rberger

rberger, 8 months ago to random

“Thirty years ago, if I told you that a bunch of billionaires and intellectuals on the right are waiting in the wings to impose a dictatorship on the United States, you would have said that I was insane,” he said.

“But it’s no longer insane. It’s now real. There are those people out there,” Linker added. “The question is: will they get their chance.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/01/red-caesar-authoritarianism-republicans-extreme-right

rberger, 9 months ago to random

Sounds like they are asking tech and white collar workers to unionize.
#RemoteWork
https://www.businessinsider.com/return-to-office-mandates-restore-ceo-power-2023-8

rberger, 6 months ago to random

Michael Sifry continues to have one of the better perspectives on the conflict IMHO.

“If Israelis and Palestinians can learn to accept the legitimacy of each other’s national narratives, can they also forge a shared future as well? That is the premise of A Land For All, a joint Israeli-Palestinian peace group founded in 2012 that has been developing a fresh approach to resolving the historic conflict.”

#IsraelPalestineConflict
https://theconnector.substack.com/p/toward-two-states-one-homeland?utm_source=substack&publication_id=96838&post_id=139516805&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=103mi

rberger, 3 months ago to random

There was a time when this was all you needed (or at least all you had)

rberger, 3 months ago to random

@pluralistic coined yet another great new word describing the dystopian era we are living in:

The Enshittocene

Google reneged on the monopolistic bargain

"A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google – which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic – suddenly turned into a pile of shit.”
#Enshittocene #enshitification
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

rberger, 5 months ago to climate

Startling new landmark research [By the British Institute and Faculty of Actuaries!] has just been published. It's conclusion? Climate Change will destroy half of our economies by 2070. Let me emphasize that again: 50% of GDP. By 2070. Gone. Burned, drowned, incinerated, levelled, flooded. How bad is that? It's even worse...than it might sound.
#ClimateChange
https://www.theissue.io/how-bad-is-climate-change-going-to-get-you-dont-want-to-know/

rberger, 1 month ago to random

“Conflict is a reliable way to know whether or not you're a leftist. As Steven Brust says, the way to distinguish a leftist is to ask "What's more important, human rights, or property rights?" If you answer "Property rights are human right," you're not a leftist. Leftists don't necessarily oppose all property rights - they just think they're less important than human rights.”

• @pluralistic

“#Capitalists Hate #Capitalism”

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/18/in-extremis-veritas/

rberger, 4 months ago to random

Blazing Saddles at 50: the button-pushing spoof that could never get made today
The 1974 spin on westerns sees Mel Brooks pointing at the absurdity of racism and the history of human evil while always ensuring a steady stream of laughter

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/feb/07/blazing-saddles-at-50-western-spoof-mel-brooks

rberger, 9 months ago to random

On the eve of that decision, the coalition of groups seeking to deny Fox’s license, led by the Media and Democracy Project, gained a powerful ally in the person of Jamie Kellner, who was the founding president of Fox News. Kellner’s letter to the FCC, requesting a hearing on the issue of Fox’s character

https://americanprospect.bluelena.io/index.php?action=social&chash=efdf562ce2fb0ad460fd8e9d33e57f57.2316&s=a25f328e944fec8e9462e7b6d554a892

rberger, 4 months ago to random

We're living in the enshittocene, in which the forces of enshittification are turning everything from our cars to our streaming services to our dishwashers into thoroughly enshittifified piles of shit. Call it the Great Enshittening…

• @pluralistic
  #enshittocene
  https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/

rberger, 3 months ago to random

Back before the Reagan Revolution … a third of America had a good union job, our schools were brand-new and well supplied and staffed, college was free, healthcare was inexpensive, and the biggest challenge America had was to put a man on the moon and bring him safely home — there was little demand for a dictator in this country.
… For the majority of white Americans to adopt a strongman authoritarian, first the country had to be broken and broken badly.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thomhartmann/p/was-the-gop-plan-all-along-to-break-d9b

rberger, 2 months ago to random

It’s amazing that the US Medical / Insurance / Pharmacy complex still runs on Faxing stuff back and forth. And do I mean back and forth.

Whenever I get a new drug or its a new year or I switch Insurance companies, it can take scores of faxing between the pharmacy and the doctor with the Insurance company requiring both to jump thru hoops.

