Big Techâs Anti-Labor Playbook Has Come for Wikipedia
TLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entireâŚ
TLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers. Wikipediaâs editors are now threatening to strike in solidarity. The Foundation is sitting on $296 million in reserves and a freshly profitable AI revenue stream. This is a confrontation with global implications.
It has been suggested elsewhere that if you are a Wiki Foundation donor, it would be a good idea to email and explain that this kind of behaviour will lead to you withholding future donations.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
personally I am of the opinion that vegans who are like âthe way our food system currently works under capitalism on a large scale is exceptionally cruel to all animals including humans and is not sustainable, so Iâm doing what I can to make the most ethical choices available to me about what I eat and encourage others to do the sameâ are generally very reasonable people who I agree with in spades. but vegans who seem to think human beings are not themselves animals who are ultimately also part of the food chain but instead some kind of other paternalistic higher entity that can never engage in ethical and sustainable hunting practices (and especially the fringe Iâve seen who think other carnivorous animal predators are also evil and need to be eliminated) are people I regard as foolish at best if not actively anti-indigenous and racist
I love that Leverage really goes out of itâs way to show us that just because you break the ârulesâ, it doesnât mean youâre breaking the rules. Rules and laws and society are all made up, at the end of the day, and all you really have is your own moral compass and sense of justice; is this just to you? Is it right? Should it be OK for companies to put people in insurmountable debt for the rest of their lives just because our medical care is so expensive in this modern day and age? No law or rule should change what you know in your heart is right and wrong, and I think thatâs the key thing that makes someone a good person in my eyes.
#there was a time when parker wouldnât have noticed, #not because she lacked the capacity to care, #but because she had narrowed herself, #to stay alive she cut off as many unnecessary things as possible, #watching her get them all back, #is one of the glories of this show (via @seananmcguire)
This scene hit me like a brick. My parents were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt when I was 16 bc Iâd had cancer the year before (my treatment ended up being free but the initial ER bills and such were not).
But somewhere along the line they just⌠Disappeared. My mom says theyâre not being paid and theyâre not in collections. Itâs almost as if someone out there didâŚexactly what Parker did.
Ever since I saw this the first time, Iâve imagined it was Parker doing it. That she and Hardison had a free weekend and decided to take it out on a collections agency. That I was one of the lucky ones who got a little Leverage.
Okay but like yeah, that is actually a thing that happens, albeit not exactly like this. I donât remember the exact process but basically thereâs a booming industry to sell peoples debt - the business you owe money to sells it to someone else for a fraction of the money owed, wipes their hands of the whole affair, and now whoever bought your debt is riding your ass to get you to give the money to the. But itâs also entirely possible for people to just⌠buy up massive amounts of debt for pennies on the dollar, and then just. Forgive it. Because capitalism is a living nightmare, but the system is broken enough that itâs possible to exploit it for good sometimes.
Like, the main reason I know about this is because John Oliver did a piece on debt buying a few years ago, and ended it by revealing that heâd bought 15 million dollars worth of medical debt just so he could forgive all of it. Both to expose how broken the system was because some random fucker like him could buy millions of dollars in peoples debt with zero regulations, and also just to take the record for biggest TV giveaway in history.
yes! if you want to help with the medical debt crisis in the US and have some extra money please donate to RIP Medical Debt if you can. Theyâre completely legit and really do what they say - you really CAN relieve an incredible amount of debt for the needy with even a small donation. Iâm a monthly donor and receive a quarterly report of the debt theyâve abolished, and it truly is amazing. Based on those reports the average amount of debt abolished per person is actually I would say about $600 - which means, if youâre doing the math, that with a $6 donation to RIP Medical Debt, you can potentially pull one person out of a poverty spiral - maybe even one family. For six dollars. thatâs a pretty good deal, I think.
This is literally what people are talking about when they say AI will be used to mainstream widely held bigotry. LLMs are trained on frequency and probability -> straight relationships are more well represented in the dataset -> straight pronouns and terms become the "correct" normal.
This is a form of backdoor bigotry from both normative facts (there are more straight than gay relationships) and well represented bigoted beliefs (men are superior to women).
Combine this with the mass of people inclined to believe (and being encouraged to believe) that if AI says and does something it must be correct
Listen, nobody who's ever opened a history book says we didn't do that shit first. Pick an atrocity and chances are there was a time europeans did it on mass to someone for the sake of profit. The difference, is that we have for the most part put that behind us, while the US is just sinking deeper and deeper into it. We're not perfect, and we were a lot worse in the past. But it has been a while since we were the problem
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
remember like 15 years ago when black bloggers were talking about this exact shit, 'digital blackface', white internet users appropriating images and clips of black people and using them as cartoonish exaggerated expressions of absurdity or high emotion. straight line from minstrelsy to your reaction gifs and nobody fucking cares any more. white people just decided not to acknowledge it and it went away, just like every other time black users have ever tried to criticise any aspect of online culture.
