Bootlickers don't interact ++ no gods no masters ++ 30s · intersex gnc woman · she/her · tme dyke · white · neurodivergent ++ my stance on most LGBTQ+ discourse is "mind your own business about other people's labels"
a whole bunch of gazan mutual aid projects and nonprofits. if the decision of which individual fundraiser to give to feels too daunting, or if you just want to help as many people as possible in one go, these are great initiatives to support.
care for gaza - focuses on providing food and essential supplies. donate here or here.
connecting humanity - securing internet access via donations of virtual sim cards (esims). if you can't afford a whole plan yourself, crips for esims is a communal pool that will use your donation to purchase and maintain esims
gaza soup kitchen - provides food, medical care, and classes for children. also has a gofundme
glia gaza medical support initiative - provides medical care through field clinics and tents at hospitals. donations can also be sent through their website.
ele elna elak - provides clean water, food, clothing, and shelter. they also have a gofundme
life for gaza - raising money for the gaza municipality to repair water and waste management infrastructure
taawon - partners with local civil organizations to provide food, water, medical care, shelter, and basic supplies
the sameer project - running various initiatives providing tents, medical care, and necessities. they have their own encampment project focused on sheltering families with children, sick and disabled members, or members in need of perinatal care
islamic relief worldwide's gaza emergency appeal - provides food, water, hygiene kits, medical supplies, and psychological support
baitulmaal - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, shelter, and medical supplies
gaza mutual aid fund - distributes food, hygiene products, water, and other essential supplies, including financial support. run by @/el-shab-hussein's amazing friend Mona. updates can be found on her instagram.
hygiene kits for gaza - provides hygiene supplies including menstrual products, wipes, and toothbrushes/toothpaste
anera - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, hygiene supplies, medicine, blankets and mattresses, and psychological care
palestine children's relief fund - provides supplies and support with a focus on children. also has an initiative for lebanon
dahnoun mutual aid - provides water, food, tents, baby supplies, financial support, and other necessities. updates can be found through their instagram
certainly this is not an exhaustive list, so please feel free to add on other projects or organizations that i didn't include. and as always, please take the time to donate if you can and share. it truly makes all the difference.
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I'm gonna be honest 'cowboys were a sort of itinerant warrior class common in meiji-era texas' always annoys me a bit because it's a funny post but also No They Weren't. They were an itinerant pastoralist class common in Meiji-era Texas. And indeed the wider western region of post-Risorgimento America
[ID: Photos of a relief sculpture of a leaping horse, inspired by the palaeolithic cave paintings of Lascaux. The horse starts as a painting at the rear and is completely three-dimensional from the shoulders, so it appears to be emerging from the block of clay. Following behind the horse and wrapping around the back of the block is a painting of another horse. Each photo shows a different angle. End ID.]
First block horse of 2025.
Will be available on my Etsy shop Sunday 11th May 7PM GMT.
eredhes.etsy.com
I keep getting in trouble for referring to my spouse as 'my woman.' That's who she is to me--wanch ngatharam, and I'm pam nungantam, her man. Apparently that bit of paleo-misogyny loses something in translation for the metro middle-class people I'm attempting to mingle with lately, so I've had to alter my language and start saying 'my spouse.' The problem lies in the cultural baggage that comes with the possessive form in English grammar, and with the language of property law.
In our Aboriginal communities, when people first meet you they will often ask, 'Who own you?' This doesn't signify a property relation--it is all about what groups, pairs and lands you belong to in your relationships, which are governed collectively. Belonging and ownership means something completely different from possession in our world. It means being in relation to family and community and place. Your belongings are not your property, but your connections. This worldview is not very compatible with the political economies, legal systems and marketplaces we must interact with to survive.
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The stupidest imaginable excuses for surveillance pricing
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:
With "surveillance pricing," businesses have finally found something AI can do way, way, way better than people: price gouging.
As the name suggests, "surveillance pricing" is the practice of charging every customer a different price for every transaction, based on the massive surveillance dossiers that Big Tech companies and data-brokers have assembled on everyone in the world. Congress hasn't updated federal consumer privacy law since 1988 (when they passed a law banning the disclosure of VHS rentals), so pretty much any form of consumer surveillance is fair game.
