This All Makes Sense

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-other? (please do tell!)

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.

Gambling operations like 'Predictive Markets' like Kalshi, sports betting, gacha games, and other gambling platforms have been heavily pushed at men (redpill/manosphere spaces especially are heavily sponsored by gambling companies) and now that a lot of men are hooked these operations will probably be targeting women as a demographic soon too. If Andra's (creator above) experience is accurate for other influencers, a lot of influencers with high percentages of women in their audience will be approached to push gambling (personally I'll be on the lookout for who's promoting gambling in the next 6-12 months).

Blind boxes, gacha games, and loot boxes have also gotten pushed out to all age demographics (see: Labubus) so if you have kids our young people in your life I'd also be checking in on them because gambling issues really can sneak up on you fast.

WRITING CHALLENGE: A hard-boiled detective story set in a solarpunk society, circa 2100. Proposed tagline: "It's hard to be noir when it's so fucking sunny."

PARAMETERS:

Science fiction rather than fantasy. Nothing unambiguously supernatural.

The society must be central to the plot: its mores, its modes of production, its culture.

The society must come across as markedly preferable to the one in which we currently live, but it should have its own problems

The society must be an extrapolation from our own. No alternate histories.

PRIZE:

The off chance of actually helping to jumpstart a genre/movement that has been revving its electric motor in place for the last 15 years.

Takes place in a near-future sustainable eco-city built on bioengineering and closed-loop circular recycling

The functioning of the city and the way it shapes society and the characters is the primary subject of the plot

The society is preferable to our own in many ways and Definitely Has Problems, which are also core to the plot

It's a hardboiled sci-fi noir with a raccoon detective. The protagonist being a raccoon is relevant to the story's plot and themes, and does not diminish the hardboiled-ness.

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'm afraid they'll become engineers and sign off on bridge designs that collapse - and people will die.

I'm afraid they'll become medical professionals who don't know what they're doing - and people will die.