Please help UK trans people! Our right to use the bathroom of choice is under threat! Less than 1% of trans people in the UK have a gender recognition certificate due to gatekeeping. This would mean I and other trans men would be barred from basically any male gendered space and trans women would be barred from any female gendered space.
Donate here, please if you can. This is the Good Law Project- they’ve fought and won the last 2 threats against trans people. They can do it again if you share this and donate.
Please, for my sake, help the UK trans community today.
Just to be clear this would not make them unable to make the movies they’d just have to properly pay the creators and their families for the use of the characters.
COVID is slowly becoming a “third world” disease. While first world countries are hoarding vaccines, having doses for populations many times their size, third world countries can’t get any because pharma companies want to sell to the first world countries first. Even then, first world countries will receive them first. While rich countries recover from COVID, they will forget about the pandemic while many other countries live the absolute worst moment of the pandemic without being able to vaccinate their population.
Watch also when some first world countries finish vaccinating their populations, they will turn to third world countries and “donate” or sell surplus vaccines. People in these countries will go “Oh how sweet! The government is donating vaccines to the poorer countries <3” when it was their hoarding that led to many, many third world citizens dying before they could even get vaccinated in the first place.
This is not a bullshit useless change dot org petition by the way this is an actual thing with legal consequences. If this petition gets to a million signatures, the european commission HAS to examine it.
They need not only a million signatures but to pass thresholds in at least seven member states - which only Belgium has done so so far. Especially if you have Italian, Irish, or Cypriot citizenship, please sign. Sign it in general, but try to circulate if you can to anyone with those nationalities specifically.
237,730 / 1,000,000 signatures as of 11/28/21 and the Signatory Deadline(it has to be signed by this date) is January 8th, 2022.
PLEASE sign, especially if you’re from one of the countries that has not reached it’s threshold. (France, Sweden, Greece, Germany, The Netherlands, Austria…basically every country except Italy and Belgium)
Minimum thresholds must be met in at least five more countries in addition to the 1,000,000 signatures requirement.
The countries closest to reaching their minimum threshold are Ireland(89% of required signatures), France(75%), The Netherlands (75%), Spain (69%), and Cyprus (46%). If you or anyone you know have citizenship in these countries, please sign it, encourage them to sign it, and pass it forward.
If the requirements are met, the European Commission will be forced to examine this and take legal action. Real change is a possibility if enough signatures are collected.
I desperately need help to pay my rent this Christmas!! 💫🎄
**URGENT: PLEASE READ/SIGNAL BOOST**
Tuesday, November 30th: Hi everyone, I’m Gemma, a bi, mentally ill disaster, who is in desperate need of help as I'm struggling to pay my rent, and I don't receive my welfare until just after Christmas.
As most of you are already aware from my previous posts, I have been struggling financially these past few months due to my welfare benefit (Universal Credit) being under a review, which is due to my worsening mental health and the UK’s controversial changes to how benefits are assessed and assigned. And at the moment, I'm currently struggling to get by, as my application for Disability (PIP) was declined and due to Covid, I have been waiting almost a year for an appointment for a WCA (Work Capability Asessment) from the DWP to assess my mental and physical health, and due to this, my debt from overdue bills is piling up.
I know this is a huge ask, and I'm completely heartbroken to be asking for help again, but I still urgently need some as I don't receive my welfare until after Christmas (December 27th) and I desperately need to pay my utilities and get groceries for Christmas. My rent is £300 + utilities/bills - £200.
Additionally I have a CHRISTMAS WISHLIST, some items are just silly wishes, but some stuff like dog food and blankets are essential for the winter, and I would appreciate it if anyone could have a look. Otherwise, my goal to get through Christmas and New Year is now £500-£600!! (please don't recommend reddit as I'm already trying there)
If anyone could spare any amount to help me, even if it’s just £1/$1/€1, it would literally save my life, and sharing definitely helps just as much as donations. Nobody is obligated in any way to donate or buy anything from my wishlist if they can’t or don’t want to, I know we’re all struggling right now.
£15/£500!!
Go to paypal.me/GemzyM and type in the amount. Since it’s PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don’t have a PayPal account? No worries.
Wet'suwet'en is just 3K away from their goal and they've had their link up since February please consider helping them cross the finish line this Indigenous Peoples Day.
Link Up there ↑
For more up to date information please click here:
Ok so can someone explain to me how cryptocurrency pollutes? Like what crazy calculations are they running that they need enough brainpower to significantly effect things? Like I’m assuming what’s causing the pollution is increased electricity consumption but… how does sending lil pretend money tokens back and forth or whatever cause so much pollution?
