Adam Dalliance

Working on an interactive #vr #scifi story, that involves lots of #programming and #animation and #art: Starship Schrödinger's Destiny (npub1xt6…hd3s)

I sometimes talk about #left #politics and #anarchy.

Live in #london #uk

There's also the tarot show: Wordcloud Tarot (npub1pym…6ans)

And you can follow my links feed: Pre's linkbot (npub19xp…r0v5)

#fedi22 #searchable #nobots

Home site: https://dalliance.net
MY VR sci-fi series: https://starshipsd.com
My Tarot Deck/Show: https://wordcloudtarot.com
Links Feed: https://dalliance.social/@linkbot

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Published at

2026-07-09T15:17:09Z

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Last Notes

2026-03-17 20:13:01 UTC

- reply

I see no sign of any recognition from those who would want such a ban that they see any of the collateral damage a successful ban would have on the majority of kids who are not falling for this bullshit. That they are banning any good at all along with the bad.
Under 18s only
I see that the lobbying for these laws are funded by the absolute worst companies on the internet, those who will be entrenched by the legal compliance costs, that will cement themselves as the arbitrators of who is allowed to access the internet.
It’s a gift to Palantir and other surveillance companies. The very people running these algo-feeds are the ones who benefit from IDing every user and stalking them across the internet on their government-approved internet-licence IDs.
I don’t think even a successful ban on social media for kids would actually address the issue of kids being exposed to sexism and misogony or reduce the kids alienation and depression.
A ban can’t help, will make many things worse, won’t address the problem, and will make competing with the worst surveillance capitalists on the planet more difficult.
Going to war with every internet site and advice forum and making internet access harder won’t fix anything, and will have massive collateral damage against everyone seeking support from strangers or trying to learn things their parents won’t teach them.
But I see we are going to do it anyway.
The direction is clear.
Those companies do get what they lobby for, and they are lobbying hard for ID checks on every website, wrapping their desire to enclose the internet commons for themselves in a faux concern for children’s welfare.
And governments wish to monitor and control the internet, so they will pass these laws.
I wonder how many parents have a family group-chat that they’re going to accidentally ban their kids from using, not realizing that ‘social media’ might include Whatsapp? 😆
It won’t fix anything, it will make the situation for kids worse, impose costs and rents and hacks and exploits on all of us, and increase government and corporate power.
Many will lose access to their networks of support and help.
So it goes.
We will build a better more censorship resistant internet. It’s already here really: Briar. Matrix. Nostr. Bitchat. Veilid. Spritely. And the rest.
The laws may push us there faster.
The race will go on.

2026-03-17 20:12:45 UTC

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None of these surveillance companies trying to break your kid’s brains would exist if we hadn’t made it illegal to reverse engineer their manipulative crappy software and produce compatible none-manipulative clones.
But they have been granted legal monopoly, so they can do what they like.
If you want a law to protect internet users it isn’t
> “Force them to consent before you spy on them”
or
> “age-gate chat forums”,
No. The real solutions are more like:
> “Buying and selling data about an individual is illegal and punishable by years in jail and a penalty of 2x yearly profit”
or
> “Advertising must be based on the content of the page context not the tracking of the individual”.
If a legal intervention is warranted then we don’t want a system where website operators have to pick between a list of monopoly providers to hand over their data to and force them all to spy on their users to age-check.
We want companies to be explicitly allowed to reverse engineer and reproduce other company’s proprietary access methods, to increase competition and end these rentier monopolies that allow them to push their manipulative phone apps.
End the DMCA and the similar laws which they campaigned for to prevent competition. It’s those laws which give the corporations the power to push their algorithms and limit alternatives.

2026-03-17 20:12:07 UTC

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There is support for these laws because people think the only consequence of a ban on a thing is that the thing stops existing.
For instance: Heroin is dangerous and addictive? Ban it then.
And suddenly you have organized crime and a grey market and criminal gangs shooting each other in the streets while addicts can’t seek help and have to resort to crime to fund their addiction. Their lives more chaotic and criminal than ever. Our streets are littered in needles.
Well done everyone.
Now we think algorithmic social media may be mind bending?
Shall we ban it? For kids? Even if we can’t define it?
If you break kids access to the internet you sacrifice all the good that the majority of kids are getting from it for an ineffective solution which won’t fix anything and will mean massive increases in government surveillance and censorship. To data-hordes being hacked and people suffering ID theft.
And it won’t help.
Misogyny and sexism and depression are older than the internet.
Plus of course kids remain better at accessing computers than their parents. You’re going to end up breaking the internet for adults who can’t figure out how to verify while the kids start to use VPNs and stolen IDs to browse 4chan.

2026-03-17 20:11:09 UTC

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Reading algorithmic feeds is a crazy thing to do: abandoning control over your own influences to a robot programmed by advertisers to manipulate you?
Madness.
I will not allow a robot programmed by advertisers and surveillance capitalists to determine what I read.
I don’t read any robo-feeds and don’t recommend anyone else does.
But people do:
> Top five highest reaching smart phone apps:<li>Whatsapp</li><li>Facebook</li><li>Instagram</li><li>Gmail</li><li>Youtube</li>
All designed to harvest data from your phone, three of them owned by one creepy billionaire, and most people use them by looking at a robo-feed suggesting to them what to read and watch or filter.
I don’t use any of them.
I watch some Youtube, but not though their app. Uninstalled that from my phone as soon as I got it. It’s an awful downgrade of just playing in a browser page. I subscribe to some channels there in my RSS reader like a boss. Never watch what their recommendation algorithms suggests.
I tell them what I want to watch, I don’t let them tell ME what to watch, and frankly I wish all those videographers would start a peertube instance or something instead of posting their work on a corporate surveillance site.
I say you should avoid that algorithm stuff, it’s crazy manipulative.
But people should be free to do what they want.
I’m free to block Facebook! And I do: and I encourage everyone else to do so too.
Edit your DNS, block their domain names. Do it.
But if governments or corporations have the power to mandate those choices for everyone, it will go badly.
Prohibitions always do.

2026-03-17 20:10:15 UTC

> But the idea here is to keep kids safe!
No: the idea is to assign identity to every user and try to monitor and control the internet though corporate means.
That’s the only reason we’re talking seriously about the laws that government and capital are trying to pass.
That lobbying money is not being spent to protect kids.
The Epstine-class oligarchs doing this don’t give a damn about your children’s safety let alone some useless counter productive methods of ensuring it.
I don’t trust the government with totalitarian power nor the companies they would employ to run their age-gate for them, nor the companies currently running social media.
They are the ones running the algorithms that are pushing propaganda at your kids right now.

2026-03-17 20:08:39 UTC

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You think it’s a coincidence these laws are being proposed all over the world all at once?
Nope.
Giant companies run by surveillance capitalists are spending billions of dollars on lobbying governments all over the world.
See https://tboteproject.com/
The reasons for this lobbying are nefarious.
The bans will entrench existing companies ensuring no small company is able to compete. These massive entrenched companies will be able to afford the identity checking and compliance costs, tiny start ups not so much.
You can see why Facebook lobby so hard in favour of these laws. If their app WhatsApp is defined as the only group messenger allowed for kids by law, that is very nice for them.
Perhaps compliance is actually cheap and easy and small companies can afford it?
Certainly not if they are trying to compete in terms of privacy. They have to turn over their user ID data to a monopolist vetting company by law.
At best: we give the government the power to impose massive costs on any company they decided to add to a list of companies that count as social media. Impose costs and force them to hand over their user data to Palantir and the like.
Even if you trust the current lot of idiots in power to not abuse this whole-internet global tracking data, that is quite a totalitarian system to hand over to the really bad guys when they get elected next time.

