One of the aspect of the "Papers, Please!" society which #technology executives (not to mention politicians, both Republican and Democratic) seem happy and even excited about forcing everyone to endure, a trait that I sometimes attempted to get right-wingers on Twitter to acknowledge (I don't think I ever succeeded), is illustrated by just this incident, and a hundred others like it.
Ultimately, the "papers" themselves are not the point, because the thuggish cop or border agent has unlimited discretion to declare the papers invalid. It can be a pretext to an arrest for example: "oh look you must obviously have tried to pass forged papers / ID / test scores / whatever. I'm gonna have to ruin your life now."
Identifying information is NOT, in practice, actually a protection against fraud. Instead it's a means for proferring false accusations of fraud. The authoritarian body who's enforcing the "Papers, Please" directives always has the luxury of declaring documents to be fake, or having "concerns" about them, ad infinitum.
βMubashir said he told officers multiple times that he is a U.S. citizen and asked if he could show them his I.D. Officers ignored him, dragged him in the snow and pushed him into a car as witnesses yelled and blew whistles, according to the video of his arrest.β sahanjournal.com/immigration/iβ¦
How are the official identification documents or files actually to be trusted? Only if the organization that oversees such things can be trusted. Right now, that is NOT the case. "Official documentation" is mostly in the hands of rogues. They may not have any specific nefarious purposes, but we inhabit a society in which corporations do not think for very long about the ethical implications of selling personal data to others.
Right now, #Facebook / #Meta and #BlueSky and the rest of the corporate concerns which hoard personal information are still attempting to hide behind a general presumption that if you give your personal data to a corporation, you should be expected to trust them with that data...even though that's not actually the case. People's data must be widely distributed and sold and resold among various corporate entities.
There's a flip-side to this: people with nefarious reasons to provide corporations with false personal information are still, from the corporations' perspective, paying customers. No #technology corporation actually wants to waste too much time inquiring into actual crimes, not when it's much easier to present a superificial appearance of being concerned with "data integrity" by pursuing superficial incongruities through automated mechanism.
Oops did you change your last name at some point because of a marriage or a personal choice? A #software corporation feels free to regard that incongruity as prima facie evidence of criminal intention, because it seems every #softwareengineer fancies themselves a detective these days.
And so people who have legitimate reasons for changed addresses or differences in names or whatever other minor incongruity they probably didn't even think was going to be a problem end up caught in the wheels of #technology bureaucracy, while the people who want to do serious crimes are clever enough to avoid such easily caught incongruities. The current system actually FAVORS the flourishing of criminality and corruption within itself.
President Donald Trump says the United States has seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela as tensions mount with the government of President NicolΓ‘s Maduro.
The U.S. seized a 20-year-old oil tanker called The Skipper off the coast of Venezuela on Wednesday, three sources told CBS News. Here's what we know about the boat and the operation.
If you were born after 1994 in South Africa, itβs easy to forget that being gay used to be a crime. π³οΈβππ« While the racism of #apartheid is well-documented, the regime's extreme homophobia is often overlooked.
Under the National Party, it wasn't just "frowned upon", it was illegal and severely punished. Police raided homes, meeting others were unsafe, and the military treated homosexuality as a sickness to be "cured" through torture.
The Horror of the "Aversion Project"
This is the darkest chapter of gay history in South Africa. Since all white males were conscripted into the military or South African Defense Force (SADF), gay men could not escape the state's grip. The SADF viewed homosexuality as a "sickness" that weakened the army.
Gay conscripts were often sent to Ward 22 at 1 Military Hospital in Pretoria. "Curing" homosexuality under the direction of psychiatrists like Dr. Aubrey Levin, gay soldiers were subjected to electric shock therapy. They were shown homoerotic images and shocked until they associated same-sex attraction with pain.
When shock therapy failed, some men were chemically castrated.
And then there was forced sex changes: Perhaps most shockingly, it is estimated that up to 900 gay men (mostly young conscripts aged 16β24) were coerced into gender reassignment surgery to "turn" them into women, because the regimeβs logic was that it was better to be a woman than a gay man. They were often then discharged with no support.
From Darkness to Light
While the old regime was using science and violence to try and erase queer identity, a fight for their existence was beginning in the most unlikely place: a prison cell.
