thinking about this bit from an article by Ann Druyan in 2003:
āWhen my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me ā it still sometimes happens ā and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I donāt ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous ā not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chanceā¦ That pure chance could be so generous and so kindā¦ That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of timeā¦ That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and itās much more meaningfulā¦ The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived.
That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday.
I donāt think Iāll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.ā
I wanted to make a post I could copy and paste and or link when I see folks asking where to buy fabrics when Joann is gone. I sew a lot, generally between 100-200 items a year and I don't do it on a big budget. Stores are not in a particular order.
Notions:
Wawak.com - start here, mostly stay here. Wawak is a supplier for professional sewing businesses and have the prices that show it. I will not pay for gutermann Mara 100 anywhere else. I buy buttons, tools, thread, and most elastic here.
Stitch Love Studio - this is where I buy lingerie supplies https://www.etsy.com/shop/StitchLoveStudio?ref=yr_purchases
Fabric:
Fabric Mart - this is one where you want to sign up for emails and never buy unless its on sale. They run different sales every day and they rotate. Mostly deadstock fabrics but I buy more from here than anywhere else. Fantastic customer service and if you watch you can get things like $6 wool suiting or $4 cotton jersey. https://fabricmartfabrics.com/
Fabrics-Store - again, buy the sales not the full price. Sign up for the emails but redirect them to a folder because it is TOO MANY. They stock linen or good but not amazing quality. https://www.fabrics-store.com/
Purple Seamstress - This is where I buy my solid cotton lycra jersey. They have other things, but the jersey is what I'm here for. Inexpensive and very good quality. If you ask she will mail you a swatch card for the solids. https://purpleseamstressfabric.com/
LA Finch - deadstock fabrics with a fantastic remnant selection https://lafinchfabrics.myshopify.com/
Califabrics - mix of deadstock and big brands, easy to navigate and always seem to have good denim in stock. https://califabrics.com/
Boho Fabrics - good variety, nice bundles. I have also gotten some really great trims from here. https://www.bohofabrics.com/
Firecracker Fabrics - garment and quilting fabrics, really nice selection and great sale section. I've bought $5 yard quilting cottons here several times. https://www.firecrackerfabrics.com/
Hancock's of Paducah - Quilting fabric and some limited garment fabric. AMAZING sale section. Do not sleep on the sale section. This is my first stop when buying quilting fabrics. Usually the last stop too. Not particularly speedy shipping. https://www.hancocks-paducah.com/
Itokri - This is something a little different. Itokri is an Indian business with incredible traditional fabrics. Shipping to the US is expensive, but the fabric is so inexpensive it evens out. I generally end up paying like $30 for shipping. Beautiful ikat and block prints. https://itokri.com/
Miss Matatabi - this is a little treat. This isn't where you go to save money, but there are so many beautiful things in this shop. Ships from Japan incredibly quickly. https://shop.missmatatabi.com/
Lucky Deluxe - Craft thrift store, always has an incredible selection and fantastic customer service. I need to close the tab fast because I never go to this website without finding something I need. https://www.luckydeluxefabrics.com/
Swanson's - the OG of online craft thrift stores, but I find their website harder to navigate. https://www.swansonsfabrics.com
Honorary Mentions: I haven't shopped at these places yet but I have had them recommended and likely will at some point.
A Thrifty Notion - https://athriftynotion.com/
Creative Closeouts - https://creativecloseoutsfabric.com/ being rebranded to sewsnip.com on March 1 - quilting deadstock
Hawthorne Supply Co. - I just got this rec and I think I need to not look too closely or I'm going to slip with my debit card. https://www.hawthornesupplyco.com/
This is not an exhaustive list of everywhere you can buy fabric, or even a full list of where I shop. There are SO many options out there in the world. You also need to think outside the fabric store box. I thrift men's shirt fabrics for quilts and sheets for backing fabric. I don't do a ton of in person thrifting and my local stores don't get a lot of craft materials but every thrift store is its own universe and reflects the community it is in. Go out and find something cool.