2026-03-17 20:05:15 UTC

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> Can’t we just have age-proving tokens that prove age not ID?
Nope.
If such tokens exist I’d be pretty tempted to sell them to teenagers myself, and I’m not even trying to get the teenagers into bed.
If the age-proof methods prove who you are, they are dystopian surveillance systems and an advertising corporation’s dream.
If they do not prove who you are, they are sellable on the black markets in exchange for whatever teenagers have that grown ups want.
There is no way you can identify children in order to treat their accounts differently without creating a massive database of all internet users which is an identity-theft honey-pot, and is already leading to constant leaks of user data from terrible companies.
Those companies promising they can do the impossible and age-gate the internet are the very ones profiting from abuse and internet surveillance already.
They are the ones feeding your kids sexist racist right wing propaganda and depression from their algorithms then using the money to bribe politicians to entrench their position.

2026-03-17 20:04:52 UTC

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Not to mention that banning under 18s means identifying every user: A government ID required to access the internet.
How about if I’m posting in a chat for an environmental protest group, or an anti-capitalist group, or against genocide, or in a queer support group in a country with laws against homosexuality? Should they have my Government ID attached as proof of age?
An age-gate is asking for an internet licence and a single unified monitored ID across the whole internet. It’s dystopian surveillance-state authoritarianism. It is not desirable, even if it were possible, which it isn’t given black markets in stolen ID etc.

2026-03-17 19:59:07 UTC

- reply

What is “social media”?
What do you actually want to ban?
Does Github count?
Does an anorexia-support forum count?
Does a queer-support forum count?
Does the schools own homework-submission system count?
Does Whatsapp, which the kids use to talk to family and to bully each other?
How about Telegram that the kids use to talk to their drug dealers?
How is it different?
Are we really saying nobody under 18 can watch youtube, and expecting that to make life better for those kids rather than worse?
How are you going to define ‘social media’ such that you’ll ban the harm you think you see without also banning any chance of support for a person looking to learn to program, or cope with their abusive parents, or seek advice about being anorexic or queer?
Is it really a good idea to attach a label to every child account for all the websites they visit? You want the kids to all have a big “Child” tag on them as they wonder the net? Might that not increase rather than decrease their vulnerability?

2026-03-17 19:46:02 UTC

Got a bit ranty on a chat thread elsewhere yesterday when some were arguing for social media age-gates and the like.
Summarized here into a blog post.
[The Age-Gate Rant](https://dalliance.net/blog/agegate/ )
> The kids are not okay, and lots of people seem to think it’s the kid’s phones and social media that’s doing it so lets simply ban kids from social media.
> Simple!
> Only: it doesn’t sound very simple to me.
https://boing.world/system/media_attachments/files/116/246/230/778/165/420/original/07036963d4c64f06.jpg

2026-03-03 10:37:23 UTC

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On the other hand, any service you pay for with a credit card has already done so really. I would prefer ways to pay where you don't have to but long ago accepted my ID goes onto anything I pay for. Which means hosting, internet bandwidth service, VPN, domain-names, phone service and more.

2026-03-02 00:39:38 UTC

It is such a mystery, why do American presidents start patriotic wars far from home when they are unpopular and the mid-terms are coming up and there's incriminating evidence against them in the news every day. 🧐 🤔
Nothing like this has ever happened before.
Some say he's doing what he promised and ending the forever wars!... By winning them!
Israel thinks that having the country next door fall to chaos and civil war makes them less of a threat. I don't think that's right, but I think that's what motivates them. Those in charge of it's military want that Greater Israel with bigger borders and smaller neighbours.
Trump thinks he can go down in history as the saviour of the world and if he just chops off the head of the regime the people will rise up and be a liberal democracy. I don't think that's right either. He thinks similarly about Venusualia.
The US administration aim to take control of the global oil supply for private American and multinational owned corporations. Their power is rooted in control of the literal power supply. Oil. Distributed clean energy is a threat to their power. They want to stop all this solar windmill crap and go back to good old fashioned tax and control of centralized oil distribution hubs.
Starmer just thinks he has no choice and he has to do what America says and can't risk the Telegraph and the Mail calling him antisemitic. He falsely accused thousands of not-terrorists of terrorism and is putting them through courts as terrorists for the same reason.

2026-02-27 12:03:51 UTC

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I mean seriously, his response to this is to say that he wants change.
He's the one in power now, he needs to stop telling everyone we need change now that he's the one we'd be changing, surely?
Stuck on the same opposition message without any plans for any actual concrete action other than the same mantra that he was saying when he lucked into a win as the conservatives imploded.

2026-02-27 11:31:32 UTC

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Thanks to Starmer's excellent stewardship, the Labour party ruled out their best candidate for factional reasons, told the electorate how Reform were correct about immigration but Labour will do half as much about it, and alienated his base voters so much he went from a massive majority to third place behind the party he's been chasing.
If Labour continue to try and ape Reform instead of debunking them, if they continue to do everything the billionaires want instead of taxing them, continue to suck up to Trump and US capital instead of striving for sovereignty, they will continue to lose voters. Alienate the left while encouraging and emboldening the right.
"I came into politics to fight for change" he says.
Agreed. Lets have some change.

2026-02-27 10:51:20 UTC

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Note that all the news and polls were saying it would be incredibly close, and then it wasn't even a bit close except for the second place position.
Funny how the polls always end up biased towards conservatism and the status quo.
Love how Reform warn the greens represent dangerous sectarianism. 😆 You should be afraid of the big bad evil green menace! 😆

2026-02-27 09:20:11 UTC

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Yes! Nice one Gorton. Well done Denton.
Greens more than 40 percent.
That's how you do it everyone, replicate this at the national level now.
https://boing.world/system/media_attachments/files/116/141/835/588/971/477/original/b43d3b5107d9410d.jpeg

2026-02-26 18:41:03 UTC

> Look out everyone, Zack and the Evil Green Menace are going to get you and give you free cocaine and cannabis. They're going to ban your landlord and allow refugees to earn a wage and tax you and they might even stop funding radical genocidal war in the middle east.
> Vote carefully man! You should be scared!
-- The entire press.
Our media are entirely hilarious, threaten me with a good time.

2026-02-22 00:22:12 UTC

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My dad was a professional meter-reader working for the electricity board, doing door to door, reading the dials.
Now that job has disappeared. The work has been unloaded onto me, the poor customer, who has to submit a reading every month or so, just for my own house.
They want to upgrade me to a "smart" meter, which they can presumably read remotely. I am ignoring their pleas to organize a date the the meter change-over. In my experience "Smart" means "Exploitative".