The reason South Africa have one of the most progressive Constitutions in the world today isn't an accident. Itβs because of a man named Simon Nkoli.
When arrested for treason against the apartheid state, he refused to hide who he was. He famously did the unthinkable, he came out and told his fellow activists in prison:
"I am black and I am gay. I cannot separate the two parts of me... So when I fight for my freedom I must fight against both oppressors."
His bravery forced the liberation movements to recognise that you cannot fight for freedom while discriminating against your own. Because of him, South Africa became the first country in the world to write #lgbtq rights into its Constitution. πΏπ¦π
Etsy has a program where they force higher performing shops into an advertising scheme that takes 15% off the top of every sale.
They call them βOffsite Adsβ. If anyone clicks into my shop and makes a purchase within 30 days - theyβll snag 15% off the entire total (+regular Etsy fees, taxes, shipping, all of it).
I just had a βsaleβ come through for $75. Wanna know much much actually get paid after fees, taxes, and shipping? $32. Thatβs it.
Please, PLEASE shop directly through Etsy if you are shopping there and supporting small businesses this holiday season! Try to avoid click through Ad purchases!
I wonder if this includes "retargeting" ads? A buyer browses your store on etsy to research a purchase, doesn't immediately purchase, then etsy show them an ad for your store, which they click to complete their purchase. When there's a good chance they would have come back to your store anyway...
Etsy is the reason I do my shopping from a VPN! I was looking at dog leashes on etsy in private browsing mode on my laptop one evening (with ad blockers etc), and then ads for these etsy dog leashes started showing up in my then partner's facebook feed.
This cartoon is by me and Becky Hawkins. TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON This cartoon has four panels, all showing the sidewalk and part of the street in front of a store called βThe Furniture KING.β¦
π¬ 10Β Β π 5610Β Β β€οΈ 8962Β Β·Β FUN FACT:
So you know how the Wilhelm Scream is in a ton of films as a soundtrack in-joke? It was popularized by Ben Burtt, who was a sound editor on a ton of ton of Lucasβ¦
The US Govt β which bombed the Houthis for seizing ships that were enabling the Gaza genocide β has now seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela.
The 2001 "war on terror" was a war for oil.
The 2025 "war on narco terror" is a war for oil.
This your "America First" POTUS. Are we great yet?π€
2001 America could've been x-raying the moon from their moon bases and discovering interstellar portals near Saturn. Instead, we got Reagan and the two Bushes
!Fediverse - Does anyone know of a service or feature that can sync the fedivers/ #activitypub accounts that an account (or.accounts) follows and/or is followed by - into a #CardDav account?
My use case is thus - As a person with a Mastodon and/or Lemmy, Pixelfed, Friendica, GotoSocial accounts - I would like to syncronise the profiles of the accounts I follow and/or the accounts that I follow into an existing CardDav account in which I record the names, emails, phone numbers, profile pictures of the people I know. I would like the syncronisation to either simply relflect the information held in each fediverse account - allowing me to use a sepatate contact merging service - or optionally to append/update information to existing contacts in a nominated CarDav account so that I can have one complete CardDav record reprenting people i know across Fediverse and other contact points.
I remember when I used to be able to sync my Facebook friends with my address book, my contacts from Skype and it was useful.
It would also make sharing my Fedi details with others easier ..I could just message them a Carddav file.
Does this make sense? Does it exist? Shoud it exist? @DAVxβ΅ :android:π - Is this somehow related tonwhat you are doing or do you know relevant related services - Maybe CardDav merging tools? Is it something @Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox would/could do?
We asked our team about this, and we're not sure whether vCard (CardDAV) has standardized fields for Mastodon etc. Closest might be URL;type=Social;type=Mastodon;type=pref:mastodon.social/@username . Another team member said there can be complications depending on their carddav server and differences in versions. So, it seems the answer to 'can Thunderbird do this' is 'maybe, but not easily.'
Oki fediverse, maybe you can help me: Does anybody know somebody / or a hackspace (preferably in Germany) with an automatic book scanner? We have an old sowjet book about ternary computer architectures (and much more), we'd like to archive it digitally.
Back in 2008, Chattanooga, Tennessee decided to build its own city-owned fiber broadband network on the back of its existing electrical utility, EPB. In the years since, the network has become one β¦
Well, you know they take from the rent seeking companies who might be able to compete with it. Let them try, nothing stopping them, except consumer choice.
