🎓 Doc Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@qoto.org

@freemo @RodneyPetersonTalent First thing to acknowledge on abortion is it's not a trivial issue and neither side is obviously wrong.

Pregnancy and abortion is practically the divide by zero error of Western ethics.

Western ethics holds that if you have one person dependent on another, and the responsible person cannot provide, you transfer the responsibility to someone else. You cannot do that with pregnancy.

OTOH the West believes each person owns their own body.

So neither extreme works.

"UN agencies are calling for a ceasefire because they have an anti-Israel bias."

#EvanPoll #poll

@freemo that's actually not often an issue unless you're in a tech-support role or something where you're working on lots of different people's computers every day. If it's a computer you use enough to have your own account on, you can save your preference for Dvorak there. Then it's just a case of building the muscle memory so you can touch type properly - the physical keys will say QWERTY but you'll type on them as if they were Dvorak.

For background, I've typed exclusively Dvorak for essentially my entire adult life, but I never learned QWERTY properly to begin with - at my school, the accelerated program taught slideshow/spreadsheet skills instead of typing. I guess they assumed that we'd be bigshots and all have secretaries or something, but that was no longer true when I got to college, and, being the nerd I am, I decided to teach myself to touch-type Dvorak. My method was to have the keymap overlaid on the screen and not switch around my keycaps, so I wouldn't develop hunt-and-peck habits the way I had with QWERTY. First week I relied on the overlay, second week I used my memory and trial-and-error when I forgot, and then my third week was on this horrible ancient system where backspace cleared the whole damn line instead of the most recent character, so it was really punishing to make a mistake.

@freemo depends. There are certain times it can be an obstacle. For example, the undo/cut/copy/paste commands are now scattered across the keyboard. Some software that uses keys based on position rather than letter value (e.g. WASD keys if you're a gamer) works automatically, some needs to be configured, and some just leaves you stuck with unusable keybinds. Importantly, early in your boot process (BIOS password, disk encryption) you'll still have to type in QWERTY because the computer doesn't know anything about your keyboard settings until after you've decrypted that information.

It will restrict your options for customising your keyboard, because many keycap sets have different profiles on a per-row basis, so keys that are in a different row between QWERTY and Dvorak will stick out. Obviously you'll touch-type most of the time, but sometimes you run into situations where you have one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse, and you'll need to find a key with your left hand for which only your right hand has muscle memory.

Also, if you swipe-type on your phone, some of Dvorak's strengths become weaknesses. Alternating fingers turns into a lot of back-and-forth. Concentrating heavily used keys onto the homerow means you have to be very precise, and even then there are a lot of ambiguous words. For example, swiping S-O-T could be:
- soot
- snot
- snout
- stout
- shot
- shoot
- shout
and that's if you aim perfectly. If you miss by one key and type S-E-T there's a whole different set of words. The poor autocorrect can only do so much for you.

Become ungovernable

Please boost!
#NativeAmericanHeritageMonth

OMG WE DID IT!
@Hvresse Michelle's is laptop ordered. The GoFundMe is at 50%+.

No #Native #Indigenous Mastodon instance loves you like Turtle Island & hundreds of allies do.

Now on to crowdfunding laptop #2!

@Tzipporah's laptop is over 7 years old, underpowered for creative work & on its last legs.

I am grateful for your help.

Moderators Need Laptops
https://www.gofundme.com/f/turtle-island-moderators-need-laptops

#PayItForward #SettlerSaturday #IndigenousMutualAid #IndigenousCreatives

@freemo @cyberspice

People needed to stop _reacting_ and start _meaningful action_ . And no, that doesn't mean blindly/bluntly protesting, forming a mob, or even blacklisting something.

A teaser:

* I want abortions to be not only legal but also publicly subsidised
* Ditto about euthanasia
* Ditto about hormone therapy and sex-reassignment surgery
* I am pro same-sex marriage
* I want more and freer migration
* I want the Sate to provide safety nets
* I am against the death penalty
* I want all drugs to be legal for adults (but also regulated)
* I think the State should be completely secular (no official religion, no subsidies for churches, no mentions of god)
* …

There is a fork in the road. A choice of paths, one labeled "difficult", one labeled "catastrophic."

What do you think I'm talking about... (Please boost)