Slightly different to the definition from my economics class - but seems infinitely more accurate and captures how it drives climate change

#Climate #ClimateCrisis #ClimateChange #environment #democracy #uk #scotland #usa #canada #australia #politics #nature #vegan #Birds #animals #science #ukpolitics

Remember, you now need photo ID to vote in England (local elections are less than 2 months away!).

If you don't already have official photo ID, you can apply for a free "Voter Authority Certificate" - make sure you arrange this well in advance!

https://www.gov.uk/apply-for-photo-id-voter-authority-certificate

I find it interesting that I get so much pushback from cis people about whether or not there is an impending #TransGenocide.

You're using your 2023 brain to assess this. That's the wrong point of view. It's not 2023 for trans people, it's 1933, and we all live in Berlin.

When we all looked at the horrors of the Holocaust, and said #NeverAgain, did we mean anything by that? Can we truly afford to be casual in our opposition to what is intended to reach the same conclusions: that the targeted group are subhuman, and don't deserve life?

You wishing it weren't happening isn't going to save anyone. What are you doing to help protect trans people? Have you even called your representatives at the appropriate government to tell them to lay off?

If not, what DID you mean by #NeverAgain? "NeverAgain, as long as it's not inconvenient for me or requires me to do anything?"

Cis people, we need you to stand the fuck up and fight back. I don't need you to tell me here how you do that; I need you to just DO IT. Don't virtue-signal. Just act. Call your reps. Get your ass out to a demonstration. Take a sign saying "I'm a cis ally!" Get on TV with it. Be noticed, standing up. When you hear transphobic talk at work or in the pub, SAY SOMETHING. Learn, so you can educate.

Bigots don't listen to the people they hate. We need your voices here, your bodies on the line beside ours.

If you're not building a secret room for us to hide in, you're really not paying attention.

Random thought.
I'm lucky enough to have numerous trans friends and I gotta say, not much in life is more beautiful than seeing the smile, the joy on someone's face after being on HRT a while, or trying on that first skirt, that first bit of makeup, etc., just FINALLY feeling at home in their own body for the first time.
It's not some weird conspiracy. It's just people trying to be their true selves and it's amazing and beautiful.
#TransRightsAreHumanRights

A new study about seabirds and offshore wind turbines may surprise you.

A two-year, €3 million study of seabirds at an offshore wind farm off Scotland combined radar data with cameras to identify the species of seabird and create a three-dimensional image of birds’ flight patterns and how they avoid offshore wind turbines’ rotor blades.

The study’s findings: Not a single collision between a bird and a rotor blade was recorded.

https://electrek.co/2023/03/02/seabirds-and-offshore-wind-turbines-vattenfall/

This is BIG. A new study in the Journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, has highlighted a regret rate of only 0.3% for gender-affirming surgeries.

To put that into context, the regret rate for knee replacements is around 20% and plastic surgery can be up to 65%. Gender-affirming surgery... 0.3% 🤷

Yet MORE scientific research debunking the misinformation that's spread about the trans and gender diverse community 🎉 Read more on this research below ❤️

https://www.gendergp.com/new-study-confirms-regret-rates-of-gender-affirming-surgery-are-non-existent/?ma=1

some intersectional antifascists were protesting some shitbag yesterday and omg THIS SIGN 😂😂😂😂💀💀💀💀💀

Hogwarts Legacy: So You Want to Separate the Art From the Artist

So here you are, having placed your order for Hogwarts Legacy, or perhaps considering it. You know J.K. Rowling is a horrible person, or at least so you've heard, but you really want to enjoy your favourite books' latest game. Sure, she's a little odd when it comes to those trans people, but other than that, she's not all bad, right? Let me enjoy the game, you say, that doesn't mean I support her (the obvious falsity of that statement aside), and really: what's wrong with it in the first place, huh?

