From a social investigation by kites in 2021, Chronicles of the struggling and dispossessed

Our caravan managed to interview a home-owner named Marie from Lillooet, a small town an hour up the road from Lytton. Marie was a healthcare worker, and the Federal government had just offered to rent or buy out her house so that emergency crew workers could be stationed in the region to battle the proliferating fires. Cheekily, comrades asked why she decided to buy a house in a region on fire:

Well it wasn’t always on fire! But yeah, when we put an offer on the house, we did have friends say, “Are you worried about the fire zone?” I said “No, I mean, I know there’s been forest fires, but nothing was that bad.” My understanding was that the wildfire forest service comes in and they build a guard for protection and to protect the town, right? There’ve been histories of evacuations, but it didn’t really cross my mind that a town could burn to the ground. That seemed like some spectacular event.

Comrades asked Marie if she thought this was creating a shift in people’s perspective around the urgency of climate change:

I think people are still dealing with things in the day to day. I know in Lillooet there’s still fires on each side: one in Lytton, one in McKay Creek. There’s like 200 fire fighters within 80km of our town. Wait… no, more than that because Ashcroft is on evacuation notice as well, and so is 100 Mile House. Like, there’s 125 fire fighters just in Mckay Creek, so there’s encampments of forest firefighters because there’s nowhere to house them. We actually had the federal government call and ask to rent out our house because there’s nowhere for them…

And it never even crossed my mind: Where do all the people go? You evacuate 1,500 people from a town, where the fuck are they supposed to go?.. I think a lot of people still don’t know if or what they’re going back too.

Predictive policing. At this point we will soon consider Minority Report a documentary.

That’s what peak revolutionary performance looks like.

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My brother in christ, what is this reactionary leftism. NATO bad, so every single thing they report is a lie and propaganda actually, even when it comes from “your side”? Without so much as to bother to look at the pictures, because they are actually photoshop and ai?

You’re looking at a piece of an engine 50cm wide and confidently go “actually this is clearly from a rocket that’s 15cm in diameter”. Like fuck, man, why is it the same shit on both sides.

Kh-101

Dimensions

Sidewinder AIM-9

Dimensions

Ngl I’ve been getting the same weird vibe from them for a while. Particularly when the questions are framed as “is this thing that we generally support actually bad, or maybe not?”

Crazy suggestion, but how about we don’t do the Israeli “this blown up hospital is definitely not what it looks like” thing? The rocket used was the Russian-made Kh-101.

Talk to them about good political news as well. When all you hear is “everything everywhere is terrible” it’s easy to just tune it out. Successful unionization efforts, protests, progressive legislature.

Actually, hard agree. Can we make filth a thing instead?

It’s the curse of being a leftist. I walk past a coffee shop and think about how there are no third spaces left to hang out for free. Because they were systematically destroyed, in order to separate the people into individuals, and at the same time commodify their leisure at ever growing costs. How there are so many people working miserable jobs in those coffee shops, jobs that we don’t need in the first place. About the chains that have swallowed all the individual businesses that could’ve been of higher quality, had better working conditions and pay. About the bench outside with extra railings, so that the unhoused people couldn’t sleep on it. They’re forced to sleep in designated “bad hoods”, from where they will eventually be kicked out by pigs filth so that their hoods can be gentrified. And all those freshly gentrified hoods will have tons of empty condos that would never house even one of those displaced people…

Then I smoke a joint, watch some cute animal videos, and forget about it until the next time I walk past a coffee shop.

The funniest part was when he called the book “neo-communist”. Gotta go get ready 4 Ze New World Order.

Look if there’s any help needed in your local soup kitchens, mutual support orgs, homeless and animal shelters, orphanages, community centers, refugee service providers. Activism is about being active, not labels. And you are very likely to meet like-minded people there, who might introduce you to more politically oriented causes if that’s more your vibe.

And in the US since 2020 it’s up 88%.

