Real-life Shadowrun character. Game content writer. Socialist menace. Aro, demi/bi, genderqueer (they/them).
GFFA Meta Rants, @styled4hire on Bluesky, ShaeTiann on AO3 Buy Me a Coffee
I'm inq, aka Shae, aka Eli (they/them). I'm queer, trying to survive as an ND in an NT world, and have some pretty strong progressive political opinions which are unlikely to change. I'm a stylist at a salon in Chicago. I still write content for video games, fanfic for fun, occasionally do art.
Please do not message me asking me to share your posts. I reblog fundraisers that have already been vetted by people I trust. Anyone who clearly has not read this will be presumed to be a spam bot or a scam.
TERFs will be blocked on sight.
In the off-chance the site implodes itself, here's where else I can be found:
Twitch: chanai_k (I don't have any content there right now but I've been considering streaming gameplay or art)
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anyway remember when the US government commissioned a study on dangers of pornography and when the commission returned with a report saying it doesnât pose a danger and recommending removing restrictions the US government denounced its own study
President Donald Trumpâs supporters actively oppose democracy, according to a recent ethnographic study, and actively want to make things wo
Last quoted a number of study participants who bluntly stated that they feared democracy would mean people they dislike â generally defined as racially diverse liberals who do not subscribe to the ideals of white conservative Christians â would exist with full rights.
. . .
Last added that these voters âvery explicitly do not want majority rule. They want minority rule.â The study found that they viewed Democrats as immoral because of issues like supporting racial diversity, backing LGBTQ rights, believing in feminism and opposing the imposition of Christianity on society.
More at the link.
---
This is exactly what I've said for years. They would rather hurt the people they hate than help their own children.
Something to keep in mindâĻ. building muscle is so hard people compete to see who can do it best. If youâre a woman worried about âgetting bulkyâ, i promise you that you cannot achieve that physique by accident. Now go lift weights to increase your bone density & protect yourself from osteoporosis and improve your insulin resistence and eat a fiber + protein dense meal with some carbs to refuel and fat for satiety + energy đĢĩ
trans women this goes double for you especially the part about eating đĢĩ you are not immune to your bones becoming tapioca in your old age pick up the weights and the fork sister weâre all gonna build our new bodies if i have anything to say about it
Iâm on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaurâs Guide to Life After AI. Catch me TONIGHT (Jun 25) in PHILLY and TOMORROW (Jun 26) in CHICAGO.
It's not often that someone on a panel says something that makes my jaw drop, but that's what happened earlier this week when the moderator of a panel I was on in Toronto described jailbreaking an iPhone as "rampant theft of IP."
Some context: the panel was in Toronto, and the nominal subject was "digital sovereignty," though all the panelists (except me) interpreted that to mean "sovereign AI." All of their interventions were focused on how Canada could build and operate its own AI, which I found very weird, since there is no AI-related threat to Canadian sovereignty. If Donald Trump ordered OpenAI and Anthropic to turn off all of Canada's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change: every firm, ministry and household would operate as per normal:
Now, that's not to say that Canada doesn't have a digital sovereignty problem â it really does! Donald Trump and US Big Tech have fused into a single entity and Trump now orders US tech giants to terminate the online accounts of foreign officials who displease him. When Microsoft turns off your Office365 account, you lose your working files, your calendar, your address book, your email archives, and the Outlook email address you use to log in to every online service:
So while turning off Canada's chatbots would not inflict any real harm on Canada, M365 terminations could paralyse any federal or provincial ministry, any structurally important firm, and most Canadian households.
The threat doesn't stop there: Trump can also order Apple and Google to brick any of Canada's iPhones or Android devices â terminating individual officials' mobile access, or terminating whole provinces. It's not just iPhones either â Trump can also brick any tractor in Canada:
This is the real digital sovereignty risk, and Canada needs to address it now. But Canada can't â our hands are tiedâĻby us. In 2012, we passed a law, The Copyright Modernization Act, that criminalizes "jailbreaking," meaning that Canadian companies can't go into business figuring out how to install different app stores on phones and consoles, or change the firmware in tractors to enable independent repair, or reliably export their cloud data to rival Canadian services:
Why did we pass this law? Because the Americans promised us free trade and no tariffs on our exports if we agreed to it. That's a promise Trump tore up, but we're still holding up our end of the bargain. That's crazy. It means that American companies can use Canada's courts to destroy Canadian businesses that offer the Canadian people tools to help them escape Big Tech's sleazy ripoffs of their data and cash.
