Brent Williams @hbw@qoto.org

What to Know About TurboTax Before You File Your Taxes This Year
--
Don’t get tricked into paying for tax prep if you don’t have to. Learn how the biggest tax preparation companies have suppressed free filling options for years.

#TurboTax #IRS #Taxes #Intuit #Tax

https://www.propublica.org/article/what-to-know-about-turbotax-before-you-file-taxes

This is important — closing Central #Madrid to cars over holidays resulted in a 9.5% boost in retail spending on its main shopping street: STUDY.

There was also a 71% drop in air pollution.

Via @carltonreid in Forbes. #citymakingmath #citiesforpeople #cities #cars #streets #urbanism #Spain

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/03/08/closing-central-madrid-to-cars-resulted-in-9-5-boost-to-retail-spending-finds-bank-analysis/

Patterns in slow-motion splashes

I'm older so I remember things. Everything you see happening today should be understood this way:

The top tax rate used to be 90% in order to prevent the really rich from destroying democracy.

The corporate tax rate was 50% because corporations exist to serve society.

AND the inheritance tax was really high to keep family dynasties from gaining power over us.

#taxes #democracy

Serenity.
Black and white photography emphasizes silence, loneliness, depth.
There is nothing superfluous here.
Just look at this photo.

Photographer: modopix
#photo #blackandwhitephoto #serenity #winter #photo #Sunday #loneliness

"What Happened When I Got Pregnant"

Sara Björk Gunnarsdóttir describes Lyon's awful response

#WoSo

https://www.theplayerstribune.com/posts/sara-bjork-gunnarsdottir-soccer-pregnancy

NEW: #Copenhagen’s new plan intends to replace 600 out of the current 1,050 public parking spaces in their city centre with wider sidewalks, bike-lanes, street trees & landscaping. That’s a great trade. It’s inspiring when great cities are still working hard to get even better. Repeat after me — your favourite cities WEREN’T “always this way.”

https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/regionale/hovedstadsomraadet/halvdelen-af-parkeringspladserne-i-hjertet-af-koebenhavn-bliver

#cities #urbanism #parking #cars

Italian photographer Alex Liverani ~ Burano, Italy
#photography #PhotographyIsArt

Want to amplify this article by @Teri_Kanefield

https://terikanefield.com/socialmedia/

Paying $10.60 to access a few court briefs on PACER is awful. When those briefs are in a First Amendment right of public access case, we're also in Alanis-level irony territory.

Get ready for another oracle, folks, because I'm in a Cassandra mood right now.

I just found out today that Linode has begun offering Mastodon servers hosting. This occurred exactly as some of us had foreseen (or, in a mundane way, "called it" ​ ).

It was only matter of time before big hosting companies started adding Mastodon to their suit of software because they saw a big opportunity there.

This is big - no, huge. Let me tell you why.

For starters, it takes the sysadmin load off from the server "admin" (or should I call it "top mod"? "ruler"?) so they can focus on what really matters: Community.

Yes, yes, I know, as some people have said it before, Mastodon is not a product. But deploying and mantaining a Mastodon instance is a huge thing, and not everyone can do it. In fact, it's a great barrier to entry.

You've already seen the amount of effort that our admins have put in keeping their servers snappy and scalable.

Well, these hosting companies are already doing it for a convenient price; which means that more people can start hosting their own Mastodon servers. Is this good? Is this bad?

Well, the way I see it it was just matter of time; whether the existing communities in the Fediverse are ready or not.

Yes, more people will start setting up their servers, and yes, more people will start joining without any respect for community standards in here. This is our Eternal September, and it is inevitable.

But here's the thing: Twitter is already crumbling. Today their website stopped functioning. This had NEVER happened in at least 5 years. Or at least, not in an unpredictable way as it happened today. Server maintenance? I can get it. A storage unit failing and people having to switch to a backup? Within the parameters. A datacenter suffering from a natural disaster? Predicted and insured against. A DNS failure? A blip.

An entire website failing for no apparent cause with a lot of team members no longer working there and very few people to maintain it? Run. The fuck. Away.

We don't know if Twitter will last till the next month. Hell, we don't know if a failure on a critical power line will cause a bunch of servers to fail. We don't know the state of their backup systems. We don't know if someone will sabotage it. We don't know if someone will start using the 400 million leaked accounts to wreak havoc in there. We don't know if today's failure was the result of an intrusion. The stability of Twitter is hanging by a thread.

And what will happen to the people that need an online space? Where will they go if there are not enough Mastodon instances around?

This is where Mastodon users like you or me come in. The Mastodon hosting services are out there already. It can be a danger or it can be an opportunity.