I commented on this with the Insurance mail order pharmacy and their response was this insane tidbit: (1/3)

rberger, 1 month ago to random

The Supreme Court has a history of its own obstruction of justice and process.

They put their finger on the scale for Bush in 2000 setting in motion the Republican takeover of Democracy.

Upheld "Citizens" United that gave corporations and billionaires infinite power.

The majority perjured themselves in Senate hearings declaring Roe vs. Wade settled law then going against the law and the will of the people to strike it down. (1/3)

rberger, 5 months ago to random

Evolution of the GOP

rberger, 7 months ago to random

Remember, the biggest peddlers of "fake news" are also the most prolific users of the term. For a lot of these information warriors, the point isn't to get you to believe them - they'll settle for you believing nothing. "Flood the zone with bullshit" is Steve Bannon's go-to tactic, and it's one that his acolytes have picked up and multiplied.

• @pluralistic
  #MediaLiteracy
  https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/28/fog-o-war/#breaking-news

rberger, 3 months ago to random

“Rather than a blip on the radar, this should be a come-to-Jesus moment for Boeing — a moment when it puts engineering back at the center of its culture…

The transition from an obsession with engineering to an obsession with financial engineering at Boeing, Lazonick told me, wasn’t just the case of one company suddenly changing strategy; it “reflected what was going on in the US.””

https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-disaster-american-businesses-greedy-broken-stock-market-wall-street-2024-2

rberger, 8 months ago to random

By 2100, in a scenario where greenhouse-gas emissions continue unabated, rising temperatures would allow Coccidioides to spread northward to 476 counties in 17 states. What was once thought to be a disease mostly restricted to the southwestern U.S. could expand as far as the U.S.-Canadian border in response to climate change, Gorris says. That was a real “wow moment,” she adds, because that would put millions more people at risk.

#GiftArticle https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/09/fungal-disease-climate-change-threat/675515/?gift=E9o0y7Rlfcfv2OQ1sSVCEpUx4SEXcSbj1xCkutyp8pY&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

rberger, 2 months ago to random

Nuclear War is still on the agenda but no one is talking about it.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/31/annie-jacobsen-nuclear-war-scenario

rberger, 3 months ago to USpolitics

Republicans: The fascist criminals destroying our society. We all must work together to vote them out of power permanently in 2024

#GiftArticle #USpolitics
https://wapo.st/42XG6uD

rberger, 1 month ago to random

The Republican Party has become the party of fascism, oppression, hatred and cruelty The only policies they propound are ones that hurt the poor and the middle class and give more power and money to billionaires. It is completely subservient to the Orange Jackass no matter how many moors, laws, democratic norms and truths he smashes.

At this point there is no doubt that this is what the Republican Party is: the enemy of peace, freedom and the American Way. (1/2)

rberger, 1 month ago to random

McNerney's big idea was to get rid of "phenomenally talented assholes" and outsource the Dreamliner's design to Boeing's suppliers, who were utterly dependent on the company and could easily be pushed around (McNerney didn't care that most of these companies lacked engineering departments). (1/2)

rberger, 1 month ago to random

By making a series of cuts and folds in a sheet of paper, Baker found she could produce two planes connected by a complex set of thin strips. Without the need for any adhesive like glue or tape, this pattern created a surface that was thick but lightweight. Baker named her creation Spin-Valence. Structural tests later showed that an individual tile made this way, and rendered in steel, can bear more than a thousand times its own weight.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/23/1090915/emily-baker-architect-materials-disaster-zones-design/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*

rberger, 1 month ago to random

Enshittification arises when the everyday mediocre sociopaths who run tech companies are freed from the constraints that act against them. When the web - and its browsers - were a big, contented, diverse, competitive space, it was harder for tech companies to collude to capture standards bodies like the W3C to secure even more dominance. (1/2)

rberger, 1 month ago to random

All this highlights the increasing divergence between the UK and the US when it comes to labor rights. Under the Biden Administration, @NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo has promulgated a rule that grants a union automatic recognition if the boss does anything to interfere with a union election:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth… (1/2)

rberger, 27 days ago to random

Finally, there was the eye-popping story broken by Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow in the Washington Post on Thursday, revealing that last month, at a private meeting with about two dozen top oil executives at Mar-a-Lago, Trump offered to reverse President Joe Biden’s environmental rules designed to combat climate change and to stop any new ones from being enacted in exchange for a $1 billion donation.
... (1/2)