Transphobia is about to be signed into law in the UK. We can fight this.
I am begging the UK trans community and its allies to attend the Mass Lobby at Parliament on June 25th, 11am-4pm, organised by Trans Solidarity Alliance.
Last year we broke the record for an LGBT+ mass lobby of Parliament. Will you help us break it again? Join us on 25th June 2026 to demand be
The new EHRC Code of Practice pushes trans people out of toilets, hospital wards, and community spaces. It normalises gender policing based on appearance and stereotypes. It becomes statutory guidance in the UK by the end of June.
Trans people are now legally their assigned gender at birth and must join gendered spaces accordingly, but if they are perceived as their lived gender, they can also be ejected from those spaces. The guidance says: either break the law, or donât pass too well.
A mass lobby is where you invite your MP to discuss your concerns with you in-person. Ask your MP to:
Demand full parliamentary scrutiny, debate, and use their free vote on the EHRC Code of Practice.
Support any motions rejecting the EHRC guidance. As of June 4th, Labour MP Nadia Whittome has submitted a prayer motion - Early Day Motion 240.
Write to Bridget Phillipson, the Minister for Women and Equalities about our concerns
Your MP does not have to be an ally, they do not have to respond to your email for you to show up and greencard them (details below the cut.) What matters is that as many people as possible show up.
I cannot stress this enough: Showing up in person matters. It is much more effective than petitions, emails, and letters.
It is a horrible, stressful time, and I am so sorry if you're trans and live in the UK. But I was at last year's mass lobby and the line for greencarding alone stretched around the back gates. It was a record breaking mass lobby and made us impossible to ignore. Let's do even better this time. Details under the cut:
Worried about what to say?
Bring your personal worries about transphobia being signed into law, and trans friends being excluded from public spaces. You are a living person who deserves dignity. Remind your MP of that. You will also get guidance and brochures from Trans Solidarity Alliance that outlines our demands. This is mine from last year.
Money issues?
Trans Solidarity Alliance provides a travel bursary that you can sign up for via the link.
Got a refusal or no response from your MP?Â
Come anyway! You can request a same-day appointment with your MP through a process called greencarding. They will come and see you if theyâre already in Parliament. Even if they donât, theyâre made acutely aware of your cause because you showed up in person. This is my greencard from last year.
Here is the EHRC Code of Practice in full. It's a tough read, but some highlights are:
Organisations canât provide trans-inclusive, single-sex services, or they risk being sued for discrimination.
e.g. domestic violence support for women including trans women, menâs rugby group including trans men (12.68).
Trans people will have nowhere safe to pee.
If youâre a trans man, businesses can't allow you to pee in the men's, and you can also be ejected from womenâs bathrooms if youâre perceived as a man. Vice versa for trans women. EHRC suggests a âthird spaceâ bathroom, which is discriminatory and unworkable for most businesses. (13.130-133)
Sports organisations must exclude trans people from single-sex competitions (13.73).Â
A womenâs only sports competition must exclude trans women because of their biological advantage or face potential lawsuits (13.74), but a trans man who has undergone testosterone treatment can also be excluded based on fairness rules (13.81).
Trans women are stripped of the legal definition of âlesbianâ, and therefore no longer have legal protections if theyâre discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation. (2.50, 2.92).
Here is the Good Law Project's better explanation of the EHRC Code.
I have also made a PDF printout of QR codes for the government petition, email your MP tool, and mass lobby link to pass around your communities. DM me and I'll send it to you.
It's also important for us cis allies to show up and support our trans community members, so think about joining this if you're able no matter your gender identity.
I'm not going to be able to go, but I do have some experience with lobbying my various MPs over the years, so here's some quick advice off the top of my head:
If you're resident in the UK but not a citizen you still have the right to go to Parliament and be seen by your MP.
If you don't know who your MP is you can look it up by putting your postcode into the Find My MP page on Parliament's website (pro tip if you are a uni student, check your MP for both your family home and your uni, one may be a better option for lobbying than the other, you may even be able to Green Card both of them, but I don't know if that's possible, ask on the desk when you ask for the card).
And everyone needs to remember that while officially you're not required to show photo ID to get into Parliament the official guidance from the House of Commons is "you don't need photo ID to get in but we suggest you bring it anyway" (which is just unhelpful)
You will also be required to pass through airport style security which obviously may be a stressful experience for some of the people taking part in the mass lobby. That can take anywhere up to half an hour, the staff are usually pretty nice, but the entry into the security check is a sloped metal ramp with zero shade and nowhere to lean or sit so plan accordingly.
