Tootfinder

New Banksy dropped in London.
I thought immediately of Oscar Wilde's "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
Perhaps it is a Christmas reference, to that star that was followed in the famous story.

@… Thank you for sharing.
I see some similarities with my own experience of American Christmas, being raised in a Scandinavian culture where Jul (Yule) is a very different tradition.
The consumerism, the self-centrism, all feels very gross and not at all what I connect the holiday with.

Spot the difference from yesterday? More framSpot the difference from yesterday? More framework over the top by the ceiling and around the windows ready for the mirrored door blinds.
Bought more wood struts. Had quite a comedy farce trying to get the things into the house now the build cupboards prevent them entering the room. Had to carry them around into the garden then in through the back door and up into the kitchen to get the angle to enter the bedroom.
The company sending the new paint had emailed saying that they don't do varnish in the colours they had allowed us to order, so asked for whatever blues they do have. That did not arrive today. Nor did the extra wood that was set for "early" this week.
Making all these doors is going to take ages and I suggested that seems like something that could be done working from home. He's probably got a proper workshop there even. Carpenter suggests his boss won't allow such things though. 🙄 Bosses eh? They do like their staff to be monitored even if only by the client.ework over the top by the ceiling and around the windows ready for the mirrored door blinds.
Bought more wood struts. Had quite a comedy farce trying to get the things into the house now the build cupboards prevent them entering the room. Had to carry them around into the garden then in through the back door and up into the kitchen to get the angle to enter the bedroom.
The company sending the new paint had emailed saying that they don't do varnish in the colours they had allowed us to order, so asked for whatever blues they do have. That did not arrive today. Nor did the extra wood that was set for "early" this week.
Making all these doors is going to take ages and I suggested that seems like something that could be done working from home. He's probably got a proper workshop there even. Carpenter suggests his boss won't allow such things though. 🙄 Bosses eh? They do like their staff to be monitored even if only by the client.

After #Trump finally crashes and burns (I'm still saying I don't think he makes it to the mid terms, and I think it's more than possible he won't make it to the end of the year) we'll hear a lot of people say, "the system worked!" Today people are already talking about "saving democracy" by fighting back. This will become a big rally cry to vote (for Democrats, specifically), and the complete failure of the system will be held up as the best evidence for even greater investment in it.
I just want to point out that American democracy gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile, who, before being elected was already a well known sexual predator, and who made the campaign promise to commit genocide. He then preceded to commit genocide. And like, I don't care that he's "only" kidnaped and disappeared a few thousand brown people. That's still genocide. Even if you don't kill every member of a targeted group, any attempt to do so is still "committing genocide." Trump said he would commit genocide, then he hired all the "let's go do a race war" guys he could find and *paid* them to go do a race war. And, even now as this deranged monster is crashing out, he is still authorized to use the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
He committed genocide during his first term when his administration separated migrant parents and children, then adopted those children out to other parents. That's technically genocide. The point was to destroy the very people been sending right wing terror squads after.
There was a peaceful hand over of power to a known Russian asset *twice*, and the second time he'd already committed *at least one* act of genocide *and* destroyed cultural heritage sites (oh yeah, he also destroyed indigenous grave sites, in case you forgot, during his first term).
All of this was allowed because the system is set up to protect exactly these types of people, because *exactly* these types of people are *the entire power structure*.
Going back to that system means going back to exactly the system that gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile *TWICE*.
I'm already seeing the attempts to pull people back, the congratulations as we enter the final phase, the belief that getting Trump out will let us all get back to normal. Normal. The normal that lead here in the first place. I can already see the brunch reservations being made. When Trump is over, we will be told we won. We will be told that it's time to go back to sleep.
When they tell you everything worked, everything is better, that we can stop because we won, tell them "fuck you! Never again means never again." Destroy every system that ever gave these people power, that ever protected them from consequences, that ever let them hide what they were doing.
These democrats funded a genocide abroad and laid the groundwork for genocide at home. They protected these predators, for years. The whole power structure is guilty. As these files implicate so many powerful people, they're trying to shove everything back in the box. After all the suffering, after we've finally made it clear that we are the once with the power, only now they're willing to sacrifice Trump to calm us all down.
No, that's a good start but it can't be the end.
Winning can't be enough to quench that rage. Keep it burning. When this is over, let victory fan that anger until every institution that made this possible lies in ashes. Burn it all down and salt the earth. Taking down Trump is a great start, but it's not time to give up until this isn't possible again.
#USPol

