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Employees were also having difficulties figuring out who was still on staff, and what areas of infrastructure needed more support to keep things up and running. One worker who wanted to resign said she had spent two days looking for her manager, whose identity she no longer knew because so many people had quit in the days beforehand. After finally finding her direct supervisor, she tendered her resignation. The next day, her supervisor also quit. Others were spending hours trying to track down which teams they were on. Some said they were asked to oversee duties they had never handled before. The changes were occurring in a near total information vacuum internally, employees said. Twitter’s internal communications staff has been laid off or left, and workers said they were looking outward for information from media articles. Mr. Musk has increasingly downplayed the role of traditional media over the past few months, citing Twitter as one of the best platforms for the rise in “citizen journalism,” as he put it.

I think the problem is that the show uses my feminism to try to make me root for Rhaenyra’s succession, instead of taking my feminism seriously enough to really write a show about why feminism matters. Misogyny drives the plot. But the show can’t really decide how much misogyny matters to being a person in this world.

If it were up to the national majority, American democracy would most likely be in a stronger place, not the least because Donald Trump might not have become president. Our folk beliefs about American government notwithstanding, the much-vaunted guardrails and endlessly invoked norms of our political system have not secured our democracy as much as they’ve facilitated the efforts of those who would degrade and undermine it. Majority rule is not perfect but rule by a narrow, reactionary minority — what we face in the absence of serious political reform — is far worse. And much of our fear of majorities, the legacy of a founding generation that sought to restrain the power of ordinary people, is unfounded. It is not just that rule of the majority is, as Abraham Lincoln said, “the only true sovereign of a free people”; it is also the only sovereign that has reliably worked to protect those people from the deprivations of hierarchy and exploitation. If majoritarian democracy, even at its most shackled, is a better safeguard against tyranny and abuse than our minoritarian institutions, then imagine how we might fare if we let majoritarian democracy actually take root in this country. The liberty of would-be masters might suffer. The liberty of ordinary people, on the other hand, might flourish.

Mayor Wheeler announced a much-anticipated proposal to ban homeless camping in Portland at a Friday press conference. This idea, which has been hinted at in various forms for more than a year, follows a growing drumbeat of vitriol from upset Portland property owners, businesses, and other members of the public about the impact that visible homeless camping has on the community—and its reputation. “Simply put, we can no longer tolerate the intolerable,” said City Commissioner Dan Ryan, who co-sponsored the proposal outlined by Wheeler on Friday. “It's time to take some risks to get our city out of this ditch.” Yet, without the needed boost of significant funding, clear support from other government agencies, and interested contractors, the proposal appears little more than a plan to create an eventual plan.

“Calling people ‘service resistant’ helps distance us from responsibility,” says Marc Jolin, director of the county and city's Joint Office of Homeless Services (JOHS). “If someone says they’re not interested in services, it doesn’t mean they want to be homeless. It should make us ask, ‘Are we offering the right services?’”

The problem is, Kanye behaves as if the only real and brave truth tellers today are conservatives with money. He acts as if the rich right wing holds a monopoly on criticisms of the Democratic party or liberal activists. This ignores a host of progressives and radicals – people like Cornel West, Nick Estes, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Mariame Kaba, Aja Monet, the Rev Jeremiah Wright, and too many artists and grassroots organizers to name who criticise the liberal establishment more fiercely than the right and with commitments to end oppression. In fact, entire progressive and radical traditions exist where people of all races offer vigorous critiques of the status quo with surgical precision. We need fewer “free thinkers” and more critical thinkers who ask about these traditions and find their places within them. The question for me is whether billionaire Kanye can ever really know about these robust traditions. Not because he doesn’t already know or will never learn about them, but because to know them is to also learn their critiques of gross wealth accumulation, Black capitalism, desire for imperial leadership, and so much more of what Kanye currently represents. Supporting free thinkers with weak conservative analysis does not threaten his status, land, antisemitic views or bank account.

In linguistics an accidental gap, also known as a gap, paradigm gap, accidental lexical gap, lexical gap, lacuna, or hole in the pattern, is a potential word, word sense, morpheme, or other form that does not exist in some language despite being theoretically permissible by the grammatical rules of that language.

