This is privilege. My partner had an "essential job" all through the pandemic. He was not allowed to work from home either. If he'd pulled this he would've been fired.

Well, yeah. But if people who have enough privilege to take a stand against workplace exploitation do take a stand, that helps slow down the ongoing creep of how much they're allowed to dick you around at work.

Make no mistake, by "not allowed to work from home," this employer meant "you will not be paid for work you do at home," while clearly expecting the employee to do work (such as answering work emails and taking work calls) while at home. (If the employer didn't expect that, then they wouldn't have noticed when the worker stopped doing it.)

If you're expected to respond when the boss summons you outside of work hours, you are on-call. If you're on-call, you should be paid.

Expecting white-collar workers to be on-call for no extra pay is wage theft, no different from if a retail or food service employee is told to, "Clock out before you clean up/close out your station, so you don't go over your hours."

(And yes, this example happens a lot. If it happens to you, in the US, you should report it to the Department of Labor. It's confidential; your employer will never find out it was you who turned them in.)

Tumblr people reblogging posts by an "AI Artist" saying nightshade and glaze don't work and providing no alternative and basically telling people to just give up and stop using them. Gee. I wonder why they want people to stop using them.

Real big mystery why the "AI Artist" (self-proclaimed, literally right there in their profile) wants people to give up on trying to protect their artwork.

Alright, to ao3's soon to be arriving Wattpad Refugees, a basic guide to general user culture:

1.) Unlike Wattpads vote system that let's you like each chapter, the ao3 equivalent kudos only allows one per work. Everyone is generally quietly annoyed about this. To engage with each chapter, you're heavily encouraged to comment. Trust me, it makes people's day.

2.) Ao3 has no algorithm. By default it's latest updated work first. You can find things to your taste through searches, filters and tags.

3.) 'No archive warnings apply' and 'user has chosen not to use archive warnings' mean two very different things. No archives warnings means the work is free from any content that could require a warning tag (character death, graphic depictions of violence, non-con, etc). User has chosen not to use archive warnings means it could contain any of the warning content, be it hasn't been explicitly tagged. Treat it like an allergen. No archive warnings apply is allergen free. User has chosen not to use archive warnings, may contain traces or whole chunks of the allergen. If you're likely to have a bad reaction, maybe don't take the risk.

4.) Speaking of warnings, ao3 has very few restrictions on the type of work that's allowed. Whatever your personal thoughts or feelings on that are, thats how the site is. You're likely to run across some dark subject matters and a lot of people are uncomfortable with reading that. You're well within your rights not like these works and have your opinion on whether they should be allowed, but harassing the authors of such works (or any works) is more likely to come back on you than them. Ao3 operates on a strong policy of 'don't like, don't read'. Use the tagging system to your full advantage to only engage with the kind of works you want to see.

We look forward to welcoming you all and seeing the fantastic works you create. Happy writing!

If I remember correctly the guy wouldn’t leave her alone so she actually shot him with it.

government is trying to ban tiktok meanwhile millions of poor and disabled americans are about to completely lose their internet access at the end of april because congress wont renew funding for the affordable connectivity program

hell fucking world

if you want to help us convince congress to do something that actually benefits society, please check out the link below. we only have roughly 45 days of affordable internet service remaining from the time this post has been written

say that shit

As of April 19, 2024 we currently have just 10 days of ACP funding left

please spread this and reach out to your representatives before its too late to save this vital program

guys the email stuff seems super intimidating but it's so easy. put your name, email, and city and they'll send in the emails FOR YOU. all repaired and written

Labour is going to win the general election and then say this doesn’t go far enough.

"Sunak said ‘something has gone wrong’ since the pandemic to increase the number of people signed off work for long-term sickness" (metro)

staring into the camera like its the fucking office

"Mr Sunak also said, if the Conservatives win the general election, those who were still out of work after 12 months after support from a work coach will have "their benefits removed entirely"." (bbc)

just fucking shoot me now i hate it here

okay logging back in for one thing:

the government now has an open call for evidence on their proposed changes.

"This call for evidence is part of a wider suite of activity to reform the fit note and will act as a prelude to a full consultation on specific policy proposals which will be launched later this year."

it's all well and good for people to say "oh just because he said it, doesn't mean it will happen", as if the government hasnt happily let disabled people die from benefit cuts, lack of social care and oh yeah FUCKING COVID. have people forgotten that? 6/10 covid deaths in the uk were disabled people and nobody cared. so don't think they won't keep making it worse for us.

please read, please share and please if youre in the uk, please consider fighting with us to stop this.

i am so tired of watching my community die.

tape casette recorders are compatible with literally every. single. thing. im out here living in 2095.

things you can record (audio only), simply by lying to your computer, telling it that the tape recorder is actually a set of headphones:

and with a VCR you could do all of this AND have the visuals as well… but an audio cassette recorder is a good place to start, since they’re small and simple. I would not recommend a boombox, because those are large and nowadays all very, very bad quality.