Well, hypothetical stranger I just made up, today is your lucky day, because since you asked…

If you are unwilling to hear any arguments, this text is not for you, but if you ask 'what's the big deal anyway', you've come to the right place.

Let's rewind a little. Until recently, J.K. Rowling was primarily a beloved fantasy author. There were always criticisms of her works (and I don't mean the frankly plebeian style), such as the fact that the goblins, hook-nosed, hunched bankers with a love for plotting and betrayal, literally reside in a building with a star of david on the floor, the hasty retcon of a singular Jewish character (with the most cliché name of 'Goldstein'), the subplot about the enslaved servants who love slavery and hate being freed, and so on and so forth, but by and large, most people saw her as the author of their favourite books, and that was it.

Since then, Rowling has come out in support of the current genocidal campaign against trans people, ostensibly out of concern for women's rights, despite the fact that people she has supported call anti-abortion crusaders 'fine people', people on her side sue rape crisis centers, and of course in spite of all known science, in support of disproven junk science, going against all major scientific organisations, and on the same side as anti-vaxxers, far-right extremists, anti-semites, more anti-semites, authors of murderous manifests, and desinformation oligarchs. It is no coincidence that Rowling's public conversion into an avid transphobe corresponds closely with the skyrocketing of anti-trans bills, going from 60 bills in 2020 to 131 in 2021, making 2021 the worst year at the time, and further to a staggering 120 bills in three weeks in early 2023 alone (that would be 2305 bills this entire year, if kept up)!

So far, so awful. But since you're reading this, that is obviously not enough to convince you, so allow me to present further arguments. Let's talk about Hogwarts Legacy.

Let's start with the fact that Warner Brothers knowingly hired a far-right gamergate youtuber as lead developer for the game, shortly after which details of the game were revealed, including the fact that aforementioned antisemitic carricatures would be central to the plot, namely in the form of a sinister plot and uprising which includes kidnapping a child. Let me recap: the greedy, treacherous, hook-nosed bankers who hate regular wizards kidnap a child. If the words 'blood libel' – the belief that Jews steal children, a trope perpetuated in modern-day conspiracy theories about 'grooming' or 'woke indoctrination' – didn't mean anything to you: now they do. The fact that this rebellion is motivated by the centuries-long oppression of the goblins, who are denied civil rights, access to wands, and basically left with no business but to run banks (sound familiar?) and the goblins' desire for liberation, how dare they, is only the cherry on top, as is the inclusion of a Jewish instrument, which just so happens to be dated in-game to the year of a real-life pogrom. Oh, and did you know that Goblins believe workers should own what they produce? That's right, the thinly-veiled jew-stand-ins are Marxists! You might want to look up 'Cultural Bolshevism', a nazi term nowadays used by far-right extremists as 'Cultural Marxism', and take a long hard look at Deathly Hallows again (the book).

I only used #KDE for a month or two about 14 years ago (on Software Compilation 4), then promptly forgot about it in favour of Gnome.

But then last week I tried Plasma 5.27 and I've been blown away. It's absurdly user friendly, but it's also not standing in your way. They do a lot of very small, very smart things that add up very rapidly to something weirdly enjoyable.

okay so guys

if you are a part of Italian Furposting telegram channel that has been doing numbers lately, one of their mods and a significant part of their fanbase is MAGA or spreading fascist/anti-queer rhetoric

this person banned me after I called them out publicly in the channel. I forwarded the requests to vulpo, who is the channel owner, and for now they didn't react yet, BUT I AM STRONGLY RECOMMENDING PEOPLE TO STAY THE FUCK OUT/CALL OUT THESE MOTHERFUCKERS.

this is a gross violation of moderation and only goes to show how lax the protection against fascism and bigotry in the furry fandom is.

fucking call this shit out and tell everybody that this telegram channel is a fascist clandestine cell

BOOST and fucking tell everybody

Seriously though, fedi was *built* by furries, trans and queer folk, disabled neurodivergent people.

