OK last announcement.

If you live in *Ohio* you should have voted "no" by now. But, if you haven't you still have till the end of Aug 8th! Time to search up your poll site and get going!

(But, don't feel bad if this referendum caught you off guard, Ohio Republicans are hoping no one will show up to vote.)

Vote NO on issue 1. It's a strange constitutional amendment that changes the threshold to make it possible for a small group to veto everything. It's the only thing on the ballot.

As a former librarian I wish a very friendly Fuck You and Die to book publishers. They are the scum of the Earth.

They hate libraries. Did you know that they induce artificial scarcity by making libraries pay for each digital copy of a book? Despite ebooks being infinitely replicable, they make libraries pay for more than one copy at a time. Publishers deliberately force a limit on the supply of digital library books to extort more money out of libraries for popular titles.

In addition, publishers lobbied (in the UK) to make library ebooks only work through their apps on mobile and PC, and not compatible with any Kindle/Kobo/etc so people wouldn’t get a good experience. There is a cartel — made primarily of a company called Overdrive. Their app is absolute buggy dogshit. A far cry from the breezy and simple interface of an e-reader.

But it gets worse. Original proposals from the publishers wanted it so that service users could only download ebooks while physically in the library, thus negating the convenience of them!

Despite ebooks being cheaper to produce than a traditional book and infinitely reproducable, Overdrive will sometimes charge more for an ebook than a supplier would charge for the equivalent copy.

Publishers would have lobbied against the invention of public libraries if they could. And take it from me — public libraries are one of the few open spaces left on this planet where one can just exist at without needing to pay for anything.

At the rural school district I last worked at, we had 1500 students, of whom 1,000 were free lunch and 500 were not. The cost of personnel (an entire department!), computers, and software for vetting students to make sure those 500 didn't get free lunch cost more than the cost of simply feeding them, already.

The GOP jihad about preventing those 500 from getting free lunch is not about taxes or expense, it's about being mean to children. #gop #antichild #school #lunch #meanness

from reddit /TIL: #TIL a family in Georgia claimed to have passed down a song in an unknown language from the time of their enslavement; scientists identified the song as a genuine West African funeral song in the Mende language that had survived multiple transmissions from mother to daughter over multiple centuries

#BlackMastodon #BlackTwitter

https://www.harrisnecklandtrust.org/amelia-s-song