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In ancient Athens, prostitutes would advertise their services by wearing sandals with carved soles that would imprint messages into the dirt as they walked. A popular inscription was "ΑΚΟΛΟΥΘΙ" (akolouthi), meaning "follow me."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reached a decision on the 'full occupation of the Gaza Strip', and experts are warning of the potential privacy issues of telling all to AI chatbots. The post Netanyahu seeks war expansion as Australia’s…
On June 12th, 2025, something historic happened—without a single protest, lawsuit, or international spotlight.Burkina Faso took back control of its gold. Fiv...
CEOs call it a revolution in efficiency. The workers powering it call it a "new era in forced labor." I spoke to the people on the front lines of the AI takeover.
And as a painful coda to Scott Farquahar’s #npc shenanigans shared earlier by @emmadavidson, here’s the other half (apparently the less warm one) firing 150 workers by video.
Beginning a thought about the prospect of mass global #underwork.
The definitions and thresholds of employment used by governments are way more granular than just “in work” or “has job”. So underworking is likely to be far more prevalent than the data derived from self-reported survey responses. And the vision of labour market transformation thanks to sparkly new futurey jobs is very light on detail about new job stability or income sufficiency.
Why think about this as #underwork not underemployment? Because underworking is a human condition with human impact, like overworking. Underwork is a social situation.
And unless the sparkly new futurey jobs show up, AI driven underworking will expand the demographic of an established and generationally impactful underworking class: working under the level of wealth creation, working insecurely, with fewer protections, weaker access to fair work provisions, solidarity or safe protest.
And the threshold of being countable as employed in Australia is one hour paid work a week, and can be not even that. So the unemployment rate references this number, not any common sense understanding of sufficient work to live on. It includes all the teenage workers 15 and up.
Within this are nested the underemployed who report themselves in a monthly survey of around 50000 Australians as employed and either having had expected working hours reduced, or preferring to work more than their normal working hours.
So this is how we get an official underemployment rate of 5.9% in Australia.
Why this matters: if you hear that 150 workers have been ejected from their seats, but you just heard that employment levels are both high and stable, you might think: that’s ok, there will be another job.
But when you factor in underemployment, which includes people already losing sufficient work and people who didn’t have sufficient work to begin with, things look tougher.
Political choices that favour business and growth are long-term social choices about how we live, who gets to flourish, who gets by, who gets trapped in #underwork.
US labour market data makes the news, in a predictable way, by confounding the Tantrum in Chief. The thing to notice though is that the science of estimation always makes people testy because labour market vitals feed into consumer confidence and political futures. Meanwhile behind the data, every point is a person, a family, a community. #underwork
This from @scottsantens on UBI is detailed and clear. Work related poverty is expanding; capitalism is failing humans as well as the planet. Capitalism as a system cannot deliver us from its own intended impacts. So, something new is needed, and urgently.
A reporter reached out to me last month with questions about Universal Basic Income that required hours of my time to answer. Here are all the answers I wrote to all the questions, none of which ended up being published by them.
A Newsweek reporter recently asked me — with a sense of urgency mind you — to provide expert answers on UBI for a story. I answered all their questions in detail by deadline. They never replied.
The US takes a granular view of “not working” in the survey period, including the subcategories of “discouraged worker” and “marginally attached to the labor force”. Among workers, “involuntary part-time workers” are what Australia would call the underemployed. This is the social experience that is rapidly becoming lifetime or even generational #underwork.
The language of labor underutilization used in US reporting moralises the problem of work, making it a problem that affects government and business rather than a social harm that affects people and communities.
Caveat: I’m not a statistically literate person, far from it. I’m really just thinking about how employment reporting is a languaging practice, a storytelling practice, and all kinds of political vibing. Trump’s tantrums make this clear, but it was already there like climate change: however you count whatever you count, the underlying lived experience of trying to get through these times is that water is rising faster than we’re prepared for.
Quietly horrifying correlate to the rapid spread of #underwork is the triumphalism now associated with #overwork.
We need to stop treating these as separate phenomena. They are the two sides of the work coin flipping. As Levitt describes, overworkers are colluding with the business ideal of competitive advantage, but in working two jobs inside one salary they’re also ensuring the rise of involuntary part-time work.
Meanwhile, salaries and sign-on bonuses in the AI sector give us a glimpse of the sunlit uplands where talent is rewarded with immediate and dizzying wealth. Work redefined as elite level competitive sport aligned to willingness to show up all hours is life changing for very few whose life goal is to, I don’t know, buy islands.
But these aspirational shenanigans are not disconnected from the social crisis of #underwork, far from it.
We found that, if our survey development and “PAL”* were good, on some topics the respondent would understand just what types of information we needed. They’d start telling their story—and the interviewer could fill out the survey questionnaire with minimal need to ask questions. PAL: the primary approach letter, telling selected households that an ABS Population Survey interviewer would come (with ABS identification card), and giving a brief outline of the survey topic.
“This unvarnished perspective reveals a fundamental truth about the corporate embrace of AI: it is, at its core, a quest for efficiency and profitability. And in this quest, human labor is often seen as a liability, an obstacle to be overcome.”.
The dehumanization of society for profit continues. #AI #forcedlabor
Cory Doctorow has garnered a lot of needed attention to the decline of modern online platforms, including Google Search, Facebook and Twitter. Much of this i...
Any mention I have seen of a "power couple" is always catering to the ego of women. No man cares about power couples, because they are not looking for a woman who is chasing some high flying career.
It only seeks to validate the feminist idea that a women should be celebrated for chasing careers, and that they should be rewarded for keeping their hypergamy even when it is unnecessary. A family can be supported fully with one high flying career. Two of them just means more money than needed.
I find myself blocking and muting more and more #liberal voices here on the #fediverse lately. Not because I'm secretly turning conservative (I'm progressive), but because their arguments are getting old and tired. And frankly they're note really offering up much of any solutions either other than whigning. #USpol
Why Epstein’s 'client list' will NEVER be releasedJoin the Future of Journalism ► https://www.patreon.com/DoubleDownNewsSupport DDN ► https://www.paypal.com/...
@arcana but he's a guy that has the epstein flight logs and black book which is apparently mostly maxwell's, and they're unredacted unlike the "epstein files" that the government released
@arcana yeah it was always funny to me when i read about Brian Epstein or really anything named Epstein. like the Epstein-Barr Virus. you're telling me there's a virus named after Jeffrey Epstein and AG William Barr????
@arcana AG William Bar? The son of Donald Barr, headmaster of the school that hired Epstein as a math teacher and wrote a sci-fi book about a child sex slavery planet??
I'm off to my much-needed bed. Before I go, I'd like to express my admiration for Iceland and its leaders. I could live happily with people like this...
US President Donald Trump’s 50% tariffs on Brazil, which are set to go into effect on Wednesday, August 6, are “unacceptable blackmail,” says Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The Trump administration cited Brazil’s prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro as a significant reason for the proposed tariffs. In response, Lula said on X that Brazil is “a sovereign country with independent institutions and will not accept any tutelage.”
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is leading Bolsonaro’s prosecution,was put under sanctions by the US last week, a move he says is part of a “cowardly and treasonous”plot.
Bolsonaro currently faces charges related to his alleged effort to stage a coup and overturn the 2022 election results on January 8,2023.Last month,Moraes ordered Bolsonaro to wear an electronic ankle monitor and prohibited him from using social media and communicating with other individuals under investigation.
These measures are necessary, say Brazilian authorities, because Bolsonaro could attempt to flee the country or interfere with the judicial process. The prosecution of Bolsonaro and the January 8 rioters, insists Lula, is a legal matter that is not politically motivated.
The major legal development opens the door to criminal charges against prominent Cabinet members who served then-President Barack Obama, including former Director of National Intelligence James Cla…
@ITM Of course that is what we are all waiting for. Still, dragging these rats out into the open and embarrassing them is still progress. The ride is fun. I try to enjoy it. The Mueller thing pissed us off big time. Imagine how Trump feels?
