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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 13th, 2023

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  • Charity can serve as a means of control. This is way Republicans advocate against social services.

    The government cannot mandate that you attend church to receive EBT. A church can require you attend a service to feed you.

    I’ve heard from friends in Utah, for example, that access to many social services is through the church. Friend was trying to rescue a girl from FLDS - pretty much all job training/housing required she play along with mainstream Mormonism.

    Orgs like the Salvation Army are known to require trans people to detransition to recieve services as well.

    Another benefit is the rent seeking - Goodwill is a good example. You can still turn a profit with the right combination of PR, and tying access to services based on things that’ll make you profit (Goodwill “provides employment” for disabled people - they are legally allowed to pay them far below minimum wage.)

    It’s the two pillars of the contemporary Right - control and grifting.





  • The Franklin Standards need to be on everyone’s radar. They don’t want your kids to learn about climate change.

    Explain how and why Earth’s climate changes over time.

    Climate changes continually at all time scales and Earth’s climate has never remained constant.

    The Earth’s climate has varied greatly between glacial advances and retreats that correlate with cyclical oscillations in Earth’s orbit around the Sun (Milankovitch Cycles, precession).

    In addition to being affected by the climate, the biosphere also has a significant effect on the climate, including self-regulation and resiliency (carbon-oxygen cycle, hydrological cycle).

    Humans are just one of the many influences on Earth’s climate (urban heat island effect, wetland drainage, deforestation, agriculture).

    Computer models of climate are simplified simulations of the real world, and make prognostications that are inherently uncertain.

    Global weather forecast models (short term) and climate models (long term) are quite different in their design, their strengths, weaknesses, value, limitations, and uncertainties.

    The wording is subtle, but you can see how they are attacking the idea of anthropogenic climate change. (There’s similar fuckery with evolution and some subtle anti-trans stuff.) Oil and gas companies have a lot of money and can afford a lot of propaganda. No states have adopted these standards yet - we think Florida and Texas will go first, then Oklahoma will follow. But this information warfare.


  • I have to use a windows 11 machine for work, and it genuinely surprises me how terrible it is. I don’t understand the opposition to local accounts - if I’m working somewhere with public WiFi/capture portal, I have to use my phone as a hotspot first.

    The PIN log in seems to roll a random number and decide each morning whether it is going to work or not.

    I also got a laptop with 11 on it for gaming. So much spyware I’ve had to uninstall, configuring anything is a nightmare. I was trying to adjust my mouse sensitivity/figure out why the scroll wheel is either 0 or to the moon, but even when you dig into the control panel, half the settings are missing.

    I also had to turn off my WiFi and google commands to make a local account, because otherwise Microsoft accounts are mandatory.

    Every change seems to make the experience actively worse for the user.










  • That’s the thing though - individuals learn to accept individuals as who they are. JKR establishes that there is systemic oppression in the wizarding world (house elf slavery is the big one, but it’s very explicit in the text that there are issues with goblins, centaurs and other magical races) - but does nothing to show that the systems have resolved/improved by the end of the series. Individuals learn lessons, but the system is inflexible.

    The way that oppression is solved in the books is always through individual action. Even when the wizarding government is implementing policies harmful to muggle-norms/magical races, it’s portrayed as a bad person being bad because they are bad. Draco/Umbridge/Voldemort are individuals that we identify with the oppression itself, so the problem of dealing with wizard racism becomes the much simpler problem of dealing with The Bad Wizards.