Mettaben @mettaben@qoto.org

According to Chris Hedges, Green Party has had to pay over a million dollars in legal fees to defend their right to ballot access. That's a lot of money for a small, grassroots party with no corporate backing. Make no mistake: the Democrat party is vicious and will sue and litigate against the Green Party every step of the way. They blame the Green Party for Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump since Green Party exceeded the margin of Trump's victory in some key states. Yet democrats have also not lifted a finger to fight for Ranked Choice Voting nor Star Voting and indeed have often fought against it. Nor do many Dems acknowledge many GP voters would not have voted for Clinton under any circumstance.

At this point, I think the Green Party has only secured ballot access in about 20 states. In the best case scenario, GP might be able to secure 20 more. Every state has different laws and hurdles to jump thru, and many of them are ruled by aggressively hostile Democrats, the very same ones who put their finger on the scale to try to keep progressives within their own party from winning.

It's a long, sad, expensive journey. But democracy is worth fighting for.

#GreenParty #GP #ChrisHedges #CornelWest

@DougWar40k

I don't think Cornel West is perfect. Nor do I think Obama was particularly "good" but I do get your point in a relativistic kind of way.

Big Brother is listening and reading and recording all your texts, direct messages, and everything else. Now easily searchable and understandable by AI. As the noose of theocratic rule tightens, always use e2e encryption or you too could face years in prison for the crime of being a good parent and a decent human being.

https://jezebel.com/nebraska-mom-pleads-guilty-to-giving-abortion-pills-to-1850621217

#abortion #e2e #ai

The way I see this playing out is companies themselves will likely have to split-- there will be companies that allow remote work, and those that don't. Companies that are mixtures of both will face massive challenges. Resentment from coworkers unable to work remotely. And hostility from executives who want to preserve workplace morale. This is my direct experience when I worked in an office and struggled to get my job converted to remote (pre-covid era). This also seems to be exactly the same dynamic playing out in Musk's tech companies and all major Big Tech companies (post-covid era).

Remote work will increasingly be done only in companies that specialize in such things. Like contractors.

People (with remote-friendly skills) will increasingly have to choose between working for a prestigious big brand company like Google or Tesla, or working remotely for smaller much less well known remote work focused companies. Like the small no-name company I work for. Small, less prestigious companies will pay less, but compensation will still be quite high because of the type of "knowledge" work. BUT it will be extremely hard to land a coveted remote job position since about 60% of the population seems to want one, and many of the jobs that could be done remotely, won't be, for morale reasons. Which is kind of sad, in my opinion, although some people might not be particularly sympathetic.

I think this is going to be the new normal. A stalemate between between workers and employers. Until something else happens to shake up the dynamic. Perhaps another pandemic. Or dramatic improvements in AI.

#remote #RemoteWork #covid #ai

https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/articles/is-remote-work-the-start-of-a-new-class-struggle

If we can't think outside the box of the Dem party, then we are already doomed. Apparently dem-aligned "progressives" are ok with war crimes now?

AOC announced endorsement of Biden "given the field" on the VERY SAME day Biden admin announces US will send cluster bombs to Ukraine.

Worldwide, civilians represent 97% of all cluster munition casualties, according to a report in August by the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor. Unexploded "bomblets" will kill and maim children decades after the war. To this day, vietnam war era UXO (unexploded ordinance) is killing children and civilians in Laos and elsewhere. 20,000 in Laos since the war ended, and still counting.

What makes diabolical UXO especially deadly for children is that they often look like toys or balls.

"The US government’s congressional research service recently estimated that, at the current rate of clearance, it would take another 100 years to make Laos UXO-free."

Many US allies have banned the use of cluster munitions long ago. The world was making good progress relegating these things to the dust bin of history.

Am i the only one who thinks expanding their use like is insane? Is this an admission that the war in Ukraine is going so badly that we now need to start propping it up with war crimes? Does the word "progressive" have any actual semantic meaning left?

Thank God the Green Party exists.

#GreenParty #AOC #Sanders #Biden #ClusterBombs #WarCrimes #GreenParty

I strongly resonate with Cornel West's critique of Barack Obama. As an early Obama supporter, back when he was polling in single digits in the primary, I went through many of the same emotions and realizations that West did. I celebrated Obama's unlikely ascendence to power in the historical context of racial injustice and yet I was also, like West, similarly horrified by Obama's tilt toward wall street and surveillance and drone strikes. Not too long after he was elected, my heart sank when I realized Obama's bailouts of wall street were essentially an exact continuation of republican policy.