This is where the AI comes in. One thing AI is indisputably great for is multivariate statistical analysis. You can feed an AI "behavioral data" (information about where you go, what you do, what you buy, who you talk to and what you say) about all of your customers and ask it to cluster them according to their shared traits. Then you can direct the AI to automatically run a series of small experiments to discover the maximum markup each group will stomach under which circumstances.
This works without you having to direct the AI to rip off certain groups of people – it will simply find the most vulnerable people and rip them off the most. If you're hiring in an industry that practices a lot of tacit racial discrimination, a system like this can figure out on its own that people of color typically accept lower wages because there are fewer employers bidding for their labor, and recommend lowball salary offers, all without you ever typing "please be racist" into your AI prompt.
This works so well that Google has announced that it is their plan for making a profit off of AI, after losing hundreds of billions of dollars on chatbots:
In the before times, marketers and demographers had to dream up demographic categories based on limited data and run focus groups to figure out how to maximize revenue from each market segment. Now an AI can segment the data to any degree you choose, and continuously, automatically experiment on each segment to find their weak spots.
It's "theory-free." You don't have to discover why a group is willing to pay more under a given set of circumstances, you merely have to observe and weaponize this fact. You don't have to know why one group of purchasers consistently accept higher prices between 6AM and 8AM – you can just automatically jack up prices on them without knowing or caring that you're gouging parents of young children who are re-ordering essential supplies while trying to get their kids to school in the morning.
I thought up that example. I don't know if it's really happening. But here's something that really is happening: ecommerce sites charge parents of newborns extra when they order thermometers in the middle of the night. I'm not saying that anyone ever sat down and said, "Parents with sick children will pay whatever we charge for a thermometer at 2AM." They didn't have to: this is the kind of thing an automated system can do without any human intervention:
The goal of surveillance pricing is to shift all the "consumer surplus" (the difference between the highest price you're willing to pay and the price you actually pay) to companies. It's a form of cod-Marxism where you are gouged according to your ability (to pay) and charged according to the desperation of your need:
The problems of surveillance pricing are well documented. Under Biden, the FTC did a landmark study on the practice, developing a rich factual record that documents the role surveillance pricing plays in the affordability crisis:
Companies are already using this technology to rip you off, and they're slavering for the chance to do more of it. Instacart was recently caught marking up some shoppers' items by as much as a third:
The problem is that as much as companies love this, shoppers hate it. Last summer, Delta announced that it was going to surveillance price every seat on every flight, only to face such a massive backlash that they had to make another announcement bemoaning the fact that we'd all misunderstood their (unambiguous and extremely damning) announcement and they were actually going to do no such thing:
One thing the Mamdani campaign impressed upon every politician in the country is that people are pissed about affordability and they will support anyone who stands up for the public against AI-equipped price gougers. The problem of course is that those price gougers are highly organized and have deep treasuries (stuffed with money they stole from us). With surveillance pricing, politicians face a familiar conundrum: if they do the thing that's popular with voters, they'll enrage donors.
One way to cut this knot is to enact legislation that seems to address the problem, but stuff it with so many loopholes that it does nothing. This lets you declare yourself the people's champion without doing anything to protect them from the donors who prey on your voters. That's the approach they took in Maryland:
But in California, they're actually doing something about surveillance pricing. AB-2564 is a smart, well-written bill that bans surveillance pricing. It contains an easily evaluated test for surveillance pricing and carves out legitimate reasons for offering different prices for the same purchase (for example, when it costs more to deliver the product or service):
Now we're in for the hard yards of turning this bill into a law. That's where California's cities come in. When municipal governments pass resolutions supporting a state bill, it makes it much easier to get that bill through the state legislature (and conversely, without support from major cities, it's that much easier to kill the bill before it becomes law).
