Solar-Lunar-Nature-Punk; Pro-Labor; Non-capitalism

@maya-serena: social issues @panthere-bleu: fandom and random @beruthiels-cathouse: cute critters @la-belle-gigi: art and writing reference materials @thethingsicantsayopenly: personal stuff

[fuck-customers]

[magnetictapedatastorage]

I Watched a 55-Year-Old Law Break the AI Hiring Industry — And It Was Overdue

The Eightfold AI lawsuit exposed what happens when companies treat employment decisions like ad targeting — and why the fix requires enginee

a bit more context

[saywhat-politics]

[onethirdofimpossible]

Okay, I was just going to reblog this without commentary, but I can't keep this to myself. I'm a PhD student in environmental science and this is my fucking highway.

The first published study about climate change (that I am aware of-- feel free to point out if there's an older one) is an 1896 paper by Svante Arrhenius. He pointed out the link between the greenhouse effect and changes in atmospheric CO2.

Plate tectonics, which the geoscience community now recognizes as near indisputable, was a fringe theory until about the 1960s.

Just in case anyone thought that climate change was a "recent fad" in research.

[ivy-michaels]

This website sometimes seems to think that leftism is when you can buy cheap things, and the cheaper they are, the more leftist it is. I really don't know how to explain the world to people like that.

[ivy-michaels]

I made a post a few weeks back about how electronics should be big, expensive, and repairable. A lot of people responded that they agreed with big and repairable, but it should be cheap too.

Here's the problem with that, cheap and well-constructed are mutually exclusive. They simply are. As long as you have an economy where people are paid for work, even with a robust safety net or even universal income, all costs eventually boil down to labor.

Yes, there's raw materials and such, but those are then converted into usable materials using, can anyone give me the answer? That's right, labor.

Simply put, money is a physical representation of labor. This isn't a controversial stance, this is extremely basic baby's first Marxism. Like, you say you go here, but you don't seem to understand this.

The reason things like LCD panels and disposable LED lights and hard disks are so cheap is because their production has been opitmized to produce the most of a specific item in the least amount of time. An electron tube for a radio takes a skilled technician an hour or so to make and costs you $30. Transistors can be made by the thousands on a fully automated production line in the same time and cost you less than a buck each.

If you want a laptop computer that you can service, repair, and upgrade, you have to engineer it to be serviceable, repairable, and upgradeable. That means someone has to be paid to do that. You have to use more materials in order to make it large enough that you can access the servicable parts, which means you have to pay for more materials. You have to provide quality control for all the various extra connections that make servicability possible, someone has to be paid for that. You have to be willing to reject products that make it to final assembly and do not check out for quality control, which is incredibly expensive.

So no, you can't just make things "Big, Cheap, and Repairable." Being cheap and well-made are completely orthogonal to each other.

[ivy-michaels]

#if everyone is being compensated fairly#nearly everything 'big' in your life should cost you a lot of money (buying it from someone who made it or at the end of the supply chain)#or a lot of time (making it yourself from scratch or base materials)#and it should last a LONG time and receive maintenance and repair over its lifetime#furniture clothes technology tools curtains quilts toys instruments#etc

[queer-as-city-folk]

Even in a post-capitalist, post-consumerist world, you still need to produce goods, as a result of this, you need factories because it is more effective to have a few people making a lot of clothes in a factory than every woman being forced to sit down and spin wool all day.

[queer-as-city-folk]

The issue with factories is poor wages, unsafe working conditions and environmental impact, all of which can be fixed through things like regulatory bodies and unions, the issue is not the fact that goods are no longer all made at home

[captain-kit-adventuress]

fun fact: this is one of adam smith's actual main arguments in wealth of nations, not that we should all be libertarian arseholes.

the idea is that specialisation makes an economy much more efficient, which then allows more and more people to thrive without having to engage in drudgery and spreading out the workload so we're not all stuck in these subsistence situations, because frankly, there are literally not enough hours in the day and smith recognised that.

[marzipanandminutiae]

Also, of course, the times and places in human history when all of the things that people who idealized history think were made at home, we're actually all made it home, were extremely limited. It wasn't "women making wool all day" at many, many points throughout history – it was still "professional weavers making wool"

[kyraneko]

Also if you have factories efficiently making MOST of the things we use, more recreational time can be devoted to making the things we really value having handmade.

A spinner, dyer, weaver, or sewist can devote time to making a fancy yarn, a cool piece of art cloth, or a made-to-specifics piece of clothing for their own personal gratification much more readily than if they had to spin, dye, weave, or sew all their family's thread/yarn/fabric/clothes.

So we can have cool things more readily. More and better art. Plus a better time making it.

[phroyd]

[enba-and-luka]

[lateleviathan]

THIS IS NOT THE END OF STOPKILLINGGAMES

THERE'S A WAY TO BYPASS THE COMMISSION AND PEOPLE ARE ALREADY WORKING ON IT

[roguesynapses]

Tldw; there is majority support in the European Parliament for a bill that would cover most of SKG's issues, and if passed this would bypass the decision of the Commission. There are also ongoing lawsuits in France and other places that would likely lead to some legislation. There is also a bill being worked on in California that wouldn't stop current games from being killed, but would stop future games from being killed

[stanfave2]

Science Backs the Man Who Always Skips Self-Checkout — Here's Why

Man Avoids Self-Checkout. Research Confirms Why You Should Too

Self-checkout avoidance isn't stubbornness — science shows choosing a human cashier boosts mood, builds community trust, and fights loneline

[posttexasstressdisorder]

File Under: SEE? I WAS RIGHT!

[zooophagous]

Why are you using chatgpt to get through college. Why are you spending so much time and money on something just to be functionally illiterate and have zero new skills at the end of it all. Literally shooting yourself in the foot. If you want to waste thirty grand you can always just buy a sportscar.

[qonphuceingey]

I’m really starting to think you people don’t understand what university is for. You’re buying the accreditation that you can do these things. It doesn’t matter how you do them.

[zooophagous]

I can assure you if you're going to school to be an xray tech or a surgical assistant it does very much matter how you do the stuff your accreditation says you can do. We aren't all business majors.

[qonphuceingey]

Yes, but you actually can’t do an X-ray without an X-ray machine and you can’t do surgery without scalpels. We already rely on technology for everything. Offloading cognitive tasks just frees us up to do more. If you can do your job with chatgpt, but can’t without, you can still do your job. I’m sure you would find university much much harder without access to google or the internet too.

[zooophagous]

Do you think scalpels are magic and do a little song and dance and perform the surgery themselves like Beauty and the Beast characters and the surgeon is there to conduct the background music

[darlingofdots]

What do you think will happen when your employer, who hired you because they saw you have a certificate to say that you have specific skills and knowledge, starts expecting you to have and use those skills and knowledge and you can't because you think a university degree is just a piece of paper that you buy

[ariaste]

"Offloading cognitive tasks just frees us up to do more"

When you're in school, the cognitive tasks are there for the explicit purpose of being brain exercises. It's weightlifting. It is FOR building your mental muscles and making you a stronger thinker and planner. "Offloading the cognitive tasks", then, is just Not Doing The Weightlifting. What happens when you pay for your gym membership and just stand around messing around on your phone? Nothing. Nothing happens. Just money leaving your wallet. Nothing else.

Using AI is a short term pleasure that is going to fuck you over in the long term, and by the time you realize that you didn't build the necessary muscles you need for the cognitive tasks required of your ACTUAL JOB (or, like, adult life in general), it's going to be too late to do anything about it... except going back and doing the real work all over again to get you up to speed.

And if your response as a college student is "Ugh i'm already good at this though, i don't need the practice" -- sweetie, you have no idea how good at it you could be though. If you're good at it now but you keep working on it, you're going to ASTONISH yourself in a couple years with how good at it you can get. I was a good writer when I was in college; I am an ASTRONOMICALLY better writer now, because I put in the work. But you have to lift the weights and build your muscles to get there, even when it's tedious. There aren't any shortcuts for this. You can be content with your own mediocrity, or you can believe that you're capable of growing towards brilliance. Which one will you choose, mediocrity or brilliance? You get to pick right now.

[skodasforge]

I’m a Surgical Assistant and that ChatGPT stan pissed me off so I’ll use my job as an example. 90% of our job as surgical assists comes down to memorizing the names and usages of the thousands of unique instruments and equipment and sutures involved in surgery as well as having the critical thinking skills to anticipate the needs and expectations of the surgeons we work with. That’s a “cognitive load” that cannot be pawned off on a computer. If I relied on ChatGPT to tell me what instruments to have ready for a case, it would create a composite of what the most likely instruments to be used in a given surgery and assuming that it’s even accurate, it would be effectively useless if my surgeon didn’t use any of those because each doctor is different. Surgeons get pissed off if you give them the wrong diameter size suture, so why would I rely on a soulless algorithm to tell me what my surgeon wants? And if I’m not figuring out for myself what they may need based off my own learning and not machine learning then why am I even there? There’s a reason robotic surgery still requires a surgical assistant and a surgeon to operate the robot, technology is an easement not a replacement for human labor and in college learning is the labor you should be doing.

