My original blog but due to Tumblr bugs latest fandom obsessions are in sideblog @animegoil-vnc. Fanart under 'animegoil art' and fanfiction under 'animegoil fanfiction' tags. - vpn france | diseño logotipos
He didn't steal 10 million dollars. They made that number up as a loss, they never fucking had it. Rockstar has spent more than a billion fucking dollars on GTA VI and will likely make billions more when it gets released.
Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.
Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.
And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?
What with GTA VI going up for pre-order i'd just like to remind everyone that rockstar conspired with the UK government to lock an 18-year-old away for life for hacking them.
I canât believe this is the first time Iâve heard about this. like for years Iâve been thinking âimagine if the police were in charge of ambulances and firefighting, all the horrible problems that would cause, wouldnât it be better if they were a separate thing, etcâ as a way to better understand/explain the fundamental problems with the existence of police. that framing was part of what made me start to understand why my friends were saying âACABâ and âabolish the policeâ. I had no idea it was literally once historically like that and not just a hypothetical tbh
disabled ppl we need to start lying to nosy people okay? you tell me i'm too young to need a cane and i will tell you point blank that maybe you should tell that to the guy who ran me over. you don't get an explanation of my health issues you get lies and depending on how much of an asshole i want to be that lie will be anything from a humble car crash to a 1 billion lions attack. mind yr business.
"i could never live like that" well maybe you'll have to because this happened overnight. yeah you heard me i was the most able bodied man in the world but then one morning bam i woke up disabled. yeah you could have that too. there's no cure either you'll just wake up one morning and now you have to live like me
I need a polite way to email multiple people in a business environment that says, "Are you having an AI chat write your email replies? Because these are incoherent sentences and if it's a chatbot, I need you to stop."
I'm not trying to accuse anyone of communicating like an angry toddler with zero sense of object permanence, but I have received an awful lot of communications which ask for help with "it" while not specifying what "it" is, or asking me to send something while telling me they have it in the same sentence.
I have a growing desire to return emails like teacher feedback on an assignment
"Thesis unclear and supporting arguments contradict leaving reader confused."
and in one particularly memorable and annoying case "You email lacks even one complete sentence or verb. Your audience is forced to wildly speculate what you are asking or proposing."
You can support imprisoned people by sending them letters of support and money to use for the commisary and phone calls. Being in prison is expensive. Don't write anything that would get them in trouble. Prisoners' mail is read by guards.
Something by I love about Black Menswear is how theyâre not afraid of color and personality. Itâs not just the same boring black or blue suit jacket every time. Itâs also just very dapper.
1. remember showing up imperfectly is better than not showing up at all. avoiding the hard conversations ensures comfort. confronting them invites growth. which do you value more?
2. define key terms being discussed in the hard conversation. if your partner isnât texting you enough⊠what does âenoughâ mean to you? how do they define it? if itâs regarding you performance at work, how does you boss define âproductivityâ? often our conflicts are fueled by miscommunication more than anything else.
3. replace judgment with curiosity. curiosity turns an argument into a conversation. instead of rushing to make your point, urge for more clarification. replace rebuttals with, âi want to fully understand. can you explain that to me a bit more?â
4. allow room for silence. even if itâs uncomfortable. silence to process is better than speaking just to speak. this also gives the other person the opportunity to fully finish their thought.
5. if youâre feeling yourself getting defensive ask yourself, âwhat is this bringing up for me? what is my ego/fear telling me right now? is it true?â sometimes we project our own hurt into a conversation, punishing the person that isnât even the real source of our frustration.
6. when itâs your turn to respond, acknowledge the points you agree with just as much as the ones you disagree with. find the important similarities between your perspectives when possible. perhaps you want the same things but have different ways of going about it.
7. rephrase what the person said to make sure you fully understood. something like, âwhat iâm hearing is ______.â then allow the other person to confirm or correct any misconceptions.