Wow. I've dealt with various toxic personalities in software development, but a good portion of the time those toxic personalities were at least extremely knowledgeable in their (often, very limited) domain.
AI, however, seems to be enabling toxic personalities *who are completely clueless*. Impressive!
https://github…

Dear USians,
How about you don’t call a Middle Eastern guy “white” and go on to tell him he’s “no better than any other oppressor we encounter” simply for trying to warn his Palestinian friends to not take any unnecessary risks and to be careful on Mastodon?
Also, apparently Divya has blocked me for this, which sucks because it has made it impossible for me to keep boosting her fundraiser, which you should, of course, still follow and support (link below).
I’m not going to …

So in another dream I just woke up from, I was talking to someone about "the idea problem" (that it's becoming harder to monitize ideas, from a vox article written by an AI cooked reporter).
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/executive-disorder-white-house-weekly-46-313675864/
Basically, I was arguing that the majority of inventions target men because patriarchy puts economic control in men's hands. As men have started to help more with childcare, there have been more inventions related to childcare. (I don't have any idea if this is true. Seems legit, but I'm just relating my dream. I think I was also oversimplifying a bit to "men" and "women" because of my audience, but anyway it was a dream.) There's actually more low-hanging fruit, I pointed out, related to making care work easier.
So I argued that the real problem was a failure to invest in research into solving that problem. Today there are all these boondoggles built around killing people. What if, instead of all this government research into killing people, we dumped a ton of money into making it easier to support a household? That would be great for the economy. (Being asleep, I seem to have forgotten that working people need money.)
In the blur of being just awake I started thinking about how you could kickstart the US economy by taking the money from the AI boondoggle and other autonomous murder bots and create something like a program to build robots for housekeepers. You'd still be funding tech with government money, so the same horrible people get paid, but you're now actually solving real problems. It wouldn't even matter if it was a boondoggle, honestly. Just dumping money into something other than murdering people is good enough.
I imagined first if there was a program to fund a robot housecleaner, like robot dog with AI some laundry pickup, that would be provided, free of charge, to help people with children. It would work the same as the military boondoggle where a private company makes the government buy a piece of hardware from them and then also pay them to service it for some number of years. But instead of that hardware sitting around waiting to kill someone, it would be getting brought to people's houses to help them.
Then I thought, hey, you could even boost the economy more if you just had government funding for doulas and housecleaners and paid them a living wage. Hey, you could really kickstart the economy by nationalizing healthcare and including doula support as part of all births. Oh, and you could also just include the optional household help for families with children until the kids turn 18.
None of this is perfect (I don't actually think most of this is possible from any state), but the point is that it's actually wildly easy to figure out all kinds of ways to invest in the economy and monitize ideas as long as you aren't entirely focused on the same old "make money from spying on people and killing them." Funny that. Like they said in the podcast, maybe "finding ideas" isn't the problem.
Hope you enjoyed the weird semi-awake brain dump/rant.

Antifa = anti-fascist
Anti-antifa = fascist
People who can’t understand something that simple are either too stupid to argue with or clearly have a vested interest in not being able to understand it.

I has a bed.
No mattress until Monday, but a bed fully stained and varnished and constructed.
Had to wait a couple of days for varnish which never came. Went out to an actual DIY shop in the end. Gonna have a lot of spare varnish soon.
Varnished the whole room with two more coats as well as the bed twice.
A few more things to buy after Xmas and the full media setup can't happen until the new Steam Machine at its heart is released. Maybe cobble together something to plug a laptop into in the meantime? All for next year though once the mattress arrives and I can actually sleep in the bedroom.