Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

Dear fellow Europeans, I am respectfully asking you to consider signing this European Citizen Initiative to institute a billionaire tax. It was invented by leading French economist Thomas Piketty; I read the whole thing, and it is technically excellent. Hit me if you have questions, but please sign it, it is important.

https://www.tax-the-rich.eu/

It needs 1 million signatures (currently 300K) and seven countries over their threshold (currently three: Denmark, France, Germany).

#economics #tax

We're hiring a Technical Administrator at @spritelyinst! This position is both technical and organizational... more or less you'd be helping the Executive Director (me) carry out the mission of the organization using FOSS tools. https://spritely.institute/news/come-work-with-us-hiring-a-technical-administrator.html

You don't have to be a programmer to take this position, but you do have to be comfortable with using and *learning* FOSS tooling (such as Emacs and Org-Mode, which are used heavily in the organization).

Non-traditionally CS paths to using FOSS tech are welcome; particularly excellent for someone who is early in their career as a free and open source enthusiast, or a humanities graduate student who uses technical tooling to organize their work, or someone who has established experience in the organizational end of FOSS ecosystems. If you feel that assisting in the organization of a FOSS nonprofit while using or learning particular FOSS tools is appealing, apply! https://spritely.institute/jobs/2024-09-12-technical-administrator.html

The question is: what do governments and law enforcements do when they realize every single person has a little agent on their phone that can answer literally *any* question about their activities, in simple human language? The “crypto wars” are going to look quaint.

The temptation to legislate government access to this agent will be enormous. It’ll start with heinous crimes like child sexual abuse or terrorism, and it will appear tightly targeted. But it will be applied at massive scale, to millions of people.

Seen in passing

#Hfx #cycling #walking

also, libraries aren't a charity, they're a public service

the anti-IA people say the IA allows anybody to borrow while "real" libraries exist for the poor but that's not the purpose of a library & RL libraries don't just exist as charity for the poor

we as a society have lost the concept of what a public service is, we only see things in terms of profit and charity

public libraries exist b/c our societies decided that access to culture, to information, to knowledge, and to a public space that preserves those things is a public good, it's something everybody should have

public libraries are not and should not be a charity that we only minimally fund b/c some people are too poor to partake in capitalism and therefore need a little handout so they can get smarter to partake in capitalism

*experience problem with home assistant*
*find a github issue about it*
*...stale bot has closed and locked the issue*

:neocat_floof_explode: