Hey all! Don't forget to help out Mohammed Ayesh! Without his tireless work for months on end, hundreds of families would not have been able to get verification and be put on our list. Now, he has a family of his own to care for.
Go to paypal.me/MAyesh674 and type in the amount. Since it’s PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don’t have a PayPal account? No worries.
My name is Mohammed ayesh from Gaza Recently, I started a new chapter in my li… Shelley Gordon needs your support for Support Ayesh’s family
Hey all! It has been nearly a year since I've been absent from tumblr, and likewise almost a year since I have last updated you on Mona and her team's mutual aid inititatives. In that time, Mona's efforts have managed to keep entire communities of displaced people alive in the refugee encampments in Ghazzah, including through the distribution of staple foods, fresh fruits and vegetables, cooked meals, clean children's clothing, diapers, baby formula, and so much more. Please continue to support Mona's efforts through the new link on Chuffed. Remember! Every single dollar counts!!! Chuffed donation link.
For more information, please consult her Instagram!
If you also have more to spare, please help Mona support her sister and niece who have been displaced 6 times over the course of the accelerated genocide.
None of this is possible without Mona and her family's diligence and work. If you would like to send her a thank you note or well wishes, please include it in the replies to this post, in your tags, or in the comments! She always appreciates them ♡
Do you know anything i can donate to for palestine that's not the gofundmes because the idea of having to choose who needs my money more is just. scary to me they all need it 3: maybe there's a thing that splits/distributes money evenly???? idk but help would be appreciated
Gazafunds actually deals with this anxiety and makes a decision for you if you want. Their home page has a spotlighted fundraiser and the code consider things like how close the gfm is to finishing, when the most recent donation is, etc. So it's randomized to help as many people as possible.
There's also @helpgazachildren which if you donate, you can help multiple people at once since it's a whole mutual aid fund, or at least close to it. Hussam distributes money to people who need it when he's asked.
I lowkey hate when programs talk to me in a friendly way. "don't worry, nearly there!" Shut up. It should say "loading 64.3% completed. Do not turn off device" and absolutely nothing else. You arent my friend you are computer. Act like it
Anita Sarkeesian, feminist who interpreted media under a feminist lens. She did a series about video games and she was the subject of targeted harassment. That was the start of gamergate
Minor correction, the start of gamergate was based around a different reporter, Zoe Quinn, but they were both absolutely violently threatened over their involvement in video game criticism and development. A hate campaign was started by Quinn's ex-boyfriend when he wrote a post falsely accusing them of dating video game journalists in order to receive positive reviews on their own game, Depression Quest, which led other bad actors to accuse all women in the industry (Zoe identified as female at the time) of perceived sexual immorality. Anita Sarkeesian's brilliant Youtube series Tropes vs Women in Video Games (which everyone should watch, right now) sparked a particular nerve for criticizing popular games of killing and/or victimizing any important female character (there is a CHILLING bit that borders on ludicrous where she describes the plots of a seemingly endless parades of games as "In [title], [male player character's] wife dies, and you then have to rescue [his] daughter."). That series did actually make a huge change in the industry, especially when touted by progressive legacy developers like Tim Schafer (Monkey Island, Psychonauts), who went on to expand hiring in his company to front women and minority voices, but the shift didn't really show for a long time and echoes of the sexism that plagues the industry at its core are still rampant.
The Trump administration admits to testing conversion therapy on trans prisoners and implies its policy of forcibly detransitioning trans me
i know hardly anyone reads articles when i share them so to highlight some key parts here:
"under [this policy], the ~2,200 trans people in federal custody will be medically and socially detransitioned against their will, all in the name of helping them “recover” from gender dysphoria."
"...the third study in this category attempts to compare trans women who undergo gender-affirming surgery to those with an entirely unrelated medical condition known as ‘adult acquired buried penis.’ Equating these two is an entirely medically inaccurate and hateful rhetorical decision, and it’s telling of the manner in which the Trump administration is trying to frame trans people’s bodies.
Meanwhile, the fourth study analyzes fertility in 18 trans men who paused their hormone therapy in order to have children, and it constitutes the only fertility study the BOP admits to have reviewed. As if that wasn’t alarming enough, this specific study doesn’t evaluate if trans men can carry children after going off testosterone; it actually evaluates when. Given the fact that the BOP has no legitimate reason to concern itself with fertility, this implies that the Trump administration—at least in part—created the prison policy out of a desire to find out how soon the forcibly detransitioned trans men in its custody will be able to carry children.
