They aren’t volunteering so it’s recommended to just call it slavery.

I have written and moderated courseware for education students focusing on digital literacy. A requirement for graduation, pass/fail. I was so excited to start the project. I was so disappointed by the end.

The teachers to-be had very little digital literacy overall, and very little ability to recognize that or care. Too many passed, by design of the department heads. It was saddening to realize that most of them were headed out into the world with indifference to social media processes and little ability to recognize digital manipulation, and to share that indifference with children.

I always took it to mean that people are fed shit information by design and we should fix that.

Or, maybe it has something to do with who owns print and broadcast media, social media and other algorithmic psyop structures, and is leaning hard on educational curricula.

The social narrative. The information water most people swim in. It’s owned by the adversaries of universal suffrage.

Billionaires own the legacy media and most social media.

In other words, they control the means of social reproduction.

Buckminster Fuller, who was smart enough to predict the geometry of the most common object in space, the ‘Bucky Ball’ and designed geodesic domes, thought that eating steak was more efficient than plants because the cow focused the nutrients.

Stay in your lane, experts.

Well that’s piqued my interest so I glanced over your comments. I have to point out that yes, people respond badly to you sometimes, reminding me of reddit.

You should know that you seem unaware that your comments occasionally have a pugnacious or even bellicose tone, not necessarily intentionally mind you, but noticeable. Sometimes dismissive or contemptuous attitudes leak out and hostile replies state they are responding to that. It’s not simple bullying, it’s buttons being pushed.

Apple doesn’t want people using the mouse with the cable attached because it would cost them a fortune due to failed charging ports within the warranty period. It’s a wireless mouse. Using it plugged in will fuck it up.

I fix computers and an apple mouse with a bad charge port is just a throwaway.

Mac Mini M1 when it was released was a good deal compared to same form factor machines at similar prices. Same for the M1 MacBook Air, despite the base RAM.

That advantage lasted a while, too, considering battery life and build quality.

Yes and it would have been funny if any rent was involved.

Edit, oh wait you mean they are SAving 5k a month, whoosh missed that

Other savings built into collective infrastructure:

• super cheap fast internet. They pay about $5/ month and when I am visiting I get 1ms ping to speedtest servers, amazing.
• tools, the workshop is set up for tool sharing as well
• laundry room, no coins
• car sharing is easy
• bulk buying groups naturally form
• event facilities, guest rooms just need booking (big deal in Vancouver eh)
• profit control: fewer middlemen to feed for maintenance and management
• dozens of tiny efficiencies that add up
• village settings are naturally designed for mutual aid, good cohousing is a microvillage

You are familiar with the concept of #cohousing, right? I don’t think anyone is renting there, all owners. Land values have been fucked in Vancouver since capitalism arrived, and in fact when the group bought the three house lots they needed, they had to deal with one of them being shadow-flipped during the purchase.

Still, pooling resources did make it very possible for the group. The hard-to-swallow expensive part was actually building to passivhaus standards and dealing with bureaucracy, if I understand correctly.

Me too, most of us would be happier and richer living like that.

Vancouver BC

Verified: group cooking is the way.

I have friends and family who live in a cohousing building. About 50 people in 30 units. Each apartment is complete but the kitchens are slightly smaller than typical.

Cohousing is mutual ownership of the building. About 20% of the building is common areas, like widened hallways with couches and bookshelves, or a games nook, music room, workshop, laundry, etc. It’s basically a tall village, and they are like roommates with privacy.

The giant kitchen and dining room is used six nights a week. One person is chef with a small crew, and dinner is for around 30 people. It costs $5 CDN per meal, though if you raid the leftovers later it’s pay what you want, usually $2. The cooking volunteer roster is optional and organized by a Slack channel. Food is usually awesome and everyone wins.

If you want you hardly ever have to cook dinner for yourself.

Thelma and Louise is the Great American Movie.

And dogs. Stupid humans make their regular dogs stupid too. (Some dogs aren’t blessed with much of that clever wild brain to begin with, I know. I like chocolate labs anyway.)

I worked in the specialty AIDS ward in St. Stephen’s hospital in London (before any meds were available).

AIDS has a devil’s banquet of particular cruelties as the diseases it kills with are many, some are particularly horrific, and they overlap so that the comorbidity of all this horrible shit happening at once is itself an overriding cruelty.

Sometimes it goes on forever, and also I watched buff fit vibrant people burst out in painful cancerous lesions and waste away to a stick figure in a month.

AIDS is a concentration camp not a prison, unless you have the best meds and care.

Drupal scales well and is very extensible with features that allow complicated permissions systems, etc. I have built some complicated courseware with it, and big document archives, etc. It has a skilled developer community. I wouldn’t use it for small inexpensive sites, but it’s top tier and free/liberated.

Joomla’s code a decade ago was so inefficient and clunky to work with I could never recommend it, my main interaction with it was troubleshooting and helping folks escape it. Maybe it’s improved.

You cannot call slapping on an external storage device “upgrading storage”, WTF are you on about? Are you just completely unaware of what a *ridiculous* solution that is to a problem that the OEM _intentionally_ created?

Oh I am very aware of how annoying and hostile it is to users: I repair computers, including macs.

I didn’t write upgrade, don’t twist arguments or it’s bad faith. Adding TB4 drives to a workstation is just normal in the industry, don’t take it out on me. In that situation it’s no big deal, and yes all the gear is expensive to an amateur.

We are getting off the original point that someone trying to break into an industry has to hew to the existing standards, and those standards often use FCP ProRes files so you better give in. While your tone was contemptuous and dismissive, you seemed a little curious about why that might be. I have tried to address that.

Suggesting that a young professional trying to break into a decent paying job in the media production industry would use a chromebook or any version of linux for production is a non-starter.

If a Framework workstation (I had no idea they made one, thought it was all laptops) runs something other than Linux or Windows, I am curious what it could be.

Still, if you had to provide support for a wide variety of everyday users, I suspect your opinion on ‘user-friendliness’ would shift. Even Mint is problematic for most users as soon as they are required to step out of basic admin production. Windows is worse, unless you fully bend over for MS.

Now I have to get back to ungluing a shitty battery out of a shitty macbook., hidden by sleazy little pentalobe screws.

[Side note that “botched” means incompetent or clumsily made, i.e. intentionally broken.]