I wish I could say it's a relief to finally close all my code and troubleshooting tabs, all my SSH and container terminals, but we all know I'm just going to open them all back up in ten minutes because I thought of ｓｏｍｅ ｏｔｈｅｒ ｔｈｉｎｇ
“On Sunday, an Israeli strike hit the headquarters of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in Khan Younis. One staff member was killed and two were injured. Critical infrastructure was also damaged” #GazaGenocide democracynow.org/2025/8/4/head…
At least six more Palestinians in Gaza have starved to death in the past 24 hours as famine spreads in the besieged strip. At least 181 Palestinians, including 94 children, have now died from hunger-related causes in Gaza.
The video starts by asking what most people know about Joseph Stalin, suggesting that many believe he was a horrific monster responsible for taking the lives...
Thanks for the video. This guy has a lot more discoveries ahead of him, and he and his followers are on the right track. I myself have spoken with people who lived under Stalin. Ordinary workers and peasants adored Stalin, the father of the people, because his rule had changed the lives of ordinary people so dramatically. But bureaucrats were afraid, especially when corruption arose somewhere.
✅Videos we recommend: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZdhTWJ6YawrVRcYeuCmiK6BLnkSprAtpRedacted talks to Ken McCarthy author of "JFK and RFK's Secret ...
tbh, I've looked at examples of other people's resumes who actually work in cybersecurity in the jobs I'm applying for, and mine isn't even bad. It's pretty good, even. I don't understand why no one's even interviewing me.
I feel like if one of these recruiters saw how rabid I'd been in the last two weeks with my home lab they'd hire me on the spot.
La bière sans alcool, ça fait le taf, y'en a des bonnes (Leffe ou Grimbergen 👌🏼). Les Tourtel Twist ne sont pas vraiment des bières, je crois, mais le goût est vraiment bon.
@niavy personnellement je préfère boire moins d'alcool que des ersatz, j'ai largement diminué ma consommation ces dernières années sans pour autant avoir totalement arrêté. Après je ne juge pas, il y a tellement de pression consciente ou non à consommer que si ça peut aider certains, c'est toujours bon à prendre. Et par curiosité, je me dis qu'il faudrait que je goûte un jour mais je suis réticente.
You can go to jail for possession of a very small amount of marijuana, impacting your employment and housing opportunities for life, but you can be a sex predator and become POTUS or a Nazi and someone hands you $29B. cnn.com/2025/08/04/business/el…
1/ Les forces israéliennes retiennent toujours le corps du militant palestinien Odeh #Hadalin, tué la semaine dernière par un colon en #Cisjordanie occupée. 2/ Sept membres de sa famille, qui ont été témoins de l'assassinat, sont toujours détenus. Une infirmière qui a tenté de le sauver a été expulsée, ainsi que d'autres témoins internationaux. 3/ Des dizaines de femmes d'Umm al-Khair ont entamé une grève de la faim pour demander justice. 4/ Un juge israélien a levé l'assignation à résidence de #YinonLevi, le principal suspect, affirmant que le dossier est faible et qu'il pourrait s'agir de « légitime défense ». 5/ Levi est propriétaire d'un avant-poste illégal en Cisjordanie et d'une entreprise de démolition qui travaille en collaboration avec l'armée israélienne. 6/ Au début de cette année, l'administration Trump a levé les sanctions de l'ère Biden contre Yinon #Levi, malgré sa longue histoire de violence et de harcèlement contre les Palestiniens.
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From Kerem-navot -- Israeli NGO established in 2012, which monitors and carries out research on Israeli land policy in the #WestBank:
#YinonLevy was born in Jerusalem around 32 years ago. Odeh #Hadalin was born around 31 years ago in the small Bedouin village of Umm al-Kheir in the South Hebron Hills. Last Tuesday, Yinon Levy killed Odeh Hadalin. This was not a one-time event but the result of many systemic failures.
Yinon #Levy owns a company that operates several heavy construction machines. Odeh Hadalin was an English teacher at the school in the Bedouin village where he was born and lived his entire life. From video footage and eyewitness accounts, we can piece together what happened that day. But in this post, we want to talk about some of the decisions that ultimately led to the moment when Yinon Levy shot and killed Odeh Hadalin — most of which were made long before either of them was born.