Finally, perhaps the greatest confession is provided by the last two sources. The first of these is a medical article providing commentary on a study—a study that was not reviewed during the creation of this policy—of trans patients at Kaiser Permanente clinics, and in its words, its sole purpose is to “describe methods of cohort ascertainment and data collection and to characterise the study population.” Put differently, it communicates two things: how to single out trans people through health information and what data a study on trans people should collect."
"So far, the judge overseeing the ACLU’s lawsuit against this policy, Reagan appointee Royce Lamberth, has been surprisingly sympathetic towards the plaintiffs and, as a result, has blocked it from being enforced for the ~800 that have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. However, if the Bureau of Prisons’ policy is eventually allowed to stand by the Supreme Court, it will undoubtedly lead to tremendous suffering among the trans people in federal custody."
there is something really nasty the body does that I have to tell you about. sleep deprivation causes the body to feel stronger signals. it can make light and sound and pain worse, just from not sleeping. and then, get this - - that can be the kind of shit that keeps someone up at night. less sleep makes more pain happen, more pain can make less sleep happen, and this feedback loop keeps spinning. and then that feedback loop fucks with your body and can make you have worse illnesses, worse infections, worse physical health, worse mental health, and feel like shit overall. and then THAT can make it even harder to sleep.
quality of sleep is quality of life. no matter what else you have going on, you have to prioritize sleep. if your sleep is not restful, you might have something like sleep apnea that can make you weaker until you get treated. whatever is stopping you from sleeping needs to be a priority because it will wreck you until you can sleep. your body cannot function properly without enough sleep, and it might not even tell you that sleep is the problen.
your body might just tell you that everything sucks forever until you can figure it out and get it addressed. there are ways to break the pain and sleep deprivation feedback loop, like medication. and if sleep still sucks, really consider getting a sleep study. even if it is a pain in the ass, your health might depend on it.
no matter what else you try, no matter how else you try to prioritize your health, and no matter how you have to accomplish this, you might not be able to feel better until you can actually get enough quality sleep.
It’s not a crime if we do it (to nurses) with an app
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:
If I could abolish one piece of received wisdom about tech policy, it would be this: "Tech moves at the speed of innovation and regulation moves at the speed of government, so regulation will always lag behind tech."
(If I could abolish two pieces of received wisdom about tech policy, the other one would be "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Decent treatment is not a customer reward program, and "voting with your wallet" only works if you're a billionaire whose wallet is thicker than all the other wallets put together.)
To be clear, there are times when tech enables new forms of conduct that don't fit neatly into the existing policy framework. For example, we apply copyright to anyone who makes or handles a copy of a creative work, and that used to be a pretty good proxy for "someone in the supply chain of the media industry."
The problem is that computers work by making dozens and dozens of copies every time you click your mouse, and we all use computers for everything, and clicking a mouse doesn't make you part of the entertainment business. The fact that we've had hyperinflation in "making and handling copies" but continued to apply an esoteric industrial framework to pretty much everything everyone does all the time is a huge problem that desperately needs fixing:
Copyright notwithstanding, tech generally does not outrun our capacity to regulate it. Rather, tech bosses come up with incredibly flimsy reasons why their business doesn't fit into the existing regulatory framework, and policymakers accept these ridiculous excuses so readily that one can only assume they're in on the racket.
Take "fintech," all those neobanks and the cryptocurrency junk and shitcoins and stablecoins and NFTs and so on that a group of pump-and-dumpers, money launderers and stock swindlers have pushed for more than a decade now. As Trashfuture's Riley Quinn says, "Whenever you hear 'fintech,' you should think 'unregulated bank.'" It's not hard to apply existing regulations to these companies: they fall under banking law, usury law, securities law and gambling law.
There's no (good) reason not to apply these legal frameworks to the crypto industry – but there are plenty of bad reasons not to. The most obvious reason not to apply those regulations is that you are on the same side as the pump-and-dumpers, money launderers and stock swindlers. The reason we struggle to regulate fintech is that we just don't want to.
Then there's Uber, which claimed that it wasn't a taxi company, it was a "transportation network company," which meant that none of the regulations we apply to taxis should apply to Uber. To call this a transparent ruse is to do great violence to the good, hardworking transparent ruses putting in the hard yards to run honest scams. "Uber isn't a taxi company, it's a transportation network company" is about as plausible as those t-shirts that read "It's not a bald spot, it's a solar-panel for a sex-machine."