This is *the reason* the culture here is what it is. Why CWs are a thing. Why image descriptions are a thing. Why privacy matters here. Why moderation tools not only exist, but are usable — and used.

If you had joined and asked yourself "wow, how come this place is so chill and kinda… nice?" — that's thanks to all the nice people from communities some people call "weird".

So #KeepFediWeird.

The thing I find most suspicious/fishy/smelly about all the current hype around Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT is that it follows, as night follows day, about six months after the bottom dropped out of the cryptocurrency scam bubble.

This is not a coincidence.

Hucksters are chasing the sweet VC/private equity money that has been flushed out of crypto, and AI is the new hotness all of a sudden.

If you're thinking about investing now? Don't: it's too late and you'll be the target of a grift.

Reddit: "My friend is in university and taking a history class. The professor is using ChatGPT to write essays on the history topics and the students need to mark up its essays and point out where ChatGPT is wrong and correct it."

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/117gtom/my_friend_is_in_university_and_taking_a_history/

Honestly, this is great! The students learn to check sources, discover that ChatGPT is unreliable, *and* can't use it to generate essay question answers for them, all at the same time!

I like UYOE fursuits and I make no appologies for this fact

Everyone in Japan wears masks voluntarily. Why?

In 1918, Japan put a lot of effort into educating the public, providing masks for free, and mandating them in public spaces. They continued to do so, even when places like the US stopped.

The result? Long-term behavioral change.

What Japan did in 1918 was so effective in changing long-term behavior that 100 years later everyone in Japan wears masks voluntarily despite there being no mandates these days.

https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/100-years-and-counting-mask-wearing-japan

#COVID

#ChatGPT and its ilk are effectively a large-scale DDoS attack on not only specific tasks (such as teaching, software maintenance and fiction editing) but on human creative inspiration, sense of self and ability to make meaning of the universe.

notice how they are
- creating work for us rather than saving us work
- automating inherently energizing and rewarding tasks such as making art rather than tiring and tedious tasks such as filing taxes
- flooding social networks with generated content that makes it harder to connect with real humans and build community
- distracting us with questions like “what if this machine is sentient?” which keep us from noticing and acting to prevent the suffering of actual humans

that thing where all search engines have become basically unusable because they’re stuffed full of AI garbage? i fear that’s about to happen to everything.

i don’t believe this is necessarily intentional, but no machine that learns under capitalism can imagine another world.

Come on folks, I know it's unlikely to move the gov either way but it's disgusting that more than twice as many people want this gay/trans/other erasure, another effective section 38, than are willing to speak out against it. They'll only claim "most people agree with us".

Sign the petition if you haven't already, boost if you have. Fuck this shower of hateful pricks.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/631529

Please consider writing your hashtags in upper camelcase so screen readers have a chance at figuring them out.

#whyistayonmastodon sounds like an giant undecipherable mess of sounds.

#WhyIStayOnMastodon reads out "Why I Stay On Mastodon" 😄

(Reason #44 I stay here: my previous requests like this have been generally well-received, proving that most people are awesome.)

I very recently learned that the term “boycott” comes from someone’s actual name: Charles Boycott. Boycott was an English land agent who tried, in 1880, to collect unpayable rents from Irish peasants on behalf of an English aristocrat landlord. When he failed to collect the rents, he tried evicting the tenants. The Irish Land League responded with a campaign to ignore Boycott’s orders and isolate him socially and economically.

They not only ignored his eviction orders and threw manure at his process servers, but refused to deliver his mail or sell him food.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boycott

It was pretty effective—the British government eventually had to deploy a thousand soldiers (naturally, because the state works for the propertied class and none more than the 19th century British state) at a cost of some £10,000 to harvest £500 worth of crops. Boycott had to be evacuated by the soldiers, who even had to drive him out, as no locals would agree to drive his carriage out of the region.

Imagine being cancelled so hard that your name becomes permanently associated with getting cancelled.