NGI just announced 4 grants as part of their âpolicy in practiceâ fund. One of the grants goes to an org that will supply refurbished hardware to help with the digital divide.
I know this is not a new idea but a valid one because an org I used to work for, Techsoup, has been doing this nonstop since the 90s.
Struggling with a brain that is working against me at the moment. Itâs a chronic condition, sometimes better, sometimes worse. Right now it is pretty bad. Makes it very hard and exhausting to interact with other humans. For some reason with cats itâs ok.
Sorry to hear that, Nadia. Pet a cat for me!
lockdown+brainweasels took a decent shot at ruining my winter, but friends and lovers got me through.
Something Iâm noticing, though, is an oscillation in my tolerance/enthusiasm for online interaction. A fortnight when Iâm all gung-ho about chats and calls, then a fortnight when I just grudgingly attend the obligatory ones, then back to the start.
A friend tells me he hasnât had any physical contact for over a year. Wrote about the struggles of living within a malfunctioning brain years ago. Had hoped that it would be âfixedâ over time. In one year Iâve gone from 3hrs of training a day, super healthy diet and rarely feeling ill, to the one issue after another, hospitals etc. Trying to find some sense of meaning in things, really the only thing that holds is art in motion. Was just about to enroll in a class when lockdown kicked in. Maybe life will begin again once it lifts:
Oh! Sorry about that
Hahahahaha!
Such a⌠Big peace of -----
Big piece of what? What do you mean?
Sorry, dear.
I canât retrieve the post I was answering.
Something you wrote about (or against Trump or Republican policies)
Up above, I canât see if or how it connects comments with posts. I guess you too.
Sorry. I just kept your joke, ironyâŚ
Cheers my friend
No worries. I do pop off about those people from time to time.
Saturday morning, cup of coffee, waiting for the rain to start. Even with what falls this week, rainfall this year is far short of the past several years. So, we head now into a âfire seasonâ that used to last a few months in the autumn but now starts in late spring.
People have always talked about the weather, since it is one of the few things that all inhabitants of an area have in common. But these days weather is a pretty exciting topic, and not in such a good way.
Excellent interview with @katejsim talking about programs and apps designed to help victims of sexual harassment and violence. She gives the best overview I have seen about these programs, who they are designed to actually serve, and what works and doesnât work so well with them. I would note also that this is extensive, sophisticated research delivered to the reader in plain spoken, easy-to-grasp language. I learned more about the tech and its context in this one interview than I have in some years reading news articles about the problem. Highly recommended. And not that long.
Not sure where else to put this, but it is news to me and likely to you too.
Bottom trawling is what the name implies: huge fishing nets dragged along the bottom of the sea to catch fish. This is how almost all shrimp that is not farmed gets harvested as well. I have know for years how destructive bottom trawling is to the fishery, especially shell fish. What I did not know is that the practice stirs up carbon from the sea floor, which is then absorbed by the seawater, which makes that water less able to absorb CO2 from the air. This is a significant increase in net CO2 emissions in any nation that practices bottom trawling (the practice is usually coastal, within a nationâs boundary). In total, the annual amount of CO2 released to the atmosphere from bottom trawling equals the total annual amount of CO2 produced by all of Germany. And it is largely unrecorded - not included in a nationâs total CO2 output. Meaning that once again, the climate problems are worse than we thought.
China is by far the biggest offender. But of the next nine biggest bottom trawling nations, all are European.
thanks John 
For whatever odd reasons, laying sleepless earlier this morning, I remembered that when I was part of a startup acceleration programme, one of the VC that invested in us once told me âwithin capitalism, you are always eating someone elseâs lunchâ.
I instinctively hated that, even though I didnât quite understand it, I was after all just part of a tight team playing with tech trying to shoot for the stars, I didnât care for competing and certainly I believed that âthe pieâ must likely be large enough for nobody to notice us.
I gladly stepped out of that world a long time ago, and while Iâm still struggling to find another way forward, that sentence still came back to me with a new realisation, of even broader, intimidating proportions. So today I would answer him with this:
âCapitalism is eating everyoneâs lunch.â
Lunch being our future, of course. And yet, we need to live within this system, and yet I need to chase more (potentially) remunerative jobs instead of focusing on making stuff that I find useful and beautiful, and all the while, the machine is eating away, relentlessly. Itâs a perverse situation, itâs saddening, overwhelming, and âŚand perhaps to feel lighter I should sleep more and go on even more hikes⌠I donât know 
But itâs getting impossible to ignore how this systemic - ungraspable for me - problem is affecting me, deeply.
You are correct - capitalism is eating everyoneâs lunch. Accelerated since the 70s by influential junk economist Milton Friedman after he wrote the super influential paper declaring that a corporationâs only priority is satisfying the stockholders. One of the big bad game changers.
Still, since capitalism tends to run on the âgreed is goodâ ethos, it may have been inevitable anyway. Here is the USA we often get nostalgic about the prosperity of the then huge middle class. But it was still all built on massive resource extraction, and in places that were severely weakened by WWII, which we, not attacked or bombed except for Pearl Harbor, were perfectly positioned to exploit.
This is not to say that I think large-scale communes work either.
Open crowd-sourced crime solving:
Last week in the gun-saturated violent USA, in a road rage incident in North Carolina, a driver on an expressway changed lanes to the right without seeing another car was in the way. This caused that other car to have to move over onto the shoulder, at least partially. Once back on the expressway, the car pulled up alongside and the driver shot into the offending car, killing the woman in the passenger seat. The shooter then exited the expressway, and drove away through a residential neighborhood.
Someone on the highway took a picture of the shooterâs car and posted it online. The photo did not show the license plate. But the word went out via social media asking anyone in that neighborhood to check their home security cameras, many of which show parts of the street in front of the house.
Sure enough, several people had images of the car, and a couple of them got the license plate number. Because of this, the shooter was arrested and is now in jail.
Blindsight was a blast, Echopraxia on the other hand, not so much⌠I had to suspend it and I will surely give it another go from scratch, but it didnât quite capture me like the first one. Maybe it just wasnât the right timing.
I think Iâll try to read/listen âThe Ministry for the Futureâ to seek some optimism⌠Maybe too optimistic?
I was gonna answer to this but, it would most likely contribute towards even less sleep for youâŚcrazy world we live in and it is getting crazier by month.
More ongoing dismay over the fact that almost a third of the US population says it doesnât want the covid vaccine. That means that this society can never achieve âherd immunityâ because the variants will always outpace vaccinations. This is so socially irresponsible I can hardly put words on it. Also, police officers in the USA are among the lowest vaccinated profession and there is zero pressure from police leadership or unions to do anything about it. they call it a personal choice. Even though they interact closely with the general population and frequently put hands on other people.
Itâs not enough that we have millions of people truly believing that Trump really won the election. We also have to have them refuse to get vaccinated. Nuts. Crazy. Irresponsible. And yes, there is a connection between these two positions.