Emboldened by the success of the "transportation network company" wheeze, Uber launched Uber Eats, claiming that it wasn't a "food delivery company" but rather a "delivery network company." This set up the template for a remorseless tide of new sex-machine solar-panels that have pushed Uber's system of wage-theft and worker misclassification into an expanding constellation of labor categories.
From fintech to price-fixing to gig-work, the entire industry runs on the very stupid proposition that "it's not a crime if we do it with an app":
One of the worst of these sex-machine solar-panels is to be found in nursing, where a cluster of heavily capitalized apps that nurses must rely on to get shifts insist that they aren't "healthcare staffing agencies," rather, they are "healthcare worker platforms" that should be exempted from the regulations that we started applying to the former after a string of calamities and disasters.
This phenomenon is detailed in eye-watering detail in "Uber For Nursing," a must-read new report by Katie J Wells, Maya Pinto, and Funda Ustek Spilda for the AI Now Institute:
If "Uber for nursing" rings a bell, you might be thinking of "Uber for Nursing: How an AI-Powered Gig Model Is Threatening Health Care," an earlier report that Wells and Spilda wrote for the Roosevelt Institute in late 2024:
The Roosevelt Institute report contained many eye-popping findings, most notably that at least some of the leading national nursing gig-work platforms were using data-brokers to find out how much debt nurses were carrying, and offered lower wages to the nurses with the most debt, on the grounds that the most economically desperate nurses will accept the lowest pay:
The new report describes how, in the absence of a muscular policy response, these nursing gig-work companies have raised fantastic sums of money, some of which they have diverted to regulatory capture projects in a bid to states to recognize their solar-panel sex-machines, with great success. These companies haven't merely refined their lobbying game, either – as a sphincter-puckering appendix detailing the experience of nurses with these apps shows, they have also made great strides in immiserating nurses and transferring their earning power to gig platforms and the hospitals that rely on them.
This degradation of the work experience is characteristic of the new world of AI-powered jobs. AI isn't taking workers' jobs, but it is enshittifying them, with degrading, neurosis-inducing surveillance and high-handed discipline:
But gig-work companies remain laser-focused on healthcare workers, likely because that is one of the only growing professions left in America. They're trying to screw over healthcare workers for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: "That's where the money is." The implication here is that the 15% of the American workforce that is employed in the healthcare industry is on the front lines of the battle against gig-work and algorithmic management.
Like parasites that attack the sick and weak, gig-work and algorithmic management come first for industries that are already bad for workers and the people they serve, making things much worse while insisting that they're just trying to apply a cool digital fix to a broken analog system. That, too, was Uber's playbook: attacking the medallion taxi system as corrupt and sclerotic – while replacing it with a system that's corrupt, extractive and dynamic, able to evade all attempts to improve things for drivers and riders (such as drivers' unions).
That's what's happened with healthcare staffing agencies. These have long been a fixture in healthcare, partly because there was always a large cohort of skilled healthcare professionals who valued the flexibility of short term contracts (for example, "travel nurses") and partly because hospitals love hiring contractors who aren't part of their workers' unions.
Staffing agencies weren't good. A string of scandals led to waves of regulations in states like Colorado, Minnesota and New York that required agencies to "register annually, disclose shareholders and executive officers, certify worker credentials, report to state authorities on the number of workers employed, document service rates charged to facilities, and list average wages paid to workers by job category." These regulations also banned staffing agencies from locking up workers with noncompete agreements and ripping them off with finder's fees.
Rather than strengthening these protections, gig nursing platforms avoid them. Where staffing agencies secure multi-week contracts for travel nurses, gig platforms typically assign workers to single-day shifts. Where staffing agencies let nurses bargain for their scheduling needs, gig platforms present take-it-or-leave-it offers and no opportunities to speak to a human when things go wrong. And where staffing agencies evaluated the workers on their roster based on employer feedback, the gig platforms install apps that continuously surveil and evaluate workers, downranking them and cutting their hours and pay based on algorithmic judgments that are never explained and cannot be appealed.
Platforms match nurses with shifts, claiming to regulators that they're little more than a "job-notice board." But when they pitch hospitals, they tell a different story, about their ability to use algorithms to erode wages and blacklist workers who make trouble. Healthcare gig-work apps push workers to accept shifts that require more travel and pay less, at facilities they don't want to work at. Refusal to accept a shift can permanently compromise your ability to get future shifts, and/or lower the wage you're offered in future.
