecure in these are slaves.
It is very simple. A tax and money system based upon debt or hypothecation of property to debt will always wax more and more fascist. This is the story of human history and everyone is ignoring it at their peril. Many people praise the idea of taxing their neighbors to pay for public schools, where their children will learn to be obedient serfs and work endlessly to pay their taxes.
Certain people leverage themselves into this system through corporations, and in order to prevent themselves from ever being the poor downtrodden, they run roughshod over all the poor downtrodden. They get addicted to the status, and envision themselves having a superior rationale due to their success. To keep themselves on top, they feel motivated to keep pushing everyone else down in a relentless struggle for mastery over the serfs in the poor and middle classes.
Laws and policies and "programs" can not, do not, never have, and never will end these problems of corporatocracy. Simply by abolishing the tax on homestead real estate, and abolishing the income tax on wages, the entire economy is forced to undergo a metamorphosis away from debt and rent seeking, to actual productivity. A people secure in their homes are not forced to work their fingers to the bone in an economic rat race. They have the time preference to make more beneficial decisions regarding work and career because they don't have the stress of homelessness or bankruptcy always looming on the horizon. Your rulers want this shadow cast on you and they have engineered the tax laws for this very purpose. Of course they give pretexts and justifications and subterfuges, but the end result was the real intention, as in the maxim, "Outward actions indicate inward intent."
No one wants to hear this. They are happy to tax their neighbors to death as long as they feel it serves their social agenda. We can signal about how bad the corporations are, or as a people we can admit how bad we are for enlisting the guns of government to rob our neighbors of their wages and homes under the unjust property and income tax schemes.
Corporations are the only entities that should pay income tax. No flesh and blood human being with the status of EMPLOYEE should be taxed on their wages for hire. The power to tax is the power to destroy, and much destruction it does. Countless Americans are dragged out of their homes by county sheriffs while their homes are repossessed or auctioned off for back taxes. This is the heart of ryot tenure, which is old-world fascism. This abomination does not belong in America. It really does not belong anywhere in the world. But the rulers and their dependents love to have it so.
That is well and good. It is easy to hate the big man. It is harder to love the little man. If we hate the fat cat while continuing to abuse the runt of the litter, are we any better than the fat cat? If we excoriate the rich while only giving lip service to the poor, wouldn't such hypocrisy make us Pharisees at heart?
I do agree on a host of limitations upon billionaire involvement in politics and bureaucracy, such as abolishing campaign contributions to lobby groups and PACs completely and requiring candidates to spend their own money for advertising, and placing caps on how much money TOTAL can be received by any candidate for office.
I also think people should keep their hands out of their poor neighbors' pockets by abolishing the income tax on employee wages and the property tax on primary dwellings.
Then the taxes can be excised from commerce between corporations, freight bills, imposts and duties. This would fundamentally alter both the economic and monetary system in favor of the have nots without a pile of even more abuse-prone laws and bureaucracy.
Corporations are creatures of the state and they should be taxed. All real estate held by all associations, corporations, and entities should also be taxed. This includes any non-domicile real estate held by religious corporations, churches, mosques, temples, etc. International and interstate non-profits should be abolished or taxed at a double or triple rate compared to those operating only within a domicile zone. Non-profit entities should be prohibited from operating outside the area of their domicile unless there is a compelling public interest approved by the legislature on a case-by-case basis. This would do away with many abusive tax shelter foundations and require the rich to put a big cut of that money to work in the economy instead of squandering it away in paper rents and interest-bearing schemes subsidized by the government through bank bailouts.
Ok folks 682 of those amazing prize tickets left to go if you want the chance to support some great causes whilst having the opportunity to own a 1 of 2 edition of @neilhimself 🌟STARDUST🌟 Neil owns the other one! Link below!!
Remember to check my @raffall_app profile for the Coraline book too at only £5 per ticket
Yes, you are correct. These things you can't read offline. And most of the time, going the visual route (like imaging each screen and then OCR) to get a clear-text copy is ruinously time consuming and difficult.
Only if you can put the file on a device, and then read off-line, in airplane mode for example, with a FOSS reader, are you reasonably safe from tracking.
