benjamin melançon

Web dev in a worker coop: https://agaric.coop Fighting for greatest power possible for all people over our own lives-- soon. Meantime, i try to do no harm.

Most posts public and searchable.

Website: https://agaric.coop/mlncn
Location: Minneapolis (on Dakhóta and Anishinaabe land)
Pronouns: he/him/ours (stole that from a comrade, appropriately)
Purpose: To help people gain the most power possible over our own lives, because liberty and justice require equality, and everything needs coordination.

Last Notes

2026-05-06 13:13:39 UTC

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More on Google Chrome secretly forcing four gigabytes of local #genAI model onto your device, it is every bit as extreme as @npub1vh5…r3th points out, and much worse for the environment than we are even touching on:
https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install/

2026-04-14 23:48:37 UTC

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Yes everything would be more expensive in this world where we pay for the true costs of what we need and want, but we would all be paid a lot more to make the world better, rather than earn less than our survival costs while making our world worse.

2026-04-14 23:42:43 UTC

The radical idea that what people pay should reflect what things cost.
We would have moved off fossil fuels 50 years ago if a meaningful fraction of the cost of wars and global warming were included in the prices.
We would already have moved on to sodium salt batteries if the human and environmental cost of lithium mining were included in battery prices.
No such thing as cheap plastic if those prices included the near infinite cleanup costs.
Not many tires; we would be on mass transit.
And there would be no talk of LLM-powered generative "AI" shoved into everything if they paid their true energy and water costs.

2026-02-06 19:19:24 UTC

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it is tragically underreported how much local police are helping ICE— protecting ICE's federal buildings from protest, harassing street blockades meant to identify ICE, and above all breaking up noise demonstrations at ICE hotels so the kidnappers and murderers get their sleep.

2026-02-02 16:24:47 UTC

Some lessons from trying to thwart #ICE in #Minneapolis for people in other cities:
1. Go out and meet your neighbors now. The threat of ICE coming is a great excuse and truly the growing solidarity is the best thing to come of all this.

2026-01-28 03:38:59 UTC

ICE assaulted a Native man—violently pulled him from his car—and detained him. He was then released because he is emphatically not an immigrant. Today they charged him—on a secret warrant and secret indictment, zero public evidence—with assaulting an ICE agent.
https://ictnews.org/news/red-lake-nation-descendant-charged-with-assaulting-ice-agent-during-detainment/

2025-07-01 18:03:45 UTC

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Fascists always go after union organizers; one reason is that unions are an effective force against fascism. In addition to a real an opportunity for a general strike, with the UAW pushing for the capability in 2028 (and so many people looking for some way to stand up), in the meantime if we pour money into strike funds at strategic labor centers for immigrant workers to be able to stay home and stay safer, the fascist edifices will crack much more.
#FightFascism

2025-04-15 22:37:26 UTC

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When i first typed i used on an old manual typewriter (German layout); it has a half-backspace key so i would use that to make an em-dash with dashes and no gap.
In school i had keyboarding classes on big typewriters too! Despite all that, i never learned to touch type— until switching to Dvorak in the summer before going to college.
Responding to AOL instant messages while referring to a printed keyboard layout went very slowly, but i was forced to learn!

2025-01-19 13:25:52 UTC

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@npub1knz…4hl3
toothpaste is a preventative medicine!