TiggyMalvern

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. Wikipedia’s 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.

"You hold more leverage than a cancellation could ever give you, and it works in the opposite direction. A donation that disappears is invisible. It shows up as one anonymous line in a spreadsheet, gets blamed on the economy or a bad fundraising email, and teaches the institution nothing.

"A donor who speaks up is much harder to wave off, because donors are handed a door that the Foundation’s own staff and volunteers aren’t. You should walk through that door instead of slipping out the back.

"In practice, that means writing to the Board of Trustees, whose job is to hold leadership to account, and telling them in your own words that your support has always been a matter of trust, and that trust depends on how an institution treats the people who build it.

"Democrats and Republicans in Congress have struck a deal on a bill they say will help keep children and teens safe online. The KIDS Act could pass on the House floor as soon as next week; if enacted, it would fundamentally change the way everyone — not just kids — accesses the internet.

At stake is your ability to use many social media platforms without revealing your identity. 

That’s because the KIDS Act at least strongly incentivizes — and, for some services, outright requires — age verification. Many platforms will turn to age verification to avoid potential liability under the law. Companies like X, video-sharing services like Vimeo, and others with a history of users’ populating social feeds with edgy content may be required to verify users’ ages because they host a certain amount of content deemed “sexual material harmful to minors,” a term that the KIDS Act defines broadly. 

That’s a big problem for people who need to be able to use the internet anonymously, since, as Taylor Lorenz has previously written about in The Intercept, “there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are.” 

Threats to online anonymity harm everyone, but one group is often overlooked: journalists and the sources who talk to them. Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources. [...]

People killed: around three quarters of a million.

* I’m drinking one right now!

* I drank one today

* I drank one within the last few days

* I drank one this week

* I drank one within the last few weeks

* I drank one this month

* I drank one within the last few months

* I drank one this year

* it’s been a year or longer since I’ve had an alcoholic beverage

* I’ve never had an alcoholic beverage

* it’s complicated

* see results

Yes

No

Nuance

Results

A/N: I used to not be, but ever since we've gotten outside animals (quail/chickens/goats) I've become pretty nervous in strong rain because of the risk of things going wrong

Saw this on Reddit - so now we are hosting actual Nazi rallies??? Fuck, Indiana, get your shit together.

This is a spot from an italian estate agency (we are governed by the right-wing party)

The woman says "Ridiculous..."

The old lady is not in her home. She is at work. She's meant to be what in Italian is called "la portinaia", aka a cross between a doorwoman and cleaner of a residential building. She's in her small "office" space, at the entrance of the building, from where she can survey the coming and goings of the inhabitants. It's a job that has mostly disappeared, but is culturally very clear to us as having the connotation of "potentially gossipy, one-million-percent judgmental woman who sees everything that goes on in the apartment complex, knows everyone and their secrets, and has Strong Opinions™️".

>looks inside

THE Ladder Scene is done 😏