The Wolf Parade member talks about his new solo album, parenting during COVID, and adjusting to livestreams.

this is a fun little app that counts down to the end of support of Internet Explorer 11 + a few more features like a list of articles/websites that tell you why you should stop supporting IE11 and a list of websites that already dropped support.

Scambaiting is the action of conversing with a scammer for a prolonged period of time so as to distract him/her from further scamming. --- I will admit that scambaiting began as a form of vengeance. A few weeks fresh from my scam discovery D-Day, the urge to seek some form of justice still raged through my veins. I began with language apps, then stemmed into Facebook and dating apps. In the beginning, the goal was only to waste the scammer’s time. After a while, it became a form of dark therapy, allowing me to relish over and over that I had “played” the “player” -- I was in on the charade before the scammer could even begin his charade. There was no sympathy for scammers, just a burning desire to know why they would scam sincere and kind people. I had heard that some scammers were human trafficked into their job, but I couldn’t believe it. It was to me another ploy from the scammer playbook -- engender sympathy from victims to maximize profits. My perspective has shifted since then to a better understanding of the industry, one in which things are not totally black and white. I’ve also gained a better perspective of what can be lied about and what can’t. The following tales highlight some of the most memorable moments since I started scambaiting last August. I hope to put a face behind the people involved in scamming and shed light on human trafficking. […] Luckily for Daddy, his workplace is kind. All employees receive a minimum wage base pay, plus a 16% bonus for successful scams. They live in a relatively clean dormitory, and no one is beaten or hurt. Workers may go out freely on certain days, being tourists at the Burj Khalifa, shopping for groceries, or visiting fresh fruit farms. The employees, most of whom have likely never before left their home country, overall appear to be enjoying their scam life. This can be juxtaposed next to the weekly influx of victims we receive in our victims group, many of whom are in tears or suicidal. Many of whom lost their life savings. […] Recently, Daddy showed off his $21k bonus from scamming an individual out of nearly $138k. He was so excited he could barely sleep for days.

These texts are usually the lead-in to romance scams that usually end with fake crypto deposits, written so as to imply wealth and success on the part of the scammer, who is often an abused and captive worker operating multiple phones and attempting to con several people from a compound operated by shady gambling rings somewhere in Southeast Asia. […] Now what? It seems likely we can expect this species of pig-butchering scam to eventually fade into the background, thanks to victims getting wise and authorities cracking down. An interview with the subject of the GASO rescue mission suggests that the scam rings’ operations in Europe and North America, at least, are not as profitable as they’d hoped…

Civil society was something that existed among white Europeans and which was supposedly lacking among indigeneous peoples across the rest of the globe. Because personhood and all the rights that go with that status were thought to exist only in civil society and not in the state of nature, it was then no violation to colonize land thought to be in the state of nature or to treat people thought to be in that state as property. Social contract theory used the idea of “civil society” to justify the colonial/racial project of excluding non-white people from personhood. […] By de-funding public education, rendering public space inherently more risky, and eliminating the right to privacy in one’s sexual and reproductive choices, these three decisions all eliminate the existence of a key element of classically liberal social ontology: the civil private sphere (i.e., the realm of civil privacy, the private sector, etc.). Put simply, they’re reworking the way the U.S. Constitution models the relation between public and private from the classically liberal model the framers used in the 18th century into a neoliberal one premised on the idea that, as Margaret Thatcher infamously put it, “there is no such thing as society.” In this neoliberal model, there is no civil society (e.g., public space, the realm of individual civil privacy, etc.) and the state only exists to enforce the boundaries of the patriarchal racial capitalist framing of the domestic private sphere.

In the late modern world something like socialism is the only possible way of embodying Christian love in concrete political practices. --- Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy? […] …where health care in particular is concerned, Americans are slaves thrice-bound: wholly at the mercy of a government that despoils them for the sake of the rich, as well as of employers from whom they will receive only such benefits as the law absolutely requires, as well as of insurance companies that can rob them of the care for which they have paid. […] States depend upon capital for revenues, material goods, and political patronage. Without the support of an omnicompetent, vastly prosperous, orderly, and violent state, global corporate capitalism could not thrive. Without corporations, the modern state would lack the resources necessary to perpetuate its supremacy over every sphere of life.

