Dreams Of An Octopus-Youth

are we drawing the connection between worker safety and consumer safety & public health yet?

More on the health point:

"US Department of Labor proposes more than $1M fine following worker fatality at New Jersey vegetable processing facility"

When he refused to leave the Nashville public park where he has lived for the past several years, Williams became one of a handful of homeless people in the country to be arrested and charged with a felony for camping on public property. Eleven states have passed homeless camping bans over the last four years, according to the National Homelessness Law Center. In the two years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cities can ban people from sleeping and camping in public, more than 300 municipalities have joined them. Supporters of these laws say they enable public officials to enforce rules that already exist and provide incentive for unhoused people to seek shelter. But opponents call the laws cruel and say that an arrest record only makes it harder for those experiencing homelessness to secure a job or a home. The maximum penalty for felony camping in Tennessee is six years in prison. Williams pled to a lesser charge and was released from jail after nine days. "The slickest thing was asking me if I knew what I was pleading to," Williams said. "I'm just trying to plead to get out of here." [...] Williams was one of two people arrested in the park on June 28 and charged under Tennessee's no-camping law — the only one in the country to make sleeping on public property a felony. Though the law was passed in 2022, advocates for the unhoused say they have never before seen it used like this. [...]

Homelessness in Nashville has been on the rise, according to the city's Homelessness Planning Council, which in December 2025 estimated that roughly 4,300 people experience homelessness in the city, an uptick of more than 30% in less than a year. Nationally, homelessness has dipped slightly after reaching record levels in 2024. But chronic homelessness has grown, according to 2025 data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD's most recent tally of chronically homeless people in the U.S. found more than 155,000. Camping bans differ from state to state — some enable the state to level penalties against cities that refuse to enforce the ban; others make it easier for law enforcement to involuntarily commit people experiencing homelessness — but the broad strokes are the same. No camping, or sleeping, on public property. Many state legislatorshave taken inspiration, or even borrowed legislative language, from the Cicero Institute, a conservative think tank founded by tech billionaire Joe Lonsdale. Lonsdale is a co-founder of Palantir, whose data mining software has been used by local and federal law enforcement, including the CIA and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). [...] Devon Kurtz, who oversees Cicero's homelessness and public safety policy efforts, has been a vocal critic of the longstanding program model known as Housing First, saying it is ineffective. Housing First, which has long been promoted by experts and homeless outreach workers, aims to get unhoused people into stable housing before attempting to address any other needs, such as mental illness and drug or alcohol addiction. [...]

"My hope is that no one is ever convicted under any of these camping bans," Kurtz said. "The intention is not to jail people. I've also said, however, that sometimes, at the margins, it is essential that law enforcement has the ability to jail them because it can save lives." Nashville's oldest homeless enclave, Old Tent City, was disbanded last year. The area along the Cumberland River where more than 100 people once lived is now encircled by fences and no-trespassing signs. Krinks said the encampment had been there since the 1980s. Krinks has seen more security cameras installed around public parks and benches ripped out of the ground in downtown Nashville. The no-camping felony, she said, only makes things more dire for the city's homeless community. "Punishing people and using police to address homelessness only makes the crisis worse, and it prolongs people's experience of homelessness," said Krinks, who also helped start the statewide coalition Housing for All Tennessee. "Most people I know experiencing homelessness are so hungry for freedom, for agency, for their dignity to be seen and recognized and understood. Jail erodes every aspect of a person's agency." If you ask Williams how long he's been living in the park, he'll say he doesn't think of it that way. It's not living, he says. It's a place he goes to stay because he doesn't feel like he has anywhere else. Williams has been offered a bed at a Nashville shelter. He's been approached by service providers over the years. But he doesn't trust those organizations, and doesn't want to leave the neighborhood he considers his own. Instead, he sleeps sprawled across the wooden picnic tables, heats his food up in the sun and does pullups on the monkey bars at the playground. But the park is not home. Home is the aging public housing complex just up the hill; that's where he grew up. Williams can see it from the picnic benches. No one lives there now. [...]

Last month, prosecutors charged Williams with two felony counts of camping and one misdemeanor charge of evading arrest. According to charging documents, Williams attempted to flee after police officers told him they had a warrant for his arrest. That's when he was tased. Alissa Heydari, a court-appointed attorney who represented Williams in the camping case, said the arrest "makes what is already a very difficult life situation for Mr. Williams harder and worse." Williams pled guilty to the misdemeanor charge and was sentenced to time served. Prosecutors dropped the two felony counts on the condition of his plea, Heydari said. He was released from custody on July 6, nine days after his arrest. As far as Cicero is concerned, this is the law working as it should.

They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.

Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.

You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.

This article specifically notes:

For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.

Other important quotes:

What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.

Two things back that up:

There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.

Collin Kennedy died in 2018, just two years after this video was taken. What would anonymity have achieved for him in those last two years? Avoiding punishment? His whole point was that these parking fees are already a punishment on the sick.

Is public protest dangerous? Sure. Is it more dangerous than merely existing as a sick or disabled person navigating a hostile healthcare system? I think that is for every individual experiencing it to decide for themselves.

Collin Kennedy, 50, lived with multiple myeloma — a type of blood cancer — for 19 years.

He invited media to watch him fill a parking meter with spray foam to raise awareness about the high costs of parking for cancer patients and other sick people getting treatment. Video of Kennedy vandalizing the meter was widely shared on social media. It led to a Canada-wide petition to end the practice of charging for parking near hospitals.

"Okay," says the human, dangling upside down, suspended by a group of tentacles. "I got it."

"Right," says the voice, which comes from everywhere and nowhere. "Now consider a cat. The cat thinks you're kind of like a cat, but you're so big, he has some problems understanding that all of your body is really you."

"Am I the-"

"Yes. Now listen. Especially under the blanket, the cat doesn't really know where your body begins and ends. He sees your feet, and decides to attack them. He's only play-fighting, but his claws are real sharp, so it hurts. What would you do?"

"Well," says the human, gently spinning in the tentacle's grasp, "I'd try to tuck my feet under the blanket."

"Ah, but then it's even worse," claims the voice, triumphantly, "because now your cat sees Blanket Monsters and attacks them twice as hard."

"So you have to grab the cat."

"It's either that or burrito her," says the voice, squeezing the human in the grip of its tentacles. "And since in this metaphor the blanket represents the fabric of reality as you know it, I don't think you'd find it very pleasant."

"Fair enough," says the human, blood beginning to pool in her head. "Can you please put me down, now? I promise I won't attack you again."

graystoke hated feet and frequently attacked them.

Eli Lilly and Company’s largest shareholder, the independent Lilly Endowment, gave nearly $1.3 billion to religious causes in 2025, much of it specifically to Christian groups, according to its annual report released last week.

The donations have funded theological seminaries, religious displays in museums and an initiative meant to “tell compelling stories that portray the vibrancy and hope of Christian faith and life to inspire and help people from a wide variety of backgrounds to come to know and love God.”

Religious giving made up a third of the $3.85 billion the Lilly Endowment sent out the door in 2025, according to the report. Its other core focuses — education and community development — also exceeded $1 billion in gifts for the first time.

With a nearly 10% stake in the Zepbound creator, the endowment has been the biggest beneficiary of its 230% stock surge since the end of 2022.