Dave T-W @davoloid@qoto.org

In the US, there's been a lot of talk & concern about foreign investors buying up US farmland.

And there is, in fact, a tech startup that helps them do that! It's like Robin Hood for buying US farmland.

And who's one of its key investors, profiting off of every sale?

J.D. Vance.

Who Trump recently chose as his VP to "represent rural America."

Hey UK-educated #trans folk,

You can get your senior school/college exam certificates reissued in your new name for free, as long as you've had it legally changed.

Can confirm AQA, Edexcel and OCR do this, and very respectfully too. ☺️

#transrightsarehumanrights

"Our information system has split into an endless number of micro communities all learning about news and major events through increasingly bizarre digital formats." https://taylorlorenz.substack.com/p/the-pop-craveification-of-breaking

Trump is now the oldest POTUS candidate ever nominated by a major party.

He has repeatedly confused Biden with Obama and Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi. He fell asleep at his criminal trial.

Will the media scrutinize his age & mental decline with the fervor it focused on Biden?

THEY DID IT!!!!

My local library built the seed library!

The local Master Gardeners provided a lot of the intitial seeds (oh my gosh we are stocked!!!). They used an old card catalogue to store them. Today's the kickoff!

The idea is you "check out seeds" from the library, plant/grow/harvest, let some go to seed, then "return the seeds" back to the library!

Free seeds for everyone!

#solarPunk #postScarcity #gardening #mutualAid #seedLibrary #earthDay

US Democrats are fretting in July about getting a candidate for a November election in respect of taking office in January.

We would have had five Conservative Prime Ministers in the same time period.

May all the rest of your times be boring and precedented.

Here’s a question for you.

Why is it that advocating for universal healthcare or affordable education instantly earns you the “Socialist” stamp, while demanding mass deportation isn’t enough to get you called a “Fascist?”

(Hint: it’s not because you’re *not* a Fascist)

Today’s daily essay:

https://joanwestenberg.com/the-f-word-were-too-fucking-scared-to-say

Academic authors 'shocked' after Taylor & Francis sells access to their research to Microsoft AI
https://www.thebookseller.com/news/academic-authors-shocked-after-taylor--francis-sells-access-to-their-research-to-microsoft-ai
Authors have expressed their shock after the news that academic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge, had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft—a deal worth almost £8m ($10m) in its first year.

Business stakeholders: If you talk down to your helpdesk/IT people today, you're a bad person (a piece of human excrement).

This isn't on them. Go take out your frustration somewhere else. Like on the executives who were told about these consolidation risks but didn't care.

Events like this are why tech needs crisis researchers who are obsessed not with "productivity" or whatever the hot little project metric of the day is but with the human behaviors and cultures that help people navigate, coordinate, create immediate community under stress, and all the things that we do when large systems in our lives break down. And I am not making that comparison lightly at all (having family deeply and inextricably involved in traumatic natural disaster crisis work)

I've been shouting that URl shorteners were a bad idea for a *long* time.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/11/the-perils-of-url-shortners/

Now it looks like Google is finally killing off goo.gl. Still, it lasted longer than some of their products!

https://social.kernel.org/notice/Ak4Ij3NuRdr6mJEhu4

Hundreds of thousands of books with irrevocably broken links.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22://goo.gl%22&sca_upv=1&sca_upv=1&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:2010,cd_max:2024,bkt:b&tbm=bks

So that's a million academic citations deleted.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=90&q=%22https://goo.gl/%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5

Today is the day of finding out who runs on #Microsoft #Windows ...

#Crowdstrike #StarTrek

There's a reason decades of psychiatric research and feminist theory eventually converged on: "Fuck it, who cares what gender is. Just let people do what makes them happy."

Because the alternates were untenable and always ended up being abusive and oftentimes deadly.

To which the conservative response has been: "But we like that."

Behind every "family values" conservative is the belief that them having power over someone else is more important than that person's happiness. And that's evil.