8. know when you need to check out of a hard conversation. if the person youâre talking to is not making an effort to hear you or making you feel small, step away. a simple, âiâm not feeling heard right now. i need to step away or revisit this conversation another timeâ can suffice.
9. remember: sometimes the hard conversation needs to start with yourself. what are you feeling? what are your opinions on the matter at hand? how are you biased? what are your blindspots? how do you want to be a better person? to others? to yourself?
itâs actually wild how terrified of the general public most usamericans are. like you donât realize it if youâre someone who mostly walks and takes transit and spends a lot of time in populous public spaces but then you talk to one of the thousands of people that seemingly never set foot in any public space besides a parking garage or a starbucks and you suddenly understand why itâs so easy for fascist rhetoric about the dangerous alien to take root. this countryâs median voter pretty much never interacts with strangers who arenât their coworkers or people they met on dating apps
saw a post on instagram that was literally someone citing statistics saying public transit is one of the safest travel options out there and the comments were literally just âummmmm op this is so ableist and misogynistic of you :) donât you know the average public transit user is a dangerous violent criminal who wants to set you on fire :)))â
it must be so terrifying and sad to go through life convinced if you set foot outside your car in public or interact with people outside your nuclear family youâll instantly be raped and robbed by the Evil Poors no wonder so many of these people are reactionary tar pits
Zuckerbergâs increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
More than a decade ago, a group of young, internet-connected Belarusian dissidents launched a series of increasingly high-stakes, increasingly surreal confrontations with the corrupt, authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenka, a man who is often called "the last Soviet dictator."
Lukashenka's secret police â still called the KGB â routinely terrorize and kidnap pro-democracy activists, and all forms of protest are banned. It was against the backdrop of this unrelenting oppression that the activists launched a series of whimsical "flash mobs" that challenged the Lukashenka regime's willingness to crack down on even the most innocuous behavior.
One of these flash mobs was an ice cream social: activists converged on a public square to eat ice cream cones. Lukashenka's thugs beat them and dragged them away:
The protestors thought that by daring Lukashenka to arrest people for eating ice cream, they could create a win-win situation: either Lukashenka would be revealed as the kind of asshole who thinks it should be illegal to eat ice cream, or he'd be revealed as the kind of weakling who couldn't keep a lid on dissent.
Lukashenka took the bait. And took it. And took it. In the years that followed, protesters would be arrested for smiling, clapping, and just standing silently:
The world learned that Lukashenka was a buffoon, and Belarusians affirmed their view that this buffoon would not hesitate to mete out the most vicious punishments for the most innocuous actions:
https://sci-hub.st/10.1080/25739638.2021.1928880
Speaking of thin-skinned, paranoid, wildly corrupt buffoons who will stop at nothing to silence their enemies, how about that Mark Zuckerberg, huh? Sure, all the headlines these days are about Zuck's intention to transform Facebook into a sports betting site:
But in the UK, Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers keeps finding new, ice cream grade depths of absurdity to plumb. The whistleblower in question is, of course, Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of the internationally bestselling memoir Careless People, which details the criminality she witnesses during her years as the head of Facebook's international relations team:
Careless People is full of revelations about the gross institutional misconduct of Facebook, including its knowing encouragement of a genocide in Myanmar. But it's also full of stories about the severe personal failings of Facebook's executive team, especially Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan and Mark Zuckerberg.
These three come off as the most colossal of assholes, cruel, petty and predatory. Sandberg comes across as a sexual abuser who dreams of trafficking in poor people's organs. Kaplan is an oaf whose plan to provide paid internet access to refugee camps falls apart once he learns that refugees in camps don't have any money (he also takes points off of Wynn-Williams' workplace evaluation for being "unresponsive" over a period when she was in a near-death coma). Worst of all, though, is Zuckerberg, whose sins range from cheating at Settlers of Catan to endangering the Colombian peace process after a 50-year civil war because he refused to get out of bed before noon. Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook and the power to censor content they disliked, as part of a failed bid to get permission to offer a Facebook service in China.
