What symbol best represents the unrepresentable?
@pixelpusher220 @chiraag no offense, because i’m sure you and your colleagues did great work, but i think a big part of our problem is relying so much on contracted consultants and vendors rather than building commitment and expertise within a salaried civil service.
@chiraag @pixelpusher220 I think it’s ridiculous that there don’t exist secure, regulated dropboxes for incoming legalish correspondence like receipts + bank statements. If we were not so dogmatically private-sector biased, this would be a no-brainer to publicly bootstrap. Under the system that’s emerged, almost no one files this sort of correspondence well. Bootstrapping such a system without some public leadership is hard, and might result in a dangerous monopoly.
@chiraag @pixelpusher220 Any credit-card should be linked to these addresses. It’d be the end of paper receipts, except for cash transactions. We’d all get secure, hashed, timestamped, notarized receipts in our dropbox on purchase.
@chiraag @pixelpusher220 (if they hadn’t been grandfathered in by tradition, we’d have no public postal service or library either. there is so much good we can do by public, collective, action, if we rouse ourselves from dogma and against those whose interests are bound up with our deficiencies.)
Just canceled Amazon Prime.
It feels like a big step. I’m not sure I’ll be able to leave it canceled for very long. If my household can’t shake its purchase habits, I’ll have to give in again. Even with Prime’s price increases, the shipping would cost more.
But I hope I can persuade the collective us to do our part to shop around on equal terms, rather than let prepaid costs + credit card deals suck us into an increasingly enshittified default.
It’s an experiment. We’ll see how long it lasts.
@migurski thanks!
1password is my password manager. i really like it! but i don’t love keeping passwords and 2FA generators in the same app, because then the 1password master password becomes essentially a single factor.
My dear geeky Mastodonians,
What do you use for your 2FA time-based authenticator app?
I used Google Authenticator for years, but then I had my busted iPhone swapped out and lost all my seeds, some of which I did not have recovery codes for, which has been a real drag. I’d like a thing that backs up to iCloud like everything else in some well-encrypted form. I don’t want to use my password manager. In case that is ever compromised, I want a meaningful second factor.
What say you?
sometimes i think it would be best if Netanyahu were to pull an Idi Amin, but Saudi Arabia would find it harder to give sanctuary to Bibi than it did to that other gentleman.
Trump on the other hand has said he might go to Venezuela, by which he usually means El Salvador, if an electoral loss puts him in carceral jeopardy. plausible enough!
@dpp That’ll speed things up for sure!
I’m guessing you’ve already seen this: https://x.com/BenRemaly/status/1825650894236684585
“A big reason why the right talks so much about immigration is that to talk about anything else - climate change, the cost of living, failing public services, unaffordable housing, flatlining real wages and so on - would be to bring capitalism into question. And that it must not do.” #ChrisDillow https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2024/08/the-end-of-modernity.html
// see also his explanation why the British center-left no longer talks about “modernisation”. they loved to in the 80s and 90s, when “it meant attacking unions and the poor”.
#MattBruenig points out that the current union certification process amounts to a kind of bureaucratic trench warfare that the National Labor Relations Board lacks the resources to adjudicate. We could massively expand its funding, or better yet, streamline the process of certifying a union with card-check, an Obama campaign promise abandoned due to Congressional resistance. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/opinion/starbucks-union-government.html
Text: But even more important is to revive and pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow unions to be certified if a majority of workers sign certification cards. This would assess workers' support or opposition to unionization without requiring the government to run costly elections. The legislation would also allow an arbitrator to approve first contracts when bargaining breaks down, preventing companies from dragging out negotiations endlessly, refusing to sign collective bargaining agreements and then assisting efforts to decertify unions — as has been the case with Starbucks.
This post is hitting my socials right now.
Bernie is a Moses figure.
@admitsWrongIfProven i’ll stick with dead people.
it’s weird how you can watch dead people performing live.
“within every lean, hungry, tech start-up founder, a bloated monopolist was struggling to get out.” @henryfarrell https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/08/no-exit-opportunities-business-models-and-political-thought-in-silicon-valley/
// from what is actually a thoughtful and sympathetic meditation on reconciling Silicon Valley ideals with complicated human reality, not a mere polemic against tech founders and VCs.
love the humans, each and every.
Great pushback to the egregious Obama apoligism and Biden accomplishment minimization by a certain cadre of self-proclaimed “centrists”. (They are the center of nothing, may they forever rule their domain.)
By @ryanlcooper https://prospect.org/economy/2024-08-19-in-defense-of-bidenomics/
from @csissoko https://syntheticassets.wordpress.com/2018/09/16/why-claims-that-the-2008-bailout-was-a-success-should-make-you-angry/ ht @ryanlcooper
Text: Forcing lenders to come to the table on the basis of economic reality is something that every collateralized borrower can do - except for the little guy whose only collateralized loan is on his/her primary residence. Fixing the cramdown inequity was one of President Obama's promises before he was elected. But lo and behold Treasury staffers in his administration "stressed the effects of cramdown on the nation's biggest banks, which were still fragile. The banks' books could take a beating if too many consumers [were] lured into bankruptcy by cramdown " (Kiel & Pierce 2011). Treasury's position on this should be read: we need to bail out the banks, so we can't allow the economic reality of the situation to affect the cut that the banks get.
@smeg (this wasn’t my experience or issue, i’m just quoting Kevin Drum.)
@BenRossTransit (Thank you!)