A few days ago, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was on the verge of passing a resolution in support of AB-2564. Now, that vote is stalled, thanks to a letter sent by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, an organization that has been pissing in San Franciscans' faces and telling them it was raining since 1850:
The Chamber's letter is – to use a technical term – flaming garbage. It raises the most spurious objections imaginable, claims about the bill's language that are belied by its plain, easily understood text. These objections are demolished in a letter the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent to the Supervisors:
In the letter, EFF explains that claims that surveillance pricing will lower prices are overblown and not borne out by evidence. But more importantly – as EFF points out – privacy is a human right, and the idea that you should have to give up your privacy to get a fair price is just a fancy way of saying that privacy should be the exclusive preserve of people who can afford to pay more:
EFF's letter goes on to address the Chamber's objections. Far from creating uncertainty about which conduct the bill addresses, AB-2564 crisply defines surveillance pricing as:
a customized price for a good for a specific consumer or group of consumers based, in whole or in part, on personally identifiable information collected through electronic surveillance.
The Chamber raises other tired objections, falsely claiming that banning surveillance pricing will end common discounting strategies like offering seniors cheaper movie tickets, or giving cheaper rates to retain customers who call to cancel their service. EFF replies by pointing out that all the Chamber's concerns are covered by the three comprehensive carve-outs in the bill: the ability to charge higher rates when it costs more to service a given customer; offering discounts to retain customers who want to cancel their service; and finally, discounts for criteria anyone can meet (like an "early bird special"), for membership in a broadly defined group (like "seniors"), or for participation in a loyalty program.
The San Francisco Supervisors could have figured out at a glance that the Chamber was bullshitting them. All it takes is a cursory read of the statute. But now they don't even have to do that: EFF has painstakingly debullshittified the Chamber's FUD.
Surveillance pricing is grossly offensive. When a company charges me $0.50 for a product that it charges you $1 for, they're essentially saying that your dollars are worth half as much as mine are. Companies shouldn't be able to reach into your wallet or your bank account and chop your money in half:
Oh look, yet another reason to hate that "scan to see menu" thing - changing prices on an online menu at any given moment is fairly trivial. And if you think this "service" isn't being pushed hard on places that use those menu systems by the providers of said systems, you haven't been paying attention.
Don’t overlook paternity leave because it’s a hugely important feminist issue
Celebrating fatherhood with official paternity leave policies challenges traditional gender roles and empowers parents in the workplace. It’s one of those rare issues where men’s rights activists and feminists can find common ground with a mutually beneficial cause. It even has an impact on LGBTQ equality.
I’ve reblogged a lot of posts today about why paid paternity leave (or just in general all parents regardless of gender being entitled to the same amount of paid parental leave) is such an important social issue, and these posts have made a lot of great points about why gender equality in parental leave is such a massively important issue for equality, such as:
- It’s important for LGBT+ parents who don’t fit the cis-hetero mold of one mother and one father.
- It’s an important feminist issue for reducing the second shift: when only one parent gets adequate parental leave, it’s only natural for a pattern to develop that the only parent who got adequate parental leave takes on the lion’s share of childcare. However, if both parents get adequate parental leave, then it’s more likely for a pattern to develop of sharing childcare duties. This is obviously massively important for reducing how much women’s careers are affected by having children.
- If the mother has post-partum health issues (anything from recovering from a C-section or other physical traumas, to post-partum depression and/or anxiety) it’s incredibly unfair to expect her partner to just go back to work immediately instead of allowing her partner to stay home and help with childcare duties. When someone is recovering from having a baby, it can be really important for their partner to stay home to help care for them and the baby.
However, one important point I haven’t seen brought up in why equal paid parental is so important for social equality is how important it is for reducing hiring discrimination.
By that I mean, when a country has *only* guaranteed maternity leave, but either no paternity leave (or really short paternity leave of a few weeks like the U.K. has), this is only going to raise the risk of hiring discrimination against women.
So if a company is choosing between two candidates for a position: one is a young woman and the other is a young man, if the country this company is in has a maternity leave policy of several months or more, but paternity leave is either just a few weeks (or completely non-existent), the company will look at the woman as riskier and less reliable to hire than the man.
So equal paid parental leave leads to more equality in the job market, because it means companies are less likely to see women as riskier and less reliable to hire. If everyone, not just women, has the same length of parental leave, everyone runs the same risk of needing to go on leave for the same amount of time.
