NerdResa @NerdResa@cybre.space

“Cryptocurrency is literally like an eight-year-old’s concept of an evil businessman. He just plugs his pollution machine in and gets money for it. It doesn’t make anything, it just. Pollutes. And makes money. Like a fucking Captain Planet villain”

https://twitter.com/WKDart/status/1386187042460106754

there was also apparently legal questions of "but we're using everybody's research, can we even patent this thing?" that went into the decision to just not patent it

and i think you could very convincingly make a similar case for the covid-19 vaccine, as there was a great effort to pool resources and data to get a solution as quickly as possible

...now if only somebody had enough money to hire enough fancy lawyers to ominously shake that particular can full of pennies at the situation

as we talk about the morality of vaccine patents

i think it is a nice time to also remember historical precident

jonas salk did not patent the polio vaccine. he went out of his way to make sure it was not patented.

he never got rich. he actively made sure he didn't get rich off of it.

but that history is full of stories about how for the rest of his life, jonas salk did not have to ever pay for a beer in any bar in this country. he would get on airplanes and once somebody recognized his name, the entire damn plane would stand up and clap for him. he constantly had hotel rooms comped, meals for free at restaurants, thus and so.

because he was surrounded by people who knew he had saved their children from having to ever consider the fear of an iron lung, and were overwhelmingly grateful for it.

he was always modest and demure when recognized thusly. but i think that when people start saying "well why else would someone make a vaccine, if not to get paid for it and hold the patent", i think it is good to remember these stories. the world did not punish jonas salk for not patenting the polio vaccine. the world loved him for it. maybe not in the structures that billionaires are most used to. but they did love him for it, in small ways, in humble ways, on the individual level.

partial list of trans holidays:

• Transgender Day of Remembrance
• Transgender Day of Visibility
• Transgender Day of Paperwork
• Transgender Day of Explaining This Shit To Your Parents, Again
• Transgender Day of Dealing With Medical Insurance (formerly part of TDoP but it got too big)
• Transgender Day of Seeing Another Trans Person at the Coffee Shop But They Don't Have Any Openly Trans Signifiers and What Are You Gonna Say To Them Anyway, Hi, I'm Trans Too, How's It Going
• Halloween

When you're talking about Linux, it's okay to say that it's "open source".

It's okay to say that it's "free software".

It's okay to call it "GNU/Linux", "Linux", or to mess up its name.

It's okay to refer to it as "the one with the friendly penguin".

Part of RMS' legacy has been an incessant obsession with terminology and pedantry, overshadowing far more important shared objectives which are fundamentally emancipatory in nature.

Pedantry is not activism; it is alienating, not emancipatory.

the "androids are taking our jobs" sci-fi trope is honestly one of the darkest, because the entire point of automation is to make it so that nobody has to work anymore if they don't want to. In literally any non-oligarchical society, the automatically generated resources would be distributed and everyone would be happy.

the idea that a population would be so brainwashed that they want more work and less automation, instead of more automation and much more universal basic income, is so deeply and fundamentally disturbing, yet it's already happening

If you’re looking for your next domain, maybe consider not using .io as the TLD. The colonial history and status of the British Indian Ocean Territories is… quite terrible.

The UK colonisers forcibly removed the Chagossians from their homeland to create an empty island for a U.S. military base. They still aren’t allowed to return.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians

the #ASL word for "trans" is the same morpheme as "beautiful" but signed over your heart, where you'd sign self 😭

(image/caption: via carodoodles on birdsite: https://twitter.com/carodoodles/status/1112803368819478529 )

It’s a shame that the only decent command-line we have is the Linux/Unix ecosystem. There are reasons it is the way it is, esp. the fact that most hobbyist devs are programmers/engineers (way too few designers, writers, sensibility readers etc., & the precious ones we have get little respect).

But a cmdline could be all of:

- fully decolonised
- discoverable
- consistent
- documented
- cute

& the fact that ours isn’t is taken to be an essential limitation of cmdlines…

Technologie und Wissen schaffen Verantwortung.

Die #Hackerinnenethik ist seit fast 40 Jahren unverändert, ich finde es wird Zeit für ein kleines Update.

https://leah.is/posts/technologie-wissen-schafft-verantwortung/?source=mastodon

I think nobody will dispute it that, if you want to immigrate to another country, you should make an effort to be considerate of the local culture and sensibilities. It's a bit like a relationship: know what you're getting into before committing, be willing to respect their limits.