All of this — the bad-faith scrutiny, the obsession with minor discrepancies, the confidence that vast conspiracies can be discovered on Google — is instantly recognizable from previous explosions of internet-enabled misogynistic bullying. The “body language experts” that swarmed around Heard spent years applying the same junk science to Amanda Knox, Meghan Markle, and Carole Baskin. The gremlins who targeted Anita Sarkeesian during Gamergate pretended to be offended by the (extremely minor) technical errors in her videos rather than her presence in their boy’s-only treehouse. The best evidence for the motivations behind the anti-Heard campaign is that while her every slip-up has been dissected ad nauseum, Depp’s far more numerous and consequential discrepancies have been all but ignored. His testimony that he was too high on opioids to attack Heard during the airplane incident, for example, contradicts his own text messages (“angry, aggro injun in a fuckin blackout”) from the day after. His absurd denials of his drug problem belie his own contemporaneous communications and bolster Heard’s account. In the final week of the Virginia trial, he bafflingly claimed that he hadn’t sent text messages from his own phone — I guess someone hacked into it and sent texts that sound exactly like him? […] Heard is not a perfect victim and has never claimed to be. In her own testimony, she admitted to engaging in screaming matches, fighting back, and insulting Depp in the final year of the relationship. The judge in the UK trial said there was probably some truth in Depp’s accusation that Heard was condescending about his drug use, something that triggered his sense of internalized shame and, ultimately, his rage. The psychologist who saw them in 2015 said both partners had poor communication skills and weren’t able to de-escalate fights or have productive conflicts. This is all damning evidence against Heard and I see no reason not to believe it. But remember: The relationship at the heart of this case was one in which the smaller, less powerful partner has evidence of at least 10 serious incidents of violence. Black eyes, bloody lips, trashed homes, chunks of ripped-out hair on the carpet. WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT WHETHER SHE WAS ANNOYING SOMETIMES? […] If you entertain the possibility that Heard has not concocted an elaborate hoax but is in fact an actual domestic abuse victim, having an emotional reaction when her husband shows up and merrily announces that he has broken his promise to her — a broken promise which may put her safety at risk — her actions suddenly make more sense. […] There is almost no evidence that the op-ed had any effect on Depp’s career. Over the previous decade, Depp had released a string of high-profile bombs (The Rum Diary, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Transcendence, The Lone Ranger, Mortdecai, Dark Shadows — I haven’t even heard of most of these) and had been the subject of numerous articles documenting his dimming star power. For years, set leakers reported that he showed up late and drunk and needed an earpiece to remember his lines (Depp says he used it to listen to music). […] In hindsight, the verdict came down the minute the judge allowed the case to be televised. Jurors weren’t sequestered or sheltered from the internet in any way, meaning they were likely exposed to the same bad-faith memes and out-of-context clips as everyone else. Plus, this case has been swirling around the internet for years, making an impartial jury an impossibility in the first place. One man was allowed to stay in the jury pool after revealing a text from his wife that read, “Amber is psychotic.” I have no idea what happens next, but I do know that Depp’s unbelievably cynical strategy to discredit his ex-wife’s abuse claims (Jessica Winter called it “a high-budget, general-admission form of revenge porn”) was a resounding success. Heard is now one of the most hated figures in America. Even if she overturns the decision on appeal, she will likely never be cast in a major Hollywood role again — what studio wants to risk a hostile internet campaign before they even start shooting? Depp’s core claim — women advance their careers by accusing powerful men of abuse — doesn’t even hold up to the evidence of his own abuse accusation. Heard is ruined; Depp is in pre-production for his next role; other alleged abusers are already copying his legal strategy. And outside the courtroom, America’s march backward toward the 1950s continues apace.

This repository helps you to have a more beautiful and attractive github profile, and you can access a complete set of tools and guides for beautifying your github profile. 🪄 ⭐

The truth is, I don’t know what to do. I hugged my own third grader goodbye this morning and sent her off to school. The middle school she’ll attend in three years is remote today because they discovered “threats” in a bathroom. We live in a country where statistically, until age 19, she is most likely to die of a gunshot wound. So what am I willing to do? Anything.

