Gaythia Weis @Gaythia@qoto.org

Aw yeah, you know what time it is, baby! Another #BlackFriday full of #BlackJoy all over #blackmastodon ! As always, shout outs to @BigAngBlack, @BlackAzizAnansi and them for getting me into this.

Humans can be fallible, violence prone, dangerous to themselves, other species and the world, true.
But humans can also cooperate, achieve amazing feats, and even save the planet from devastation.
I considered this when I heard that 70 years after the first use of atomic fusion, humans have achieved *ignition* at the Lawrence Livermore Lab. That means more energy was produced from a fusion reaction than was used to power it. We have a long way to go, but this is a huge milestone! #Hope #Fusion

Nearly all the progress the U.S. has made in treating #HepC in prisons has come because incarcerated people filed lawsuits against their jailers. When Phil Turney took on the Idaho Department of Corrections, he didn’t even have a computer. Watch: https://www.statnews.com/2022/12/15/typewriter-in-prison-overturns-idaho-hepatitis-c-policy

Just before the invasion, #Ukraine made a deal with #Amazon #AWS to create a data warehouse for its government information and infrastructure: tax and property records, bank statements, and the like. Things that an invaded and occupied Ukraine might lose if Russia got their hands on the only copies.

They literally snuck Pelican crates full of SSDs into the country and spirited them back offshore after backing up 10 petabytes of important historic and legal records.

This paragraph, second from the end, really put a fine point on why Amazon did this: They were not beholden to, nor being held hostage by, any Russian operations...because they never had any:

Amazon didn’t have to worry about its relationship with Russia on the Snowball project. It doesn’t have one. “We didn’t have anything to turn off there,” Maxwell said. “We had never invested there. It’s a point of principle.”

Truly an amazing story from the #LATimes.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-15/amazon-ukraine-war-cloud-data

Corporate profits only accounted for roughly 11% of price growth from 1979 to 2019.

Today, record corporate profits account for 53.9% of price increases.

Folks, corporate greed is driving inflation, not workers asking for better wages.

In 1941, Nazis asked the city of Amsterdam to make this map of Jews in the city. Each dot equalled 10 Jews.

In 2022, TX AG @KenPaxtonTX sought data from driver's licenses on #transgender Texans.

But don't worry. History never repeats itself. #LGBTQ+
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/12/14/texas-transgender-data-paxton/

Democrats have until Jan 3 to pass DACA protections. After that, MAGA GOP takes over and we know they'll do everything to make DACA lives miserable.

I need y’all to raise your voice. Sign the petition & demand Dems act: https://bit.ly/3YaaZt7

This petition is from United We Dream, an extremely reputable immigrant rights org that does the hard work on the ground.

I'd be deeply grateful if you signed at the above link & shared this post to get maximum participation. Thank you. Much love.

#NASA new #SWOT #satellite will study #climatechange and its ability to look in detail at surface #water on #Earth is already getting excitement from scientists.

https://www.space.com/nasa-swot-satellite-earth-water-science

## Few bullets about myself.

* At work my current focus area is software systems for industrial process automation.

* I have interests in wide variety of topics as mentioned in my profile https://qoto.org/@srijit or https://mas.to/@srijit.

* My preferred languages are English, Bengali, Kannada and Hindi.

* I favour free and open source application software.

* I expect Mastodon fediverse to be the digital town square which rewards moderate and rational talk that promotes consensus.

#Introduction #MastIndia #Bengaluru

New UC Berkeley report funded by Tusk Philanthropies concludes internet voting is not ready for prime time. Pleased to have been part of the group developing this piece. https://gspp.berkeley.edu/faculty-and-impact/news/recent-news/csp-working-group-findings-on-mobile-voting

EFF has had a ton of victories in the past few weeks. Learn about them, and more work that we are doing defending digital freedoms with this issue of EFFector. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/digital-rights-updates-effector-346

Beyond excited for my grad class on 19th-Century US Women's History in the spring! It was unbelievably difficult to narrow down the readings, but LOOK at this final lineup of #WomenAlsoKnowHistory! #histodon

The current state of #Mastodon does remind me much of the glory days of #Usenet so very long ago. But it's worth remembering that what ultimately "brought down" Usenet as an effective communication tool, was not the technical issues of communications between distributed hosts without any true centralization, but abuse problems caused by a percentage of users, which proved to be effectively intractable.

Newly obtained records show how Leonard Leo, an architect of the right-wing takeover of the courts, has been funding groups pushing to change #elections and anti-discrimination laws.

Flush with money after receiving the largest-known political advocacy donation in U.S. history, #conservative activist Leo & his associates are spending millions of dollars to #influence some of the most consequential recent #SupremeCourt cases.

#DarkMoney #Politics #SCOTUS #Courts

https://www.propublica.org/article/leonard-leo-scotus-elections-nonprofits-discrimination?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

The fact that the federal minimum wage has stagnated at $7.25/hour since 2009 is atrocious.

But in reality, it's actually far worse than that.

The federal minimum wage is worth 28% less today than it was worth in 2009.

It’s worth 41% less than in 1968.

An absolute disgrace.

John Wesley Powell and His Stunning Map

Decades after John Wesley Powell finished his exploration of the Grand Canyon ( https://c.im/@vickyveritas/109435308102411931 ), he became one of America’s foremost scientists, and the head of the US Geological Survey. As such, he became the voice of the land and was looked to for leadership for the nation.

Senators from the west formed a committee to explore how the federal government could bring water to the western deserts and open the land to new pioneers as part of the US vision of Manifest Destiny. They looked to Powell for answers. Powell did not give them the answer they wanted.

In a thorough study and report complete with maps, Powell’s 1878, “The Arid Regions of the United States,” contains one of the greatest maps ever created: the “Arid Regions of the United States Showing Drainage Districts” showing the area carved up into watersheds in riotous color instead of political boundaries.

This was the first time a map had been used to visualize the intersection of hydrology with topography and in such an effectual manner that minimized the political. Powell argued that America should move cautiously and conservatively to preserve natural resources and maintain sustainability and stewardship of these arid places.

In this way, the one-armed geologist, John Wesley Powell, in prescient fashion outlined a way forward for a land now locked by climate-change and wracked with drought and water shortages. America should have listened.

From: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/visionary-john-wesley-powell-had-plan-developing-west-nobody-listened-180969182/

See also: https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf

#JohnWesleyPowell #WatershedMap #TheAridRegionsOfTheUnitedStates #Map #Hydrology #Geology #ScienceMastodon

#Texas AG’s office sought state data on #transgender Texans

“Employees at the TX Dept of Public Safety in June received a sweeping request from #Republican AG Ken Paxton’s office: to compile a list of individuals who had changed their gender on their TX driver’s license & other dept recs during the past 2 yrs.

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske
#TXAG #discrimination #equality #lgbtqia #persecution #KenPaxton #GregAbbott
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/12/14/texas-transgender-data-paxton/

"Rather than providing care themselves, telehealth companies often act as middlemen connecting patients to affiliated providers covered by HIPAA. As a result, information collected during a telehealth company’s intake may not be protected by HIPAA, while the same information given to the provider would be." https://themarkup.org/privacy/2022/12/13/out-of-control-dozens-of-telehealth-startups-sent-sensitive-health-information-to-big-tech-companies