twodimes @twodimes@writing.exchange
I like to think things could be better.
Joined Nov 2017
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And so she moved on. Sometimes for no better reason than because she didn't like the view from the coffee shop. This time it was just a feeling that the beach side town was too quiet in the winter, and she was looking for some work to stretch her arms. So she cashed her mincome, bought a train ticket up north and fell in with a brand new makerspace setting up in an old sawmill. It was freezing, but the first thing they built were small rooms inside the giant building that they could easily heat.
I've managed to throw my back out on Mystery Leaking Toilet Day but at least it's a weekend...
Finally got my web page off EIG-owned Netfirms, but I lost a bit of data - my own fault for starting the transition 24hrs before my renewal ;)
Guess that means it's time for a refresh...
twodimes
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Hey the wordle guy sounds cool.
"I am a bit suspicious of mobile apps that demand your attention and send you push notifications to get more of your attention," he said.
"There are also no ads and I am not doing anything with your data, and that is also quite deliberate."
Asked whether he planned to make money from it, he said: "I don't understand why something can't just be fun. I don't have to charge people money for this and ideally would like to keep it that way."
twodimes
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I wish there were more just plain winter songs not attached to a holiday. Like, maybe we can just admit that it's cold and dark and maybe that's reason enough to celebrate.
Police violence
Sorry for the birdsite link but this is the kind of metaphore I'm trying to get at right now.
<There's supposed to be a pic of a cop pepper spraying protestors but I can't figure out how content warnings work on my phone>
"The human body has an immune system, evolved to keep the human body running.
But in some folks, the immune system is over-active, attacking the very body it's supposed to be protecting.
These are "autoimmune diseases".
🧵 1/5"
https://twitter.com/valacosa/status/1465333414459056129?t=w4AY7gE4vSNVtqClx2RSdw&s=19
...
Yeah ok, you get to keep calling yourself a self-made man. But all the rest of you fuckers better shut the hell up.
"I swam to antactica and built my business empire delivering snow around the world by listening for someone to call my name, then throwing a snowball to their location in any continent, with a note indicating how they could deliver me my payment and the threat that if they didn't I would throw a larger, harder snowball next time"
"I was born an orphan on the moon. When I was 40 seconds old I taught myself how to photosynthesize my own oxygen using moon dust and positive thoughts. I trained my body for years until I could jump high enough to achieve escape velocity and leapt from the moon into point nemo in the pacific ocean."
I haven't yet figured out how to write my accessible 'money as proxy' parable. But I googled it and came up with this blog post that was exactly the same topic:
https://mathbabe.org/2013/06/09/profit-as-proxy-for-value
and
https://mathbabe.org/2013/06/04/how-proxies-fail
Turns out it's Cathy O'Neil who also wrote 'Weapons of Math Destruction' so I already knew she was cool.
It's been a decade, but quorum at my makerspace still = One person with an idea and a second person who doesn't care enough to object.
The 'self-made man' story is often someone who is fighting against being bound by the law without ever noticing how they're being protected.
twodimes
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Have you searched for a particular hashtag and not found enough results?
One trick you could try is searching for hashtags on other instances by going to this web address:
(other instance) /tags/ (hashtag without #)
For example, here are #DogsOfMastodon posts visible on the instance https://mas.to:
https://mas.to/tags/dogsofmastodon
This is useful if you are on a small/new instance, and you aren't seeing many results for tag searches.
Larger/older instances tend to have a lot more posts visible, because they have made more connections with more instances over a longer period.
Money is a shitty imperfect proxy for value.
I should start writing about money. I just remembered I have a minor in economics. Haven't thought about that for ages...
twodimes
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Huh, never noticed that the phrase "pay attention" is classifying attention as a payment.
Same deal as "time is money", but hardwired even deeper into English. I wonder if other languages do the same thing.
twodimes
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It's hard to overstate what a scam academic and scientific publishing is. It's run by an oligopoly of wildly profitable companies that coerce academics into working for free for them, and then sell the product of their labors back to the academics' employers (often public institutions) for eye-popping sums.
1/
What if I gave my sand too much anxiety
twodimes
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"If somebody robs a store, it's a crime and the state is all set and ready to nab the criminal. But if somebody steals from the commons and from the future, it's seen as entrepreneurial activity and the state cheers and gives them tax concessions rather than arresting them. We badly need an expanded concept of justice and fairness that takes mortgaging the future into account."
—Ursula Franklin, 22 years ago, on our societal tendency of flat out ignoring and even explicitly rewarding negative externalities
twodimes
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We should probably at some point consider facing and questioning our widespread pop-cultural aesthetic feeling that finding and shooting a small number of powerful elite evildoers is a clean and side-effect-free solution to the problem of widespread social evil.
Preferably before it morphs completely from a pop-cultural aesthetic feeling into an actual political platform.
Every FPTP election after I voted in a party that promised to get rid of FPTP hurts a little.
I like to think things could be better.
Joined Nov 2017
