Dave T-W @davoloid@qoto.org

New coasters just dropped.

Not all math puns are terrible.

Just sum.

The fact that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife was one of the organizers of Donald Trump’s armed insurrection should be mentioned every time SCOTUS is in the news, IMHO.

We made a comic about dogs.

So, Rishi Sunak confirms 25 courtrooms have been found to immediately process Rwanda asylum claims. What a kick in the teeth for the thousands of people waiting for their day in court due to the government letting the backlog spiral out of control.

#ukpol

Sorry for the rant, but everything this government have touched they've ruined. We have foodbanks, record NHS waiting, unis facing bankrupcy. No policy successes to point to after a decade, including and especially from their flagship policies. All they have left is desperate bids to be divisive.

It's Professor Snyder. Listen to facts and wisdom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mId4LefqBck

#TimothySnyder
#Hero

Today, we filed our final brief in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the publishers’ lawsuit against our library. For four years we've been fighting for library rights—what our founder, @brewsterkahle, calls “a battle for the soul of libraries in the digital age.” https://blog.archive.org/2024/04/19/internet-archive-stands-firm-on-library-digital-rights-in-final-brief-of-hachette-v-internet-archive-lawsuit/

Women Who Code (WWC), a U.S.-based organization of 360,000 people supporting women who work in the tech sector, is shutting down due to a lack of funding: https://slashdot.org/story/427440

TFW you can't afford a GF who codes :marseysigh:

Anyone who says "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product" has been suckered in by Big Tech, whose cargo-cult version of markets and the discipline they impose on companies.

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

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The more *any* platform's stakeholder stands to lose by leaving, the worse the platform can treat them without risking their departure. Thus the beneficent face that tech turn to its most cherished tech workers, and the hierarchy of progressively more-abusive conditions for others - worse for those whose work-visas are tied to their employment, and the very worst treatment for contractors testing the code, writing the documentation, labelling the data or cleaning the toilets.

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This is the economists' "collective action problem" - a phenomenon with a much better evidentiary basis than the hypothetical, far-fetched "dopamine loop" theory.

To understand whom a platform treats well and whom it abuses, look not to who pays it and who doesn't. Instead, ask yourself: who has the platform managed to lock in?

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Because *all* capitalists are surveillance capitalists...when they can get away with it. Sure, Apple blocked Facebook from spying on Ios users...and then started illegally, secretly spying on those users and lying about it, in order to target ads to those users:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

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This theory is great for tech companies: it elevates giving them money to a democracy-preserving virtue. It reframes handing your cash over to a multi-trillion dollar tech monopolist as good civics. It's easy to see why those tech giants would like that story, but boy, are you a sap if you buy it.

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