Linode is the first, but soon other cloud companies will start to compete and offer their Mastodon hosting services. With competition, prices may drop (to a certain limit).

In a matter of months, sysadmins will gain more experience dealing with Mastodon administration: backups, scaling, all that stuff. Before you know it, companies will start hiring Mastodon administrators. Courses will appear on online learning platforms like Udemy and Platzi. It will become a valuable thing to put in your resume.

And we WANT that. The ball just started rolling.

So admins, this is a message specifically for you:

Get ready. You can panic like everybody else, worrying that Gargron will finally give up and implement quote toots OR you can start preparing for the time when the inevitable happens:

Making videos for Community leaders (aka admins) about online racism, how to get rid of trolls, common caveats when running a Mastodon server... etc.
Starting discussions between Instance admins about community standards and codifying them in server rules.
Making lists of trusted instances and their admins to add them as allow-lists on the versions of mastodon that support them, JUST IN CASE.
Opening admin-only alternative communication channels to deal with big problems when (not if, but when) they arise.
Doing your homework and finding out which laws and regulations you need to follow when setting up your instance.
Creating blocklists for known spammers and nazi instances.
Training and recruiting more mods.
Adding moderation wikis to your instance servers.

Yes, wikis. Where are they? I don't see any wiki on how to do Mastodon admin stuff! And we want to organize millions of people? Seriously??? Even reddit has built-in wikis, why don't we have them?!

Right now, the way I see it, a lot of new instance admins are winging it and learning along the way. But we need organization, because sooner or later Twitter will fail (even temporarily) and people will flock to here in even greater magnitudes than we saw in mid 2022. And I'm not talking about server capacity and our usual headaches. I'm talking about dozens, even hundreds of instances opening up with Linode or other cloud services, people joining in the hundreds of thousands per week, with very few moderators, and if we don't prepare for that, they will overrun us with their toxicity, dogpilings, harassment and doxxing. We can isolate ourselves but the fediverse as we know it is at risk of being outnumbered by a decentralized mob. Whether that happens or not, it's up to you. It's up to you to be ready for the moment that huge gate opens and millions of users come in a stampede.

#Meta #MastoAdmin #musings

Washington Post will be creating their own instance. They will add #mastodon accounts to journalist profiles.

Institutional #journalism embracing the #fediverse is important.

#commodon #journodon @communicationscholars

The bit about a lawyer being stopped from entering a music hall in the US because its facial recognition system picked up that she's part of a law company that's suing them is even crazier than I thought.

The law company isn't suing the music hall - it's suing a restaurant, in another state, which is owned by the hall's parent company MSG Entertainment. MSG gone ahead and harvested photos of all the lawyers in the firm and fed it to an image recognition system to ban them from every MSG Entertainment owned location.

People always tell me that if you've got nothing to hide then you've got nothing to fear. She's got nothing to hide and they still went after her.

If this doesn't start making people worried about facial recognition then there's serious trouble coming.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/facial-recognition-flags-girl-scout-mom-as-security-risk-at-rockettes-show/

#Introduction - I'm Congress member Ritchie Torres from #NewYork , The past few days here have been great, I want to keep building our platform here on #Mastodon to make sure we can continue our conversations on a public social media platform.

Can you please BOOST this post and FOLLOW our account and encourage your followers to do the same? Thank you.

I am 100% not shitting you when I say scientists named mastodons after their teeth which they thought looked like nipples. “Mastos” as in breast. “odont” as in tooth.
We’re on a website that, in Greek, literally means “Booby Tooth.”

Six news websites across Alabama and Florida have been secretly taking payments from power companies to run stories attacking clean energy.

Bombshell investigation from NPR.

#energy #climate #climatechange
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/19/1143753129/power-companies-florida-alabama-media-investigation-consulting-firm

Here's one of the many beautiful things about Mastodon and the Fediverse:

I saw that @johnvoorhees opened a @Pixelfed profile. That service is powered by federation too. So here's what I did:

- Took his profile URL: https://pixelfed.social/johnvoorhees
- Changed it to: @johnvoorhees@pixelfed.social
- Searched for the account, and followed him.

Now John's photo feed is another account, from a completely different service, that I follow on my Mastodon. I love this.

Work from home has been a huge boon to employment access for disabled people.

“The jobless rate for disabled workers — typically in double digits and 12.3% two years ago — dropped to 5.8% in November … the lowest rate for people with disabilities since record-keeping began in 2008.”

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2022-12-15/long-left-out-of-job-market-people-with-disabilities-reap-benefits-of-covid-19s-teleworking-boom