In 1980, #Israel established a “Nachal” military outpost called Carmel. It was built on lands belonging to the Palestinian town of Yatta, in the southeastern West Bank. Near that site, several Bedouin families from the Hadalin clan had been living. These families had arrived after being expelled by Israel from the northern Negev area during and after 1948. A few years later, the Nachal military outpost became the settlement of Carmel, which is home today to around 650 settlers. In 1983, Israel confiscated about 2,200 dunams of Yatta’s lands by declaring them as State Land. These lands were handed over to the settlement of Carmel and today form its “municipal jurisdiction”.
Over time, the settlement expanded and became more extreme and violent. In the most recent elections, for instance, 86% of the votes there went to Ben Gvir and Smotrich. The rest were divided between Likud, Shas, and Ayelet Shaked (there used to be such a politician). In short, you get the idea of the type of settlement and settlers we’re talking about.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian village of Umm al-Kheir also grew — despite the army and Civil Administration’s ongoing attempts to choke the community through lack of planning, denial of basic infrastructure, repeated raids, and house demolitions. As a result, these two communities have been living just a few dozens of meters apart for decades. Nowhere else in the West Bank settlers and Palestinians live in such proximity.
Despite this close proximity, the disparity in quality of life between the two communities is unfathomable. A visit to the area — no matter which side of the fence you stand on — is the kind of sight that wounds both the eyes and the heart. Assuming you have one.
This situation is the result of deliberate policy, from which countless administrative and planning decisions have stemmed. One of them was to expropriate the lands surrounding the village of Umm al-Kheir in a way that would suffocate the village and its residents’ ability to live off agriculture and herding. And since these lands were seized and transferred to the settlers, they can now do whatever they want with them — including build something 30 meters away from the village homes. Their “right,” no?
And when settlers want to build, they hire people like Yinon Levy, who makes his living from this system. And what do people like Yinon Levy do when working near Palestinian villages? They deliberately drive their bulldozers into privately owned Palestinian land — not yet officially expropriated — in order to provoke, humiliate, and destroy. And when tensions rise, what do people like Levy do? They draw their pistols, start shooting — and sometimes kill someone who happened to be 30 meters away, someone who posed no threat.
Yinon Levy is just a contractor — a particularly violent one — whose job is to execute the policy that every Israeli government since 1967 has promoted in one form or another. That policy is called apartheid in every other part of the world. And that apartheid is gradually shifting into a policy of ethnic cleansing. That’s why Odeh Hadalin lies dead, while Yinon Levy smiles in court and now sits comfortably at home. Yinon Levy knows that if he’s punished at all, the sentence will be laughable. He knows the apartheid regime will ensure its contractors can continue rampaging — and occasionally, shooting and killing along the way.
#KeremNavot - Naboth’s Vineyard Naboth’s Vineyard (Kerem Navot) is an Israeli NGO established in 2012, which monitors and carries out research on Israeli land policy in the #WestBank.
Odeh Hathalin, qui avait tourné des images du documentaire israélo-palestinien oscarisé, a été tué par balle lundi 28 juillet. Le tireur est Yinon Levi, un colon extrémiste sous le coup de sanctions internationales. Depuis l'Oscar décerné en mars dernier, l’équipe du documentaire No Other Land, qui montre le sort des villages de bergers palestiniens de la vallée de Massafer Yatta, en Cisjordanie, sous les violences des colons et de l’armée israélienne, paie très cher ce coup de projecteur. La France a condamné ce meurtre « avec la plus grande fermeté ainsi que toutes les violences délibérées perpétrées par des colons extrémistes » affirmant que "ces violences sont des actes de terrorisme". Pourtant, ces derniers semblent bien protégés de toute accusation. Trois semaines après l'oscar, l’un des réalisateurs, le Palestinien Hamdan Ballal, qui habite la région, est lynché par des colons puis arrêté par des soldats israéliens durant son évacuation en ambulance, avant