Musician, mechanic, writer, dreamer, techy, green thumb, emigrant, BP2, ADHD, Father, weirdo

https://www.battleforlibraries.com/

#DigitalRightsForLibraries

  • 13 Posts
  • 137 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle

  • This is the real answer I was looking for in the comments.

    Edit: it always goes back to Reagan.

    Why did unions lose their power? Reagan threatened striking ATC workers with firing if they didn’t return to work immediately. Suddenly striking workers could be fired.

    Why did weed become a life sentence drug? Reagan.

    Who demonized the poor on welfare, calling them welfare queens? Who is Ronald Reagan, Alex?

    Deregulated Wall street, banking and commerce sector, too.

    If there’s a glaring problem with the USA, there’s a very good chance it dates back to RR.


  • Sorry for your loss 😥🩵I hope you’re okay. Momo is beautiful!

    I, too, have a toy-carrying chirper! Her name is officially Violet, but we call her Gubba. She has a stuffed fish she is particularly vocal over. We always know when she has it in her mouth, be cause her chirps take on a muffled, more variable and “conversational” tone. For example, she’s usually more, “brr-brr” for attention, but with her toy, she’s like, “uh-owwwwlll! Brrowww!” Finished off with some modulations caused by her chewing.

    Here she is, chirping to let me know my lap needs room for her impending jump:

    … And what usually follows the jump:




  • I think there’s a misconception about elected officials. Many people believe they work to improve the lives of American citizens, but they don’t.

    This. They want votes. They do what they think will get them votes. And yet, often – and in the last election – the democrats that help the people (like by walking a union picket line, supporting LGBTQ+ and basic human rights, legalizing cannabis, reducing penalties petty crimes, etc.) don’t get the votes that are part of the bargain.

    They vote for and enact legislation that helps the people, and the people don’t re-elect them. The incentive shifts to satisfying wealthy donors.




  • The Chinese owners seem to discourage all communication between writers. They did however just acknowledge the difficulties the writers face with this platform tool.

    This whole operation just smells to me like Chinese work ethic (work them till they jump out the windows, then put nets under the windows) to me. There have been two “supervisors” in the past 16 months that have come and gone. They used to buffer requests and pish to open submission on time, but then they resign without word.


  • Ty for the reply.

    Not comfortable sharing location info, and I know state laws vary. I do know that our state has a law on the books prohibiting withholding pay based on time entry, because my union rep pushed back when I kept not getting paid because a supervisor was forgetting to approve time.

    This is similar, because its the final approval process, but the work has been done, taken out of her hands and finalized. Not to mention, she waits weeks sometimes for them to get off their hands and allow her to upload.

    No known contacts in the field other than her coauthors. This is her second year doing this, which is her dream job, and its opening doors for her.

    Definitely, it could be automated. But part of the problem is the text box that handles the pasted data inserts characters that are not present in the final work. We’ve tried dumping to plaintext several different ways and looking for hidden characters, but it still occurs. Thus, it would still require human review. Double quotes could likely be filtered, but who gets paid to develop the automation? She wouldn’t know how to debug or validate the code, and she shouldn’t have to.

    She knows this isn’t her ultimate dream job, but she is getting paid to write, and getting your own stuff published is a lot of work, luck, and who you know. She’s meeting lots of insiders, but struggling with these constraints.




  • Important excerpt:

    “Introducing a scanning application on every mobile phone, with its associated infrastructure and management solutions, leads to an extensive and very complex system. Such a complex system grants access to a large number of mobile devices & the personal data thereon. The resulting situation is regarded by AIVD as too large a risk for our digital resilience. (…) Applying detection orders to providers of end-to-end encrypted communications entails too large a security risk for our digital resilience”.


  • There can be a lot of ways this has nothing at all to do with you.

    Begin anecdote: I just got back from two years out of the country and am back to visit family and earn more money for my next trip. I’m hugely depressed. I drained about $80k in savings that took me 15 years to build, have no job, no car, and am sleeping on a concrete floor in a family member’s basement. I’m grown with three adult children.