2026-02-15 10:40:21 UTC

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would a graduate tax apply to people already graduated or only new graduates? If the former, could some end up paying loan repayments and also graduate tax? Would MPs, mostly graduates, really vote to tax themselves?
Seems complex compared to just subsidsing education from general tax like a civilised country.

2026-02-13 10:49:52 UTC

Palestine Action have never been a terrorist group, have never tried to terrorize the British public. The attempt to classify them as one was unjust, authoritarian, and motivated by support for a foreign state committing war crimes.
I'm mostly just surprised that judges appointed by the British state operating in secret agree. Usually they back the corrupt British state entirely.
Shabana Mahmood should be resigning in disgrace, suspected of treachery. Every MP and Lord that waved the proscription through through should be ashamed and probably also fired.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/13/uk-ban-palestine-action-unlawful-high-court-judges-rule
[This message should not be read as support for Palestine action, which would be illegal, but instead just contempt for the authoritarian corrupt UK government]
#ukpol #palestineAction

2026-02-12 20:41:22 UTC

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She's entirely charming, and not some representative of billionaires bought and paid for.
Hard to imagine how anyone could watch her talking to Zack for an hour here and then vote for someone else, out of what? Loyalty to Labour that have shown no loyalty to you? Hate with reform who run an our of town GBeebies lunatic?
Will Farage interview his mad candidate for an hour? Will Starmer? Would doing so do anything other than expose those candidates and turn everyone off?
[Some context: Her dogs are greyhounds, rescued from mistreatment in the gambling and racing industry.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCy0VdHTVvs
#gortonAndDenton #labour #green #reform #hannahSpencer

2026-02-12 19:44:30 UTC

Zack's right of course. Labour only really look incoherent if you assume they are trying to do good for the country or win elections for themselves.
If you assume they have been bought and paid for by the oil, gas, arms-trade, private health-care and gambling industry and don't care if they're unpopular just want to do what they've been paid to do they look perfectly coherent.
Labour bar their best candidate, Reform run some knob head off of GBNews, and the Greens run a great working class candidate from the local area who can speak her mind well and explain the way the rest of politics, including Reform, is run by billionaires.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtPojDOwptQ
#green #ukpol #zackPolanski

2026-02-06 11:09:20 UTC

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This is why peertube is such a struggle. Video hosting costs are incredible. Anything with unlimited open signup is going to bankrupt itself leaving the users without a host.
I think that Peertube and likely any video platform really needs, much more than Mastodon etc, to be self-hosted. Only if you're paying for your own storage do you really know if things are worth archiving and keeping in perpetuity.

2026-02-01 10:19:07 UTC

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There's no way it's really cheaper to put a data center in space where hardware has to be radiation hardened and induction cooling is next to impossible and repair and replacement of hard drives and chips is next to impossible and launch costs rival building a tower block.

2026-01-25 12:44:01 UTC

Hahhahhaa. 😆
The Labour party are utterly determined that they will obliterate themselves by proving themselves to be run by an executive committee who will not tolerate anything but extractive neoloberal capitalism,
They are a party against their own members.
> Andy Burnham has been blocked from standing as a candidate for an upcoming parliamentary by-election in Gorton and Denton by Labour's ruling body.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czr4e7ep468o
#ukpol #labour #burnham

2026-01-24 01:10:37 UTC

Remember when the internet used to be a thing you could use to organize and spread word of your protest and dissatisfaction? It could spark an arab spring or bring down a government.
Now it's all like, oh, there's a protest and threat of general strike so Facebook are suppressing posts from the area and Twitter and demoting anything mentioning the hashtag.
We really should have never let the corporations control the selection algorithms. Not only do they distort it for money from advertisers, they suppress messages that conflict with their billionaire capitalist owner's interests in any way at all.
We must decententralize and decorporatize the internet. Its our only hope.
Solidarity with y'all striking and marching today. I see you here. I see that they can't see you from over there. The corporate internet is as selectively focused as the newspapers were now.

2026-01-23 10:53:24 UTC

Run Zack Run!
Glad to see lots of people liking and sharing the Green Party England&Wales broadcast this week. It's striking.
Hope it's happening in the corporate spaces too, though presumably the capitalist leaders there suppress it with their algorithms.
Zack is in general doing such a great job of speaking my mind really it's unreal.
All the other leaders just seem dazed and confused, trying hard to maintain the status quo, ensure that capital power persists and they don't offend their corporate donors.
Or worse, just blaming the poor and the helpless and threatening that hurting people will solve the problems England and Wales face (it won't).
Here's hoping it has some impact and the Green Party make huge progress because the country seems likely to just get worse and worse under any of the other party's policies and positions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF_a_w7Dozo
#green #greenParty #zackPolanski

2026-01-14 00:15:38 UTC

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Yep, every podcast should have it's own fedi server and then the podcast wars can get really heated as the various podcast factions block and de-federate each other. 😁
Hope it goes great for them. That seems to be twice their target number already. More isn't necessarily better and it's hard enough being an admin when you aren't also a n00b.

2026-01-03 10:42:14 UTC

Hummm. Wonder if the UK will have to support the USA invading Venezuela because it's a member of Nato?
Or if we'll just support it because we also want western oil companies to have access to those oil fields?
Or maybe we'll sanction the USA like we sanctioned Russia for their illegal invasion?
No? Why is everyone laughing?
Anyway. These days it's cool to invade other countries and kidnap their presidents to steal their oil it seems. Even though the oil needs to stay in the ground.
🙄
#war #venezuela

2025-12-26 08:40:32 UTC

Nice to see a UK party leader demonstrate some actual compassion and care this Christmas. I'm so fed up with politicians pedaling hate and division trying to pander to terrible racism and xenophobia, trying to pick up the votes of the hateful.
This is what political leadership really is. Not following the right wing media hatred but countering it.
Zack Polanski's Christmas message is less than five minutes.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lopMMkz0law
#green #christmas

2025-12-04 13:59:18 UTC

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Seems silly. Everyone was shouting that there was a bubble in tech stocks in 1999 too and that time they were right.

2025-12-01 18:42:40 UTC

So the temporary placeholder name "Your Party" is made permanent.
None of the options on the shortlist were good. Most of them just as grammatically inconvenient as the dumb placeholder name.
The people who decide on the short-list, who can be a member, whose votes counts and what the options are, have quite a lot of power.
Zara Sultana boycotted day one over who sets the rules and who can be involved. If Your Party have a governing body with power to override conference they end up like the Labour party and just are easily taken over and usurped by a cabal of thatcherite neoliberal capitalists.
They did allow the dual membership system and a wider governance, so Zara won on who gets to be a member and who gets to be in charge. Which is probably good.
Coz as the terrible name shows, if you put the idiots in charge you'll get idiocy not good collective decision making.
For now the membership appear to have won, and I hear are they are all very excited and fierce and canny and not likely to let the old guard just set up another dictatorship from the top.
They currently have half the membership count of the greens, less than a quarter that claimed by Reform. Lets hope they can get some attention towards something other than how billionaires think the country should be run and focus on the people.
Here's hoping they can inflate that number by draining the Labour party and Reform members who just want change really rather than actually liking anything said by Farage.
#yourParty #ukpol

2025-11-24 09:22:06 UTC

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bitcoin leeds the way, just as it did in 2022. It sniffs out liquidity issues way before the rest of the markets cos it's so liquid and speculative and markets never close.
I think rather than bitcoin being to blame, it's the leading indicator that people don't have any money.
Markets can't go up if ICE have kicked out a bunch of the customers and scared away even more and business have sacked all the workers.
Bitcoin is affected first and hardest, but the root cause is just that nobody has any money to buy because there's a recession everywhere except ai investment which will never be profitable.