In addition to these poor working conditions and low wages, gig platforms have resurrected the prohibited practice of charging workers "finder's fees," by layering on junk fees that take money out of every paycheck. Staffing agencies aren't allowed to do this, but the gig-work platforms' "solar panel for a sex-machine" gambit transforms the finder's fee into a "platform fee" that somehow escapes regulators' grasp.
How is it that a regulator can't see that a "platform fee" is exactly equivalent to a "finder's fee?" This is not a case of technology outpacing regulation – it's a case of lawmakers colluding with profitable firms to evade regulation in order to steal from workers.
The platforms are aslosh in investor cash – Clipboard Health, Intelycare, and Shiftkey are all valued at more than $1b, and Shiftkey just completed a $300m private equity raise. This leaves them with lots of ready cash to spend on regulatory entrepreneurship. In Georgia, Clipboard lobbied "to exempt gig nursing platforms from state unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation laws." In Ohio, Shiftkey and Clipboard are pushing a bill "to classify gig nurses as independent contractors, exempting gig platforms from minimum wage and other worker protection laws." In Utah, Nursa is praising a bill that a state senator called "lightest-touch regulation." All in all, 17 states have nurse gig platform deregulation bills underway.
In 2022, the healthcare gig-work platforms tried to get a California ballot measure to carve nursing platforms out of all state labor laws. They withdrew it, but pursued an "under the radar" approach to get the same thing by seeking changes in administrative rules, rather than state laws. Lobbying for administrative law changes to exempt healthcare gig-work platforms from regulation is also underway in Missouri, Louisiana and Utah.
One bright light in all this comes from New York state, where a 2025 law "affirmatively recognizes gig nursing platforms as entities that must comply with the state’s healthcare staffing agency rules." The existence of this law proves that the crisis of gig-work healthcare platforms is not an example of tech racing ahead of regulation. If New York's state leg can figure out that a gig-work platform is just a staffing agency in app form, then other states can do so as well. If they don't figure that out, that's because they don't want to.
Sometime in this century, our political class and our financial class arrived at a consensus that Douglas Rushkoff describes as "go meta," in his 2022 book Survival of the Richest:
The "go meta" ethos insists that the most important, smartest and most valuable move is always away from productive labor. Don't drive a cab: go meta and own a medallion that you rent to a cab driver. Don't own a medallion, go meta and start a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don't start a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don't invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and buy options in a gig-work ride-hailing company – and so on and so on, into ever more abstracted forms of gambling and rent-collection.
The reorganization of the economy around parasitic middlemen and financial gamblers (but I repeat myself) is the real reason that we can't regulate tech. Once you've decided that the most important party to a transaction is the person who has the option on the share on the platform on the license that the worker who actually does the job requires, of course you're going to see a solar-panel for a sex-machine in every bald spot.
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:
I've known EFF executive director Cindy Cohn for 27 years. I met her when I needed cyberlaw advice for a startup I'd helped found. We got along so well that I ended up quitting the startup and going to work at EFF. Now, Cindy's memoir, Privacy's Defender, is on the shelves:
I'm hardly a disinterested party here, obviously. I was at Cindy's wedding, I've danced with her at Burning Man, and I've worked with her for most of my adult life. What's more, I was present for many of the pivotal moments she recounts in this book. But still: this is a great book that I found utterly captivating.
Cohn's been with EFF since its earliest days, when she litigated one of the most important cases in computing history, the Bernstein case, which legalized civilian access to encryption technology and changed the world:
Cryptographers had been arguing with the US government over the ban on working encryption technology for years before Cohn joined the fight, and they'd tried all manner of arguments to overturn the ban: technical arguments, political arguments, financial arguments. All of these efforts failed – they didn't even make a dent.
Cohn's genius was the way she formulated a free speech argument about the ban on encryption: arguing that computer code was a form of expressive speech, entitled to protection under the First Amendment. While she didn't come up with this idea, it was her gift for assembling a narrative and a cadre of unimpeachable experts that carried the day.
In this age of bad faith right-wing trolling about "free speech" and "cancel culture," it's easy to forget how central free speech cases and causes have been for the advancement of human rights and human thriving. Free speech cases gave us the nation's first privacy protections, protection for unions, and protection for civil rights organizers.