If your MP is not in the building to come and meet you they are required to respond to your Green Card as soon as possible via the contact details you put on your Green Card. While meeting them in person is the ideal you will get a response so it will be worth it even if your MP is unavailable.
Have a safe, productive lobby! Proud of all of you who can go and support the cause.
Israel's attacks have been relentless since the eve of Eid al-Adha on Tuesday, May 26. Just yesterday the head of anesthesia at Al-Yafa Medical Hospital was killed in an attack that injured three others. Over 50% of hospitals in Gaza are nonfunctional. Even when Palestinians survive attacks, treatment is limited and medical bills are expensive.
This targeting of healthcare workers and infrastructure is the reason my friend Fadel needs to raise funds for medical evacuation to a hospital outside of Gaza to surgically remove shrapnel that embedded in his body during the Israeli airstrike that destroyed his home while he was inside.
Fadel (@fadel-dani) is currently struggling to afford his hospital bills. He is being treated for severe anemia and malnutrition as a result of long term food insecurity and being unable to afford his monthly medication to treat his blood disorder. He suffers from frequent fainting and collapses unconscious, leaving his family terrified that he has died from starvation. Please help him.
My friends ,You are our last hope. If you leave us now, we will not survive. Please stand by us before it is too late, Please don't ignore what we're going through.
Please don't stop, please don't stop. Your Help help me a lot. The medication is very expensive, and my condition is very serious. Please stand by me now now, please.
medical abuse opinions you can have are "that doesn't happen" "that doesn't happen" "that happens sometimes but definitely only to people who deserve it and they're not real people anyway so it's ok" "that doesn't happen" "that maybe happened in the past but its funny" "that happened in the past but it was empowering somehow" "that doesn't happen"
the thing is that if you look directly AT various forms of medical abuse it becomes so fucking instantly clear that the forms happening today (forced antipsychotic medication, involuntary institutionalization, involuntary sedation, electroshock, etc etc) all have the same goal that things like lobotomy did: to make someone more convenient to their caretakers. like. that and making money for drug corporations. i was put on multiple medications it was absolutely not appropriate to put a child on when I was institutionalized as a child. there's procedures and meds that they know parents/guardians and insurance companies won't refuse to pay for if their kid or family or whatever is institutionalized and the doctors get kickbacks from the corps to mass prescribe these to institutionalized people bc we're basically like farm animals to them. a captive population to experiment on and charge us money for the pleasure of doing so. this isn't a conspiracy theory, there have been infinite class action lawsuits about these cases. which drug corps work into their budgeting by setting aside Settlement Money bc they know that's cheaper than not illegally giving doctors kickbacks to overprescibe their drugs to vulnerable people. this is public information. it is happening now and it has happened to many, MANY people who are alive today and a lot of them are your own age and you probably interact with them in your daily life without knowing it.
"the kind of person who would be lobotomized" still exists and is still inconvenient to patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. they're still abusing us. stop ignoring us. STOP IGNORING US
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
I rarely bring this up because it feels like fairly silly and low-stakes compared to all the other effects of american imperialism, but one of the funniest things when Americans deny that living in the imperial core and the center of global cultural hegemony confers them any sort of privilege over people from the imperial periphery is that like. In order for this conversation where you tell me you have no privilege over me to even be able to take place one of us had to learn the other's language, and it wasn't you.
I think the fact that by default the onus of learning the other's language to enable communication is always put on the other side is a pretty significant privilege on the cultural front.
Someone commented this post with "So if I learned, say, Hawaiian and talked to a hawaiian person, then the hawaiian would be privileged? Come on, think about what you're writing, man" and then blocked me as soon as I tried to reply, so.
Monolingual anglophones are a deeply solipsistic people unable to think about international power dynamics on any level beyond the individual to comprehend that "one guy making the individual choice to learn your language" does not represent the same level of linguistic hegemony and privilege as "millions of people all over the world learning specifically your language because they're expected to be able to speak it as a near-universal requirement for any kind of upward mobility while learning a second language is never expected of you"
This is still very much a work in progress. Iâve already written over a thousand words of lore for it, and I was originally planning to wait until I had more drawings finished before posting anything⌠but I seriously couldnât hold it in anymore, so I pulled together nine images and decided to post them first.
This batch is mostly about the base character designs + a little bit of the fusion.
(And honestly, canon already gave us a fusion form, so if I didnât use that as inspiration, Iâd feel like I was wasting Dan Moraâs absolutely gorgeous design.)