2025-11-13 23:54:24 UTC

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I thought the Steam one was indeed going to be a stand alone device as well as having a link to a PC, just as the Quest does?
Facebook should feel threatened though. It doesn't even have to be better than their headset to be better than their product. It just has to only be a VR headset that plays games and not try to also be a surveillance machine nudging you into VR meetings.

2025-11-06 09:02:31 UTC

Weird to see Sky News, owned by Rupert Murdoch who has no formal authority in the UK but uses his newspapers to control narratives and push right wing content and politicians he favors, complain that Elon Musk has no formal authority in the UK and yet has the power to control narratives and push right-wing content, extreme content, and politicians Musk favors.
🤔
Still, interesting report pointing out those things, and it all just highlights how important it is that these spaces have no owners.
https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boosting-the-british-right-13464487#
#twitter #sky #media

2025-10-29 22:32:44 UTC

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Shorting is a mugs game. Even if you're right you can lose it all if the market doubles in the weeks before it crashes.
I am not shorting.
I am reducing risk, and trying to ensure I have some cash equivalent around for buying the bottom.

2025-10-24 12:50:33 UTC

> You'll never need a digital ID for NHS
Says Starmer, and literally the only people in the entire world who believe him is the UK press.
He doesn't believe it himself, the civil servants making the policy don't believe it, the programmers making the app don't believe it, the public at large don't believe anything he says.
Only the reporters show any credence at all. They are programmed to just repeat the words without even assessing if they are true. That's what journalism is now.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/digital-ids-nhs-keir-starmer-7wdxs8kqw
#nhs #digitalId #Starmer

2025-10-16 08:12:11 UTC

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The apocalypse came in 2000 and then again in 2008. 50% drops in the S&P that take years to recover like that come fairly often.

2025-10-10 23:27:51 UTC

Well if I can't have a peace prize then I might as well tariff China and smash all the stock markets.<li>Tantrum Trump. Tantrump, if you will.</li>

2025-10-06 17:08:02 UTC

If at first your protest doesn't succeed, try, try again. But after that you are legally obligated to give up or risk arrest. 😆
Hard to imaging those who are protesting by getting arrested for bogus terrorism laws giving much of a shit if instead they are arrested for protesting too many times.
What a joke. You can't just legally define a false thing as true. Palestine Action are not a terror group, even if you define them as one in law you authoritarian crazed lunatics.
I wish this government would just fuck the hell off. Imagine being more authoritarian and illiberal than the conservative party. 🙄
> Police forces will be granted powers to put conditions on repeat protests, the government has announced, a day after nearly 500 protesters were arrested.
RE: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c24rmdngrrjo
#ukpol #protest #authoritarian

2025-10-03 10:40:42 UTC

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Dunno that "mandate" is quite the right word for setting up the system so that every pull request to the codebase gets reviewed by the AI bot, but since it's use is unavoidable that's what I voted.
It's caught some bugs before they're published, and hallucinated many problems which aren't really there.
But all the code we write is being reviewed by robots now, and so the code is written slightly differently to avoid it going on about issues that aren't really there.
People imagine that code is written for the computer to run, but really it's always been written for the programmers to understand. Now it's also written for the ai that has no context or understanding to review.

2025-10-03 09:34:06 UTC

The cops and the government suggest that tomorrow's protest against the proscription of Palestine Action should be postponed because a crazy person done some murders.
The home secretary says
> “If the point of protest is to stand up for something and persuade other people that you are right, then I think this is entirely the wrong way to go about it, but that is on their conscience.”
That is not the point of the protest. The point of the protest is to show that the proscription of a non violent protest organization under terrorism laws is ridiculous and unenforceable as well as being a massive waste of police and court time.
Delaying the protest would harm that demonstration. The police are over stretched and can't enforce this stupid counter-productive proscription without compromising their duty elsewhere.
Demonstrating that is the point of the protest, and police saying "We are too stretched to arrest all these demonstrators" just reinforces that point all the more.
You know what police and government? You could just not persecute non violent protestors as terrorists. That'd solve your over-stretched police resources problem in one stroke!
#palestineAction #ukpol #protest

2025-09-18 17:06:57 UTC

Ah, the left, can't even wait until there's a name and a membership list before you split eh?
YourNameHere Party isn't even a party yet and there's fights. Sultana launches a full on membership join-up site and then Corbyn claims it ain't the right one.
🤣 🙄
And there isn't even any policy to argue about yet. Factions forming just over who is in control of organizing conference and taking membership fees.
Well done everyone ❤️
Join the greens 🟢
#ukpol #yourParty

2025-09-16 23:31:40 UTC

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they all look pretty much the same to me.

2025-09-02 11:07:15 UTC

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Well Zack's won, convincingly, 20k votes to 3k votes for the others.
So that's good.
Now lets see if he can make the media actually reflect the message like they reflect Farage constantly.
Gonna be harder for anti-capitalists than pro-capitalists, what with the media all being owned by the capital.
#ZackPolanski #green #uk

2025-09-01 18:14:52 UTC

People are disrespecting the flag of Saint George by spraying it on roads and graffitiing it on houses and plastering cheap tacky ones on lampposts.
The prime minister was on the radio asked about flags. He's always been a flag-shagger. He said he's very proud of the flag.
Proud of a flag?
What does this even mean? How can you be proud of a pattern on a cloth that you didn't even design or print yourself?
Proud of your badges? What? It isn't even one you picked, it's one you were born under.
We don't need no stinking badges.
It's because people mistake the symbol for the thing it symbolizes. They think in magic. The flag isn't just a symbol with a referent, it IS the country. They feel attachment and pride to the symbol, because they feel attachment and pride for the country.
In England you can choose between two flags:
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 The flag of the crusades, when marauding Christians fought across Europe to murder Muslims.
🇬🇧 The flag of the empire, when the island's nobility violently enslaved and pillaged a third of the world.
🤔
And people say they are proud of the flag, mistaking the symbol for those acts which they symbolize. Proud of this?
The people who paint roundabouts claim to think they are being patriotic somehow, but painting the flag of the crusades on a mosque isn't patriotic. It's just aggressive and deliberately threatening.
These people aren't my people.
Think the country needs a new flag really. Maybe something with more rainbow in it. 🏳️‍🌈
#ukpol #flags