Cohn never forgets this. Her decades with EFF are a history of the fight for speech rights (and thus privacy rights) on the internet. After the US government seized on the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to dismantle privacy and turn the internet into a system of ubiquitous surveillance, Cohn (along with EFF, of course!) was at the center of the fight for digital rights. The same prescience and strategic brilliance that led her to take up the Bernstein case and win it were with her through those millennial years, and her description of our cases, campaigns and fights in those years vividly foreshadows the moment we are in today.
The same goes for her "three letter agency" chapter, which takes up our fights against the NSA and other US agencies in the wake of whistleblower disclosures by Mark Klein and Edward Snowden. These accounts are one part master class in legal tactics; one part battle cry for a global pushback against the transformation of the internet into the perfect surveillance and control machine, and one part personal memoir of a tactician, finding ways to leverage a righteous cause to raise a guerrilla army of experts, co-counsel, amici, and champions who carried our message to the world.
All of this is connected back to her other legal career, as a human rights defender litigating on behalf of the survivors of a massacre perpetrated by a death squad working on behalf of Chevron in Nigeria. Cohn skilfully connects these very concrete, visible human rights struggles to the invisible – and no less important – human rights work she carried out for EFF.
I didn't just have a front-row seat for this stuff – I had backstage passes for a lot of it (though not the juiciest national security cases, which required EFF lawyers to maintain total secrecy from colleagues, spouses, even our board, on pain of a long prison sentence for disclosing classified information). Even so, Cohn's pacey, smart retelling of these events brought them to life for me, and of course, there's a coherence that you get after the fact that is missing when you're living through it in a moment.
But what really enlivened this delightful book were the personal details that Cohn weaves into the story. I've always known that she was an adoptee (and I even have a small, strange, coincidental connection to her birth family), but Cohn's intimate, personal, frank memoir of her early family life, and her bittersweet connection to her birth family were so intimate and well-told that I felt like I was getting to know my dear friend all over again.
Cindy is retiring from EFF (but not the law) in a couple of months. This book is a beautiful capstone to a brilliant career that defined the fight for cyber rights, and a deep, accessible dive into the defining tech and human rights battles of this century.
Btw keep reblogging my post with fun tags and keep using your tagging system as it was intended, idc what that fuckass update say, we gonna make tumblr roll that shit back
But let's be clear, this is clearly some corporate speak for "we gonna force that bullshit on you someway somehow anyways" we will have to be more vigilant about tumblr constantly fucking with the reblog feature, them adding a goddamn menu button for reblogs on desktop was only the start, it genuinely feels like these people don't use tumblr or their main social media is twitter because they are constantly trying to shit all over the best tumblr features to make it more like fucking twitter, the battle might have been won but the war continues
When I told you the battle has been won but the war continues this is what I meant, tumblr has rolled out once again this very exact same updated but this time it only affects the least protected users of this website aka the gifmakers, edits makers, artists and creators of all sorts, because not only is every reblog of a gifset it's own post, but now every reblog of a gifset can get flagged without OP even being aware of it
They get flagged on your blog AND in your queue, and sometimes you can't even tell what the fuck was even in the post so you can give a justification for asking an appeal
And if you aren't scrolling your own blog or queue constantly like a maniac, you won't even know the reblog is flagged cuz they get put in your Review Flagged Posts section of your app and website, somewhere NOBODY even checks, and has no number next to it to tell you how many posts are in there
I got reblogs flagged all the way to 2017 in there, and the only way to know is to SCROLL DOWN
And the cherry on that bullshit Sunday is that some of these reblogs can be flagged without you even being able to appeal them like I have a bunch of them which are simply impossible to appeal, even if yet again the post is completely innocent
Tumblr seemingly continues to find new and original ways to make this place absolutely worst for creators by taking any & all agency you got on your creation away, and they fucking hiding it behind their April fools green cat
@allthecanadianpolitics have you seen the sunshine list this year?
A historical viewer for Ontario's Sunshine List
The cbc article which states the employment of the top earners, including the seven police officers on the list that were involved in the corruption probe 🙃
what’s important to note and missing from the “headline” tweet is that they simultaneously constructed additional good public transit to the public transit already in the city (bus rapid transit, train stations). Just removing highway alone isn’t going to make traffic better, the bigger part of the story is that they improved public transportation. And the current mayor wants to do more - cyclist lanes and reinstate a tram system
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