Public Libraries Jump On Board the Our Future Memory Movement

The Our Future Memory movement was already building momentum with flagship library organizations like IFLA, ALA, and SPARC. But now, local and regional library systems from across the United States are leading the way in their own communities.

by Michael Menna via @internetarchive

https://blog.archive.org/2026/05/01/public-libraries-jump-on-board-the-our-future-memory-movement/

#Books #PublicDomain

Was Clippy even a real one? 🫤

#clippy #privacy

Following California implementing a law raising its minimum wage to $20 for more than 500,000 fast-food workers in the state in 2024,
Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of research firm Beacon Economics, offered a warning about the state raising its minimum wage.

“California’s well-intended push to reduce income inequality via wage floors is beginning to have a significant negative impact on some of our most vulnerable workers
—our youth, particularly those from lower-income households,”
he wrote earlier this year.

His concerns echoed those of fast-food franchise owners, one of whom told Fortunein 2024 that higher wages would be unsustainable for smaller chains with slim margins.

But nearly two years after the law’s passage, economists are seeing very different results than what was initially feared.

A working paper from University of California at Berkeley released this month found the policy increased average weekly wages for eligible workers by 11% and did not reduce employment.

Prices increased modestly, about 1.5%, or the equivalent of about six cents for a $4 item.

“The results are nowhere as dire as predicted,”
Michael Reich, the study author and chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at UC Berkeley, told Fortune

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/economists-warned-california-not-raise-110500084.html?guccounter=1

From the Anti-Authoritarian Playbook;

“The targeting of trans people - and specifically trans youth and trans women in sports - is not a policy agenda. It is a strategic operation. Understanding it as policy produces the wrong response. Understanding it as strategy produces the right one.

Jason Stanley, in How Fascism Works, identifies the targeting of vulnerable minorities as a core mechanism of authoritarian consolidation. The function is not primarily to harm the targeted group, though that harm is real and intentional. The primary function is to test the solidarity of potential opposition coalitions, to find and exploit the fracture lines, and to establish a precedent: that some members of the coalition can be sacrificed when the political cost of defending them is judged too high.

Every successful authoritarian project has done this. The question it is always asking of the opposition is: is there anyone in your coalition you will abandon to protect the rest? Because if the answer is yes, we know exactly how to proceed. We find that person. We make defending them as costly as possible. And we watch the rest of the coalition either hold together or fracture. If they fracture, we learn where the next fracture line is, and we push there.

The targeting of trans people is not the end of this strategy. It is the test. And what the test is measuring, in real time, is whether LGBTQ organizations, progressive coalitions, and pro-democracy movements will sacrifice their most vulnerable members when the pressure is sufficient.

OpenAI Backs Bill That Would Limit Liability for AI-Enabled Mass Deaths or Financial Disasters
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-backs-bill-exempt-ai-firms-model-harm-lawsuits/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Business @business-WIRED