2025-08-16 10:40:52 UTC

Voting in the UK Green party elections is half over. Too late to join the party and vote, and sounds like Zack is very likely to win.
Which is good. I voted for him.
I think the job-share rule is important and that any job should be possible to share between workers. But in the case of the "leader", which is literally the face of the party, having two faces is difficult in the public hive mind. Even with a united front, it's litterally two faced.
But mostly my vote was just for Zack, and would have likely voted for him in a job-share too.
He's very personable and seems to know how to talk to the public and express not just environmental issues but other green issues like inequality and war and how your enemy is not a boat of refugees but the concentration of power in the hands of maniacs both political and corporate.
I confess I gave up trying to read anything about the candidates and cast a vote about half way down all the other jobs being elected. I'm just adding noise. I dunno who any of these people are or even what the job entails most of the time and there's too many all at once. Should stagger them weekly or something.
Anyway here's Zack on Mark Steel's sweary podcast being brilliant on the issues and how to explain them better than I can.
I love Mark Steel too. Miss the sketches things it used to have in the newish revised entirely-an-interview format.
🤞
In two parts
https://pod.link/1573424189/episode/ZWI0OGNhMjQtNzNhNC0xMWYwLTkyZmEtZGI1MDBkMjU1YWVl
https://pod.link/1573424189/episode/ZjE1NmRjYTYtNzNhNi0xMWYwLTg0ZTUtN2ZmNjkzMzU4NDg1
#podcast #green #uk #ZackPolanski #listening

2025-08-11 17:58:39 UTC

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More than 500 people arrested. Highest of any protest since the poll tax.
"They're not completely non violent you know, they did some violence against our genocidal war machine. The worst kind of violence." -- Government are Pathetic.
The government looks ridiculous, petty, authoritarian, out of their depth, supporting a genocide with no way out, floundering and gaslighting and trying to cover up their own crimes. They will fail.

2025-07-19 21:31:25 UTC

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it's true, you never know when you might need to run away very quickly. Don't get chance to change if there's a fire.

2025-07-17 19:15:12 UTC

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Blasphemy is literally impossible. Any god who isn't powerless and weak would be able to prevent words said against them easily. If god allowed an utterance, s/he/it blesses it.

2025-07-16 00:27:13 UTC

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Crazy thing about the internet is you can be multiple places at once! You can even cross post!

2025-07-14 11:42:23 UTC

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I know a UK local councillor who tells me that more or less all the councillors are now using the thing to generate summaries of all their meetings, and so mostly unknowingly or unthinkingly giving OpenAI the details of government operation over the whole country.
Lovely.

2025-07-04 18:13:17 UTC

It's been a pretty good run, more than two hundred years of freedom for some people (if they aren't slaves) and even sixty years - nearly one lifetime - of actual universal suffrage!
Now that this short experiment in democracy has ended, I wish all of America good luck in the struggle to come, as you each discover your place in the new strict social order.
Try to stay out of the camps!
The title "Land Of The Free" has now moved to.... 📨 👐 ... New Zealand!
So from now on the new Forth of July will be the Sixth of February.
Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.
#freedom #forthJuly

2025-07-02 18:27:06 UTC

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These are the only honourable members in the house. Every other MP thinks that Palestine Action should be banned as terrorists even though they have never done any terrorism and are against killing and genocide.
https://boing.world/system/media_attachments/files/114/785/028/314/879/624/original/1658f5ca3015a65e.jpg

2025-07-02 17:33:09 UTC

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Fifteen minutes of debate and less than 30 votes against.
The MPs just wave it through without even trying to object.
The House Of Commons has voted to add a group that doesn't do any terrorism to the list of banned terrorist groups.
They will do climate protest groups next.
Protest is not terrorism, this government is a fascist authoritarian nightmare.
#palestineAction #ukPol #protest

2025-06-27 11:56:36 UTC

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Snowden's reply to that was to compare it to someone saying "I don't care about freedom of speech because I have nothing to say".

2025-06-27 11:55:14 UTC

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Yeah, these days you gotta leave the phone at home if you're going abroad really. Not only if you're going to America. If you're crossing a border at all.
You can always buy or borrow a cheap burner phone at your destination and log in from that.

2025-06-26 17:04:54 UTC

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Dear Emily Thornberry,
I don't usually bother to write to you on most issues because I figure there is pretty much no point communicating with a whipped MP in a safe seat under first past the post. Such an MP has no reason to listen to their constituents at all, and is entirely a tool of the party leadership.
I make an exception today since I hear your government is about to classify Palestine Action as a terrorist group. Despite them being peaceful, non-violent, and dedicated entirely to preventing the greater crime of the ongoing genocide of Gazan Palestinians.
This is obviously a gross overreaction and a completely unjustifiable act designed not to prevent domestic terrorism but to cover up British forces and UK government involvement and collaboration with the genocide in Gaza.
If we are taking suggestions for groups to ban as terrorists even though they aren't terrorists, I would like to suggest the Labour Party! The party has helped facilitate a genocide abroad, and continues to supply the perpetrators with arms and intelligence to aid their actions.
I don't expect you to take that suggestion seriously, but maybe Reform will take it seriously when they get elected in a few years and I suggest it again to them. After all, a precedent will have been set that groups which aren't terrorists can be banned under anti-terror legislation anyway. Democracy will have already been eroded.
I was ready to be disappointed by this Labour government, but I confess that the level of gut-wrenching visceral disgust I am experiencing at them surpassed all my wildest expectations. Taking money from the disabled to buy new war-planes from a fascist US president while abetting a genocide in Gaza makes me wonder if Reform wouldn't be better in the end anyway. At least they might do electoral reform and nationalize the water companies.
Labour's only hope, the country's only hope, is to remove Starmer. I wish you had won that leadership election instead of him.
Anyway, as I say, I don't expect it to make any difference at all because under this election system even MPs in safe seats are nothing but tools of the party leadership and the party leadership seems determined. But I thought I'd let you know that I see you. I see what you are doing.
I support Palestine Action more than I support this government. Let me know where I should hand myself in for my "crime".
Yours sincerely,
Adam

2025-06-26 15:13:30 UTC

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The more sketchy the porn site, the less likely they are to comply with UK identity verification rules.
I wonder if this would make kids give up on looking at porn entirely, or just make them head towards the more sketchy and extreme sites that don't comply. 🤔

2025-06-23 14:17:12 UTC

I support Palestine Action more than I support this terrible genocide-enabling so-called "labour" government.
Does that mean I'm going to go to jail? Will I have to hand myself in?
#ukPol

2025-06-22 10:19:09 UTC

I see Sir Kier Starmer thinks that it's "inappropriate" for a music festival to have a band that campaigns for peace and an end to genocide, but that it's perfectly appropriate and may "alleviate" a "grave threat” for a country to bomb nuclear sites in a another country!
He thinks daubing some paint on airplanes as a protest is terrorism, but that using those planes in reconnaissance to support an ongoing genocide by Israel is a good and normal use of them.
What a fucking weasel, absolute death worshiping fuck-knuckle.
Goddamn Labour party loves them some illegal wars of aggression in the middle east. Can't get enough of it.
Please fuck off Sir Starmer.
#ukpol #iran #kneecap #starmer #fuckKnuckle

2025-06-13 10:50:54 UTC

I believe I have managed to prove my ID in order to comply with the new laws that say I have to prove my ID to own the business I own that I'm sure already asked me to prove my ID when I registered it.
First we tried the on-web version, but that apparently relies upon the corporates having managed to profile and track me, because it told me they had no questions upon which to base identification. Good I guess? My avoid-tracking systems must be working at least a bit?
Next we tried the android app, but apparently the phone I tried that with is too old and the app won't install.
So next option is turning up at a post office with a printed letter. I don't own a printer though, so had to have them post that to me.
Took the letter and a driving licence up to the post office today and "It's not going through" they said, pointing to a stalled progress bar on an android app on a tablet.
Um. Okay. So?
Just wait longer apparently. About ten minutes and it finally proceeded and the post office man took a photograph of me after asking me to disrobe of my robe, strip down to a teeshirt and jeans.
Not sure in what sense this has proven my ID any more than it was already proven to get the driving licence or company registration in the first place?
Apparently I now have government logins for "One Login" and for "government gateway" and they are not the same thing? But sort of are the same thing?
Can't say I really understand it. Expect they'll introduce a third government login when they do these Digital ID cards they're talking about.
God knows how I'm supposed to know which to use when the company tax records need updating in a few months.
#id #government #oneLogin

2025-06-10 23:56:22 UTC

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best restaurants in the solar system by far.