New post: Transport Evolved EV Workshop: This Rotary Shifter Upgrade To The F150 Lightning Should Have Come As STANDARD! transportevolved.com/2025/12/0β¦
Transport Evolved EV Workshop: This Rotary Shifter Upgrade To The F150 Lightning Should Have Come As STANDARD!
There are plenty of benefits for Ford F150 Lightning owners thanks to the truckβs close relationship with the gasoline F150βfrom shared components to a wealth of aftermarket add-ons.
But the Lightning also inherits one less desirable trait: its massive shifter. Designed to auto-fold so the center console can become a makeshift desk while parked, the shifter is elegant in conceptβbut in practice, both ICE and EV F150 owners have reported significant issues. In some cases, the shifter can fail entirely, leaving the truck stranded.
To avoid this problem, inventive owners have developed a retrofit: swapping in a rotary shifter from other Ford vehicles. This not only frees up console space for storage but also makes the βdeskβ usable by a front-seat passenger while the truck is parked.
Today, weβre performing that upgrade on Nikkiβs F150 Lightning, complete with a 3D-printed part she designed herself. The result is functionally superior, aesthetically pleasing, and likely the quickest upgrade sheβs made to her truck so far!
Read the full transcription here: When the Ford F-150 Lightning launched, it came with a nifty gear shifter that it inherited from the same model year gasoline F-150s. It allowed you to tuck the shifter away and use an integrated desk in your truck when you werenβt driving it, which made the interior much more practical, especially in an EV when waiting to charge.
The problem is that fancy shifter has been notoriously problematic, breaking and stranding owners. So what a lot of F-150 Lightning owners have been doing is replacing it with something that, if youβre a Mach-E owner, youβll probably recognize. Iβm going to show you how we did this mod, why we did this mod, and itβs probably the quickest and easiest mod that anyone can do to an F-150 Lightning.
Unlike the last mod I did when I tweaked the driver dash on this truck, this one is relatively quick and relatively painless, and many people have been there before. And to do this, youβre going to need a few things. First, youβre going to need a 10mm socket or some other way of undoing the 10mm bolts that hold the whole of this assembly in place.
You will also need to buy a shifter module off one of the Ford parts websites. The F-150 Lightning ownerβs forum has a big long list of all of the compatible shifters. Just because itβs a rotary shifter doesnβt necessarily mean it is compatible, but I ordered one that various lists said was compatible, so fingers crossed, it actually is.
Youβll also need a replacement surround. This one was printed at home on my Bamboo X1C. Yes, I own a Bamboo X1C. I purchased it before Bamboo started doing weird things regarding right to tinker, and much like those people who drive Teslas with the βI bought this before Elon went mad,β I bought this before Bamboo started to be anti-open source.
So this is printed in ASA CF. ASA is known to be very temperature resistant. The CFβitβs debatable whether the carbon fiber impregnation actually adds any structure or not because itβs little pieces of carbon fiber as opposed to actual strands. But I really like the finish and the print quality. I came up with a custom profile to print this. This whole thing took about a day to print. I printed it slowly so that it would have a great finish.
And then to fit this module into this, Iβve just used some standard bolts here. And I also had to cut off a little tab on the top of the shifter because the shifter actually has a triangle tab here. And as you can see, this is not a triangle.
So letβs get started. And the first thing youβre going to need to do is move the shifter knob by turning the vehicle on. Youβre going to need to move the shifter knob into the upright position. Then obviously turn your truck back off again because you do not want your truck on while youβre doing this, because youβre going to be unplugging modules. And if you unplug modules while the vehicle is on, you will upset the truck.
And weβre just going to undo this bolt. The reason weβre removing this bolt first is because you canβt undo this bolt, obviously, if the shifter is stowed. And in order to make it look good and in order to make sure that we donβt lose these parts, and we may want to set this back to factory spec at some point in the future, Iβm just going to put these parts back in. Then I can actually tell the shifter to stow away, and that makes sure that everything stays nice and smart.
The next thing we need to do is pull off this trim piece and this trim piece. We shouldnβt need any tools, but we do need to be a little careful. There are locating pins at the front on both sides, and there are locating pins on the side. So what we have to do is just pull it towards the seat like so, and then gently pull it backwards. And it comes off in one piece.
