There is a hard, mathematical limit to how elegantly you can arrange your cables, which moves inversely and exponentially with the number of devices that need to connect to other devices.
Coalition of Workers at Penn, of all of the unions that represent workers at Penn — not only academic workers involved in teaching and research but also food-service workers, sanitation workers, librarians, research and administrative staff, and resident advisors.
For anyone who's interested & wants to know about the Green Party of the United States, we've been doing workshop videos to fill in the gap of many others questions.
With my kids getting a bit older I'm starting a MAJOR purge of kids' toys. Getting rid of all the off-brand building sets and dinky cars & other stuff the kids don't play with. Hoping to end up with only 1 shelving unit of toy bins in a closet and.... NO more toybox. 😱
No miscellaneous-toys toybox is a major #parenting milestone.😁
The kids were extra helpful so the Great Toy Purge of '24 was unexpectedly completed today. A garbage bag of things to donate. One of things to sell & a bag & a half of things to throw out (3 boys = lots of broken stuff).
Emptied an entire toy-bin shelving unit (photo), and eliminated the toybox completely. Brought the twin to my other coffee table out of the crawlspace to occupy the former home of the toybox (photo).
It also feels nice to have the toy-ish stuff less visible. They still have a "play room" upstairs - all 3 share a bedroom & so the spare room is a common area - which has a closet that I've put shelving & bus boxes into for toy & game #organizing. We've pared down to things they actually play with & it's now more out of sight & tidy.
Plus the kids are out-growing toys that are very young like hotwheels.
TBH after 12 years of #parenting... having the toy mess less front-and-centre is a relief.
Looking for tips. Due to a catastrophic fridge/freezer failure at home we're starting from scratch. What tips do you have for organizing a drawer-type freezer??
#Introduction - I'm building #autonomous#communication infrastructure in the #global south and writing a petition to the #IMF#World#Bank in line with the letter by Budhoo (1990), and specifically demanding the IMF/WB restructure according to the original bancor plan proposed by Keynes before it was butchered at Bretton Woods, and #organizing with poor and working people to leverage a general strike big enough to ensure that our petition is not ignored-and that there are consequences if it is.
Standards just mean that when something goes wrong, we can blame somebody else.
My last organization box was filled upon receiving a Thunderbolt cable today that ended not being useful. I found the boxes at Michael's, in their scrap booking section, I believe.
SESSION CLIPS: We are working on getting our 101 sessions broken into clips that are more easily digestible & referenceable. Accompanied by Chris Blankenhorn & @thegreengarret.
"Social movement organizations are groups where people can come together to meet the needs of participants and others through reconstructing new practices, ways of relating, and decision making while also opposing domination, exploitation, and oppression. Social movement organizations can help meet people’s short-term needs while also taking actions to transform society. Social movements organizations vary in many ways. They can be in relationship to community issues, workplace issues, student issues, and beyond. At their best, social movement organizations wisely use free and egalitarian processes to meet short-term, mid-term, and long-term needs of people. However, not all social movements organizations have the kinds of organizational relations, qualities, and contents that make them ethical and effective. Free and egalitarian relations and practices require the means thereof; they will not emerge out of nowhere. The freedom of each and all has objective, universal, and necessary features as well as subjective, particular, and contingent features. The freedom of each and all needs to be continuously recreated, co-authored, and given life by people responding to unfolding conditions.
While social movements are needed to transform society outside of the official channels of business as usual, social movements can go terribly wrong. For example, some attempts at social movements replicate unfree and unequal structures and contents of the social order that they oppose! Some social movements do not meaningfully oppose unfreedom while others fail to meaningfully reconstruct new ways to meet people’s needs. Given the goal of using free and egalitarian processes to develop free and egalitarian social relations, the following are some foundational elements for social movement organizations. Participants in social movement organizations can agree to shared practices, processes, and goals without participants agreeing on a specific ideological line. With something like the following as a compass, social movements and participants in them will be better able to navigate from here to a better society. "
Allan Pinkerton, creator of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the private cops that murdered dozens of labor organizers and activists, that tried to frame Big Bill Haywood for murder, that provided the perjured testimony and bogus evidence that got 20 innocent Irish American miners executed as Molly Maguires only immigrated to the U.S. to avoid a stiff prison term in Britain, where he was wanted for armed insurrection. Yes, America’s first celebrity cop had been an arsonist, vandal and violent soldier in the radical Chartist movement, before fleeing to the U.S. with his 15-year-old wife.
If you think the were just a nightmare from America’s labor and activist history, think again. They are still at it today, undermining labor organizing at Amazon, Apple and Google, among other.
If you and your coworkers been hoping to organize against the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the folks at Collective Action in Tech have published an in-depth guide that is very good, and worth your time: https://collectiveaction.tech/2024/organizing-against-genocide/
"Meta's fediverses", federating with Meta to allow communications, potentially using services from Meta such as automated moderation or ad targeting, and potentially harvesting data on Meta's behalf.
"free fediverses" that reject Meta – and surveillance capitalism more generally
The free fediverses have a lot of advantages over Meta and Meta's fediverses, some of which will be very hard to counter, and clearly have enough critical mass that they'll be just fine.
Here's a set of strategies for the free fediverses to provide a viable alternative to surveillance capitalism. They build on the strengths of today's fediverse at its best – including natural advantages the free fediverses have that Threads and Meta's fediverses will having a very hard time countering – but also are hopefully candid about weaknesses that need to be addressed. It's a long list, so I'll be spreading out over multiple posts; this post currently goes into detail on the first two.
Opposition to Meta and surveillance capitalism is an appealing position. Highlight it!
Focus on consent (including consent-based federation), privacy, and safety
Emphasize "networked communities"
Support concentric federations of instances and communities
Consider "transitively defederating" Meta's fediverses (as well as defederating Threads)
Consider working with people and instances in Meta's fediverses (and Bluesky, Dreamwidth, and other social networks) whose goals and values align with the free fediverses'
Build a sustainable ecosystem
Prepare for Meta's (and their allies') attempts to paint the free fediverses in a bad light
Reduce the dependency on Mastodon
Prioritize accessibility, which is a huge opportunity
Commit to anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and pro-LGBTQIA2S+ principles, policies, practices, and norms for the free fediverses
The free fediverses should work together with people and instances in Meta's fediverses and on Bluesky whose goals and values align with the free fediverse
Many of the Meta advocates I've talked to share the free fediverses' long-term goal of building a sustainable alternative to surveillance capitalism -- and the same is true for people on Bluesky. So there are likely to be situations where some of the people and instances in Meta's fediverses and Bluesky wind up as situational allies to the free fediverses.
A few areas where collaboration could be very useful:
A key principle of organizing is meeting people where they are.
Moderation on decentralized networks is a shared challenge.
Bringing concepts similar to Bluesky's custom feeds to the fediverses, and more generally focusing on human-focused and liberatory (as opposed to oppressive) uses of algorithms in decentralized social networks designed from the margins.
Meta's fediverses, Bluesky, and the free fediverses are all vulnerable to disinformation.