2025-05-21 21:56:46 UTC

😆 Missile Air Defense As a Service
MAD AS you like.
In some ways a government paying by a subscription for a missile defense service has been inevitable since Reagan started the mission to Privatize Literally Everything.
The government will own nothing, and be happy.
States must do only one thing: Pay money to rich people to get them to do the things.
The idea of Reagan's Star Wars returning is pretty crazy in itself. That launching all those satellites would massively enrich the government's biggest donor is mostly just pretty typical corruption.
But having the government pay to rent it out is just amazing. 🧑‍🍳 💋
Hey, if Russia and China outbid America during the hour they were launching the missiles, that's just the free market!
Never really even know if it works without being attacked, but the rich owners get to extract the wealth from it all the same.
Rentierism? In this economy?
🤣
https://defence-industry.eu/spacex-proposes-subscription-model-for-trumps-golden-dome-missile-defence-system-reports-reuters/
#goldenDome #us #defense

2025-05-20 17:37:11 UTC

Finally, with a hundred thousand dead, two thirds of the buildings bombed, all the hospitals and infrastructure destroyed, more than a million people on the verge of starvation, and Israel's leadership even more openly bragging about their intent to ethnically cleanse the area, it's gone on "too long".
Well done Lammy and Starmer. You finally noticed eh?
So trade deal talks are off, and weapons export licenses are... Well. We'll see. "Always Under Review" they say.
And the main reason for the slight and tiny change in emphasis? Mostly Trump. They are following Trump. They feel easier criticizing Israel's genocide now Trump looks easier with it.
#ukpol #gaza #israel

2025-05-12 10:28:35 UTC

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I see Starmer is once again taking to the national stage to tell everyone that Reform are correct, that Reform have accurately described the source of the problems of British people.
Telling everyone that migrants are a problem, that migrants are causing trouble, that migrants need to be cracked down upon.
And then he somehow thinks this will make people more likely to vote Labour?
It's basically a massive country wide national advertising campaign for Reform.
Well done Labour. When you lose it will be your own fault.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/may/11/english-test-among-range-of-labour-measures-to-control-immigration

2025-05-08 17:30:50 UTC

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Carla has said she's not standing, so there's no incumbent team to beat.
Adrian could stand alone I guess. Assume he won't.
Wonder who will stand against Zack then?
Is it too late for Corbyn to join and run? That'd really be something. 😆

2025-05-07 23:28:53 UTC

I wish at least one political party would be like "No, Reform Are WRONG, we are going to get you back your right to freedom of movement that THEY TOOK AWAY"
Under us your kids WILL be able to go study in Europe, you WILL be able to go winter in Spain , you WILL be allowed to take a fruit picking holiday.
But no. They're all pathetic chasers, all wanting the same racist bigots to vote for them. All meekly weakly saying people have "legitimate concerns" and promising to punish anyone who ain't from around here.
Depressing is what it is.
Get me my freedom of movement back you weak losers!
STAND UP
#ukpol #freedomOfMovement

2025-05-05 23:05:33 UTC

Zack seems to have a pretty good message and to be keen and energetic to be Green Party leader.
Carla and Adrian have been pretty good, but they haven't succeeded in getting the Green Party messages all over the press.
Think the UK public and press might not really be sophisticated enough to understand a job share. Probably better to have one person full time.
Dunno if the incumbents will even stand again. Four years is a long time for Green Party leaders. Usually supposed to be every two years.
Zack seems likely to get my vote unless someone better turns up. Would be really great to get the country fired up about the party somehow. God knows the other parties are all absolutely awful.
Here he is answering Owen Jone's questions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfdfeTXvi6I
And he was talking to Novara this evening too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAh_0GNbQbY
#greenParty #ukPol #ZackPolanski

2025-05-02 18:41:48 UTC

Labour's entire election campaign and parliament has looked like an endorsement of Reform: Hey, we hate refugees too! We also want to pick on pensioners and the disabled! We would never undo a brexit! We'll suck up to Donald Trump just like Farage does! We'll stop the boats too!
Then Reform do well at the elections, because Labour keep reinforcing Reform's message.
Then First Past The Post kicks in. Under First Past The Post with five parties, you can win a landslide with 21% of the vote.
Greens did pretty well, growing solidly, but they never got the affirmation of their policies by government like Reform did, and don't have their own TV channel like Reform has GBeebies.
#ukpol #elections

2025-04-27 15:59:10 UTC

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The speed of light is 1.
Meters are weird, not light.

2025-04-25 13:50:38 UTC

> Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell ‘hyper personalized’ ads
Dalliance CEO says he will never use that browser and will continue to use whatever blocks adverts and tracking of all kinds most effectively.
Dalliance CEO says Perplexity CEO can take his browser and fuck off.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-browser-will-track-everything-users-do-online-to-sell-hyper-personalized-ads/

2025-04-24 12:32:37 UTC

Bluesky is cancelling accounts when foreign governments ask them to, and Threads is doing adverts soon.
The thing to understand about the corporate public messaging systems is that they do not exist to let you publish or to talk to people. That is not the point of them. That's at best just the bait laid to lure you into their trap.
They exist to make money for the shareholders. That's why Threads exists, that's why Blockchain Inc invested to keep Bluesky running.
Only one network exists in order to let people communicate as the point and reason for it's existence. Only one network has no shareholders and no owners.
Only one is fighting for the user, not the shareholder.
#fediverse

2025-04-13 14:37:04 UTC

I keep hearing Americans saying that China has been manipulating the Yuan for a long time, as though America never adjusts their interest rates or does quantitative easing.
Strange to say that China is doing currency manipulation in such an accusatory tone when literally every currency is manipulated by changing the supply or interest rates on a monthly basis.

2025-04-13 12:00:26 UTC

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He compares the wealth flows from America to China with the thing he more usually talks about: The wealth flows from the poor to the rich that is ruining western society.
The wealth flows from rich countries to poor countries are equalizing though, probably a good thing. The wealth flows from poor to rich within the rich countries are exasperating wealth inequality which is not a good thing.