Also, what the fuck is “mining”? How d'you mine… like bitcoin is not a naturally occurring resource, and I assume that you can’t just make it, cause that would make it instantly worthless… help?
So you get “coins” as a reward for performing the cryptographic calculations necessary to update the public ledger which is the blockchain. This is, by design, an increasingly complex and resource intensive process to slow down the collection of (intentionally finite) coins.
So every transaction with bitcoins requires the ledger to be updated with the current ownership of every already existing bitcoin, which also requires encrypting and decrypting a bunch of information and sharing it across the public ledger. So every transaction made with bitcoins increases the energy requirements of updating the ledger making it harder and harder to complete the latest version and get the coin which is a reward for doing that work.
There’s a lot I don’t fully understand myself but the long and short of it is that the actual value of any crypto currency is pretty much just what people agree on, except instead of a fiat currency where a government says it’s worth something and a mint that makes physical currency, there’s a bunch of nerds who agree that solving certain math problems is worth rewarding.
Feeling like adding on for a bit of context, I know it’s kind of hard to understand how mining for really any kind of crypto is hard to imagine, but seeing what a bitcoin mining facility looks like for the first time really helped me realize just how energy intensive it is.
See all these warehouses? They’re quite literally filled to the brim with specialized computers that do nothing but mine, each one filled with thousands of these computers, just row after row of this:
So all the power consumption winds up adding up like crazy.
Yep, that’s why cryptocurrency and NFTs are considered major contributors to pollution – because the energy needs of all those computers doing the calculation are equivalent to a medium sized country. Currently, crypto consumes more energy than Argentina.
Guess what’s inside a lot of mining rigs? Gowan, guess.
Graphics cards!
Lots and lots of these puppies side by side, spinning their little fans as fast as they can go because as it turns out: GPUs are perfect for doing the calculations required for mining cryptocurrency.
Which means amateur miners buy a lot of these things.
So many, in fact, that there is now (May 2021) a world-wide shortage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards and building a new gaming rig is damn near impossible because of the shortage.
OR you can pay a ridiculously inflated price by GPU scalpers on eBay.
Seriously. Places that sell GPUs impose quantity limits because if they don’t… some crypto asshole will buy out their entire stock in one go.
But the “good” news is that the professional miners (like the Bitmain site up there, in the photos) use dedicated ASIC mining rigs which don’t use consumer GPUs. But (bad news) they DO use the same sort of chips that NVIDIA & AMD rely on to make their products, which just starves the supply pipeline at a different point.
Bottom line: not only does cryptocurrency mining consume terawatts of electricity, it also consumes megatons of computer hardware. Which is expensive to produce (in resource terms, like rare metals, petroleum, water, electricity, paper) and will, someday, require even MORE resources to recycle. Or else it ends up in a landfill.
Note that current dedicated mining rigs are so highly specialized they are useless for anything other than mining. They cannot be easily repurposed to (say) sequence DNA or fold proteins for miracle cures.
was anyone gonna tell me that some nerds peepee poopoo “currency” is the reason why graphics cards are sold out everywhere or was i supposed to find that out from comments under a screenshot from twitter user whoreganic cop puncher explaining how bitcoin is just an artificially complicated math problem
Also I’ve read be very wary about buying used graphic cards cause there’s a chance it’s one that’s mostly heavily used from one of these bastards. These thing are very heavily used so a used one sold by one of these guys would be on its last leg of life from being on 24/7
Make sure there’s a return policy just be very careful if you’re buying used.
To be more fair than Crypto miners deserve, they’re only one of the factors driving the current chip shortage.
The other issues are both related to the pandemic. The first one is that manufacturing of a many things, especially cars, slowed down quite a bit until recently when the factories reopened. But so many reopened at the same time and went full blast that the demand far outstripped the supply, a supply already reduced by the shutdown of those factories.
The other bottleneck is literal mining. Computer chips rely on silicon and various metals, especially gold and copper to conduct electricity to do their work. In normal times this means that crypto’s environmental impact is even higher than just the energy requirements. But in the meantime the mines and refineries that provide the raw materials were also shut down in many cases due to the pandemic, squeezing the supply further.
Mining shutdowns have also caused a huge shortage of ammunition in the US (brass bullet casings need copper). Which means for anybody wanting to buy consumer electronics of a reasonable complexity you’re competing against both ends of the libertarian spectrum, the crypto techies and the gun nuts.
Really glad someone brought this home to actual mining, and I want to show you what the mines look like:
These are silica mines, necessary for making ALL things requiring silicon, among other things.