Now you may be saying “how is any of this helpful, I want a digital file…” here’s the fucking magic. You go into Audacity (free program), and lie to it that the tape recorder is really a microphone. Then you hit record on Audacity, and hit play on the tape, and let it play at regular speed. Trim and export the digital file, and you’re doing gangbusters. You’re cooking with gas. You’re thinking with portals. You’ve won the internet.

Congratulations, you can “pirate”* anything you want, and literally no one can catch you, because you’re not downloading in the traditional sense. You’re streaming to an external device, and that device is recording what it receives. It’s exactly like taping a live tv show to a VHS. This is a very low-key and non-strenuous task for the computer, since your tape recorder does all the work.

*Is this piracy? No. Well- it’s time shifting. Sort of. Tell it to my Steely Dan albums. Tell it to my The Sims: Hot Date VG Soundtrack album.

OP, dropping surprising knowledge from across time and space:

KOSA Moves to the House

KOSA is still moving forward and OTW Legal explains how fans can add their voices and who to contact. Read more at https://otw-news.org/37dhnd5a

As someone who has personally had to take those calls, they do matter. It just doesn’t matter what you say in the call: the only way your calls actually reach the politician is a tally sheet of each call received on different topics. End of the day/week, the politician gets told “you had X many calls about people wanting you to do this, Y many calls about people wanting you to do this, etc.”

Individual calls matter little, but if they get tons of calls on one topic then they take it seriously. The example above was probably during a time where the office was flooded with so many calls at once that they took the phones off the hook, which actually means that calls are working especially well. When the phones are blowing up, everyone in the office notices.

The best call to your representative does not involve you making an impassioned and well-argued case, because you’re probably talking to an intern. The most effective call you can make takes 15 seconds: “I am from [place in your district] and I am very pissed about [topic].”

OI. PEOPLE IN THE THREAD. CAN WE REBLOG THIS VERSION PLEASE. DON'T STOP MAKING CALLS.

But also as another person further up says, don't let your activism start and stop with phone calls either.

DON'T TRUST ANYONE WHO TELLS YOU NOT TO PARTICIPATE

As a kid, when your parents are poor, you're poor. If they don't have money, that means none of you have money. But if someone's parents are rich, that doesn't necessarily mean the kid is. Sometimes rich peoples' kids aren't rich kids, they're just some rich freak's exotic pets that can talk but aren't allowed to.

That’s… not how class works

OK, so- my partner was adopted by a rich woman when he was a baby. She's from a prominent family, practically royalty where we're from. She certainly had the means to send him to fancy private school, give him good food, nice clothes/toys, premium healthcare... she chose not to. According to her he was lucky to be "adopted out of poverty" at all and should have been content with what she deigned to give him. And she reminded him of this constantly, all through his childhood.

She dangled the promise of uni in exchange for good behavior and good grades- with terms and conditions, of course. And filling her laundry list of demands was something like pulling teeth whilst jumping through hoops. In the end, did he get to go to uni? Of course not. (And certainly being queer/trans on top of it all did not help things whatsoever).

He cut her off after high school, and when I met him a year ago he had been working as (the equivalent of) an UberEats driver for a living for the last few years, including through the pandemic. (Sixteen hours a day for the equivalent of $6 (six) USD, not including the gas for his shitty rundown scooter; caught COVID twice, suffers from chronic fatigue to this day).

And to this day he still has to be selective about which of our ~leftist anarcho-commie~ friends he divulges this part of his background to- cos all they hear is "raised rich" and then suddenly he's not One of Them because "well teeeeechncially :^) you're from the oppressing class...". Like.... shit, man!

Social rules don't mean shit when it comes to abusive parents. Even rich ones.

Probably especially rich ones.

people are totally on board with the concept of "sufficiently rich people are above the law, and this is bad" but refuse to connect that to the concept of "this also includes laws that protect children from abuse and exploitation"

like we understand "the ruling classes get and maintain their wealth through cruel exploitation of those less powerful" and we can't wrap our heads around "a lifetime of this cruel and merciless behavior being valorized by your peers probably doesn't predispose you to suddenly changing gears once you have a helplessly dependent child that's totally under your control."

like yeah the rich are our enemies in this ongoing class war, absolutely, it's an Us or Them situation to save the planet. but if you don't give a shit about saving the enemy's children too, i don't think very highly of your motivation or your methods.

If (what's left of) the fuckin' middle class can hold financial stability and basic safety over their kids' heads in "exchange" for fealty, and cut them off and throw them out for insufficient subservience (like daring to be queer/trans/wrong-religion/wrong-political-stance), what in the EVERLOVING FUCK makes you think the rich won't and haven't on a regular basis?

I look at it this way (since I was in this situation with my middle class parents):

Growing up, I never worried the lights or the water would be shut off, never worried that the house was gonna be foreclosed on. My parents were Exceedingly Bad With Money (and tbqh financially terroized each other a lot), but there was always some kind of food in the house, even if it was the cheapest food you could buy.

That’s a step removed from poverty, and is distinctly different from how my grandparents grew up, or many of the people I went to public school with. I don’t claim a struggle that wasn’t mine.