We have currently had 12 consecutive months of record breaking global temperatures, with an average of 1.63°C above the pre-industrial levels. Good times.

Ooh baby, this is just a tiny part in how terrifying they actually are for the open web. Their implementation of manifest V3, platform for browser extensions (that they basically force every other browser to use), along with the deprecation of V2-based extensions (starting this month) is straight up authoritarian. In short, they entirely remove blocking of webRequest and Event pages (user-side background scripts), among other things. This will essentially kill open ad blockers (like uBlock origin) and let them control the supported ones (like AdBlock), meaning we will have ads from advertisers who pay the fee purposely let through.

We have known about this coming change and its implications for 5+ years.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#issuecomment-496009417

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/resuming-the-transition-to-mv3/

Meanwhile Firefox, who would also have to implement it for cross-compatibility, will not remove those critical features, as well as will keep support for V2 extensions. This is only one aspect in which Firefox is committed to user privacy, security, and control. I would highly recommend Firefox to everyone, including the Android version.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manifest-v2-march-2024-update/

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

I gave a number of real life use cases where it would solve real problems. There are so many more, especially “boring” ones like official documents, research, and medical records that would benefit from it tremendously. Blockchain does not equal crypto, but they complement each other really well.

Proof of stake could make the thing not too environmentally damaging but it’s been years that major blockchains are saying they will implement it the next year

What do you mean, Ethereum is pos.

I AM NOT SHILLING CRYPTO IN ANY WAY OKAY THANK YOU

With that out of the way, those are not intrinsic qualities of either. The fundamentals on which every shitcoin and the bored ape garbage were sold to the public are still very strong. This is like saying “online shopping is horrible” in 2004 - technically not incorrect, but very shortsighted. While the proof of work protocol (mining for it to function and who mines more is the truth) is unsustainable, proof of stake (who holds more is the truth) and mixed ones are fundamentally amazing. Imagine stablecoins pegged to indexes of international currencies. BRICS coin, for example. With smart contracts (rules built into the transaction itself) and being practically legitimate international currencies it opens up so many possibilities. Transparency and easy comparisons in payments - salaries, rents, goods and services. Immutability - you can’t just whack a person and steal the deed to their house. The “chain” part of blockchain - clear history of ownership of assets, no more “I accidentally bought a stolen car/house”. And eventually the contracts can be made complex enough to cover most interpersonal transactions.

And the same thing for nfts. Especially now, in the rapidly exploding era of unethical AI art, music, etc. Artists could easily sell/lease rights for their work, including for it to be a basis for generative models. It’s not limited to digital products - whatever you want to to confirm ownership of can be tagged with one-way encrypted signatures baked into nfts.

So both are great technologies that can still be improved on a lot. But it’s just that the ways in which they’re used today are almost exclusively rugpull bubble dogshit.

That’s neat and all, but especially considering the eventual outcome this has nothing on the legendary Soviet faceted glass. Autogenerated auto translated subs on the video are pretty good.

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Technically they operate with the same model of taking a profit from others’ activity.

People use them regardless, for many different types of content, they’re primary platforms. Patreon is a secondary one, pretty much nobody would just go to Patreon and pay for a random subscription to discover someone’s content. But with the primary ones if a certain person was banned from there, subscribers would still keep using them for all the other ones.

Anyway, I’m not really disagreeing, and it’s speculation either way. For all we know, States might straight up illegalize commie content online, moving all of it, including payments, underground.

The idea that corporations will allow free speech because it’s in their financial interest to do so just doesn’t conform with what we observe happening in reality.

There is a fundamental difference between a business selling a product and one that simply takes a part of profits from others’ activity. Creators don’t have to take money through Patreon, they can choose any other platform, and for the subscribers it doesn’t make a real difference. Quite the opposite, if a different service was to take a lower fee (and put more money in the pocket of creators), or be more explicitly in line with their content, then people would be even more eager to support them there instead.