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.
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."
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
Another person’s perceptual experience may not be the same as ours.
This is Fundamental to understanding the experience of #autistic folks. I always assumed everyone perceived the way I do & I’m just a sook who can’t cope. This is not true! I am sooo glad my partner now understands this.
Same applies to information processing & seeing patterns. I thought everyone can see what I do. They don’t. We’re ok.
It’s bleeding obvious once it’s put this way, innit. I struggled all my life to understand my differences w sensory &information processing, thinking of each bit as a different issue & me as sooky &broken. Framing as neurodivergence over the past 15yr (since my early 50s) has been a revelation. Reframing is slow work & there’s a lot to grieve for, but through it all the company of nd peers is THE BEST THING.
596 years ago today, Hanseatic cities of Northern Germany retained the services of the privateer captain Bartholomeus Voet, his nine ships and 300 men. With dire consequences for my hometown, Bergen - but also to great annoyance for themselves.
A thread:
The Hansa and the Nordic countries were the best of frenemies at this time. The Hansa traded extensively with the Nordics and often waged war as well, typically allying with one Nordic country against another...
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.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/ancestors-1.jpgThe last few weeks I have been unduly fascinated by Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, a 2019 game that was supposed to make the whole of human evolution playable in a breathtaking journey.
You might think that’s promising a bit much, and it is. The game released to rather critical reviews and never made the impact it was supposed to.
And I see why. The game is intentionally impenetrable. It seems in the beginning it didn’t even have the visual cues for the actions I came to rely on, and even with those barely anything is explained. The tutorial is brief and drops you directly into an intensely dangerous world, and the game delights in telling you it won’t give you further hints.
You start as a tribe of hominids about 10 million years ago (the missing link) and have to make your way to about 2.5 million years ago.
In between you have to steer your hominids, start figuring out the world (horsetail good, mushrooms uuugh but filling), invent the first tools like “stick” and “mud” (a truly versatile tool!), and, well, die a lot.
Everything seems made to kill you. Go too high up the tree and an eagle gets you, go through grass a python gets you, walk through water a crocodile eats you. And then there’s the stalker cat which often comes unannounced and pounces you. And unlike the others the cats will stalk you until they can kill you. I had one follow me from one side of one biome to the other.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/ancestors-2.jpgIn between you carry kids with you, because it’s not important what you do with your current character, unless kids see you do it and learn from it. If you do enough of a particular action neural energy will grow and new neurons will activate. In the end its a skill tree system, even if developing it needs generations, or hundreds of thousands of years and a single character will never survive it. From one generation to the next a limited amount of newly learned skills can be kept, but what you really need to get is mutations. These come randomly with new kids, but they won’t become apparent until you do an evolutionary leap. But you need them because some skills are gated by them, and you won’t be able to progress unless you have them.
It’s all very complicated and worse, barely explained.
Unlike many other games this game has nearly no fantastic elements at all. Everything is based on scientific research, there is no story at all, outside of the story of how humans start becoming bipedal and omnivorous… and start killing everything else I guess. The only element I would term fantastical are the meteors.
Danger, here be spoilers: Every once in a while you discover a new landmark and it triggers a cut scene where meteors rain down on the landscape. These will smoke for a while (multiple generations and even generational leaps), but in the end they stop. If your hominid finds them they will gain further unity with the universe, and they will get a free skill, and all kids present get a mutation. It becomes a convenient shortcut to organize an expedition to a meteor site with as many kids as possible to lock down as many mutations as possible over one or two generations. Of course it turns out all these meteor sites have some rather dangerous wildlife nearby, or are in rather inconvenient sites.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/ancestors-3.jpgEven the actual goal of the game is barely communicated: you have to reach the last evolutionary step in the game, reaching the genus homo ergaster, and then the closing animation plays. I guess it was planned that the next part of the series show the further development, alas I don’t think the game was successful enough. It is rather niche, and the only reason I even got it was because it was part of my Humble subscription at one point. Still. It is an interesting game, and one that I spent a lot of time on. It gives you an appreciation of how far we’ve come, and how dangerous cats used to be. Or still are.
"the www is fundamentally a distributed hypermedia application."
— taylor, medividovic, dashofy. 2010.
"[i]t is far easier to standardize representation formats and relation type names (i.e., naming controls) than it is to standardize objects and object-specific interfaces."
— roy fielding. 2008.
"..our universities in Australia must be places where we have the courage to take up our responsibilities as ethical researchers and teachers: our classrooms must be spaces of historical truth-telling that seek to explain why and how this is happening and support students to express their truths, including through student activism."
"As educators and researchers, we pay our deep respect to Palestinian scholars, writers, artists, and activists, including Palestinians based in Australia. We commit to continuing to learn from long histories of Palestinian description, critique, and analysis. Our colleagues in Palestine have called on us again and again to take action, and so we must. Telling the truth in history – as we know from our experiences in this settler-colony of Australia – is an important act of resistance, and we commit to undertaking this task."
“As historians who study – amongst other things – settler-colonialism, genocide, apartheid, gendered and sexed violence, Jewish history, Palestinian history, Israeli history, and more, we say that this breathtaking and heartbreaking violence is unacceptable and must be opposed entirely. We know that the violence did not begin on October 7th, and is a result of long transnational histories of imperialism, colonialism, state violence, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism. The story does not begin on October 7th, and longer histories – involving European colonisation of Palestine, the mandate system and British rule, the 75 years since the establishment of the State of Israel, the 56 year occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, and the 16 year blockade on Gaza – must be held at the forefront of our minds. “