Oh I just had this conversation with my friends group yesterday. Btw while you can, buy brother machines at the going-out-of-business sale! I just got a serger for $270 which is insane! There's EMBROIDERY MACHINES!!! Anyway, here's some more places--my stash of websites is very orientated toward natural fabrics, and historical ones in particular--I'm a rennie.
https://periodfabric.com - more historical fabrics
https://bigduckcanvas.com - duck and canvas like it says. tent fabric.
https://fabrics-store.com - linen and cotton. They sell kits for kitchen towels too.
https://woolsome.shop - wool
https://www.papercityfabrics.com/ - everything is $4/yd
https://metrotextilesnyc.com - has a lot of quilting fabric
https://fabricdepot.com - general fabric store
https://onlinefabricstore.com - general fabric store
https://burnleyandtrowbridge.com - SYNTHETIC PLASTIC WHALEBONE FROM GERMANY. BEHAVES LIKE WHALEBONE!!! they also carry clothing, fabric etc but the whalebone is the exciting thing bc I do not know many places in the states to get this stuff.
https://farthingalecorsetmakingsupplies.com - Corset supplies, another place to get synthetic whalebone.
https://firemountaingems.com - bead store!
https://beadtin.com - bead store, emphasis on pony beads.
https://jetpens.com - pens, inks, anything you want for calligraphy etc.
https://tiedtohistory.com - goldwork supplies and other notions, patterns, some fabric too. Mostly sparklyshinies. This is my source for actual real genuine Thread-of-Gold and Thread-of-silver!
https://angelusdirect.com - Angelus paint, which is a paint used by cosplayers the world over to paint leather and fabric and shoes. It dries flexible and comes in a zillion colours.
https://shop.smooth-on.com - Silicone and moulding supplies.
https://dickblick.com - ART supplies, but I'm putting this here bc Joann's did sell art supplies.
https://sculpey.com - Sculpey clay, buy it directly from the company.
https://hollanders.com - Bookbinding supplies!
https://leatherhidestore.com - Leather, mostly the sizes for garments or upholstering.
https://tandyleather.com - Another leather crafting store, focus more on crafting. They sell tools and machines as well as leather and notions for leather.
https://patterns.bootstrapfashion.com - DIY dress forms! Plus sizes and men included!
https://herrschners.com - string things! Embroidery, latchook, macrame, etc! I hesitate to say a general craft store, but it does have a LOT of stuff. The prices for their DMC embroidery floss are particularly attractive though.
https://trimsbytheyard.com - TRIMS! They got fringe, they got tassels, they got ruffles and beads you want it they got it!
https://sonomawoolcompany.com - wool but more specifically, wool batting for quilts!
If you have supplies and like them, see if the brand has a website you can buy from direct.
If you need a sewing or serging machine, Bernina is the best, followed by Viking. Brother is best for embroidery machines. Get an older Bernina if you can.
If you live near a fashion city (LA, NYC, Paris, London) then GO TO THE GARMENT DISTRICT. LA has a place you can buy fabric BY THE POUND. It's not got a website it's just a little hole in the wall on like the second floor of a building and a tiny old man is at the counter and has probably been there like a hundred years. NYC has fabric stores that are over a century old. Even my tiny little village has a quilting shop.
Also, join your local historical re-enactors or SCA chapter, that is chock full of crafters looking for new blood. The SCA is a great way to learn crafts you've never heard of, too, like Nalbinding. If you're not careful you'll wake up with an inkle loom and a spindle in your house and like five bags of roving from someone's pet alpaca.
Joann's itself was a corporate takeover of a bunch of smaller local fabric stores, and was sterile and devoid of the REAL kind of community that crafting has. Go look for NON-chain stores, go local! That is where you will find resources--crafters know crafters, because everyone tends to have at least 2+ crafts they do.