It's a terrible company, with awful products, run by the worst people. Wynn-Williams' conditions of employment required her to sign a contract that bound her to silence (nondisclosure), forbade her from speaking ill of the company (nondisparagement), and denied her access to the legal system in all her dealings with Meta (binding arbitration).
Together, these three clauses â routinely used by Meta to silence would-be whistleblowers â meant that after Wynn-Williams's book was published, Meta got its arbitrator â a lawyer who is paid by Meta to adjudicate contractual disputes instead of an actual judge â to order her to never promote or even speak about her book.
The arbitrator awarded Meta $50,000 for each criticism that Wynn-Williams levied, quickly coming to a total of over $11,000,000. This vastly exceeds the assets and lifetime earning potential of Wynn-Williams and her husband (a reporter with the Financial Times). If this bill ever truly comes due, they will be wiped out.
Which raises an interesting question: what else can they do to her? Once they've secured civil damages that exceeds her net worth several times over, why shouldn't she just flout her agreement? "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," and all that.
Nevertheless, Wynn-Williams has scrupulously hewed to the arbitrator's rules, steadfastly remaining silent about her book, its contents, and her experiences at Facebook/Meta. When she and I appeared onstage together in London for the launch for my book Enshittification last year, she fell silent and assumed a blank expression any time the subject of Meta came up, and she didn't sign or sell books afterward:
When she won the British Book Award, she did not speak to accept it, and the cover of her book was blurred out on the overhead screen (she gave an acceptance speech on behalf of her co-winner, the late Virginia Giuffre, who was abused by Jeffrey Epstein and who accused Prince Andrew of sexual assault):
Nevertheless, when she was booked to speak â about a subject other than her book â at the Hay Festival on a stage with Tim Wu and Carole Cadwalladr, Meta sent a legal threat to the festival and Wynn-Williams, claiming that if by speaking about anything in public, she would violate the arbitrator's order. Accordingly, Wynn-Williams maintained total silence and a blank facial expression for an hour on stage, saying not one word, while Wu and Cadwalladr carried on a discussion. Careless People was withdrawn from the festival bookshop on the days she appeared there:
Nevertheless, Meta has informed Wynn-Williams that her silent, motionless appearance on a stage constitutes a further breach of her "agreement" and that they are going to seek even more damages from her. This act of anti-ice cream thuggery has pushed Wynn-Williams over the edge and now she's sued to invalidate her contract:
Her lawyers have posted their documents related to the suit, including a 285-page declaration by Wynn-Williams explaining the great lengths she's gone to in order to comply with Meta's demands, and the company's absolute intransigence and arbitrary menace:
Why would Meta be so intent on destroying this one high-profile whistleblower? Surely they've heard of the Streisand Effect. There is no better way to ensure that Wynn-Williams' book (already a NYT #1 bestseller) continues to attract readers than to continue to escalate these threats.
I think they're perfectly aware that they are convincing more people to read Careless People (you should read it, it's genuinely excellent):
But I think they've decided that this is a price worth paying, because:
a) They've done even worse things since Wynn-Williams parted ways with the company; and
b) They're laying off thousands of workers because their giant bet on AI has been a flop, leaving them with a massive cash crunch; and
c) By destroying Sarah Wynn-Williams, they can terrorize all those thousands of bitter ex-employees into silence about the even graver sins the company has committed.
Lukashenka knew that arresting children for eating ice cream would make him a laughingstock abroad. Zuckerberg knows that threatening Wynn-Williams for standing in wooden silence on a stage makes him look like history's most guillotineable billionaire. But both Lukashenka and Zuckerberg are willing to be thought a thin-skinned bully, so long as that means the people they oppress the most are too terrified to ever challenge their authority.
For these who donât know: The restaurant she worked at closed down but she left before that and opened her own bakery, thatâs apparently very successful!
She has a youtube channel where she shares recipes and cooking advice!