A common thread with ChatGPT simps seems to be that they truly believe all labor is as easy as their cushy middle management jobs in the tech industry. “Buying an accreditation” might work there but can you imagine someone in the medical field not actually knowing the subject they’re licensed or accredited to know? I’ll give you a hint: the word we typically use is malpractice.

[shower-thoughts-last-responder]

I would also like to add as somone who did a one degree about 10 years ago when academia was just startingto make the switch from fully physical to full online, it is entirely possible to do a degree without really using the Internet or Google. You turn up to lectures, you collect the reading list, you go to the library, you find the book you need on the shelf, you take it and several others back to whatever desk you're working at and the you read them and make notes (I made notes on a PC but plenty of people in my group used paper notes pads), you critically evaluate the information amd decide whether or not to include it in your assessments. No Google required, it's not that fucking hard.

[selwyngrimm]

Let me introduce you all to the building trades concept of "buying your book."

A "book" is (a slightly outdated beyond this specific topic) term for your union card, which states that you're a member in good standing of your local/union and ostensibly means that you have the coinciding skills that go with the title of journeyworker or apprentice or whatever. Typically, to become a journeyman, you serve an apprenticeship (usually 5 years) and then have to take a test of some sort to prove you've acquired all the necessary skills to earn the qualification. The card/book is the proof that you have a basic level of competency.

Sometimes though certain locals, usually in the South or other places where right-to-work or similar attitudes are stronger, will "sell books," which is to say they will allow people who either haven't served an apprenticeship or passed a skills test to buy their card so that they may work on union jobs.

There's a myriad of reasons and reasonings on why a local might do this, but on the ground, it means that if I'm on a big job, anyone from areas or locals that have a reputation for selling books is automatically assumed to be under-qualified. This sucks, because I've known plenty of badass hands from Southern Locals, but because they come from book-selling locals, they had to overcome that stigma. To an extent, this whole thing is self-regulating because if you bought a book and can't hack it, you only come to a travel job once before they will never invite you back, but it is a constant source of sand in the gears for the whole labour management process.

Anyway, learning is important and faking learning WILL bite you in the ass if you have any desire to exist in the world in a meaningful way.

[veganzeus]

Right?!!!!! 😉🌱🌱🌱😂

[postcapitalist-dreaming]

Well, yeah, but... 😬 cauliflower. *hork*

(This is humor, dont @ me, dammit.)

[postcapitalist-dreaming]

I don't have beef with conscientious veganism, but the holier-than-thou my-veganism-is-a-virtue, closet capitalist, performative vegans can kiss my fat, dimpled ass.

[depsidase]

[theseventeensteps]

obsessed with how fixable society is, on a structural level.

obsessed with how all you need to do is throw money at public education and eliminate most standardized testing and you will start getting smarter, more engaged, kinder adults. obsessed with how giving people safe housing, reliable access to good food, and decent wages dramatically reduces drug overdoses and gun violence. obsessed with how much people actually want to get together and fix infrastructure, invent new ways of helping each other, and create global ways of living sustainably once you give them livable pay to do so. obsessed with how tracking diseases, developing medicines, and improving public health becomes so much easier when you just make healthcare free at point of use.

obsessed with how easy it all becomes, if we can just figure out how to wrench the wealth out of the hands of the hoarders.

[africanaquarian]

I thought I needed a new laptop but nope, youtube is slowing down your PC if you have adblock on on any open tab...

[astraltrickster]

To be very clear about this: CPUs aren't magical devices that can operate forever. They generate heat. They wear out over time. This happens faster when they're operating near capacity. This is not just an attempt to inconvenience you; this is an attempt to damage your property.

For the "crime" of not wanting to be tracked/have ads pissed into your eyeballs 24/7.

Even if you've paid for the "privilege" of the latter.

Fuck Google, and I hope they get sued into oblivion over this.

[fernwah-funzone]

i see everyone in the notes talking about newpipe but nobody's talking about youtube alternatives for desktop

IF YOU USE A DESKTOP PC OR LAPTOP, TRY INVIDIOUS

https://invidious.io/

it is a free, open-source alternative YouTube front-end. in addition to not having ads, it has other great QoL features like a download button. try one of the several instances on that link up there ^^^^

[saintjosie]

so i was super pissed and concerned about this but i have just discovered that while this is true, it is apparently only true for google chrome users. i just tested this by having ten tabs open in firefox playing ten different youtube videos at the same time and my cpu usage spiked to 25% as the videos were loading and then dropped back down to 10% as they played.

if you ever needed another reason to switch to a different browser, this is it.

