| Pronouns: | they/them or he/him |
“Cryptocurrency is literally like an eight-year-old’s concept of an evil businessman. He just plugs his pollution machine in and gets money for it. It doesn’t make anything, it just. Pollutes. And makes money. Like a fucking Captain Planet villain”
there was also apparently legal questions of "but we're using everybody's research, can we even patent this thing?" that went into the decision to just not patent it
and i think you could very convincingly make a similar case for the covid-19 vaccine, as there was a great effort to pool resources and data to get a solution as quickly as possible
...now if only somebody had enough money to hire enough fancy lawyers to ominously shake that particular can full of pennies at the situation
as we talk about the morality of vaccine patents
i think it is a nice time to also remember historical precident
jonas salk did not patent the polio vaccine. he went out of his way to make sure it was not patented.
he never got rich. he actively made sure he didn't get rich off of it.
but that history is full of stories about how for the rest of his life, jonas salk did not have to ever pay for a beer in any bar in this country. he would get on airplanes and once somebody recognized his name, the entire damn plane would stand up and clap for him. he constantly had hotel rooms comped, meals for free at restaurants, thus and so.
because he was surrounded by people who knew he had saved their children from having to ever consider the fear of an iron lung, and were overwhelmingly grateful for it.
he was always modest and demure when recognized thusly. but i think that when people start saying "well why else would someone make a vaccine, if not to get paid for it and hold the patent", i think it is good to remember these stories. the world did not punish jonas salk for not patenting the polio vaccine. the world loved him for it. maybe not in the structures that billionaires are most used to. but they did love him for it, in small ways, in humble ways, on the individual level.
The Applied #Networking #Research Workshop 2021 is still accepting submissions until May 5th.
If you're interested in presenting and discussing your work related to #Internet protocols with the networking community, please consider writing it up in a 2-pager or 6-pager:
https://irtf.org/anrw/2021/cfp.html
QUEER WRITERS OF COLOR (ESPECIALLY TRANS WOMEN)
"This fund is for queer writers of color who are in critical need due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
With thanks to the Philadelphia Assembly and the Money in the Streets initiative, we'll be able to provide 40 queer writers of color with $250 each.
This fund will prioritize trans women writers of color.
The deadline to apply is May 13 at 11:59PM PST. You will be notified in late May of your status."
https://theshadejournal.submittable.com/submit/191635/queer-writers-of-color-relief-fund-round-2
This fund is for queer writers of color who are in critical need due to the COVID-19 pandemic.The first iteration of this fund started in March 2020, disbursing nearly $45,500 to 175 writers across the world. With thanks to the Philadelphia Assembly and the Money in the Streets initiative, we'll be able to provide 40 queer writers of color with $250 each.This fund will prioritize trans women writers of color.The deadline to apply is May 13 at 11:59PM PST. You will be notified in late May of your status.If you have any questions, please email [email protected] help with Submittable, please visit http://help.submittable.com/.
When you're talking about Linux, it's okay to say that it's "open source".
It's okay to say that it's "free software".
It's okay to call it "GNU/Linux", "Linux", or to mess up its name.
It's okay to refer to it as "the one with the friendly penguin".
Part of RMS' legacy has been an incessant obsession with terminology and pedantry, overshadowing far more important shared objectives which are fundamentally emancipatory in nature.
Pedantry is not activism; it is alienating, not emancipatory.
the "androids are taking our jobs" sci-fi trope is honestly one of the darkest, because the entire point of automation is to make it so that nobody has to work anymore if they don't want to. In literally any non-oligarchical society, the automatically generated resources would be distributed and everyone would be happy.
the idea that a population would be so brainwashed that they want more work and less automation, instead of more automation and much more universal basic income, is so deeply and fundamentally disturbing, yet it's already happening
Dirk Strider's Inability To Experience Whimsy
Sylvhem
Harp 
final boi (tj)
Vyr Cossont
Erik Moeller
V is migrating to @