USA people! Buy NOTHING Feb 28 2025. Not anything. 24 hours. No spending. Buy the day before or after but nothing. NOTHING. February 28 2025. Not gas. Not milk. Not something on a gaming app. Not a penny spent. (Only option in a crisis is local small mom and pop. Nothing. Else.) Promise me. Commit. 1 day. 1 day to scare the shit out of them that they don't get to follow the bullshit executive orders. They don't get to be cowards. If they do, it costs. It costs.
Then, if you can join me for Phase 2. March 7 2025 thtough March 14 2025? No Amazon. None. 1 week. No orders. Not a single item. Not one ebook. Nothing. 1 week. Just 1.
If you live outside the USA boycott US products on February 28 2025 and stand in solidarity with us and also join us for the week of no Amazon.
'This won't work, this isn't widespread, nobody knows, we're in a bubble, blah blah blah' my mom, a 64 year old lady with no social media whose first language is spanish, told me about this before tumblr did, and said we are going to participate.
I looked up the media coverage, because it's a good way to know if this will be counterculture and easily ignored, or mainstream as people who might not see it elsewhere will hear it in the news.
Holy shit, y'all.
DO IT.
Forbes is handwringing. When Forbes handwrings, they're scared. Media Bias Fact Check rates them least biased and mostly factual, and slightly right politically, with high credibility.
CBS, sharing on MSN News.
The Root, a magazine about Black culture, available in English, Spanish, and French. Media Bias Fact Check rates them left-biased, mostly factual, and high credibility.
USA TODAY, and USA TODAY, and USA TODAY. For those of you who don't travel often, you should know this is the physical newspaper you're most likely to find in a middle-class hotel or a truck stop. This is their online edition, but the large amount of coverage suggests it may be in their print edition, too.
Newsweek.
AZ Central on two different days. This is my "local" paper (it's the online edition of rhetorical Arizona Republic), but by local I mean it is statewide with a large readership and its articles often get picked up and cited as a reputable source by national media.
AOL News.
An editorial for MSN News urging people to take part.
I'm also seeing a lot of coverage in the kind of tiny little papers that serve just a couple of counties, where those towns will be buckling under the weight of greedflation and corpofedual policies and the residents will be ready to raise hell. States I'm seeing represented by these include North Carolina, western New York, Louisiana, New Jersey, and Ohio. Notice something interesting there? It's states from all across the political spectrum.
unsung benefit i think a lot of ppl are sleeping on with using the public library is that i think its a great replacement for the dopamine hit some ppl get from online shopping. it kind of fills that niche of reserving something that you then get to anticipate the arrival of and enjoy when it arrives, but without like, the waste and the money.
bonus it ALSO fills that dopamine hit of in-person shopping. āoh I didnāt go in looking for this but hmm, Iām temptedā¦ I canāt resistā¦ oh ho ho I have made some irresponsible decisions at the library today [carrying my stack of ten random books]ā and then it doesnāt even matter if you donāt like them because a) free b) youāre gonna give them back anyway
Librarian here! Please please please please PLEASE do this! We donāt have any way to know if you read them, and we donāt care! Weāre happy to see those books go out because that helps our stats. And that affects how much money we can get.
So grab that silly paperback romance, and maybe this new YA fantasy, oh and check for the new movies too! And donāt forget to check Libby and hoopla for music and ebooks and e-audio.
On Saturday, Yosemite National Park workers hung an upside-down American flag ā traditionally a symbol of distress or a national threat ā thousands of feet off the ground on the side of El Capitan.
The flag was hung from El Capitan near Horsetail Fall to protest the thousands of federal job cuts made by the Trump/Musk administration.
Statement by Yosemite NPS workers: āThese losses, while deeply personal and impactful, may also be invisible to visitors and members of the public ā we are shining a spotlight on them by putting a distress flag on El Capitan in view of Firefall. Think of it as your public lands on strike.ā
Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trumpās second term and youāll see something very different than what he wants you to see.
The article is under the cut because paywalls suck
This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on āThe Ezra Klein Show.ā You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on theĀ NYT Audio App,Ā Apple,Ā Spotify,Ā Amazon Music,Ā YouTube,Ā iHeartRadioĀ orĀ wherever you get your podcasts.