Ellen DeGeneres did not “betray” queer people. Such a claim presumes that she owes us, or speaks for us, and that impossible burden — one she has faced since she came out on “Ellen” — is part of what landed her in this mess in the first place. Still, I cannot help but feel exasperation at her defensive crouch when she’s questioned about Bush, or Hart, or her responsibility for the toxic work environment on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” I cannot help but roll my eyes at the self-pitying strain that runs through “Relatable,” her scrupulously unilluminating 2018 Netflix stand-up special, in which she professes, or performs, frustration at the indignities of the celebrity stratosphere. […] As in her interview with Hart, her segment on Bush, her farewell announcements on “Today” and with Oprah, the Dakota Johnson moment inadvertently expressed a central feature of modern American life, and of DeGeneres’ own post-aughts crises: that the very rich and the very famous, the odd Dolly Parton excepted, are in solidarity mostly with themselves. […] For DeGeneres, who built her career on playing versions of “Ellen,” by appearing, as a queer woman in a patriarchal society, not only “normal” but ordinary, this evolution couldn’t help but hold symbolic resonance. Because “progress” is not an achievement but an action, and to let up the fight is already to lose it. From “Don’t Say Gay”-style legislation in the U.S. and the prevalence of transphobia in U.K. media to the deadly threat to queers in Russia and its occupied territories, LGBTQ people are engaged in a tug of war on a tectonic scale, struggling ceaselessly just to keep our footing. It does not seem so outrageous to me, in this context, to expect the most prominent LGBTQ American to pull in the same direction, or at least to accept that the price of holding the vanishing center is becoming a little less beloved. It’s not as if DeGeneres has been driven into hiding. She simply forfeited her position as the queer celebrity everyone — me, my mother, George W. Bush — could agree on, because in a time and place of such terrifying revanchism, it is not enough to be agreeable. For those of us frightened by the change she once represented being so swiftly rolled back, DeGeneres’ fumbling attempt to keep her distance turns out to be the one choice we couldn’t forgive, and will not forget. When we lost Ellen, she lost us.

An enormous amount of personal data and 'quantified self' information that this person has kept via trackers and manual input for years. Source: https://github.com/KrauseFx/FxLifeSheet

A great summary of the shift in music writing and coverage around 2013 as music publications shifted to covering more pop music (and did it in a more take-based fashion) and pop music itself made a comeback critically.

This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline ☼ --- Low-tech Magazine refuses to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution. A simple, sensible, but nevertheless controversial message; high-tech has become the idol of our society.

“Projected global emissions from (national pledges) place limiting global warming to 1.5C beyond reach and make it harder after 2030 to limit warming to 2C,” the panel said. In other words, the report’s co-chair, James Skea of Imperial College London, told The Associated Press: “If we continue acting as we are now, we’re not even going to limit warming to 2 degrees, never mind 1.5 degrees.” Ongoing investments in fossil fuel infrastructure and clearing large swaths of forest for agricultu […] It’s more likely that the world will pass 1.5C and efforts will then need to be made to bring temperatures back down again, including by removing vast amounts of carbon dioxide — the main greenhouse gas — from the atmosphere. Many experts say this is unfeasible with current technologies, and even if it could be done it would be far costlier than preventing the emissions in the first place. The report, numbering thousands of pages, doesn’t single out individual countries for blame. But the figures show much of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere was released by rich countries that were the first to burn coal, oil and gas beginning with the industrial revolution. […] “We don’t actually have a remaining carbon budget to burn,” said King, who now chairs the Climate Crisis Advisory Group. “It’s just the reverse. We’ve already done too much in the way of putting greenhouse gases up there,” he said, arguing that the IPCC’s calculation omits new risks and potentially self-reinforcing effects already happening, such as the increased absorption of heat into the oceans from sea ice loss and the release of methane as permafrost melts. Such warnings were echoed by U.N. chief Guterres, citing scientists’ warnings that the planet is moving “perilously close to tipping points that could lead to cascading and irreversible climate impacts.” “But high-emitting governments and corporations are not just turning a blind eye; they are adding fuel to the flames,” he said, calling for an end to further coal, oil and gas extraction. “Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness.”

