"We live in a world where a few people capture unimaginable wealth while billions are denied access to basic needs. Such extreme inequality is not natural or inevitable. It is an effect of the dominant economic system, capitalism, where production is controlled mostly by capital and organized around maximizing and accumulating profit, rather than securing human well-being.

Capital accumulation requires cheapening labour and resources, particularly in the global South. This produces inequalities between classes and leads to uneven development between regions. It also drives ecological breakdown, and while some benefit from the exploitation of our planet’s ecosystems, others suffer the damages."

https://globalinequality.org/

#Inequality #GlobalInequality #Poverty #Capitalism #GlobalSouth #WageSlavery

'Very rare' Viking grave uncovered in Denmark by accident

#DanishTown #KingHaraldBluetooth #VikingGrave #HistoricalFind #Archaeology

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/viking-grave-denmark-aarhus-rare-b2772109.html

Digital rights campaigners Open Rights Group has condemned the last minute addition of extreme powers to the Crime and Policing Bill. The new additions would give the police the powers to extract data from a seized device and any online accounts that have been accessed by that device. This could be done without any judicial oversight, just the sign off by a senior police officer

https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/police-forces-to-get-authoritarian-powers-to-extract-data-from-online-accounts/

Shabana Mahmood, Labour Justice Secretary, also wants "reform of the European Convention on Human Rights"

This is very, very dangerous, folks.

It doesn't matter whether they say reform of it, gutting it, leaving it, rewriting it. What they want, is removal or disapplication of Article 8 because that's what's getting in the way of them deporting people arbitrarily and separating refugee families at will.

As an aside, it's also what will eventually stop them from gutting trans rights to privacy, giving all your data to techbros, making government lists (let the reader understand) and a hundred other things that will ruin people's lives.

Go read the Convention, the Articles aren't very long. Look at Article 8 and see which rights you'd like to lose. Then join the Greens and vote for Zack Polanski, because even Ed Davey has said he's in favour of this.

#ukpol

Oh WhatsApp, you changed. Meta got the best out of you.

"No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they'll see tomorrow.”

"Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought.“

~ WhatsApp Blog, June 18th 2012
https://blog.whatsapp.com/why-we-don-t-sell-ads

Matt Seybold on Technofeudalism –
"It isn’t that computing is antithetical to education, it’s that education is happening in many modes and many places during a student’s scholastic life, and sometimes technology can be an aid and sometimes a hindrance."

"I take for granted that whether or not OpenAI or its competitors are actually able to execute the takeover plan they and their political collaborators imagine, their attempt will be destructive. It threatens to further disenfranchise a generation of students who have already been dealt lockdowns, learning loss, book bannings, school shootings, carceral surveillance, protest suppression, overpolicing, and so forth."

#ai #pedagogy #higherEducation

https://theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/against-technofeudal-education

A stable smart #grid and distributed, #renewables based, #energy generation open the door to some weird but interesting ideas, like peer-to-peer energy trade. We have no idea how it would look like, but we can speculate (and think of regulating).

Link: https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/rpg2.70075

Every Big Tech company's dream: I can haz all your disposable income. 😼

Guess what? You're on notice Big Tech. Get your act together and remember you serve at OUR pleasure. If we don't like how you're “disrupting” our livelihoods and our cultural spaces, we'll turn off the computers.

My Theory of Computer Form Factors and why there's no Next Big Thing™ on today's 📨 Cycles Hyped No More newsletter (🎙️ plus audio edition!), published by @theinternet

https://buttondown.com/theinternet/archive/if-computer-fits-it-sits/