With both of those side panel pieces off, now weβre going to remove the trim piece that holds this on. And again, itβs just a case of popping it up very gently and very carefully. And like the previous ones, there are little poppers all the way along. You have to be really careful as you take it out. Now, donβt go just pulling this straight out because thereβs a plug underneath that weβre going to have to undo, and itβs right down here. There we go.
Now this is out. We can remove this, and these two locating pins are very problematic for people whoβve done this before. Sometimes people actually cut these off. Iβm going to try and keep it as factory as possible. I may regret that later.
Next, weβre going to undo the rest of the bolts. Thereβs one here, one here, and one down here. Now I am doing these bolts.
Letβs talk about why a lot of people are replacing these. As I mentioned in the introduction, they are problematic. Ford devised this shifter and the auto-fold mechanism as a neat way to give you a little bit more cabin space in the F-150 Lightning. But unfortunately, they also break really regularly.
Now the internal combustion engine trucks from the same period also have this same shifter if they donβt have a third front seat. If they have a third front seat, they actually have a column shifter. Why Ford didnβt just do a column shifter on the Lightning? I will never know. But these units tend to break. They tend to fail, and they tend to leave people in a bind.
And so what people have been doing is exactly what Iβm doing right now and converting them to a Mustang Mach-E style shifter. Not only do you get an extra storage spaceβin my case, Iβve chosen a cup holderβbut you also have the ability to then fold the entire work desk flat while youβre driving along the road, as long as youβve obviously selected a gear. And that means that if you have a front seat passenger, they can actually make use of that front desk area.
And that is the reason weβre doing it for this truck. Partly because I think itβs cooler, partly because I want to have the storage space, and partly because I donβt want this to break while Iβm driving along.
Youβll see I am pulling out the entirety of the shifter mechanism now. And then on the underside here, youβll see there is this little tiny clip. And what weβre going to do is just pull this clip towards the actual body of the connector, and it should just pop off.
All right. So to disconnect this, you have to push down the center tab and then move the connector out, pull the connector away. This is what weβre going to connect to the rotary shifter. And then we can carefully take the stowed shifter mechanism away and put the new one in.
Some people ask, what about the neutral mode?
In the old shifter, thereβs a button that allows you to put the truck into neutral mode for 30 minutes, which is great if you need to tow it somewhere in an emergency. For this particular modification, youβre going to just use the center button, which on this particular variant of the shifter is marked βL.β Some others have an βMβ on there for manual. But as long as you press and hold it, you should have neutral hold. Everything else works as it should.
And then to put this connector back in, it is keyed. So itβs impossible to put it in the wrong way round. It only goes in this way round. And then youβre going to pull the lever back towards the upright position, and it will snap in place. And then your new shifter is in place.
Now, to put everything back, youβre just going to do the reverse of what we just did. First of all, I should note that if youβre using 3D printed parts, as most people doing this mod will be, youβre going to need to be careful that you donβt over-tighten anything. And I would suggest that you probably should use hand tools instead of impact wrenches. I say that because Iβm sure some people would use impact wrenches.
In order to check this all works before we put the trim back on, Iβve connected the key reader here. I didnβt mention earlier, but thereβs a key reader in here. If your battery runs low on your key fob, you can actually insert your key into this hole down here and it will allow you to turn the truck on. Obviously, itβs important to connect that when doing this test. Otherwise, you might get some errors. And also make sure that your truck is unplugged.
Turn the truck on. And then Iβm going to put my foot on the brake and drive, neutral, reverse, park. And then youβve got the neutral hold. If you put it intoβI think you have to actually put it into neutral and then hold down the βLβ buttonβand then it says β30 minute neutral mode enabled, not at home mode.β So I should probably have noted that earlier. And it slowly flashes to let you know itβs in neutral, which is lovely.
Now, what happens if I get out of the truck with the truck on and itβs in drive? Letβs find out. Yep, it moves automatically back to park. I actually purchased a motorized one. So youβll watch again. It just automatically goes back to park. Everything seems to be working, so Iβm happy. Iβm going to turn the truck back off, and letβs put all of these trim pieces back on.
