If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers, we call him crazy.
If a woman has a trailer house full of cats, we call her nuts.
But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish the entire nation, we put them on the cover of Fortune magazine and pretend that they are role models.
(Then when they give a tiny fraction of their hoard to build a museum wing with their name on it - we call them philanthropists)
Because the Calibre ebook library software just acquired AI garbage (as of 8.16.2, this week), it has *already* been forked. For AI-free Calibre, seek out clbre:
Mubasher is a U.S. citizen and ICE fascists kidnapped him. This denial of due process is the fascism Trump is enabling. We cannot tolerate this. This is indefensible.
Iβm continuing to speak up and sound the alarm. Support my human rights advocacy at qasimrashid.com/subscribe
As a human rights lawyer I bring the receipts to debunk disinformation and advance the fight for absolute justice. Click to read Let's Address This with Qasim Rashid, by Qasim Rashid, Esq.
it's December already and still no #GeneralStrike. no wonder things have gotten so much worse that trump is outright torturing and murdering people while STILL no release of the Epstein files
Cold today in #stl , likely to be equally as cold #tomorrow , so I decided to cancle my shift, frankly I've made enough for the week. Well, more or less, goal is $700, with a min of $500. Last week we made a bit over $200, that's it because I took off because of the weather, so making $6xx this week is a bit of a shortage, but not bad, and I don't _have_ to work as hard as I do. #today #stlouis #work
U.S. prosecutors have told the Supreme Court that they want to give up their fight to preserve the convictions of a former Fox executive and a South American sports media company in a corruption case related to the TV rights for international soccer β¦
After two months of pressure and violent threats, Republican state senators voted against Trump's effort to eliminate two House seats held by Democrats.
@paul_kelly Oh that isn't me, just an artist I follow, and I don't think that's a ukulele, but something very similar, but you'd have to check his page.
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¦
@Khurram Wadee Indeed, but this post accuses him of popularizing it, plus him being in it and doing a live reenactment of it, I'm just too lazy to verify any of that.
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.'
Muse
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