Lunatech @Lunatech@social.cleverlibre.org

As a bootstrapped founder I’ve certainly had to make staffing reductions to deal with contractions in the market before.

BUT — These tech multibillion dollar companies who saw record profits in the pandemic laying off thousands?

Not at all the same.
Not even in the same universe.

They are not cutting Executive pay or bonuses, which they could easily do if they were indeed running short on cash for regular payroll, which they aren’t.

It’s a straight up labor rights spirit crushing move & I wish they weren’t forcing people to sign their rights away like Elon did so the workers can’t seek class action relief.

We need tech workers unions the same as we need unions for all workers.

That’s right. I’m a CEO who is in favor of labor unions.

Because up until almost 7 years ago, I was a wage earning regular worker just like everyone else, PLUS I deeply understand business cash flow from a profit-driven company perspective.

I just choose to run my company with empathy for the workers, even in times of downsizing due to real market constrictions.

To all the workers in any industry who have been laid off due to mega billion dollar corporate greed, or for real market constrictions, I’m so sorry.

It’s not your fault.

You deserve better, especially more than what these profit giants gave you. Take a good break if you can and know your work is valuable.

By the way, a tax of up to 5% on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires could raise $1.7 trillion/year.

That would be enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty and fund a global plan to end hunger.

We can't afford NOT to tax the rich.

Donald Trump looked at a photo of the woman accusing him of rape and thought it was a picture of his ex-wife? That's pretty bad.

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/deposition-transcript-adds-trumps-troubles-carroll-case-rcna66491?cid=sm_npd_ms_tw_ma&taid=63cad9f14726640001f24584&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

Egg prices are up 60%. That’s absurd. People are paying up upwards of $6 and $7 for a dozen eggs.

Why? Corporate greed.

Cal-Maine, the largest egg producer in the US, is raking record profits — $198 million in its latest quarter.

That’s a 65% increase from a year ago.

I often wonder how many people live with a severe sleep problem that they cannot control but feel that they are lazy because they cannot get up in the morning and end up depressed because when they seek medical help they are diagnosed as depressive. Blood tests cannot produce results because by the time the patient arrives at the GP surgery blood chemicals will be in a normal range, and doctors often dismiss tiredness as not a serious condition.
#sleepproblems #depression #illness

Internal records: Twitter lost about 80% of staff since Elon Musk took over and now has around 1,300 employees, including fewer than 550 full-time engineers (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-than-550-full-time-engineers.html
http://www.techmeme.com/230120/p24#a230120p24

These challenges could be interesting discussion, interesting debate, and opportunities for creative solutions. But instead, I just feel like traditional Free Software ideology is more and more neo-Luddism.

What drew me to Free Software was the frontier spirit, of self-reliance and can-do optimism.

But what we see now is largely towing the line of "Reject it".

It's almost a sort of neo-Luddism and it's not the spirit of the movement that I fell in love with.

#FreeSoftware

2/2

I keep thinking about how the Free Software Foundation *could* be talking about the rise of these language models in more interesting ways, because they post a new and interesting challenge. The models themselves are fairly replicatable, but the data isn't, and training them is prohibitively expensive, and even running them is not feasible in the near term for a vast, vast majority of people (unless you have a server with 128+gb of RAM and a ton of GPU processing power).

1/

'Democracy for All': House Dems introduce bill to overturn Citizens United - Raw Story - Celebrating 18 Years of Independent Journalism

It won't make it out of the house

https://www.rawstory.com/democracy-for-all-house-dems-introduce-bill-to-overturn-citizens-united/

I've mentioned before that Twitter had a lock on journalists and other people using social media to communicate with audiences based on platform features and user base . As an example of this phenomenon, consider what happened when twitter removed one of those features - Moments.

12 out of 14 major media outlets tracked by Similarweb saw declines in referred traffic since Moments were eliminated in December. Almost all of them saw declines in the double digits.
https://digiday.com/media/publishers-lament-the-removal-of-twitter-moments-as-referral-traffic-dips/

@Sophie Like this?

Very wholesome reading for the kiddies, right?

#ChristoFascism #BookBans

Dear T-Mobile customers:

Refusing to take security even a tiny bit seriously is evidently a part of T-Mobile's business model, and the result is that hackers routinely get your data. The latest breach is a doozy.

Remember, they company's execs obviously don't care much about this as long as they cash their mega-paychecks.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/t-mobile-says-investigating-data-breach-affecting-37-mln-accounts-2023-01-19/

iKoolCore’s palm-sized PC with four 2.5 GbE Ethernet ports ships worldwide in February

https://liliputing.com/ikoolcores-palm-sized-pc-with-four-2-5-gbe-ethernet-ports-ships-worldwide-in-february/

#MiniPC #iKoolCore #computers #networking

Active duty Marines with connections to military intelligence were part of the Jan. 6 coup attempt. How deep does this rot go in our armed forces and law enforcement? https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/01/19/3-active-duty-marines-who-work-intelligence-arrested-alleged-participation-jan-6-riot.html

"A few weeks ago, the New York Times called mask-wearers "the last holdouts". This week, the world's richest people went to great lengths to protect themselves from COVID"
https://thegauntlet.substack.com/p/billionaires-at-davos-dont-think