These are rare-earth mineral mines.
Both are required for the manufacture of computer technologies. Both requre excavating huge amounts of earth, decimating all life in that area and more often than not, ruining land that is supposed to be stewarded by indigenous people.
They’re very, very bad for the environment.
This is where the ‘online’ world comes from. It’s not another place. Every transaction, every pixel comes from the ground.
So yeah, crypto mining is definitely deceptive. That ‘value’ isn’t coming from nowhere. It’s ripped from the earth.
Last night, a fundraiser and nonprofit worker named Mahnoor ( @speaktomyself) reached out to me to ask for my help spreading this cause. Her close friend Maleeha Qureshi is dying from chronic cardiac issues, ulcers, and many other chronic illnesses. Last night she went into cardiac arrest, but survived, and she desperately needs our help.
To be able to get life saving treatment, she needs to raise $2000. Together, we can do this!!! With our help, we can give Maleeha a shot at survival!! Please, share this post, ask others to share this post, and boost it however you can!
I will be putting proof and her medical documents in the replies. You can also contact @speaktomyself if you have any more questions.
Look, I know a good number of you are from the US and things aren't amazing there either, but my country is literally on the brink of collapse. So I'd love it if we could talk about that for a minute.
If you can't do anything else, please just read and reblog.
A second COVID wave has taken out the healthcare system. There are no more hospital beds. There's an oxygen shortage. There's a critical vaccine shortage. The Central Government has thrown its hands up and is passing the baton to the State Governments to do what they can.
There are over 16 million covid cases. A record 330,000 new cases reported yesterday - comparable to the US at its peak. 187,000 dead as of today.
There is no plan.
Mass cremations are taking place. The cremation grounds are running day and night and they are short on wood. People are watching their loved ones die while waiting for a hospital bed, and then they're unable to give them the proper burial rights.
Hospitals are overwhelmed. Patients are being confined, two to a bed. They're the lucky ones.
We are on the verge of people dying in the streets.
This is the second-most populous country in the world. The largest democracy. A country that encapsulates over 15,000 years of recorded human history and has endured everything from famine to invasion to colonisation.
We might be at the end. This might be the thing that does us in.
People are dying.
People are dying.
People are dying and there is no plan.
More good news? Variants are popping up. A double mutation strain has shown up. It is resistant to current vaccines. This will not go away. This is the devastation they warned of when the anti-maskers were out protesting the minor inconvenience of covering their face in public.
My country is on the verge of an emergency state. Our government has failed us. This is as dire a situation as it ever could be.
Look. I don't do much with my life. I write fics, some of you have read them and that's pretty much it. I spend my days with my head in the clouds because that's where I like to be.
But two days ago, my grandmother tested positive, had to be taken to hospital and the ambulance caught fire.
She barely made it to the urgent care she needs.
So, here I am, using whatever meager platform I have to cobble this request together. Because I have to do something.
Even a small amount of 5 or 7 or 10 of foreign currency will help a lot. Our government has essentially abandoned us. People have turned to social media for help. WhatsApp groups and DMs on twitter/insta is where we find help. Our helpline is a Google doc. Situation is so dire that hospitals are discharging patients due to lack of oxygen. Every night the same story, oxygen running out in hospitals, citizens running around to somehow arrange for oxygen with minutes to spare. Last night, we had manged to get oxygen to a hospital with 14min to spare.
Reblogging with more links. Listen to @groundzero-and-deku ☝️ they know what they're talking about.
Some of you in the US have asked what else you can do. I'm not the best person to answer this since I'm not from there, but I do know that Biden is being urged to ship supplies to India. Maybe a more informed person can chime in with how best you can help but calling your representative and registering your concern sounds like a good starting point.
From one democracy to another, thank you. Please keep this going, you're all amazing.
EDIT: Reblogging with some more donation links from @spacegirlstuff
Here and Here
Y'all, this is a good time to mention that I am not affiliated with any charity or donation centre, and am not receiving donations on behalf of anyone.
This is a list of resources compiled by me and more importantly, other people who have a better grasp on the situation than myself. They are to the best of our knowledge great resources but
I still encourage you to do your research and put your money where you believe it will be used best.
If you find more ways to help or donate, add them in a reblog - let's get as much information out there as possible.
Much love and please stay safe
PLEASE BOOST THIS VERSION OF THE POST WITH THE EXTENDED LIST OF LINKS TO DONATIONS AND RESOURCES
If people can believe the earth is flat,there might be people who believe that the earth is a billion-sides polygon,thus making it both round AND flat.
vaporwave
germansingergirl
annaxmalina
areudirty