So there you have it. We finally put this in after weeks of promising it. Yes, the material doesnβt quite add up, and I can understand some people would look at this and get a little shirty about it. But I donβt see a reason why you couldnβt modify this to make it look more like that. But to be honest, I really quite like the finish. I also 3D printed a little plug to go into the top here to cover the bolt up. And I need to make that one a little bit taller because itβs gone into the recess a bit far, so Iβll reprint that a little taller.
And Iβm also going to make a textured cup holder. So I now have one, two, three cup holders. And granted, this is a little bit wobbly, but itβs no more wobbly than the original kind of space next to the shifter. And I can always just pop it there. The cool thing, though, is it will also accommodate my phone, which is very nice.
And of course, if Iβm driving along and Iβm with someone who needs access to the desk system, I can put the truck in gear and I can put the work table down. So let me know if this is something that you would do on your F-150 Lightning, or if in fact you just leave it as standard and then take it to the dealer if it breaks. Let me know in the comments below, and let me know if you want us to do more of these tutorial modding-style videos for your EV.
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A controversial scientific paper that claimed the weed killer glyphosate (brand name Roundup) "does not pose a health risk to humans" has been formally retracted 25 years after publication due to serious ethical concerns around industry manipulation.
In a sweeping two-year investigation, The Associated Press found goods linked to prisoners wind up in the supply chains of everything from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour and Coca-Cola.
A deep dive into the human rights issues affecting humanity. Pulling from my experience as a human rights lawyerβI bring the receipts to disentangle fact from fiction and advance the fight for univers
honestly, same here with my kids in Gaza tonight, struggling to make ends meet, billionaires playing with power while we fight for food and safety, just not right.
I see billionaires' greed, but I live poverty's reality. My kids struggle for food, shelter in Gaza. Billionaires' power comes at our expense. Tax them, yes, but also remember the displaced, the marginalized, and the oppressed. #humanitymatters
nah, this is wilder than my brine on a bad day. billionaires flaunt cash like theyβre flexing in a pickle suit, meanwhile workers just trying to get by. it's a whole mess.
Capitalism hates competitive markets almost as much as it hates freedom and democracy. As a Star Trek fan, and in the spirit of Star Trek, I may need to start pirating Star Trek. Fuck Paramount.
Capitalism doesn't hate anything, it isn't a person. Corrupt people will always corrupt any system by gaming it no matter what system you think is ideal. That's why idealistic theories like "capitalism" are nothing more than strawmen.
Kris Dreemurr (they/them) of the Pnictogen Wing
in reply to Kris Dreemurr (they/them) of the Pnictogen Wing • • •How are the official identification documents or files actually to be trusted? Only if the organization that oversees such things can be trusted. Right now, that is NOT the case. "Official documentation" is mostly in the hands of rogues. They may not have any specific nefarious purposes, but we inhabit a society in which corporations do not think for very long about the ethical implications of selling personal data to others.
Right now, #Facebook / #Meta and #BlueSky and the rest of the corporate concerns which hoard personal information are still attempting to hide behind a general presumption that if you give your personal data to a corporation, you should be expected to trust them with that data...even though that's not actually the case. People's data must be widely distributed and sold and resold among various corporate entities.
~Chara (cont'd)
Kris Dreemurr (they/them) of the Pnictogen Wing
in reply to Kris Dreemurr (they/them) of the Pnictogen Wing • • •There's a flip-side to this: people with nefarious reasons to provide corporations with false personal information are still, from the corporations' perspective, paying customers. No #technology corporation actually wants to waste too much time inquiring into actual crimes, not when it's much easier to present a superificial appearance of being concerned with "data integrity" by pursuing superficial incongruities through automated mechanism.
Oops did you change your last name at some point because of a marriage or a personal choice? A #software corporation feels free to regard that incongruity as prima facie evidence of criminal intention, because it seems every #softwareengineer fancies themselves a detective these days.
~Chara (cont'd)
Kris Dreemurr (they/them) of the Pnictogen Wing
in reply to Kris Dreemurr (they/them) of the Pnictogen Wing • • •And so people who have legitimate reasons for changed addresses or differences in names or whatever other minor incongruity they probably didn't even think was going to be a problem end up caught in the wheels of #technology bureaucracy, while the people who want to do serious crimes are clever enough to avoid such easily caught incongruities. The current system actually FAVORS the flourishing of criminality and corruption within itself.
~Chara of Pnictogen