A common criticism of my arguments against crypto is that they assume too much knowledge or that my prose is too dense. So a friend challenged me to rewrite ‘The Case Against Crypto’ using mostly the 1500 Simple English words and short sentences version that perhaps a well-read twelve year old could read in a 6th grade history book from the future. About the financial disaster of the 2020s. --- The economics of bitcoin were also bad. When people use money they want to buy things with it quickly and they want to know that the price of the thing they want to buy won’t change drastically. Bitcoin is bad at both of these things. Bitcoin was bad at being stable money because the technology was not designed to do that, because it didn’t want to have a central bank. This was unfixable because the entire project was based on a bad idea. […] Crypto was a story about giving people new money, but instead it just stole people’s old money and destroyed their lives. Unfortunately the world figured out crypto was a bad idea far too late.

Arnold wasn’t just a football-headed fourth grader. He was an urban planning pioneer. --- The stories of a group of fourth graders coming of age in the big city at times mimicked the neoliberal objectives of Clinton-era policy: The bullies that Arnold and his friends faced might as well have been the state and private capital, which linked arms in the name of urban renewal while actually threatening the sanctity of working-class life. And although Hey Arnold! did not present itself as a manifesto for a generation that would grow up to cast doubt on the normalcy of capitalist logic, the cartoon did provide a cultural experience that remains salient, 25-plus years on—and one that fans tell me, surprisingly for a cartoon, broached these subjects more blatantly than many are willing to do today. […] Geographers have since explored the long-term deleterious effects of these 1990s schemes. In 2019, for instance, Samuel Stein published Capital City, where he explored how the $217 billion industry that is global real estate follows the movements of a “creative class,” whose members move to poorer neighborhoods after being priced out of more expensive places already overrun by high rent costs. Only then do urban planners see these neighborhoods as “livable”—as Stein puts it, “a euphemism for White people with disposable income”—before tearing down old buildings and erecting new ones that ultimately price out the creative class that made neighborhoods attractive to capital in the first place. […] It’s not so much that Hey Arnold! radicalized millennials in their youth, it seems, but that it infused their inchoate political and social consciousnesses with ways to respond to their material realities later on. A lot of the rhetoric of liberal capitalism—that it is driven by natural turns in the market—was flipped on its head in Hey Arnold. In the show, capitalism was nothing more than the destroyer of fun. It threatened not only the displacement of the city’s working class, but also the places in which young viewers played. And as millennials are now feeling many of the neoliberal structural changes of the 1990s, including being unable to buy homes or even rent in cities, it’s no surprise that the majority of young Americans now look unfavorably upon capitalism—just as their favorite cartoon characters did two decades ago.

Finicky is a macOS application that allows you to set up rules that decide which browser is opened for every link or url. With Finicky as your default browser, you can tell it to open Facebook or Reddit in one browser, and Trello or LinkedIn in another.

A handy compilation of games based on Josh Wardle's Wordle. Including Dordle, Quordle, Worldle, Heardle, and more.

The Block, Element, Modifier methodology (commonly referred to as BEM) is a popular naming convention for classes in HTML and CSS. Developed by the team at Yandex, its goal is to help developers better understand the relationship between the HTML and CSS in a given project.

A site dedicated to format changes? Why not; what’s more historic than when something begins or ends? The Format Change Archive is your home for airchecks of the beginnings and endings of some of the most historic radio stations (and some you may never have heard).

As life in the Anthropocene tips into a gradual decline brought on by the irreversible effects of climate crisis, the past becomes a highly valuable commodity in criticism because the future gets more volatile by the second. Those of us with a lot of time in the bank account sit comfortably on hundreds of thousands of pre-pandemic hours, while younger, more time-poor people wonder every day what kind of past they will actually inherit—what will their past be worth?

Handcrafted 3D icons. Customize it online - change color, material and choose right angle. 100% free for commercial and personal use.