My parents absolutely held that over my and my siblings’ heads at every opportunity. When we were old enough to work, they’d pull out money from our accounts to pay bills (not because they weren’t making firmly middle class money by the late 2010s, but because they were Bad With Money and ruined each other financially and then had to pay the electric bill with my money). When we couldn’t work, my mom would have us help renovate our house, and I stayed home from school frequently to strip and restain our deck, paint the fence or house, re-caulk the tub, etc. We were expected to work to earn our keep, and when we got ready for college, we were expected to pick an acceptable major or else my parents wouldn’t fill out their portion of the FAFSA application or cosign private loans.

On top of all that, when my parents outed me as trans, if my best friend and their parents hadn’t been able to help me, I would’ve swiftly fallen to “in danger of being homeless.” And even with their help, we’re fucking poor. We’re not middle class. If we had kids, we’d be in danger of not making rent and bills and food every month, and one or two bad weeks would be devestating.

Actually rich parents have the ability to abuse you in ways you can’t escape from until they decide to give up. They have influence and sway over people who you need help from to escape. My dad wasn’t even rich, just a cop, and I had to leave the fucking state to ensure I wasn’t being monitored (and still couldn’t guarantee it). They know so many people that even 2 hrs away from my hometown, people saw my last name and went “Oh you’re their kid!” I had to change it, have the record made confidential, and avoid situations that could draw the wrong people’s attention. I’m positive rich parents can swing similar amounts of control if they choose to. They don’t have to physically stalk you or do anything that would be prosecutable. They can do it all from a distance. The cops likely won’t believe you.

The general rule is not to consider people as analogous to demographics. If you do, you will eventually look like an ass. Judge people on their actions, period.

The most cyberpunk thing on your dash today.

This....this is why you do not need to connect EVERYTHING to the internet.

I'm comfused- how much damage could an enslaved toothbrush cause??

The aggressors installed remote control software onto the smart toothbrushes via their unprotected internet connections, aggregating 3 million of them into a botnet: a network of robot computers under remote control.

Next, they would instruct all 3 million of them to attack a website of their choosing, causing a distributed-denial-of-service (DDS) situation where the targeted website was so busy talking to hijacked toothbrushes that it couldn't do the work it was designed for, resulting in crashes and lost revenue.

A DDDS, or Dental Distributed Denial of Service, if you will

anyway heres the article, he was bedridden for 5 weeks and continues to suffer from fatigue and gastrointestinal issues

Your second thought has always gotta be "this is a corporation trying to make us ridicule their victim, whats the real story here?".

Quick PSA, if you get one of those "Work scanned, AI use detected" comments on AO3, just mark them as spam.

Some moron apparently built a bot to annoy or prank hundreds of authors.

There is no scanning process, your work doesn't actually resemble AI writing, it's all bullshit. Mark the comment as spam (on AO3, not the email notification you got about the comment!) and don't let it get to you.

The spam comments have evolved.

They are now also linking to a site they claim is able to scan works and tell you whether they were AI written or not, and that you should do that before reading a fic.

It should go without saying that you should not, under no circumstances, visit a site advertised in a spam comment.

In this case, I'd say there's even a chance that the "scanning" site is actually used to scrape fics and use them for future AI writing. What it definitely doesn't do is tell you whether something was AI written or not. That's a bullshit claim.

Don't use that site. Don't believe these spam comments, whether you get them on your own works or see them on someone else's.

It's all bullshit.

Just got another one, so here's what they look like to anyone curious. They're never real users, either, just keysmashes for the display name.

Image Description: a screenshot of an AO3 comment by nlaoboh that says HoloAI pattern found in work. To all readers, before you read please scan the work with an AI detector like gowinston.ai and call out all AI using cheaters /end ID

As someone who works in education, actual AI detectors don't even work well and are rendered obsolete within weeks if not days. Please spread this around to spare your fellow writers and reader!

Check your hand sanitizer y'all

Here's the full, updated list from the FDA. It's currently (well, as of March 14 '24) 67 pages.

Also be aware that a LOT of companies substitute cheaper ingredients in their food products. Which is obnoxious but fine, unless you're allergic to the substitute ingredients.

Olive oil, tea, honey, cinnamon (not that lead is exactly "safe" to eat), vanilla, coffee, fish, blah blah blah. The list goes on. Any corners a company can cut to save .001%, they will. Usually the substitutes are mostly harmless, but it isn't as if companies care about consumer safety when there's profit to be made.

To clarify, the list linked is ALL hand sanitizer products officially recalled (and may have ongoing additions). It is NOT just the Aruba Aloe brand; there are many brands by various manufacturers on the list. So please check to see if you own anything on that list.

29 BILLION?!?!

The IRS has collected more than $500 million in back taxes from delinquent millionaires (MarketWatch)

How a Maneuver in Puerto Rico Led to a $29 Billion Tax Bill for Microsoft (ProPublica)

IRS Free File (btw your taxes are due THIS MONDAY!)