In #Vienna, any citizen can replace a street parking space with a parklet, an urban green space for everybody to enjoy.
The grΓ€tzloasen, or neighbourhood oases, are built by volunteers, and more than 100 have been built with the blessing of city hall.
This reads a bit like an obituary for American science. Or a murder story from the crime beat.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/07/science-empire-america-decline/683711/
You may have heard that President Musk's latest inane demand to the civil service was an email that went out demanding that all U.S. government employees summarize what they accomplished in 5 bullet points, and send it via email to [email protected] .
This is, of course, ludicrous and pointless. There's no real way to use such unstructured data - it's probably just another attempt to terrorize employees into quitting.
However... if you assume they do actually want to do something with this data, then polluting that data with garbage, lots of garbage, enough to drown out any real responses, would be a good way of throwing a wrench into that bit of ratf*ckery (the workers threw their shoes, called sabot, into the machines, hence ... sabotage).
This would be impossible, of course, if the email address [email protected] were closed to submissions from outside government networks, as it should be. But it isn't. The DOGE bros are incompetent as well as everything else.
It would be a real shame if [email protected] drowned in useless reports, preventing this technique from working. So don't do that.
That email address, again, is `[email protected]`. That's `hr` at `opm.gov`.
#sabot #email #doge #elmo #PresidentMusk #ratfcker #DontDoThis
In the mean time, lean on each other. Use your current support networks and build those networks up.
Mutual Aid means you give AND you take. It isn't charity. It's support structures that don't rely on those that would exploit you.
Plant food. Share food. Learn about your local food banks. Contribute now if you can. TAKE NOW IF YOU NEED! That means your money for rent can go a long way.
Those with means and equity can look into buying multi-family buildings (think apartment buildings and condos... yes those are for sale). And setting up tenant co-ops.
Others can form renters unions. Think of it as a reverse HOA where you organize to protect against landlord exploitation.
Use your libraries and boost them. They have free internet and free hotspots. Free streaming. Free education. On top of free books. They are third spaces with free meeting rooms. - Use the library to organize your local unions.
Those that are out of work need to hold weekly meetings with each other. Compare notes. Share leads. One person gets in and can help hire the others up. Form unions when you get hired.
Make no mistake, the massive layoffs are intentional SHORT TERM sabotage by business decision makers with the goal of LONG TERM benefits for them.
They're trying to drive down the costs of labor. Specifically, they're firing everyone so that we'll accept lower wages upon rehire.
In #infosec, this will backfire on them.
By firing everyone, the level of security technical debt will increase that they'll have to hire everyone AND THEN SOME back at even higher rates.
So. Neat. Fucking great.
In the mean time, research how to create unions. Start doing so. Tech folks and infosec are not used to needing collective bargaining. You need it now.
Learn about the concepts of Economic Leverage and how it works as an individual contributor and when that fails how Collective Leverage works. The whole "if you fire that one person, we all quit" sort of thing works.
You all hack systems every day. You all study Social Engineering and combat it every day.
Hack the labor market. Socially engineer our mutual protection.
The semantic search engine of over 25,000 CD-ROMs from the Internet Archive is back:
http://DISCMASTER.TEXTFILES.COM is once again helping people discover long-lost computer history, forgotten images and music, and endless other buried treasures.
It was gone for half a year. Now it's here to stay. Enjoy.
πππππ πΆππππππ π
Peter Gleick
Bill the Lizard
C.
Andrea Junker 
Smudge The Insult Cat π
Tinker βοΈ
Jason Scott
@yabellini@fosstodon has moved