Even if you get a book DRM-free from Gutenberg or a shadow library, if you read it using a corporate reader like the Amazon app on a smartphone...I'd bet that Big Brother is watching.
@demerara@yo_bj@scissortail I keep coming back to this quote from the #book "100 Things We've Lost to the Internet" by Pamela Paul: "The United States remains the sole developed country without some kind of federal consumer #data protection law or agency."
Here's a video on YouTube making the case for why agile was an innovative methodology when it was first introduced 20 years ago.
However, he argues these days, daily scrums are a waste of time, and many organisations would be better off automating their reporting processes, giving teams more autonomy, and letting people get on with their work:
First, it's worth noting that many organisations that claim to be "agile" aren't, and many that claim to use agile processes don't.
Just as a refresher, here's the key values and principles from the agile manifesto: http://agilemanifesto.org/
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.
Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
Working software is the primary measure of progress.
Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Your workplace isn't agile if your team is micromanaged from above; if you have a kanban board filled with planning, documentation, and reporting tasks; if your organisation is driven by processes and procedures; if you don't have autonomous cross-functional teams.
Yet in many "agile" organisations, I've noticed that the basic principles of agile are ignored, and what you have is micromanagement through scrums and kanban boards.
And especially outside software development teams, agile tends to just be a hollow buzzword. (I once met a manager at a conference who talked up how agile his business was, and didn't believe me when I said agile was originally a software development methodology — one he revealed he wasn't following the principles of.)
I’m fortunate that my boomer VP has taken the time to learn and internalize agile. If we ever lose our VP, I’ll probably leave the org because company culture (outside of my dept) is such that our next VP is likely to suck.
@ajsadauskas@technology
Funny video. He's apparently doing real CD and his stakeholders know every day what's going live. I don't know how he works in detail, but very likely it's pretty agile. It's just not by the (scrum) book.
The authors of the agile manifesto were very experienced software craftsfolk and "just" pudlished their common sense. As the guy in the vid does. If devs communicate anyway, e.g. if you have rotating pair programming, you probably don't need a daily ...
I'm putting together my Christmas list for family. It's that time of year again. So... Send me some reading recommendations! Give me links to YOUR books, guys. I'm going to bookmark this and save it for later, so I can purchase stuff throughout the year as well. I want to support everyone.
I hope everyone will check out the comments, too. Let's all support and love one another and help each other when and where we can.
@floofpaldi Love seeing everyone promoting their work! 😊❤️ Hope the family finds a new favorite among them!
My book isn't out (yet), I just have some short stories and research articles available on my BuyMeACoffee. If you do this again next year, I'll throw my work in then. I will recommend "The Starless Sea" by Erin Morgenstern. Haven't finished it yet but what I have read I've enjoyed.
At this point in history everyone is a bigot--depending on who you ask. You, dear reader, are a bigot. All I must do to confirm this is ask your enemy and he will tell me so.
I had to go out late last night and I turned on the car radio. Red Eye Radio was on the air. The hosts went on a several minute tirade saying anyone critical of the Israeli bombings and tactics was a genocidal bigot. So if you oppose slaughtering tens of thousands of people, you are now the bigot. It takes an Olympian amount of mental gymnastics for that logic to work.
The world has always been insane, but now the world has fallen off its nut. We don't have a media anymore. We have Pravda established by the power of noise-to-signal ratio. The real journalists get drowned out by the loud barking of the big dogs.
The U.S. Government wants this Gaza fiasco to continue. The U.S. has the power and influence to put a stop to this conflict in the middle east. The truth is that whoever owns the politicians wants endless conflict to continue.
It is very sad and annoying to see cultists on the left, right, center, and extremities toss around words like, "bigot", "racist", "anti-semite", to describe any criticism they don't like. It is the lowest form of yellow mendacity. The words are so often misused that they have lost all meaning in political discourse. At this point everyone is a bigot depending on who you ask. Now when you do encounter a real flesh and blood bigot, it is hard to find an apt word of description since everyone else is now a bigot, too. Just ask their enemies, and they will tell you so.