Basic gem assignments:
Bruce/Bat â Black Star Diopside
Clark/Supes â Moissanite
Fusion â Rainbow Lattice Sunstone
Based on the original SU worldbuilding, Bat and Supes and their little crew are one Crystal Gem squad active during the war on earth. More DC gems will be tagged under #justice gems later on.
The backstory is still under polishing and Iâll post more of it later. In the meantime, my ask box is open, if youâre curious about their lore or backstories, feel free to ask!
"Why there isn't more trans men in history, contributing to queer advancements?" damn I wonder why people who were previously women that were forced into marriages and into being property either of their fathers or husbands would have a hard time coming out as a trans man. Truly a mystery. Oh wait you're also telling me people that lived their whole lives as men but were outed after they died are actually lesbians that did that to scape sexism? That's so cool. What more are you wrong about.
It's like people forget that a lack of women's rights directly contributed to the majority of trans men being closeted or literally having 0 ability to be themselves.
It's almost like women's rights issues impact everyone.
It's almost like misogyny doesn't stop targeting trans men just because they come out and/or identify as men
The historic trans men we do have clear documentation of, either are STILL having their identities erased, or the history of those who weren't erased is shoved to the sidelines.
And to be fair, It *is* understandable that historically, trans women existing was a big deal. It was showing people that "wow men would throw their rights away??". It's much harder to ignore than someone who's just seen as a "crazy woman" aka hysterical.
But we should do our best to highlight the history we do have, trans men existing and being themselves is just as important as the trans people who advocated back in the day. Existing as yourself is always an achievement.
Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???
for real though, those DO NOT WATCH OR YOU'LL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN lists put out by conservative christian family groups is where I find all the stellar tv shows. Like, shit I didn't know half of those existed, thanks for finding them for me, gonna go watch 30 hours of gay tv now!
For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.
So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?
Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?
Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.
Same as the journalists describing Black Rock City as all naked. Same as the right-wing religious culture warriors describing television as entirely mixed-race and gender non-conforming. Not because it's even vaguely true, we know that, but because they haven't gotten over their discomfort over the last one by the time the next one comes along. The anger, not the stimulus, is the part that's continuous, so their mind lies to them that it's "all" the thing they can't get over.
Similar effect for the presence/proportion of women in things, by the way: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/how-17-equals-496-the-amazing-multiplying-women.htm
Why is it that every time I google something like "Are olives poisonous to cats" the top results are always like "Fun fact: Cats are carnivores! This means that they eat meat. There is no reason to include olives in a cat's diet. You should feed your cat cat food, which is dry or wet food especially designed for cats. You can purchase this at a store." like is there a single person alive on the planet who's googled "Are blueberry muffins safe for cats" because they're planning on switching their cat to a muffin-only diet??? No, I'm asking because the little bastard somehow popped open the packet while I was putting away the groceries and dragged one under the couch before I could react and now I need to know if I should call the after-hours vet. "Cats should not eat spaghetti." NO SHIT, SHERLOCK!!!! "Try to keep human food away from cats." i live in a studio apartment with a completely silent and permanently hungry apex predator who has the intelligence of a toddler and the desperate Machiavellian cunning of a creature who spent his formative months on the streets. He can already open doors and he is this đ close to learning how to open the microwave. He is stronger than me and covered in knives. So im gonna do my best but for the moment i just need you to tell me whether this yoghurt is going to kill my son y/n
I've been using the pet poison hotline's poison list cause it has a search function. It also tells you whether something is mildly, moderately, or severely toxic which can be very handy! It doesn't contain like everything but it might be a good place to start, it also includes plants for fellow houseplant lovers <3
Explore Pet Poison HelplineÂŽs vast knowledge on poisons by reviewing our pet poison list. Explore our top 10 poison and holiday poison lists
For plants specifically, thereâs also a wildly detailed set of posts and listings about toxicity on the old, wonderful, Plants Are the Strangest People blog
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
weird little brain tweak/reframing that helped me out. i Often find that advice that seemingly helps Everyone Else doesnât make any sense to me, in ways that are hard to describe, and it can be really frustrating. but when i find a way to explain it to myself that finally seems to break through and make it click, it feels really good
At my last company, one day someone in accounting approached me at lunch and quietly told me I need to ask for a raise because I was way underpaid.
They gave me a number to shoot for. Â It was about twice than what I had been making at the time.
So I went online, did some research, found some figures backing up my claim, put it all together and went to my boss.
I got what I asked for.
If it hadnât been for that person in accounting telling me I was way underpaid, Iâd have never known. Â I went from barely scraping by to being able to have a savings account and getting all my debts paid thanks to them.
You should at least check sites like salary.com to start the process of seeing what you should be making.