And boy do those US tech companies take in a lot of cash. The US ad-tech duopoly of Google/Meta rig the advertising market, taking 51% out of every ad dollar through an illegal, collusive arrangement called "Jedi Blue":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
The US mobile tech duopoly takes 30 cents out of every dollar spent via an app, by forcing every app vendor to use their payment processors, which charge 1,000% more than any other payment processor in Canada. That means that every time a subscriber to a Canadian news site signs up through an app, 30% of the lifetime subscription revenue for that Canadian subscriber is funneled to one of two California companies.
The corollary, of course, is that if Canadian businesses were free to compete with US companies â if Canada stopped foolishly holding up its end of the bargain that Trump has dishonoured â then it would be as though every Canadian news outlet increased its subscriber base by 25% overnight! What's more, the Canadian companies that sell those jailbreaking tools would make billions out of US Big Tech's billions.
And that's where the moderator of this week's panel comes in. When I finished making this pitch, they turned to the rest of the panel and said something like, "Well, apart from rampant theft of IP, what else could Canada do to secure its digital sovereignty?"
That's when my jaw dropped. Making it possible for, say, a Canadian company to sell its own Canadian game to a Canadian customer, in Canada, without giving Apple or Xbox 30% of the purchase price, is not "theft of IP." It's not "theft of IP" for a rightsholder to sell their own products to their customers. It's not "theft of IP" for a Canadian owner of a device to decide for themselves which software they want to run on it. If buying software from the company that made it and installing it on a device you own is "theft of IP," then so is putting non-Nike shoelaces in your Air Jordans.
It's not "theft of IP." It's just good business. Moreover, it's the kind of good business that created America's tech giants in the first place. As Jeff Bezos tells his suppliers: "Your margin is my opportunity." US tech giants make whopping margins around the world, thanks to the anticircumvention laws that the US Trade Rep crammed down every US trading partner's throats, laws that allow US companies to use other countries' legal system to destroy their competitors.
I've been mulling this "rampant theft of IP" remark for a couple of days now, but it wasn't until a reader wrote to me to remind me about Apple's origin story that I realised what the punchline is. Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak financed their first product launch by selling "Blue Boxes" (devices that let you make free long distance calls by cheating the phone company) door to door in the UC Berkeley dorms:
Now, I'm not going to weep for the lost revenues that Jobs and Woz denied to AT&T. After all, AT&T was stealing that money from its customers, which is why, just a few years later, a federal court convicted AT&T of monopolistic practices and broke the company up:
But the legal term for what a Blue Box does is "toll theft," which is to say, Apple â a company literally founded on theft â now makes the majority of its profits by convincing people that making a competing product is literally stealing. A company whose founders got their seed capital by marketing illegal circumvention devices now markets products designed to make it a crime for a rightsholder to sell their own work to you.
I've long said that "every pirate wants to be an admiral":
But this is just a little too on the nose. When Apple went into business selling products to rip off the phone company, that wasn't progress. When Canadians go into business selling devices that let iPhone owners use their own property to do legal things â like buying copyrighted works directly from their creators â that is not piracy.
Canada has a real digital sovereignty problem, and it's not AI. Canada will not mitigate its digital sovereignty risk by successfully launching a Made in Canada version of the money-losingest venture in the history of the human species:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/
Canada's real digital sovereignty problem is its reliance on the apps, cloud services and devices that are tethered to the American cloud, access to which Donald Trump could â and does â terminate whenever he feels grumpy. Trump has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada and turn us into "the 51st state." He's trying to steal Alberta right now. Our digital sovereignty risk is the risk of Trump paralysing our country in order to steal Alberta â or the entire shop.
We can address that digital sovereignty risk â and make billions at the same time â by legalising jailbreaking and becoming the world's "disenshittification nation." Unlike a program to build Canadian AI, this will make billions, not lose them â and unlike Canadian AI, this will make our country more resilient and safer, by delivering products that Canadians â and the world â want to buy and will pay us a fortune for.
Big Tech's margins are our opportunity.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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this is what I mean about how right now in the united states (won't speak for elsewhere but feel free to lmk in the notes if you'd like) a lot of us trans adults who are able to access transition care can only do so at the direct expense of trans minors. this clinic would not have opened if they held the line and offered equal access to healthcare to trans minors.
"Martin announced the direct-care clinic, calling it âone of the first times a public health department has ever taken that step.â But when CabÃĄn pushed back, pointing out that trans youth are the ones most under attack right nowânoting that there are âalmost no providersâ left for youth the entire cityâMartin indicated the clinic would not serve youth, citing the need to âstrike a balanceâ between providing care and avoiding âclawbacks from the federal government.â This morning, EITM can directly confirm that the age cutoff is 19âmatching the Trump administrationâs executive order threshold, not the standard legal age of adulthood in New York."
a lot of the structural transphobia we are experiencing is hitting minors even worse. their care gets banned first. if you want a preview of what access to healthcare will look like for us trans adults in 2 years, look at what access looks like for legal minors right now.
please have the compassion to show them solidarity now. do for them what you hope a cis person will do for us. like at the very least, talk about it.
