cry me a conundrum

a small price to pay for Snail Table, in my opinion

a bunch of archives of incredibly important government datasets like maternal mortality statistics are about to be deleted forever. in a regime where they're known to fudge numbers, we can't trust a lot of the data coming from them to not be altered. open source backups like those found on data.world are vital to being able to verify that the data coming from our government is still intact and not altered. and they're about to delete all of it.

i don't know if we need to start a petition or what. nobody seems to fucking care. there are millions of users on data.world and yet nobody is raising the alarm bells and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. somebody needs to do something. i don't know what to do. it feels like more and more of this world is being destroyed and dismantled. it's not only US centric data, either! it's all sorts of countries from around the world! and they're about to fucking delete everything.

the only things that won't be deleted are private companies who happen to use the paid version of their platform (which isn't accessible data to the open source community; some people have just been using their service to host their own data on privately)

and the kicker? this announcement was made... via an AI generated blog post. so not even any sort of human touch. just a generic, soulless announcement made by a soulless human about to take a wrecking ball to one of the more important websites that exists on the internet.

an example of some of the things that will be deleted on July 11th:

https://www.re3data.org

There are over 3500 respectable data repositories on one respectable global registry; to a researcher there’s no point in data existing if not findable; if you’re trying to find a new home for your dataset, start there

235 pts · ★ pangram · no hints

🟨🟩🟨

🥞⭐🟨

- it’s fun to be awake & in an upright position

- consciousness is a gift

If someone were, as a random example, say hospitalized for over two weeks with no explanation, I think that should automatically trigger a special election to replace them.

If you're still able to do your job, then prove it. And if you're not, then you're actively obstructing democracy by not stepping down.

Which is to say, that if a public official were to pass away or into a coma, and their handlers choose to obfuscate that fact, this should be seen as intentionally obstructing democracy.

I then ask, "what would it be like if you could simply give us feedback, have us graciously receive it, reflect, and work to change the behavior?" Recently, a man of color sighed and said "it would be revolutionary."

I ask my fellow whites to consider the profundity of that response. It would be revolutionary if we could receive, reflect and work to change the behavior. On the one hand, the man's response points to how difficult and fragile we are. But on the other hand, it indicates how simple it can be to take responsibility for our racism."