Ouch

Practical Organising

“Only the Organised Survive”: A Rebel Worker Handbook

Direct Action in Industry by the Direct Action Movement

Weakening the Dam by the Twin Cities branch of the IWW

How to Hold a Good Meeting and Rusty’s Rules of Order by the Industrial Workers of the World

Community Control of the Poor community

A Practical Guide to Anarchist Organisation – Compiled by Andrew Flood

How to Fire Your Boss: A Workers Guide to Direct Action

The Bosses Need Us… We Don’t Need Them: Common Sense Reasons for Worker Self-Management

Organising in the Workplace

Organising Communities by Tom Knoche

Anarchist Agitation & Community Building by Ronald A. Young

Things are worse now than they were 25 years ago.

I was sixteen years old, freshly out of the closet, walking around holding hands with my girlfriend proudly, happily, utterly in love and at no point did I ever feel scared.

This was twelve years or so before same sex marriage was legalised and an apology was given by the queen for the criminalisation, harm and stigma brought upon our community. Equal rights seemed unthinkable to me at sixteen years old, and yet I never once felt a need to hide who I was or who I loved.

Today, I do.

The Pride flag I hang every June has been stolen and found burned in a nearby field. My neighbours don’t put my bin out when they take out everyone else’s, a deliberate choice of exclusion. A woman braked to a stop outside my house and asked me what I was doing there (I was very obviously cleaning my windows), and she looked shocked when I said I was the person who lived there, glared at me and drove away without explanation. I am the only female-shaped person who visits my local barbers, and although the staff there are friendly and welcoming, I see the coldness in the eyes of some of the other customers in the mirror, and I feel the need to explain my hair fell out due to cancer rather than that I actually quite like having short, masculine hair. Because I don’t feel safe.

I don’t feel safe.

Everywhere I look, I see Pride posts flooded with hateful comments, and it’s more than the ignorant basement dwellers I’ve dealt with all my life, these are deranged, radicalised individuals who believe their hatred is allowed because it is being given a platform. They are organised. They are finding each other. They are so full of rage and desperate to point it somewhere. At someone.

And I hate that I’ve been pushed into a state of fear and shame that I’ve never, in my twenty five years of being openly me, experienced.

It is bad out there. And I’m afraid it’s going to get worse.

I know my page, my whole thing, is mama bear hopecore, but I’m genuinely all out of hope. It’s so fucking hard to be hopeful in this charged political climate. So if you’re out there, and a part of you is afraid, I’m telling you that you are 100% right to be, that in twenty five years the most dangerous it has ever been is right now, and just staying alive and being yourself is all you need to focus on right now.

There are two general types of ways you can screw with a door: either the door cannot lock, or the door cannot open.

Let’s talk about locks!!

If you use any sort of badge/keyfob/rfid nonsense to enter a building, the door is either locked by a powered lockset, an electric strike, or a maglock. Here’s how you tell.

This is a maglock! If there is a little rectangle in the door frame, this is what it is. This takes 12 or 24 volts of power, rather low amperage, and by fire code there must be a DIRECT INTERRUPT to force these locks to open on the inside of the door. It may look like this:

If this button were to be held down in some way, or if the (likely to be) green and white wires behind this thing were cut and twisted together, the door would remain open. There are also frequently little access doors on these locks where the power wires connect:

If there’s no door, look for access to the wire inside of a box near the door frame as they can just have a wire that comes off of them:

Unlike other locking devices, maglocks NEED CONSTANT POWER TO OPERATE, also known as being “fail safe” opposed to “fail secure”. Fail safe meaning that in the event of a failure, you would be able to egress. The other types of electronic locking systems are typically fail secure, meaning that the door remains secure from the outside.

I’ll add more to this post later but the important thing to remember is that fire code necessitates that any door with an exit sign above it must maintain “one touch opening”, meaning a crash bar to exit with like this:

When there’s a certain occupancy level.

Remember, if you want to keep your business secure, keep in mind that anyone who has access to the inside of your door has the ability to disable the door completely. For example, this crash bar could also be disabled if that little black thing (called a strike) on the left were to be removed via the two phillips 3 screws holding it in.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

He has made so many amazing illustrations and character designs over the years, but one of my personal favorites is the darkly humorous "Pontifex Maximus":

Superhuman, the tech company behind the writing software Grammarly, is facing a class action lawsuit over an AI tool that presented editing suggestions as if they came from established authors and academics—none of whom consented to have their names appear within the product.

Imagine being so full of yourself that you think you can just use the literal most successful author alive's name without his consent.

The interviewer calls out Grammarly’s parent company’s ad copy for saying that “in the AI era, taste and judgment are more valuable than ever”, and then insists that the CEO defines what “valuable” means and who is actually receiving the value in the situation. CEO ends up trying to spin the thing into an offer to have the interviewer design an AI chatbot that will impersonate himself more accurately than the one they previously made without his permission, and the interviewer proceeds to point out that the CEO basically admitted that AI devalues creative work to the point that the only way creatives can still profit is by selling out to the companies that stole their work anyway.

linked tree (includes options to donate to Ghanaian projects)