If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBSās āFrontlineā in 2019:
Steve Bannon:Ā The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because theyāre dumb and theyāre lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. ā¦
All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. Theyāll bite on one, and weāll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never ā will never be able to recover. But weāve got to start with muzzle velocity. So itās got to start, and itās got to hammer, and itās got to ā
Michael Kirk:Ā What was the word?
Bannon:Ā Muzzle velocity.
Muzzle velocity. Bannonās insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media ā be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media ā if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next ā no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.
Donald Trumpās first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannonās strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasnāt in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trumpās country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, itās over.
Or so he wants you to think. In Trumpās first term, we were told: Donāt normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Donāt believe him.
Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.
Donāt believe him. Trump has real powers ā but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trumpās transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassinās bullet ā as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trumpās soul ā but it was an act that was within his power.
But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge ā a Reagan appointee ā who told Trumpās lawyers, āI have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.ā A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.
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What Bannon wanted ā what the Trump administration wants ā is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If youāre always consumed by the next outrage, you canāt look closely at the last one. The impression of Trumpās power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Donāt believe him.
You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.
But Trumpās odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the courtās ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budgetās order to freeze spending suggests they donāt. Bravado aside, Trumpās political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trumpās approval rating at 47 percent ā about 10 points beneath Joe Bidenās in January 2021.
There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trumpās aim is to bring the civil service to heel ā to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends ā he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.
But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.
That is the tension at the heart of Trumpās whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.
The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that theyāre ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. Weāve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials ā āit didnāt go through the proper approval process,ā an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a presidentās second term is embarrassing.
But itās not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the ādeep stateā it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: āFork in the Road.ā Musk wants you to know it was him.
The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: āTake the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.ā The Washington Post reported that the email āblindsidedā many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.
I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?
The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Muskās takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.
What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself ā that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Donāt believe them.
I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.
But he didnāt. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.
There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: āThis non ābuyoutā really seems to have backfired. Iāll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.ā As I write this, itās been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.
In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isnāt building support; heās losing it. Trump isnāt fracturing his opposition; heās uniting it.
This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And thereās only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.
Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part ā a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.
The first two weeks of Trumpās presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isnāt true. Donāt believe him.
You can listen to this conversation by following āThe Ezra Klein Showā onĀ NYT Audio App,Ā Apple,Ā Spotify,Ā Amazon Music,Ā YouTube,Ā iHeartRadioĀ orĀ wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guestsĀ here.
āThat is the tension at the heart of Trumpās whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.ā
These are people that believe perception and PR are everything, so they're trying to create the perception that they can destroy and remake government without consequences or constraints. And for a while people were stunned and overwhelmed by the ugliness of it all.
But now people are moving. Many, many lawsuits have been filed and the people are starting to claim their power.
Don't despair and don't give up. We're not done yet.
Hey everyone, I know it's going to be a busy day for a lot of people, but Google enrolled everyone over 18 into their AI program automatically.
If you have a google account, first go to gemini.google.com/extensions and turn everything off.
Then you need to go to myactivity.google.com/product/gemini and turn off all Gemini activity tracking. You do have to do them in that order to make sure it works.
Honestly, I'm not sure how long this will last, but this should keep Gemini off your projects for a bit.
I saw this over on bluesky and figured it would be good to spread on here. It only takes a few minutes to do.
Because this isn't mentioned above, also go to google.com/drive/settings and turn off all the annoying bits that interface directly with docs there.
This is all in the "privacy" tab of your settings. How fun that everything is hidden two layers deep. š This DOESN'T get rid of the stupid little star constantly asking you to use it, unfortunately, but that's what the picker in ublock is for. š
More detail instructions for OP's post for those who are confused. This is done from the browser on my laptop, I don't know what they look like on phones.
When you click the first link gemini.google.com/extensions, you need to click on the setting icon at the bottom, then choose "Extension", like this:
Scroll down a bit, you will see the options, turn them all off.