"Consideration" is such a slippery notion tho. I've been told to not gay kiss or poly kiss because it made people uncomfortable, it's a family environment, think of their feelings. I've seen Japanese homosexual ppl say they had to marry for procreation, for to do otherwise would be a tremendous lack of consideration to their parents, to whose tirelessl hard work they owe their bodies. I've been told not to wear makeup to work, because I had to be professional and respect German cultural norms. By a non-German. No German ever seemed bothered by early transition me wearing concealer, but somehow "being considerate of the local culture" seems to translate so easily to "don't make me uncomfortable by flaunting queerness".

In some countries, everyday cooking is full of spices, with a rich, appetising scent. When they immigrate, some locals will complain of that terrible greasy smell that gets everywhere. Maybe they'll refuse rent to ppl from those countries. In the country of origin the smell get everywhere too, but there it was just a fact of life, nobody paid any mind, nobody blamed their neighbours for it. In the host country, it's inconsiderate.

I imagine what it feels to those immigrants. Either resign yourself to eating what must feel like the most boring, cardboard nothing food every meal, day at day. Or fail to prove that you deserve to live in the rich country. Taint the reputation of all your countrypeople. Fail to show that you assimilated, get booted right back into whatever terrible conditions you were fleeing from. ("If it's so terrible there you can get by without the spices". Yes you can. But should you have to choose?)

I'm being roundabout, even here, afraid of being one of the bad ones. I'm lying, I don't have to imagine how they feel, I know. You _will_ be assimilated. When the choice is deportation or assimilation, well, resistance is futile.

But what really gets to me, what really gets to me, is not being allowed to express sadness about it. The taboo on criticising host country. "If you complain so much why do you want to live here."

I want to live here, and I want to complain so much, complain about things that make me sad about living here. Germany will be fine. I'm not going to change anything, I don't hold any power in our relationship, I have to be a model citizen or else. But I will grant myself the right to vent to the void how I really feel.

It's past 1am and I am crying, a lot. I'm crying about things that most Germans won't empathise with, things they'd frown upon on their neighbours. Things related to overwhelmingly negative opinions about third-world, non-EU immigrants in polls, looming under outwardly liberal attitudes and a generally respectful treatment. (Usually Most of the time.)

Hell, I want to cry about things that many Brazilians will see as our flaws and not empathise with, at least the upper classes, at least those who haven't spent a few years in the cold lands. I look at my poor, dirty, violent country, and I miss not a curated reel of the best parts, I miss the people, with all their very real issues.

I miss not being able to sleep at 2am, every week, because middle-aged ppl are singing painful love ballads on booze and an acoustic guitar in the specialty bar in front of my rented room. I'm not being facetious, I really miss it. Having my healthy sleep patterns disturbed by them made me smile. They were happy. They were _making happiness_ I had to work the next day, I woke worse, work was worse, fuck work, work doesn't matter, this is music, love, happiness, this matters. They understood that.

Music and love and happiness is holy, damn you all.

I miss not being able to sleep at 2am because my neighbours are having a loud party. I miss the knowledge that if I knocked on the door with a smile I'd be taken right in, a perfect stranger, even if I was too shy and dysphoric to act on that knowledge it comforted me.

I miss not being able to sleep at 2am because of the magnificent ppl coming down from the hills, the favelas, blasting downright pornographic earworms right to the face of polite middle-class society, hacked DIY sound systems shaking the security walls with maxxed-out bass. They are so right, polite middle class society is a grinding wheel running on blood, it more than deserves being blasted at 2am with cocks buried to the balls and dripping, all-consuming hungry pussies.

I curse this silence. I miss not being able to sleep at 2am because it's Carnaval and everybody is outside dancing and drinking and fucking one another for the pure, innocent shining reason of a body wanting another body.

And yes, I confess, I miss singing at 2am.

This twitter thread from the Caves Of Qud devs about how they keep the alt-right out of their game community is worth reading.

https://twitter.com/unormal/status/1319901926515986433

Universe runs on Debian.
#debian #Linux

making straight people have to choose 'other' and write it in is praxis