There’s no reason not to demand that all parents regardless of gender receive equal paid parental leave. All parents and all children benefit from it.
also important is making taking parental leave mandatory for both sexes. when parental leave is left up to the discretion of individual workers, you see the same sexist patterns emerge: men don’t take it and women do, and so you’re back to where you started with women being “risky” and men being “safe.” making it mandatory for both parents relieves the social pressure for one parent to work while the other cares, and lets both parents spread out the time off longer. better for the kid AND better for both parents. men, it turns out, want to parent, particularly with a baby, but there’s a lot of unspoken pressure to focus on work instead.
Iceland actually has a paid parental leave specifically for the purpose of preventing that, because we’ve seen in so many other countries that even when fathers are offered parental leave they often don’t take it, so Iceland set up a parental leave policy that basically forces both parents to take near equal amounts of leave.
Currently, both parents get seven months each of paid parental leave, and there’s an extra two months they can divide between themselves any way they please (both two months go to one parent, each parent gets one extra month each, etc.) however, they are only allowed to receive those extra two months if both parents use their full seven months. If one parent says “I don’t want to take parental leave / I don’t want to use my full seven months” then those two months are gone and can’t be used.
That way fathers can’t skip out on paternity leave without there being a penalty.
They’ve done surveys on the results of this parental leave policy, and children born after this parental leave policy was put into place rate having a better relationship with their dad than children born before it was put into place, and studies have also shown it has diminished the “second shift”. In other news, it’s worked.
People in the notes arguing that this is about individual comfort and misgendering are missing a major piece of the puzzle, which is that programs made for mothers and pregnant women often by definition exclude anyone whose gender marker is not F on every form they’ve ever filled out.
Insurance agencies use M markers to deny coverage for pregnancy related healthcare. Doctors offices hang up on pregnant people trying to schedule pre- and post-natal appointments for themselves because their voices or their names aren’t feminine enough. And if they manage to make the appointment, they can get harassed out of the waiting rooms or face medical malpractice behind closed doors.
Charities and benefits made for pregnant or new mothers don’t accept pregnant/new fathers or non-gendered parents. The WIC fund is called women, infants, and children.
If we degender pregnancy and childbirth (and periods while we’re at it) we open up support for every trans and intersex person who needs it. We normalize pregnant people of other genders and sexes, leaving less room for harassment and malpractice and more accountability for those who decide to be assholes anyway.
It’s not a-fucking-bout comfort. It’s about safety and survival. This can literally be the difference between life and death for some people.
Even if you manage to find a supportive healthcare team, this shit is unavoidable. When I gave birth, the hospital software couldn't monitor labor (including monitoring vitals for parent and baby) for patients with an M marker. They called tech support for the company that makes it and were told that there was no way to do it. They had to monitor my multi-day labor on a Jane Doe profile, completely disconnected from all of my health info.
Totally normal for a legitimate for-profit company to refuse to reclaim or stop running their products even after they're no longer being paid to do so. I'm sure it's very normal to just keep running your service for free when your contract's been terminated. Spending money to continue running cameras that supposedly no one is looking at is definitely not an indicator they are just run by the federal government to spy on everyone and only a wacko conspiracy theorist would think so.
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i feel like "feminist" anti-kink sentiment is very tail-wagging-the-dog. like male doms playing out bdsm scenes of abuse are not oppressing their female subs that's acting. you're mad at acting. you're those aliens from galaxy quest. same with fearmongering about "booktok". however an eroticized version of patriarchal dynamics being a popular kink DOES speak to the pervasiveness of sexism, bc eroticizing the oppression is a way of coping with living under it. it's women creating a fantasy world where men being menacing to them is sexy and not scary like it is irl, or where it is still scary but in the fun way like a horror movie bc you can tap out at any time by using a safe word or putting the book down. acting like this sort of kink is oppressing women is like if you assumed the thermometer controlled the weather outside. it might be depressing to look at the thermometer and see the impact of climate change, but it's not the thermometer's fault
new overwatch trailer prominently features hamster terrorist disregarding orders and his own safety to slaughter as many civilians as possible before being captured
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