Francis 🇾🇪 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ @francis@greenplenty.social

It is profoundly intellectually lazy and offensive to the soul to think that the sum total of human expression could ever be mediated by any single entity.

I built the foundations of Twitter with my bare hands and watched in awe and sadness as it grew into a cynical temple of ego.

I delight in its destruction.
We're better off here.

I just saw like the fifth variation on “I see lots of posts from people explaining the basics of Mastodon, which is a sign the platform is difficult to use. I hope it improves.”

I’d say that’s actually a sign that the community is eager to make people feel welcome and comfortable, but what do I know?

I’ve asked this on Twitter before but let’s also try it here in the hope to reach more people outside of the #infosec bubble.

Do you use a password manager?

Reblogs appreciated!

After an Era of Austerity, What is Left to Cut?

Sian Norris digs into the data on a decade of cuts, assessing its impact on people and public services, as Chancellor Jeremy Hunt lines up Austerity 2.0.

The Government had pledged that by the next election (due in 2024) it would restore school funding to its 2010 level in real terms. That should be enough to tell you the scale of real-terms spending cuts over the past 12 years, but here’s another figure: school spending per pupil fell 9% between 2009-10 and 2019-20, adjusted for inflation.

Grants to local governments from the central government were cut by an average of 49% in England between 2010 and 2017. This has had a huge impact on local services, which in turn have had an impact on people’s health and wellbeing.

Sian Norris @BylineTimes

#ukpolitics #austerity #PublicSpending #PublicServices #autumnstatement22 #jeremyhunt

https://bylinetimes.com/2022/11/17/after-an-era-of-austerity-what-is-left-to-cut/

Mike Pence is an example of toxic Christianity. We should have freedom of religion, yes, but we must also ensure freedom *from* religion. Your religious freedoms don’t give you the right to deny freedoms or civic participation to others. Period.

Funny that we seem to be going in circles.

The web started as a bunch of individuals running their own servers. Then things got professionalized, and we got the mostly benevolent, for-pay corporate services. Now that your data is more valuable than whatever meager subscription fee you're not going to pay for anyway, we're back to trusting the randos.

The plummeting server/software costs help, but it would be impossible without volunteer labor.

It behooves us to support the randos.

#mastodon

As sewage pollutes our rivers and coasts, nurses beg for fair pay while the boss of @AstraZeneca pockets 14m @GraceBlakeley sums up how the ‘Boom&Bust’ neoliberal policies of the Tories have been fiscally fracking Britain since the early 80s #wakeupbritain #EnoughisEnough