[nudityandnerdery]

Hey, we’re in line for some absurd temperatures here in the southwest this week. This is very important to know and keep in mind. Be safe, stay hydrated, stay out of the sun as much as you can.

[ninjakittycomics]

List of emergency telephone numbers - Wikipedia

911 is usa. Don’t use our number if you’re in danger in France.

France is listed as 112

Please get very familiar with your emergency numbers, write it down and stick it to your fridge or other place that you’ll see it daily.

That’s how they trained us (yes I’m older than the full implementation of our emergency number)

Know the signs of the heat dangers, and know your local emergency phone number!

Stay safe!

[mimosa-sexypeople-contests-2026]

I always forget there are maga people on tumblr, this doesn’t feel like a website you’d find them on, so to keep them away:

Reblog if your blog is a maga free zone because if it wasn’t clear enough fuck ice, fuck maga, fuck Trump, Fuck Rowling, and fuck all the other bigots I missed

[mimosa-sexypeople-contests-2026]

In case anyone missed it

[depsidase]

[robotslenderman]

The recent hot VS cold polls have made me realise that a lot of people have no idea how to cool down.

As someone from a hot country that's regularly on fire, here's some tips:

WATER IS YOUR FRIEND! WATER! IS! YOUR! FRIEND! You can transfer SO much heat into this bad boy! You cannot cool down without water!

Wrists under the cold tap. Splash your face and the back of your neck. Fan yourself.

In some countries you can buy a little handeld fan with a water sprayer.

Damp tea towel around the neck. Stick an ice pack in there on hotter days.

Half fill a water bottle with water, stick in freezer. If you use a bottle with a straw, make sure it's lying on its side with the straw side up and out of the water. When frozen top up the rest of the way with tap water and off you go.

Desperate to cool off? Wet T-shirt. Sit in front of a fan. This will nuke it, just don't get hypothermia and don't fall asleep like this.

Cold showers are also your friend in summer. Some people get psyched up by these. Personally, I sleep like a baby, so I'm good to have them before bed. Just keep in mind that it takes a bit of time for the cool to circulate, so your body will tell you that you're colder than you actually are. I find that when I have cold showers I need to step out of the spray when I think I'm cold... I'll just wait, and thirty seconds later the temperature has evened out and I actually need to step under again. Rinse and repeat until you maintain coolness even after stepping out for a bit.

If you can't do cold showers, turn the cold shower on anyway and just stick your arms under. When they're cold, lift your arms up above your head. The sensation of cool blood draining into your body is fucking weird and kinda unpleasant but less unpleasant than being hot.

Feet in a tub of water with ice. Blood naturally flows to your extremities when hot, so take advantage of this. If you don't have a tub of ice water, sticking a wet rag on your feet in front of the fan works too, it's the less powerful version of the wet T-shirt.

Drinks lots of water but make sure that water has electrolytes as well. Stay in the shade.

Keep air circulating. Fans don't actually cool rooms down, they just help transfer heat from your body to the moisture on your skin or the air via evaporative cooling.

Block north facing windows early in the morning so the sun doesn't get in. If you're in the northern hemisphere, this is opposite for you. Keep in mind that if your home is brick, the bricks will still heat up and slowly release heat into your home even after the sun goes down so this will only do so much.

If it's hotter inside than outside, close all your windows but two, making sure they're on opposite sides of the house/unit you're in. Point a fan out of one window, making sure that the doors between the rooms with the open windows are all open. This will help create a mini pressure system in your home, pulling cooler air in and pushing the hotter air out via the fan. Bonus points if you can get that fan high up where the hot air rises; even within a single room the top is much hotter than the air by the floor. Adjust the amount of open windows based on how many fans you have, but generally you want more windows with fans open than windows without fans to keep the pressure correct.

Obviously, use your common sense for these. Not everything WILL work for you, just use the stuff that does and adjust what needs to be adjusted. Some of these will be impossible to use in the workplace but others you can still use. Others are best used at home. If humidity impacts your ability to use any of these, get a dehumidifier if that's an option, or use more ice instead of evaporation.

Also keep in mind that the skinnier you are, the faster these will work. More fat means more insulation, means more heat, so you may need to be more patient with some of these or use them in combination.

[robotslenderman]

Bringing this back for my dying mutuals