2025-04-13 11:40:46 UTC

Gary's on Tariffs and Trump
What are trade deficits? Rich countries can buy more than poor countries, so the US buys more from China, so there's a trade imbalance. So money/wealth flows from the rich country to the poor one.
So America is in growing debt to China. Tariffs can be erected to slow that flow. You can tax imports instead of income. Great.
Trouble is that tariffs are a regressive tax, and so replacing income taxes with tariffs makes taxes more regressive, moving the tax burden to the poor. Gary takes us through that Progressive and Regressive taxes are.
Initially tariffs were supposed to be targeted at those with highest trade barriers, but Trumps crazy formula targeted the poorest countries with the biggest trade deficit instead. A theoretical attempt to move the worst jobs in the world into America. Would have killed some of the poorest people in the poorest countries. Make clothes expensive in the US to try and make the US have sweat shops again!? Gary finds it so insane he can't barely stop himself laughing. "Low competence implementation" is his euphemism.
"God knows how many cambodians would have died just to make it so American's can't afford trainers". Could have make Nike bankrupt.
"What would you do if you were the chancellor" is a question he gets asked a lot. His answer is that he'd not just make up economic policy and rewrite the economic system on his own on his youtube channel. He'd actually game things out with experts and international cooperation. Trying to do it just by some geeks making up policy in their kitchen is stupid.
Markets crashed. Nobody thinks this can go on. Rich people buying discounted stocks. Gary was buying, mostly on reflex, expecting change in policy.
He'd have sold US bonds if he had any. Everyone else was. started to look like US could go bankrupt.
"Thank fuck, they decided to back down"
"Donald trump is manipulating markets on social media"
Don't listen to what trump says, don't panic into selling, don't let him use tariffs to disadvantage the poor, stand together.
What happens next? Probably deal with China, but if not price increases in the US making the poor poorer. But cheaper prices elsewhere, UK and Europe maybe. Which could reduce inflation and so interest rates.
Who will build a factory in the US now? The rulers seem crazy.
Whole world might well have to rearm because the US isn't their ally any more?
Whole world must reorient their economy to be with China instead of the US now? The US isn't dependable.
It's like international policy run by the Fyre Festival. It's not just trump. It's not even just the US. The whole world is run by idiots.
He wants to go on holiday. He's knackered.
---
"Fuck you foreigners, we all hate foreigners" - Gary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-1s9AykUyUw
#economics #garysEconomics #tariffs

2025-04-09 22:59:25 UTC

"Insider trading" is what they call it when someone has advanced knowledge of economic numbers or a policy change and trades on that knowledge.
So what do you call it when a president posts a note to all his followers saying "Now is a good time to buy" and then two hours later announces an economic policy change that pumps stocks to their highest single-day rise of the decade?
🤔
Wonder if he'll ever tell his followers it's a good day to sell?
Seems like 10% tariffs on everything and a trade war with China is still pretty bad economic news to me, even if it's a bit better than full on global trade war.
#economics #tradeWar #tradeWarCancelled #tradeWarBackOnAgain #waitTradeWarOffAgain.

2025-04-09 10:51:01 UTC

James O'Brien spending the first hour of his show talking about how the Trump government is really actually fascist in the proper sense of the word.
And then the second hour talking about how precrime police computers analyzing vast amount of data to pick out people most likely to commit murders is okay.
Fucking centrists. They're always like this. They approve of the building of the infrastructure of the fascist state, thinking it will be great, without any understanding of who will take over that infrastructure when the fascists are elected.
Ugh.

2025-04-04 08:51:53 UTC

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The balance of trade can't be fixed while dollars are the world reserve. Those nations he is tariffing need dollars to pay their dollar debt, they must have a balance of trade deficit. Even if they could relocate immediately all the industry they would still need dollars to pay their dollar debt.
The world money system is designed to impoverish countries with dollar debt to force them to sell goods to America in return for dollars to pay their debt.
That's how the IMF and America extract all their wealth
Now they will be further punished for it by tariffs aimed at preventing collecting the dollars to pay the debts?
Madness.
Pundits seem to think they'll back off the tariffs because otherwise they'll wreck the system, but I think their aim might be to wreck the system and replace it with something out of handmaid's tale.

2025-04-03 10:08:28 UTC

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Seems like they want to fix the balance of trade with the rest of the world, which may be a laudable aim, but there's a reason it's so skewed: The dollar.
You can't print all the global reserve currency that the world needs and supply the world with money while also having a balanced trade sheet. The world is taking your money, your promises to pay, and giving you consumer products in return.
If you want to give them consumer products in return instead, then they no longer take your money, and the world has to find something new to trade among themselves other than dollars because they no longer have dollars.
Perhaps it really is time to destroy the petrodollar as the world reserve currency. Would likely be good for American workers to do that.
But this seems a somewhat chaotic method to pick.

2025-04-03 00:00:49 UTC

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Can you see on the graph where the liberation set in?
https://boing.world/system/media_attachments/files/114/271/078/896/892/007/original/0c71f0bf3fa4cf0d.png

2025-04-02 13:17:48 UTC

Really amazing how they can label the biggest tax rises on America seen since the big wars as "liberation day" and people swallow it.
Look forward to being liberated by having these giant tax increases, expect the big price prices to be very liberating, the reduction in choice at the checkouts to be a liberating experience.
Increases in poverty and shifts in the tax burden towards the poor? How liberating!
#usPol #liberationDay #taxes

2025-03-28 18:12:57 UTC

Free speech for everyone I agree with!
Free abduction and deportation for everyone else!
Sad what's happening out there.

2025-03-27 23:33:07 UTC

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On improving mental health services especially for children, they just wanna blame lockdowns and ban kids from phones, or maybe tax social networks to pay for councilors.
They all think the internet is to blame rather than the pressures of poverty and capitalism.
Gary on the other hand has been open in his book about his own mental health, and does blame poverty and that working a job won't even give you enough to feed your kids.
Earlier generations were able to earn enough to have a family and a house, and modern kids can't, that is why he thinks they're all struggling. Because they face a bleak economic future.

2025-03-27 23:17:34 UTC

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On the question of how to respond to Trumps Tariffs, Gary just doesn't know. Maybe take some of the money that's flowing to US Tech companies but not details on how to do that.
Some suggest that Brexit has a benefit here, that rather than standing in solidarity with the rest of Europe we should negotiate a special deal just for us, by giving him what he wants, whatever that is.
The government want to be a bridge 🤦
Nobody even aware of Cory Doctorow's plan of removing the protections that prevent reverse engineering and forced competitive compatibility.
The thing which might actually work and do good is unthinkable.