Then, you click on the second link myactivity.google.com/product/gemini, you'll see it tells you that it's already "turn off". NO! IT'S NOT! You have to click on that "Turn off" option, it'll drop down a menu like this:
Turn that thing off. Until that button shows you have to click to turn it back on like this:
And then, click on the delete button down there too, even if it says there's nothing to delete, just do it as a caution.
After you's done with those two. You go to your Drive, find the Setting button.
Click on the "Privacy" tab, choose the button "Manage Workspace smart feature setting"
Tick both of those off, then click Save. Or if you still want to use Google AI assistant for some reasons, please read the fine lines very very carefully.
Only then, you can feel safe enough with this force AI assistant bullshit. FOR NOW š¤” All these steps still can't get rid of that Gemini blinkblink icon though >:(((((
can confirm it looks pretty much the same on mobile
if you already had your google account on the highest privacy settings possible (as i did with my main), gemini is off by default, there won't be anything in the extensions tab and you don't have to turn it off
but i did have to go through this process with my other accounts, so do check all of them
Keep sharing this folks. & take action. This is a major bill that has republicanās support. It is essentially the reversal of the 19th amendment using citizenship as a scapegoat
There will be a lot of distractions preventing folks from focusing on this bill. Because this is the one that will bring democracy down.
The sponsor, Earl Carter, is doing this to distract from the bill he sponsored immediately before this, H.R. 1160, which appears to classify all traveling doctors and "advanced care practitioners" as independent contractors (can't be 100% sure as the text hasn't been released yet, but it sounds like it's gonna be exactly what it says on the tin).
If you've ever seen a post about doordash or lyft drivers being overworked and underpaid, this is basically the same thing but for doctors. Here's an article about why independent contractors are bad for the worker, but here's the cliff notes:
shit pay
no benefits
social isolation (coworkers changing frequently, so you don't have time to make friends or even proper acquaintances)
not actually independent workers/still tied to a company
They dressed it up by adding this reasoning to the end of the title "to help alleviate physician shortages, including in underserved areas," but it's just political theater. Any physician would still need proper licensing, and there are already systems and travelling doctor companies in place designed to address underserved areas. The only difference is that the companies would be "required" (i.e. CEOs have been chomping at the bit to do this) to make all these doctors ICs instead of salaried employees.
All this to say, when you see some outrageous shit like this, look for the stuff that's been released at the same time. That's what they're actually trying to get passed.
I think ChatGPT is going to end up writing a lot of sermons.
I have two cousins whole are pastors, and they're diligent about planning out sermon series, and writing new sermons every Sunday, being diligent in their work, spending the necessary time preparing, etc.
I imagine that, as with most professions, not all pastors will be quite so diligent. Sermon plagiarism is already a serious issue, at least, per my cousins, a problem mostly because it's dishonest misrepresentation of someone who is supposed to be a spiritual leader.
So as with academia, there are probably varying levels of how you'd use AI to write a sermon. Maybe you're just asking ChatGPT some questions because it's "faster" than looking something up yourself. Maybe you're not AI-literate, so you're taking what it says at face value, accepting its interpretations of scripture.
Or maybe you're just asking for the AI to write a whole sermon for you, because that saves you ten hours or writing, study, and reflection.
So I think we can agree that this is going to happen in some fraction of America's 300,000 churches, and that it would be extremely difficult to spot, especially for the more transient sermons that aren't put up online, that only exist in the moments they're spoken.
I'm an atheist, but there's something poetic about it, the sum total of human conversation digitally devoured, the word of God placed into the machine, interpreted and spat back out, having at least some small amount of influence on the way people actually live, how they relate to their faith.
I need to talk to my cousins about it, but I would guess they don't have my same detatched interest in the topic.
you will feel so alive again.. like so incredibly alive. i dont know when that will be but it will be. u are gonna feel so alive that ur cheeks hurt from smiling oh man oh man i promise that day is coming. you do have a future, you do have good things coming, and youāll survive everything thatās thrown at you until you reach that day
lukewarm mess @thatonetimeatbandcamp - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