And pay attention because every time a new state discusses banning trans care, they raise the age limit by a year - Texas GOP is discussing banning up to age 26 now. It's not just a foot in the door towards banning gender-affirming care care universally, it's a foot in the door to straight up removing people's human rights. If even adults can't have a say in their state of care and self-determination, what do children get?
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Pleased to report that after a day of this i am not longer craving caper brine and my mouth is not dry as usual. There's some good suggestions in the notes too that I want to try.
-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)
-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt
There's a heatwave happening in the Europe right now. 18 people have already died in France. I was looking into air conditioners for a friend of mine who lives in the UK, and I saw a shockingly low number of actual air conditioners on sale, and a shockingly high number of "Evaporative Coolers" on offer. They're also sometimes called "Swamp Coolers".
DO NOT BUY THESE DEVICES.
These types of coolers work by blowing air over cold water or ice, and while they can produce a slight, localized cooling effect, they also increase the humidity in the air. At 40C (104F), a 40% humidity will feel like 48C (119F). 50% humidity will feel like 55C (131F).
Evaporative/Swamp Coolers only work if it is really dry. Like desert dry. And even then it's only effective up into the 90s (my personal opinion). Any higher and it doesn't do much.
Discord is supposedly saying this is going to affect "only 10% of users", but I really don't believe them at all. It's always going to be way worse and affect more people than what they claim.
So in case anyone needs it:
After Discord announced plans to require age verification for all users, a free, HTML-based tool emerged that aims to bypass facial scans on
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Come to think of it, it really is insane that my entire country is burning alive and literally no one in the rest of the world cares. Thousands of Indians are dying every day from the heat, it's 45+ degrees in multiple areas, the government couldn't give two fucks, we're getting severe warnings and red alerts, and not a soul outside of South Asia is speaking about it because why would you ever care about brown people
As much as I understand and sympathize with your concerns, it's hard not to look at that entire list and not feel like it's being held up solely by Slippery Slope thinking. There's a lot of dangerous stuff going on in tech right now, but without some serious evidence the last thing anyone needs is fearmongering that makes it sound like lawmakers are so idiotic can't even, for example, ban CSAM without making it illegal to share ANY images online.
the last thing anyone needs is fearmongering that makes it sound like lawmakers are so idiotic can't even, for example, ban CSAM without making it illegal to share ANY images online.
I have extremely bad news for you about our lawmakers.
This is NOT a slippery slope argument, it is an argument with very clear precedents and lots of evidence of harm done. There isn't dangerous stuff going on in tech right now, there has been dangerous stuff going on in tech since "tech" has existed.
SESTA/FOSTA, passed by lawmakers to prevent human trafficking, is why it's so easy to get trans women on tumblr banned for posting 'mature content'. It has also made human trafficking worse, made sex work more dangerous, and sanitized the internet to the point that it's difficult to post photos of classical sculptures or instructions on how to perform a breast self-exam on most platforms.
The DMCA, passed by lawmakers to protect copyright holders online, is frequently used to censor criticism, cover up reporting on corporate malfeasance, and prevent buyers from having true ownership of digital purchases.
Lawmakers are CONSTANTLY attempting to use "But this would protect children/prevent the sharing of CSAM" to attack Section 230, a legal provision that prevents platforms from being held liable for the content they host. The proposed changes lawmakers idiotically present actually would drastically erode your ability to post ANY images online, would not make anyone safer, and would further consolidate the power held by platforms like Google and Meta while making it harder for smaller online platforms to exist.
The original sin of all of this (in the US at least) is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was passed in 1986 to regulate charges and sentences for computer-based crime and has been used since to prosecute security researchers and activists, and has been responsible for tremendously disproportionate sentences levied against people charged with computer-related crimes.
The people who write and pass laws about computers and the internet don't understand computers or the internet. The people who advocate for these kinds of laws either don't anticipate the second-order consequences or anticipated the consequences and wanted fallout like the sanitation of the internet or the criminalization of downloading journal articles.
I am not fearmongering, I am someone who has been aware of the disastrous outcomes of legislating the internet for decades pointing to the specific ways that the sorts of rules people are proposing have demonstrably been fucking people over forever.
I really really really want you to understand that any time someone says "there oughtta be a law" about regulating the internet you should immediately raise every possible red flag and investigate what they're proposing and what tech-literate people think about what they're proposing. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a wonderful resource for this, you should pay attention to the things they care about and advocate for because they are one of the best safeguards we have against dangerously uninformed legislation.