2025-03-27 23:09:14 UTC

Watched BBC Question Time since Gary Stephenson was on it. He's great of course.
Everyone else is exactly the same as why I stopped watching. The panel filled with pompous bootlickers and wankers who defend the status quo and the rich, even as they attack each other.
The audience full of barely coherent idiots whose questions miss the point where they make any sense at all.
The panel other than him is unanimous that Wealth Taxes can't work because they've been tried in some places, and those places then stop trying after a while.
I mean the obvious reason for that is that wealth taxes affect the rich and the rich run the country, so they stop those policies that effectively reduce their wealth.
Strange to jump to the conclusion that it's because they're ineffective.
#bbcqt #watching #ukpol

2025-03-26 12:16:53 UTC

Shortly the chancellor of the exchequer will do a budget in which she's expected to cut a wide range of benefits and allowances and generally try and balance the books by taking from the poor to give to the rich.
Rachel the reverse Robinhood.
They won't call it Austerity, because that name is poisoned and they promised not to do anything called that, but that's what it is.
It won't work.
Duh.
Making the poor masses poorer reduces spending in the economy, which reduces government receipts, and makes the deficit bigger not smaller.
Austerity never works. Can't work.
If balancing the books matters it really needs to be done by taxing the rich to spend on the poor, so that the poor spend the money into the economy and grow the economy to increase the government receipts.
The rich end up with the money anyway, once the poor spend it. They always do.
Cutting from the poor to avoid taxing the rich just means more money goes into overseas tax havens and into pumping up the untaxed prices of assets for the rich. No growth, except in asset prices and the hordes of the owner class.
You'd hope a left wing government would get this, but of course Starmer's Labour aren't a left wing government, they are just more tory.
#ukpol #budget #taxWealthNotWork

2025-03-24 10:20:46 UTC

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Do not rate the employees as shit though, sometimes they use these things to fire or reduce wages.

2025-03-18 22:33:46 UTC

Here's an article from [Medialens on fighting for your country](https://www.medialens.org/2025/wurden-wir-alle-deutsch-sprechen-the-case-against-fighting-for-sir-keir-starmer/ ).
Mark Urban finds it "disturbing" that 40% of Zoomers would not fight for the UK under any circumstances.
Media Lens, and I, think it more marvelous, a glimmer of hope.
The idea that I should risk my life to fight in a war to protect the monarch's right to reign Britain, the barely democratic first past the post system, and the increasing wealth of western oligarchs, and never ending austerity is sickening.
Fight to protect the monopolists rentierism, and Starmer's welfare cuts and attacks on the needy?
Nope.
Fight to protect this bipartisan tory oil regime that rules the country and intends to burn fuel till the walls come down?
Nope.
This country is already under occupation, by the bankers, and the capitalists, and the petrofascists that will destroy us all for more dollars in their pockets.
Every war they have executed in my lifetime was based on a lie.
They can all fuck off if they think I'd fight for any of them. Wankers.
The only worrying thing is 60% of the zoomers are apparently still falling for it.
#war #nationalism #mediaLens

2025-03-10 11:03:28 UTC

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In fact I've turned the radio off, just too much complete misunderstanding of everything and populist phone-blaming.
Everyone wants to ban phones and tiktok for kids without realizing that means ID checks for all adults.
Frustrating.

2025-03-10 10:47:35 UTC

Today is Online Safety Day because the terrible awful Online Safety Law comes into affect this month.
To me, Online Safety means:<li>Never use your government name on the internet.</li><li>Use fully end to end encrypted services like Signal.</li><li>Avoid using large online surveillance projects like Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp.</li><li>Self-host wherever possible to protect your data from Big Tech.</li><li>Alter your software to block ads, use ad-blockers everywhere.</li><li>Use a VPN to help subvert tracking technology.</li><li>Avoid allowing the algorithms decide what you see. Turn off autoplay, use RSS.</li>
But the government, and most of the callers to talk radio today, seem to think it means:<li>All sites must ID check their users to ensure they aren't children.</li><li>Encryption must have government back doors so the police and state can read all messages.</li><li>Only big tech sites are legitimate because they are more subject to legal control.</li><li>Self hosting should be legally onerous so that only big companies with huge legal compliance departments can run internet sites.</li><li>It should be illegal to alter the software made by big business.</li><li>VPNs should be illegal since they can avoid government blocks.</li>
So that's all pretty depressing.
Good luck everyone. Stay safe.

2025-03-01 20:00:03 UTC

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That doesn't really capture the way those things aren't just opaque, but also actively harmful and against the user's interest.
"Dark Corporate Malgorithms" maybe. Something more like that.

2025-03-01 19:49:20 UTC

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Seems like we're going to need a new word that means "algorithm which is an impenetrable black box written by corporations to serve their interests rather than yours" and unless we coin that word quick people are just gonna overload the word "algorithm" for it.

2025-03-01 19:46:46 UTC

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Yep, I switched on my main machine when Mozilla merged with an advertising company, which is to say the new combined entity is an advertising company.

2025-03-01 19:00:18 UTC

"Tone and body language", plus a "lack of respect" are the things which Trump objected to, which blew his deal up and left him failing to reach any agreement.
What a master deal-maker he must be, to let his entire negotiation blow up in anger just because of the tone and respect he thinks he deserves.
Hope he never has to broker a deal with me and anyone else coz Zelenksyy appeared to me to be far too differential, and didn't even swear or try and throw a milkshake over the fascist.
I'd be throwing a milkshake at the very least. Showing full on contempt, never mind lack of respect.
Strange how much these so-called "strong" men require respect and deference to support their fragile masculinity or else they throw all their toys out of the pram.
Don't seem that strong to me. Seems pretty pathetic.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/01/trump-zelenskyy-white-house-tone-elon-musk.html
#trump #ukraine #artOfTheDeal

2025-02-28 21:44:29 UTC

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Strangers can impose their replies upon you too I guess, until you block them, though you could argue that's not in the "feed".
I don't see any promoted posts from megacorp who bribed the systemadmin though. Which is nice.

2025-02-28 21:04:34 UTC

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The word "Algorithm" seems to be evolving a second meaning. In the context of defining the difference between social media sorting systems, "the algorithm" is an opaque system built by advertising companies with nefarious intent designed to manipulate a person in to engagement, and to political and purchase decisions.
As usual with language, you'd pick a better word if you could design the language instead of having to let it evolve in a messy contradictory way.
Even without that second meaning though, the phrase "No algorithm imposing posts on us" is true for Mastodon at least. The things in your feed are chosen, not imposed. Even those boosted are boosted by your followers not by advertisers or political manipulators or the owners of the site. The key word is "imposing".

2025-02-25 18:18:28 UTC

Billions of pounds found, not by the hard choice of taxing the super-rich of course but by the easy choice (labelled "difficult") of taking it from the poor!
What will it be spent on? Primarily contracts for American war corporations.
It's a tithe. We are paying a tithe bigger than the "black hole" everyone was worried about last year to buy favor with the menace in the white house.
None of this in their manifesto. Fuck this tory party as much as the other one. Labour and conservatives, all tories.
#ukpol #defense

2025-02-21 17:41:38 UTC

Well, well. If you want to encrypt your backup data in the UK you'll have to do it yourself with open tools because [Apple have removed encryption from uk backups](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo ) rather than create a master-key to let the government decrypt everything.
Absolutely the right move from Apple, probably nobody should have been trusting Apple to encrypt their backups and so doing it themselves anyway.
Absolutely the wrong move from the UK government, as usual, who seem to think there is such a thing as an encryption breaking key which only good-guys can use.
Even though the cops and the government also contain bad-guys.
Tsk. Seems like governments can't make good internet law ever at all.

2025-02-19 14:16:38 UTC

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If you keep predicting a recession for long enough eventually you'll be right!