    My older cousin has three kids in their late twenties and early thirties. Two daughters live together and have game night every Tuesday. They adore me and invite me weekly. I’ve not had the stamina to endure a long activity like that, and I also am waiting for both sisters to be available, as one had been working nights, but has next Tuesday off.

    When I canceled this past Tuesday, the working sister told me the following day that her father and sister are angry with both of us – convinced I favor working sister more than the two of them. They assume (as is their dramatic nature) that anything that affects them was intentionally done with malice.

    I had a doctor’s appointment the day of game night that ran until 3pm, and game night was 70 miles away at 5pm.

    These two are sure that I’m slighting them, when in reality, I was home rocking on a cold floor trying to find the motivation to face the public so I could eat dinner. I never did eat. I woke to the revelation from working sister, and now, visiting game night seems 50 times more awkward and uncomfortable to me.

    If they hadn’t taken it personally that I’m a mess, I’d be scheduled for game night in two days. As it is, I’m almost 98% guaranteed to skip it to avoid that drama. My canceling had nothing to do with them. My depression and self-loathing are of my own making, and when people feel the need to pressure me or shame me, it never helps in any way.

    End anecdote.

    If you took it personally that people didn’t show to your party, I get it. I’m sorry. But it likely was not you, and isn’t indicative of the care these people have for you. Its their own thing. My advice is to laugh it off as a plan gone wrong and put it behind you. There are real things that affect us. We don’t need to invent them.

    “Remember that time I decided to celebrate my birthday for the first time in decades? I thought 50 would show, but it was 5? Guess that didn’t go as planned!” Its funny, if you let it be.

    Take the win: you stayed on-task and for a big shin-dig planned. You have 50 friends.

    Maybe you can keep gatherings small and simple for a while, and let the large gatherings happen more organically?

    I hope your week is a good one and you can smile about this soon. Happy birthday.






  • tl;dr I really don’t get it either.

    I really don’t understand how people can do it. I moved to a developing nation in the Caribbean. Everyone’s livelihood is connected to nature here. Reefs, especially. Yet every local I have met will casually toss their garbage. I went to a festival on the beach and most of the locals were burying their trash in the sand just enough to keep it from blowing away in the moment. Some don’t even bother with that pretense. There were trash cans in easy strolling distance, every 50 feet.

    The roads and waterways are stuffed with garbage here. I live on a canal that connects to the sea, and have watched tour guides and fishing expeditions tossing plastic bottles, polystyrene food containers and plastic bags overboard daily for two years. These are the same people protesting dredging their flats and cayes near the reef, but inexplicably and deliberately ignorant of their own impact.

    Also interesting to observe is the speed at which the nation transitioned from class and aluminum drink containers to plastics. Mt first visit here was just three years ago, and most drinks were in bottles that were clearly recycled. Laser etch marks, rubbing from other bottles, etc. Now its all plastic. There’s a national ban on single use plastics, but it isn’t enforced, and it all ends up in the water and in the ground.

    When I first witnessed the ghastly indifference of everyone here regarding proper disposal of garbage, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like watching a bunch of five year-old kids, the way they shamelessly toss their trash to the wind.


  • I’m nor a cash-only convert, but I have some anecdotal evidence for you.

    I’ve visited Boston five times in the past thirty years. Every single time I used my debit card at Thanuel Hall for food, my card was later used for fraud. Always caught and never a big inconvenience beyond replacing my card, but still not ideal. I only ever use cash there now.

    Online shopping, before the Amazon monopoly on e-commerce, my card would get compromised every few months.

    Now I use privacy.com for all transactions that allow it, and its amazing how often those cards are stolen. Thanks to the way the service works, the stolen cards are useless to scammers or thieves, but my declined transaction filter has a few charges declined each month.

    My point being that if you want to avoid fraud, and you can do it, cash is king.