Musician, mechanic, writer, dreamer, techy, green thumb, emigrant, BP2, ADHD, Father, weirdo

https://www.battleforlibraries.com/

#DigitalRightsForLibraries

  • 31 Posts
  • 317 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • A band is not the same as a luxury fashion brand.

    One is exploited by massive corporations, gets a single digit percentage of the profits they generate, gets known by word of mouth (or T-shirt) among fans, and creates a piece of culture.

    The other is a (usually massive) corporation, exploits low paid workers, is a status symbol for the rich and the people who want to appear as rich, and sometimes they make an item that could technically be considered a piece of culture.

    Advertising for and/or showing your support for them are very different things that imply different things, for different reasons.

    Wearing band merch implies support for their musical stylings, a connection with the creative output of the band, and possibly their world view.

    Wearing a logo-festooned piece of couture clothing implies wealth and status, and (often) complicity with sweat shops.

    While the two previous paragraphs seem to be similar, because of the first two paragraphs, they are quite different.


  • The Chinese owners seem to discourage all communication between writers. They did however just acknowledge the difficulties the writers face with this platform tool.

    This whole operation just smells to me like Chinese work ethic (work them till they jump out the windows, then put nets under the windows) to me. There have been two “supervisors” in the past 16 months that have come and gone. They used to buffer requests and pish to open submission on time, but then they resign without word.


  • Ty for the reply.

    Not comfortable sharing location info, and I know state laws vary. I do know that our state has a law on the books prohibiting withholding pay based on time entry, because my union rep pushed back when I kept not getting paid because a supervisor was forgetting to approve time.

    This is similar, because its the final approval process, but the work has been done, taken out of her hands and finalized. Not to mention, she waits weeks sometimes for them to get off their hands and allow her to upload.

    No known contacts in the field other than her coauthors. This is her second year doing this, which is her dream job, and its opening doors for her.

    Definitely, it could be automated. But part of the problem is the text box that handles the pasted data inserts characters that are not present in the final work. We’ve tried dumping to plaintext several different ways and looking for hidden characters, but it still occurs. Thus, it would still require human review. Double quotes could likely be filtered, but who gets paid to develop the automation? She wouldn’t know how to debug or validate the code, and she shouldn’t have to.

    She knows this isn’t her ultimate dream job, but she is getting paid to write, and getting your own stuff published is a lot of work, luck, and who you know. She’s meeting lots of insiders, but struggling with these constraints.









  • I used to participate in (what was then) the largest and most active automotive enthusiast forum for a specific brand. They had forums for each major model run, and classifieds, etc. I’d go there for how-to’s, detailed info, reviews, tips and tricks, and of course, to tall with like-minded people. Meet ups even spawned from these groups, and friendships were forged.

    As it really picked up steam, though, the forum creators decided to monetize, as every large website grapples with how to sustain their growth. Unfortunately, they decided to implement ads, subscription/pay wall, and within a month, there were five competing websites. The majority of us left in the first two weeks.

    Now that forum still exists, but the content is gone, deleted by users who didn’t appreciate their content being monetized (sound familiar, June 2023?). The replacements? Some struggle on, and one or two are vibrant, but mostly, it imploded. There was one glorious pair of years though, when I (and thousands of others) spent hours every day on the forum, and every topic was covered.

    In hindsight, the downfall was more than just the advertisements and pay walling. It was a few non-admins that were treated as defacto mods, and they had bad attitudes. Flaming anyone who asked questions that were asked before (this was before Google made searching easier), and also holding their own practices as the only way to maintain their cars.

    The reddit versions of the forums were not remotely the same, with people coming and going and not really sticking around. The best place for the info is still forums, though I think they struggle with server upkeep and costs. It’s sad to me, but all things change. I’m glad for archive.org.


  • Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili has refused to sign into law a bill approved by parliament last month that rights groups and many opposition politicians say drastically curbs the rights of the country’s LGBT community.

    The so-called “family values” bill was pushed through parliament by the ruling Georgian Dream party on September 17 in an 84-0 vote, which was boycotted by the opposition while rallies were being held by protesters outside the parliament building.

