Drífa Jónsdóttir @[email protected]

I generally don't accept follows from accounts with no visible toots and no connection to people I know and trust.

One thing I really hate about my culture is its fetishization of competition. We create needless competition in business, sports, politics, etc. Why? It is destructive, it creates more losers than winners, and it wastes resources that could be better used to solve our collective problems. Proponents claim it spurs innovation and achievement. Bullshit: it spurs cheating and gaming the system. Competition of *ideas* is better served by *cooperation* to study them.

I should probably pin Britt's ref sheet.

If you're trans, remember: the point of changing your appearance and presentation is to feel better living in your own skin. Anyone who gives you grief for not meeting some arbitrary standard is welcome to go shag a cactus.

Good morning

And that's the even-more-cruel rub of digital blinders: they're more of the same crumbs-of-psuedo-prosperity used to drive a wedge between the house slaves and the field slaves and keep the lot of us from sending the master running for his life in only his underwear.

Because keeping all this tech going requires rare earths, food, etc. Maybe some of those people can be similarly pacified if the physical world can be gamified, but I suspect they have a much simpler plan in mind for a whole layer of folks below the coppertops: more of the same capitalist neo-slavery we've been subjecting colonies to.

They're right, I think--as past interviews on the show have demonstrated--that the techbros want to turn us into the cows, or even the coppertops: the future the walled city crowd has in mind for many of us is to be hooked on digital opiates to inure us to inequity.

But there's part of this story that *isn't* as well covered, at least in Part 1: the future the walled city crowd has in mind for the people it *doesn't* think need digital pacification.

The It Could Happen Here podcast crew has put together one of the clearest descriptions I've seen yet of the sociotechnical implications of the corporatized VR world the techbros are trying to sell us as the "metaverse."

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-metaverse-that-never-was-part-1/id1449762156?i=1000548777189

Good morning

Today's wordle: Wordle 220 3/6

🟨⬛🟨⬛⬛
🟨⬛🟨⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Once you start down the road of challenging assumptions and thinking about whose interests are being overlooked, forever will it dominate your destiny.

I went off on a bit of a birdsite rant about vehicle-to-infrastucture/vehicle comms and safety measures. If you want to read it, it's here: https://twitter.com/drifa_j/status/1485619305505042442?s=20

The Citations Needed crew have an excellent special episode up on the Democratic Party’s attacks on unions of disproportionately female workers: https://twitter.com/citationspod/status/1484569170536767489?s=21

Good morning

There are longer clips on birdside: https://twitter.com/drifa_j/status/1484985532388200453?s=21

Snö katte shenanigans

What's even more jarring about that is that the filmmakers seem to be aware of what they're doing. There's a scene where the main character asks the brownface character where he's from, and, getting an answer in the USA, asks where his "ancenstors" are from. The brownface character replies, "Pittsburgh."

Like, if they'd hired an Indian actor and hired some culturally competent scriptwriters, they could have made wicked fun of the white main character's casual racism. But no.

In "gosh, my childhood was a racist indoctrination" news, I rewatched "Short Circuit" the other day. I had completely forgotten that it had a brownface character. Wheeeee.

TL,DR: irony poisoning is bad, and something I really need to work on myself.

Making fun of decision-makers is free and fun. But it's not a substitute for actually thinking about how to make this kind of call.

Indulging in this humor seems to keep people from developing the skills needed to make it. Which in turn keeps them disempowered.

Moreover, the decision to close things needs to be made in advance. It's pointless to force folks to drive in--some from a substantial distance--then wait for roads to become bad and send them back over them.

So the decision to close for safety has to be made many hours in advance, on the basis of weather forecasts. Those are imperfect, so they both sometimes err and inherently show a range of possible outcomes. You have to pick a level of plausibility of the bad outcome.

See, we get snow so infrequently here that the highway and city folks really aren't equipped to clear it quickly. Many roads won't be plowed, and many shady areas in which ice could form won't be salted. Nobody has studded tires here. Local driver training and driver exams have nothing substantial in them about winter driving.