Bobby Brown @bobbyd0g@hellsite.net

Alaska Says It’s Now Legal “in Some Instances” to Discriminate Against LGBTQ Individuals
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On the advice of the state’s attorney general, Alaska’s civil rights agency quietly deleted language promising equal protections for LGBTQ Alaskans against most categories of discrimination, and it began refusing to investigate complaints.

#Alaska #LGBTQ #CivilRights #Discrimination #SCOTUS

https://www.propublica.org/article/alaska-drops-lgbtq-discrimination-ban?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

Are there ANY car manufacturers NOT selling data about you / your car?

Reading @pluralistic 's Feb 28 piece about VW tracking cars (and not providing the info unless you pay): https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/28/kinderwagen/

Cory Doctorow writes:
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> And yet, here we are. Like most (all?) major car makers, Volkswagen has filled its vehicles with surveillance gear, and has a hot side-hustle as a funnel for the data-brokerage industry.
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Is anyone keeping a list of car manufacturers who are NOT doing this?

bees: a black market in live bioweapons

The best thing I've seen written on Musk and Twitter is this random YouTube comment (that I can't find a way to link to directly)

be careful out there.

https://torrentfreak.com/filmmakers-request-identities-of-reddit-users-to-aid-piracy-lawsuit-230218/

this is sort of the fate of every conceptual framework: the useful concepts gets lifted into some other, subsequent frameworks, but the language — particularly category labels — can easily survive in this unmoored state, now colloquially popular but signifying nothing

and so 15 years later you're shaking your head because you read a whole paragraph about how "Narrativism" is when fictional positioning doesn't matter

in a moment of lovely synchronicity i rediscovered this David Byrne quote today.

"It can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves—they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation."

Years ago elementary was approached by Canonical to become an official Ubuntu flavor. “All” we had to do was offer Snap out of the box. We debated it—being able to offload some additional infrastructure concerns was attractive—but we realized it helped Canonical more than it helped us, and we had chosen Flatpak for all of its benefits as covered here:

https://blog.elementary.io/elementary-appcenter-flatpak/

#elementaryOS #Ubuntu #Flatpak #Snap

I've been working my way through Eric Balchunas's /The Bogle Effect/, on the founding of Vanguard. Hagiographic biz books like this are hard going for me, but it is important stuff, hopeful in some respects, and deeply saddening in others...

🧵

This is something you see over and over when you study co-op history: This stuff works. Really well, if there is real money behind it. But it doesn't facilitate stealing. So the rich people who get to decide what gets done in the world don't decide to do this. That's the problem.

But there's another problem...

Police arrested a man for making fun of police, SCOTUS approves.

Where's the "free speech" brigade when the state is actually censoring speech? https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-rejects-ohio-mans-bid-sue-police-arrest-facebook-parody-rcna70435 #FreeSpeech #SCOTUS

A reminder that the New York Times coverage of Section 230 has been dishonest for a long time.

The "paper of record" relentlessly frames this a Congressional favor for tech giants. In fact, the law protects freedom of expression -- yours and mine -- on the sites where we share, and the ones we own. It also protects our right to edit.

This is about money, and control. Traditional media have less of both due to the Internet. They want it back.

It is disappointing that even now, critics of Section 230 persist in calling it a big-tech "get out of jail free card" -- it is the law that protects all of us, and the repeal of which would substantially wreck online freedom of expression.