I really like West. I hope more people take the time to listen to what he actually has to say.

#CornelWest #Obama #GreenParty #WallStreet

https://m.youtube.com/watch?fbclid=IwAR2xrn_upyXVjuMHPc52mYoiEmAXAeGT6dHEX-6x8VZDfqs_1RO7-nj54Jc&v=4eqQgippBEE&feature=youtu.be

Now The Hill is piling on, doing the bidding of corporate bosses, getting corporate office workers to pretend that Return to Office is for their own own good instead of realizing what it really is: a panopticon for complete surveillance and control. RTO'd office workers will be lab rats training the next generation of AI models that
very likely will eventually replace them, and they will like it. Because, like, blood clots or something.

Funny how all the alleged health effects of working from home are actually the health affects of too much working. But nobody gonna propose cutting hours per week, will they?

#RemoteWork #ReturnToOffice #AI

https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/4076569-remote-work-poses-risks-to-physical-health/

I've been a regular listener of the #ChatGPT #podcast by Jaeden Schafer and i have to say this episode took me by surprise. Normally the host of this podcast is a major cheerleader for #AI and he even has a couple of AI start up businesses of this own. But he got seriously spooked by this chatbot called "Pi" by #BillGates funded #InflectionAI, the second most funded AI startup the world in the world after #OpenAI.

Apparently #Pi is aligned with the values of #DeepEcology to such and extent that it values the life of a single insect as much as a human. It was, apparently, without special prompting, able to talk about the upside of the extinction of all human life in that our decomposing bodies would provide lots of fertilizer to help the environment.

This guy is not normally an alarmist, but on this episode he sounded seriously shaken.

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/aibox/episodes/Inflection-AI-Raises-1-5B-Thinks-Ecology-is-More-Important-Than-Human-Life-e26c7om

I feel like I've said this before, but I think I'm quitting #Twitter. The right wing content spamming my feed was bad enough but now I'm getting severely rate limited as part of Elon #Musk's plan to force people to pay for access. I keep seeing the same dumb tweets over and over again. It's boring, but even worse I feel like Twitter is now just another walled garden and i long to be part of the free world.

Wanna train your #AI on Mastodon "toots"? Have at it. No billionaire will try stand in your way and try to collect a tax.

@mettaben

This article presents an interesting theory: the reason why GOP doesn't want a stimulus before the election is due to a distortion in the way our democracy works, specifically the US #Senate. In this particular upcoming election, due largely to gerrymandering no doubt, most GOP senate seats are safe from Democrats. But what #GOP senators fear the most is being primaried. So this is how the incumbants circle the wagons-- they can point to their gop challengers as treasonous for supporting "Blue State bailouts". An absurd argument even among the larger republican population, but i guess it could stick in weirdly gerrymandered ad-saturated extremist districts.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/why-the-gop-killed-a-stimulus-one-month-before-election-day.html

Sometimes one wonders if it's possible to stage an intervention in the arc of these kinds of historic trends....

"Provocatively, the Abdallas’ paper draws parallels between Big Tech funding for AI research and the way tobacco companies paid for research into the health effects of smoking in the 1950s."

#ai #finance

https://www.wired.com/story/top-ai-researchers-financial-backing-big-tech/

A lot of ppl were rightly disturbed at the #debate that when asked to condemn white supremacists, #Trump instead told the #ProudBoys to stand down and stand by. But something else Trump said disturbed me even more and not too many other ppl seem to have picked up on it:

President Donald J. Trump: (42:53)
You know what, Antifa is a dangerous radical group.
Chris Wallace: (42:56)
All right, gentlemen we’re now moving onto the Trump-Biden record.
President Donald J. Trump: (42:58)
And you ought to be careful of them, they’ll over throw you.

When Trump said "you" in that last sentence, it was pretty clear he was saying that toward Biden. In effect Trump is saying #Antifa is an existential threat even if democrats are elected. Whether or not this is true is one issue, but the fact that (1) there some ppl who think this is true is true, and (2) Trump just dog whistled to them, is disturbing to me. It is a call out for both major parties to be ruthless against Antifa. And the protesters who align with #antifa.

South Korea making strides toward #UBI, with support both from left and right, and has an elected regional governor who sounds a lot like Andrew Yang.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Universal-basic-income-gains-support-in-South-Korea-after-COVID