    In line with the provisions of the Georgian Constitution, Zurabishvili refused to endorse the bill and returned it to parliament without written comments, the presidential administration **confirmed **to RFE/RL on October 2.

    The move highlights the dramatically polarized political landscape in the Caucasus nation ahead of national elections in October.

    Parliament speaker Shalva Papuashvili, a co-sponsor of the bill and member of the Georgian Dream is now expected to sign the bill into law and publish it within five days.


  • Important excerpt:

    “Introducing a scanning application on every mobile phone, with its associated infrastructure and management solutions, leads to an extensive and very complex system. Such a complex system grants access to a large number of mobile devices & the personal data thereon. The resulting situation is regarded by AIVD as too large a risk for our digital resilience. (…) Applying detection orders to providers of end-to-end encrypted communications entails too large a security risk for our digital resilience”.






  • There can be a lot of ways this has nothing at all to do with you.

    Begin anecdote: I just got back from two years out of the country and am back to visit family and earn more money for my next trip. I’m hugely depressed. I drained about $80k in savings that took me 15 years to build, have no job, no car, and am sleeping on a concrete floor in a family member’s basement. I’m grown with three adult children.

    My older cousin has three kids in their late twenties and early thirties. Two daughters live together and have game night every Tuesday. They adore me and invite me weekly. I’ve not had the stamina to endure a long activity like that, and I also am waiting for both sisters to be available, as one had been working nights, but has next Tuesday off.

    When I canceled this past Tuesday, the working sister told me the following day that her father and sister are angry with both of us – convinced I favor working sister more than the two of them. They assume (as is their dramatic nature) that anything that affects them was intentionally done with malice.

    I had a doctor’s appointment the day of game night that ran until 3pm, and game night was 70 miles away at 5pm.

    These two are sure that I’m slighting them, when in reality, I was home rocking on a cold floor trying to find the motivation to face the public so I could eat dinner. I never did eat. I woke to the revelation from working sister, and now, visiting game night seems 50 times more awkward and uncomfortable to me.

    If they hadn’t taken it personally that I’m a mess, I’d be scheduled for game night in two days. As it is, I’m almost 98% guaranteed to skip it to avoid that drama. My canceling had nothing to do with them. My depression and self-loathing are of my own making, and when people feel the need to pressure me or shame me, it never helps in any way.

    End anecdote.

    If you took it personally that people didn’t show to your party, I get it. I’m sorry. But it likely was not you, and isn’t indicative of the care these people have for you. Its their own thing. My advice is to laugh it off as a plan gone wrong and put it behind you. There are real things that affect us. We don’t need to invent them.

    “Remember that time I decided to celebrate my birthday for the first time in decades? I thought 50 would show, but it was 5? Guess that didn’t go as planned!” Its funny, if you let it be.

    Take the win: you stayed on-task and for a big shin-dig planned. You have 50 friends.

    Maybe you can keep gatherings small and simple for a while, and let the large gatherings happen more organically?

    I hope your week is a good one and you can smile about this soon. Happy birthday.




  • “It’s irresponsible for the Department, and a disservice to its officers and to the people of the city of New York for the NYPD to claim it needs more than 60 days to review every case it receives from CCRB,” said the Rev. Fred Davie, who chaired the oversight board until two years ago. “Simply ignoring substantiated incidents of misconduct is truly untenable and indefensible.”

    The CCRB did have a history of handling cases slowly, but that was due in large part to the NYPD withholding evidence from civilian investigators, a 2020 investigation by ProPublica found.

    After police shot and killed a Bronx man in his own apartment in 2019, the department refused to share the body-camera footage with the oversight board for more than a year and a half. The delay prevented the CCRB from filing charges against the officers within the statute of limitations. (The department has since pledged to hand over body-camera footage within 90 days of a request from the board.)

    This year, Caban announced that he would not impose any discipline in the killing. He approved an NYPD judge’s ruling that the oversight board had acted too late.

    “The CCRB is not perfect, but its goal is clearly accountability,” said Chris Dunn, legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “The NYPD clearly does not have that goal. When a problem arises, the department’s default solution is to kill the case.”