#PennedPossibilities 645. What was the most unexpected challenge you encountered while writing your WIP?

I didn't expect large parts of the Western world to fall to fascism while I was writing a series about the West falling to fascism, though, in retrospect, I should have seen that coming.

Important info from the Aussie embassy in Germany re #AusVotes. In person voting happening in both Frankfurt and Berlin, #DemocracySausage in Berlin only.

#MigrantLife

Hive mind: any suggestions?

On my Macbook Air, Safari has been behaving weirdly when I plug in my external monitor. Many (but not all?) of the Safari windows get rendered full-window (even though they weren't when I was only on the laptop, nor before I disconnected and reconnected).

I had suspected a bug with BetterSnapTool, which I was using, but I've deleted that and rebooted several times since.

I *think* this may have started happening at the last Mac OS update.

It's not terrible, just really really annoying. So far web searching hasn't yielded any hints. Any thoughts?

#mac #macOS

We are not lawyers, nor our alter egos play as such on the Internet. Ergo in the face of legal challenges we are only rusticos.

If you feel ad idem and want to lend a hand, or head, to #FDroid pro bono and bona fide, you can help in our ongoing efforts ad infinitum.

Quaeritur right here: f-droid.org/2025/04/16/strengt…

#Mozilla #EFF #SFLC #OpenTechFund

Strengthening FOSS Legal Resilience | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository

As part of the FOSS Sustainability grant awarded to F-Droid by the OpenTechnology Fund(OTF)earlier this year, we’ve taken on the task of developing clear,com...

^f-droid.org

Remember, income disparity in the US was at its LOWEST when unions were at their STRONGEST!

Want to Save Democracy? Organize a Union in Your Workplace.
thenation.com/article/activism…

#Labor #Democracy #UnionStrong #USPol #NoRepublicansEverAgain

Want to Save Democracy? Organize a Union in Your Workplace. | The Nation

Authoritarian regimes make crushing unions a top priority for a reason: Strong, independent unions are the best safeguard against tyranny.

^{The Nation}

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"DOGE went weeks w/o updating its webpage. Just after midnight on Tues -removed nearly a $Bs worth of previously claimed “savings.”
--M Alfred

"DOGE website -only public accounting of Musk & Trump’s attempts to reduce fed govt spending: riddled with errors -incl revisions: suggest: previously overstating its savings by 100s of $Ms.

On Tues alone -removed ~$962M in previously claimed cuts & altered 100s of others to boost indiv items’ purported “savings” values.

#USPol notus.org/policy/doge-claimed-…

Nearly a Billion Dollars in DOGE ‘Savings’ Disappeared Overnight

In a late-night update to its webpage, DOGE removed hundreds of previously claimed cuts and altered scores of others to boost the items’ claimed “savings” values.

^{Mark Alfred (NOTUS)}

NEW: End Slavery in MN campaign advocates for fair wages in prisons. According to panelists, an incarcerated worker makes $0.25-$0.50 an hour which is split in half to pay for essential needs for the worker, an equivalent to “damn near free labor.”

[Video]unicornriot.ninja/2025/end-sla…

End Slavery in Minnesota Bill Advocates for Fair Wages in Prisons - UNICORN RIOT

Minneapolis, MN — On February 25, 2025, the Minnesota Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee hosted a panel discussion on Ending Slavery in Minnesota led by Marcia Howard, Vice President of the Federation of Teachers Local 59 and ex-prison labor w…

^{akicita (UNICORN RIOT)}

The sad reality.

#memes #humour

Oh, this? It’s just the federated Bluesky PBC, funded by federated venture capital, federatedly censoring people on behalf of the federated dictator of federated Turkey, Federated Erdoğan. mas.to/@osma/11434616689055247…

Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦

2025-04-16 06:14:00

Bluesky didn't reach a federated stage where you could choose a service provider in a free country before they started to censor people based on authoritarian demands.

We're an Apple shop at work.

Looking at making Linux desktops (laptops) a blessed alternative.

What do you wish you knew about desktop Linux in a business environment before deploying it?

More general details:
- Global remote-first team.
- FinTech (so we have compliance requirements - 99.9% sure we can meet them all with existing tools)
- Will be optional, only for those who want Linux.

For those of you still wondering that #Palantir does: dominate the battlefield, dominate societies, dominate you.

This is their billboard hanging around at US colleges.

Canada has fewer "constitutional impediments" to slow down Poilievre's implementation of Elon Musk's DOGE policies on Canada, meaning that same destructive rampage (which remains the Conservative priority) will fall on us with lightning speed should Poilievre win the election and take office in Canada.

---

If Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives win the federal election, they could move at lightning speed to shrink the size of the public service.

That’s according to Ian Brodie, a former chief of staff of prime minister Stephen Harper, who believes the most surefire way to usher in deregulation in Canada (a main priority for Poilievre) is to reduce the head count of the public service and fast.

“Once you deprive the public service of the people to create policies, guidelines and regulations and letters and contract documents and so on and so forth, the burden on society is reduced,” Brodie told an audience at the Canada Strong and Free Network’s annual conference in downtown Ottawa on April 11.

For Brodie, time is of the essence to reduce the federal budget. If elected, he said the Conservatives should move quickly to downsize the Privy Council Office and give ministers mandates to cut down departments’ workforces.

“The good thing, compared to the United States, is that, for all sorts of constitutional legal reasons, the impediments to DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) moving quickly, we don’t really have to worry about in Canada,” Brodie said at the conservative conference. “Canada can move as quickly as it wants in fixing the fiscal problems.”

It’s been the approach for American and Argentinian right-wing governments that have sought to reduce public spending and regulation by trying to eradicate whole government agencies and departments. The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has laid off hundreds of thousands of government employees in recent months.

Poilievre’s Conservatives have said they will reduce the size of the public service through attrition, which would shed 17,000 jobs a year.

ottawacitizen.com/public-servi…

#cdnpoli #fascism #NeverConservative

Stephen Harper's former chief of staff says a Poilievre government could move 'quickly' to cut the public service

Time is of the essence to reduce the federal budget for Stephen Harper's former chief of staff Ian Brodie.

^{Matteo Cimellaro (Ottawa Citizen)}

Fuck it, I'll do it.

#Fediblock mastodon.hetzner.social

Yes, the same hosting service that's taken a banhammer to paying LGBTQIA+ users based on false reporting of *non-pornographic LGBTQIA+ content as pornography* has now spun up their very own instance.

Edit: And if you need another reason? They provide hosting to Germany's AfD - [edit 2] a group recently declared to be a right-wing extremist organization by the German government. (source: euronews.com/my-europe/2025/05… )

Germany designates AfD as right-wing extremist organisation, citing threat to democracy

Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has designated AfD as a right-wing extremist organisation, citing xenophobic stances as the reason.

^{Estelle Nilsson-Julien (Euronews.com)}

The past tense of slay is slew. The past participle of slay is slain. I don't make the rules, I just enjoy bizarre verb tense spelling changes. Can you imagine if we conjugated "play" the same way?

That said, I applaud the simplification of English for learners, so from here on out it's slay slayed slayed. Also we're spelling laid "layed" from here on out. Sorry.

Christians beware. If he's coming after academia's tax exempt status for pushing back against his agenda, then he has no choice but to also come after churches who don't support him. You're next! #USPol

(Note that thanks to the Fediverse I now distinguish between "Christians" and "followers of Christ" because the two aren't the same anymore.)