d’être relâché 24h plus tard. L’oscar “ne m’a pas protégé de la violence”, écrira-t-il dans une tribune publiée par The New York Times. Lundi 28 juillet, c’est un autre palestinien de l’équipe de No Other Land, lui aussi de la région, qui a été victime de cette violence. Mais Odeh Hathalin, militant de la cause de Massafer Yatta, qui a tourné certaines des images du documentaire, l’a, lui, payé de sa vie, raconte le média israélo-palestinien +972 Magazine, auquel collaborait Hathalin, ainsi que deux des autres réalisateurs du documentaire, l’Israélien Yuval Abraham et le Palestinien Basel Adra. Le 28 juillet, aux alentours de 17 h 25, un homme entre dans le village d’Umm Al-Khair, dans la région de Massafer Yatta, avec un bulldozer, selon le récit fait par le site d’information. Cet homme, c’est Yinon Levi, un colon “bien connu des Palestiniens de la région”. Fondateur d’un avant-poste illégal dans la région et gérant d’une entreprise de terrassement, il a été reconnu coupable de plusieurs “attaques violentes dans des communautés palestiniennes visant à les chasser de leurs terres”, ce qui lui a valu d’être sanctionné par l’UE et l’administration Biden, des sanctions US annulées par l’administration Trump. Ce bulldozer détruit alors la clôture, la conduite d’eau principale et les oliviers du village, puis l’homme s’en prend à un cousin d’Odeh Hathalin. En réaction, des habitants commencent à jeter des pierres sur le bulldozer. Yinon Levi court alors vers eux, frappe l’un d’eux qui le filmait avec la crosse de son pistolet avant de tirer des coups de feu en leur direction, poursuit +972 Magazine. Une balles atteint Odeh Hathalin au poumon, il meurt dans l’ambulance en route pour l’hôpital. La police israélienne a ouvert une enquête et a arrêté Yinon Levi. Il a été placé en résidence surveillée en attendant la suite de la procédure. Odeh Hathalin "a considérablement servi sa communauté, plus que quiconque", déclare un autre de ses cousins. "Chaque jour, il œuvrait pour nos droits. Il l’a payé de son sang et aujourd’hui, de sa vie." Depuis le début de la guerre à Gaza, près d’un millier de Palestiniens, en majorité des civils, ont été tués en Cisjordanie par des soldats israéliens ou des colons. Dans le dernier article qu’il a signé, datant de juillet 2024, pour +972 Magazine, Odeh Hathalin écrivait : "À Umm Al-Khair, l’occupation nous condamne à un traumatisme multigénérationnel."
Odeh Hathalin, qui avait tourné des images utilisées dans le documentaire israélo-palestinien oscarisé sur le sort de bergers palestiniens sous la menace de l’armée israélienne et des colons, a été mortellement touché par balle lundi 28 juillet.
Deutsche Bahn boss Richard Lutz demands obligatory go-arounds for aircraft to achieve train parity.
"Aircraft in Germany must be delayed in flight at least by 20 minutes to make trains more attractive for passengers" he said during Tagesschau interview.
"Trains with their considerably lower operating costs simply cannot compete with heavily taxed air travel." he further explained.
If you're looking for a privacy focused desktop system I have a used Dell Optiplex 7050 up for sale on Ebay. It's a nice system for basic use with a Core i7-6700, 16GB RAM; 500GB NVME SSD; 500GB HDD, Intel HD 530, and with Trisquel 11.01 on it. I will donate 10% of my net profits to the Trisquel project. I have it set to ship to Canada and the United States.
Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Dell OptiPlex 7050 Desktop i7-6700/16GB RAM/500GB NVME/500GB HDD/Trisquel 11 at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!
Next Saturday could see a mass demonstration against the proscription of Palestine Action with the Metropolitan Police warning they will make mass arrests of people in breach of the Terrorism Act's prohibition of any support for a proscribed organisation.
If the numbers that are expected turn up this will push PA proscription arrests over 1000 & will further demonstrate Yvette Cooper's anti-democratic credentials.
Is the Country and the World ready for the next #space #disaster from either #SpaceX or #BlueOrigin? Putting humans atop giant roman candles and hurdling them off into space is hard, and it is dangerous, and the fact that neither of these Companies has lost a life yet doesn't mean they won't tomorrow (or the next day).
Complacency is a cancer, and we (the collective us) have become complacent, just assuming that SpaceX builds perfect launching machines.
A disaster is coming. I don't know when, but I do know when it happens lives will be lost and lives will be changed.
