Massachusetts has collected about $1.8 billion from a voter-approved surtax on the state’s highest earners through the first nine months of the fiscal year, the Department of Revenue said Monday in a quarterly report.
That’s more than $800 million more than what the Legislature and Gov. Maura Healey planned to spend in surtax revenue for all of fiscal year 2024, raising the possibility of a sizable pot that will land in an Education and Transportation Reserve Fund and the Education and Transportation Innovation and Capital Fund, both surtax-specific accounts, once the books close.
ALAMOSA — Over decades starting in 1985, the Colorado Mushroom Farm northeast of Alamosa sold millions of pounds of mushrooms grown and harvested within the building’s dimmed cavern to grocery stores in Colorado. Along the way it offered year-round employment to generations of immigrant workers, many of whom came here from Guatemala fleeing civil war and searching for a better economic future.
But when the farm filed for bankruptcy in December 2022, it owed thousands of dollars in unpaid wages to employees, some of whom had been subjected to unsafe working conditions and were injured on the job.
[…]Now, some of those workers are taking charge of their futures with the help of a powerful coalition of nonprofit and government supporters as well as Minsun Ji at the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center, which works to dismantle economic systems that benefit a small few at the expense of many, especially working-class communities and communities of color.
It’s an American Dream in the making, but not without funding for an employee-owned mushroom co-op and the workers learning to navigate the hurdles of business ownership in a system that favors wealthy white entrepreneurs.
always fun after the wolf reintroduction vote from a few years back. here’s why they’re doing this:
Colorado is considered a prime habitat for wolverines, which are listed as a threatened species across the Lower 48 states by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Wolverines were nearly eliminated from much of the United States in the 1930s, experts said, but conservation efforts have helped the animal to make a bit of a comeback. In Colorado, the last confirmed sighting of a wolverine was in 2009, when one traveled down from the Grand Tetons.
Advocates for reintroduction said Colorado is home to the largest block of wolverine-ready habitat in the Lower 48, with about one-fifth of total suitable land. Wolverines are solitary animals that favor high-alpine environments.
in this case: no, they’re just Filipino, and it seems to just be a contraction of Jupiter or something similarly banal. i think it would be prudent in the future to do a bit of double checking before we start accusing people of Nazis; you can easily check your assumption by just visiting their mastodon page, linked in the description of their kbin account.
Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works. I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.
unless we’re compelled to, it is exceedingly unlikely we will upgrade. we are fully committed to moving off the platform so it just makes no sense to prioritize Lemmy updates.
with respect to refederation: we already polled that with both SJW and LW months ago and were given a very definitive no, do not refederate from our userbase. only 11% and 17% of our users were in favor of refederation respectively, and majorities were fine with continued defederation from both. our defederation policy was also strongly supported. (i believe this is the first time these numbers have been posted because they were so definitively in favor of the status quo.)
At the time that they defederated SJW, Beehaw was more that 3 times larger, at about 12k total/3k monthly users. Now, SJW is more than 5 times larger than Beehaw, which has dwindled to just 450 monthly users.
we’re not and have never been in this for numbers so this is immaterial to us–we’ve been quite public that we’d be fine having a community of a few dozen people, because that’s what we were before the Reddit fiasco. in any case: please understand that we are not responsible for the health of the Lemmy ecosystem. and even if we were (which we reject categorically) we have definitively been told to leave the platform because of our disagreements with the Lemmy developers. bettering this platform is no longer a priority for us in any way–and it is the general opinion of the team that we wasted a lot of time prioritizing that given the developer antipathy toward us. you can read more on that here if you’d like.
if it can happen in the South, it can happen in your workplace too! you should start a union–and if you need help to that end, reach out to the AFL-CIO or, if you would prefer a more radical alternative, EWOC
i don’t think “adding race-specific stripes to a pride flag” is a bad thing, is “treating people differently based on skin tone” except in the most cringeworthy, pedantic, I See No Color way possible, or is “racist”—and i think that if you believe these things you probably will not be allowed to partake in discussions like this on our instance after today
So a pride flag that is clearly textbook racist is good and arguing against it and the people that say its better because of the racism is not allowed here
when you call them racist and imply they’re segregationist for having their preference, yes, that is not allowed. that’s needlessly aggressive and needlessly sectarian—and speaking personally, “having a preference for more stripes on a flag that represent marginalized communities is racist and like segregation” is just such an overstatement of the point (that i otherwise agree with, for the record—i am not a fan of the progress flag) being made that it verges into being unserious.
also in Israel news today is this–the probable shutting down of Al Jazeera’s operations there. Netanyahu says he’ll act swiftly to request the outlet be banned under this new law
the strategy here appears to be that Israel is trying to bait Hezbollah into attacking them, which is a very sane strategy and not at all completely psychotic
Otherwise you could claim a crossdresser were trans or people who claimed they were “attack helicopters” would have to be accepted as trans because there would literally be no argument you could make against it.
this just sounds like a skill issue on your part, i’m sorry–this is not an issue if you have a postmodernist understanding of gender, which most trans people (myself included) subscribe to.
at the end of the day when you drill down? there really is not a material difference between the “real” and “fake” genders–gender is entirely socially constructed, and the designations of “male” and “female” that most people fall into are as arbitrary as any xenogender (real or frivolously created by right-wingers). you only “lose” by entertaining frivolous designations if your understanding of gender is already so narrow that you can’t conceptually accommodate anything beyond a handful of stock gender identities to begin with.
yeah the difficulty here really is: even if we wanted to stick around (i think the consensus is not especially) and even if we did get the mod tools we think are needed (no reason to believe this will happen), the bridge here is burned pretty definitively. i don’t personally see the sense in sticking around on a place where the people stewarding the software have an actively adversarial relationship with us