@penpencilbrush@claudiac@bookstodon Have to thank you again for recommending Blackwells. Although I am a solid supporter of my local independent bookstore and public library sometimes they just can't get books that aren't published in Canada or in North America. Blackwells delivered Hannah Kent's wonderful #historicalFiction Devotion and Maggie Shipstead's excellent Astonish Me. So grateful to finally have the opportunity to read these marvellous #books. #Reading
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?
Default instance blocks should largely replace defederation
Since what content users might want to see is quite unlikely to match which servers the admins tolerate, choosing instance on the Fediverse can be quite complicated, which is inconvenient and off-putting for new users.
For this reason, and simply that the Fediverse is stronger united, I believe defederation should ideally be reserved for illegal content and extreme cases. If Fediverse platforms would allow instances to simply block the rest for users by default, the user experience would be the same, unless they decide otherwise.
It already is, you just have to convince the server owner whats ‘extreme’ or not. Some servers hate liberals, others hate the right, some are followers of the windmill party and others would get you on a watchlist.
And the more mundane stuff like having porn and gore posts not tagged as NSFW will get your instance defederated.
I would love to see more middle of the road, non-extremist content. It seems that every instance is all the way left, falling off the chart, and then like 3 instances are falling off the other side of the chart, and defederated everywhere.
This Friday (tomorrow) at 4pm, AMASE Chair @ferrous will be talking with Pete Wharmby, autistic author, about #autism, #writing, #education, #monotropism and all that sort of thing.
Tickets are free and open to anyone. This event will be recorded.
What games would you suggest that have LAN support these days?
While PC may be one's first thought here, I'd also be really interested in any mobile games that might leverage one's local wifi network for multiplayer.
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."
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.
"As of Monday, Israeli forces have killed at least 18,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including 7,729 children. Israel’s siege has also injured 50,000 Palestinians and dismantled critical health systems in Gaza."