Went to the Nat Hist museum....reminded of how bright, inquisitive, curious and full of discovery our species is. Why do we have to put up with all the ignorant, rotten psychotic assholes who we LET "run things"??? Meanwhile....will we go extinct before we figure this out? portside.org/2025-08-03/sunday…
A pair of #JeffreyEpstein’s victims blasted the #Trump admin & the #DOJ for their attempts to unseal grand jury testimony in the #criminal case against the late financier, saying govt officials haven’t listened to the voices of people who were harmed by his actions.
The 2 victims, who weren’t identified, asked in separate letters filed in a Manhattan court Monday, that any files related to Epstein be reviewed to protect their privacy….
In one of the letters, an #Epstein victim [#survivor] said they were writing “in disdain, disgust & fear” of how the #DOJ has dealt with the promise to release information in the case, saying the situation should have been handled with “more respect towards & for the victims.”
“I am not some pawn in your political warfare,” said the *victim. “What you have done & continue to do is eating at me day after day as you help to perpetuate this story indefinitely. Why not be completely transparent? Show us all the files with only the necessary redactions! Be done with it & allow me/us to heal. You protect yourself & your powerful & wealthy ‘friends’ (not enemies) over the victims, why?”
The #US on July 18 asked US District Judges Richard M. Berman & Paul Engelmayer to release transcripts of the proceedings in the case against #Epstein & his associate, #GhislaineMaxwell, & both judges have given *victims until Tuesday to respond to the requests.
Natalie Baldassarre, a spox for the #DOJ declined to comment. #Trump has acknowledged a friendship with Epstein, but says it ended years before Epstein’s death.
Bloomberg News reported last week that the #FBI redacted Trump’s name & those of other high-profile individuals from govt files related to #JeffreyEpstein, citing 3 people familiar w/the matter….The names were withheld under privacy protections because those individuals, including #Trump, were private citizens when the federal investigation into #Epstein began in 2006, the people said.
Another *victim asked Berman to have a third party review any documents to ensure no victims’ names or likenesses are revealed through the process, saying that it appeared the #DOJ’s priority is to protect “wealthy men.”
“To learn that our own president has utilized thousands of agents to protect his identity & these high-profile individuals is monumentally mind-blowing,” the victim wrote. “That is their focus? Wow!”
One of the most effective misinformation tactics antivaxxers use is to quote legitimate news sources out-of-context in order to convey a biased narrative.
Studies suggest that news editors often contribute to this problem by publishing clickbait headlines that are easily weaponized by antivaxxers.
"Top health expert says vaccinated people are spreading Covid variant" is a headline that was often used by major outlets.
The full context in the article was: "Data shows that vaccines reduce transmission. However, some experts warn that vaccinated individuals may still be capable of contracting & transmitting Covid."
Given that presenting legitimate sources out of context has been shown to be a prevalent and effective misinformation tactic, it is critical that news editors stop undermining their science writers by using clickbait headlines that strip articles of much needed nuance and context.
What would be your dream Desktop Linux (or 'bsd) system configuration? Is your current setup close? What would close the gap?
I really need to learn a keyboard-centric workflow and I think part of that would include learning a tiling window management system. But I'm hoping to migrate my main system from Arch to Guix once I devote time to learning it.
Tired of feeling powerless as you watch a genocide? Would you like to help put real economic pressure on Israel to cease their genocidal terror campaign and repeal their apartheid laws?
This webinar will teach you how to run a divestment campaign, pressuring companies and organizations to financially disassociate from Israel until the country respects human rights. You'll learn how to: • Find information and analyse data • Develop a strategy and pick targets • Factors that impact your campaign • Tips & tricks to make your campaign as impactful as possible
Join Just Peace Advocates and organizers from Retired Teachers Divest, Queers for Palestine Toronto, Toronto Writers Against the War on Gaza, and the Coalition du Québec URGENCE Palestine to learn how to develop an impactful campaign! We will be talk…
Just finished Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow. Engaging story that just pulls you along so well you don't want to put it down.
By luck of the Libby draw, I ended up reading the series in reverse order but still enjoyed every one. Thanks for the wonderful story, @pluralistic ! Looking forward to the next Marty Hench tale!
i want sweep to give me a lap pillow
shortstories
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