@mariyadelano@hachyderm.io2025-11-14 21:05:53
So I grew up next to #Chernobyl and this is, well, TERRIFYING.
A story for y’all: I’m from a city called Zhytomyr, 2 hours west of Kyiv in the North of #Ukraine. We were downwind of the Chernobyl #nuclear power plant when the 1986 disaster happened.
I wasn’t born for another 12 years, but my childhood was filled with stories and the aftermath of it all. Things like:
- My grandmother worked as a head doctor in a hospital and rehabilitation facility exclusively for children of Chernobyl victims to treat the extremely high prevalence of Tuberculosis and other severe health complications. (To specify: these were SECOND GENERATION of exposure).
- A lot of the kids in that facility were orphans, because their parents died young from health problems.
- My uncle’s wife was born in Pripyat. She was 1 year old when the disaster happened. Her parents were told to evacuate while given no information about what happened. They had to pack up their things and rush out to an unfamiliar city with their baby, never to see the rest of their belongings, apartment, or hometown again.
- When I was a kid, it became so common to see weirdly mutated animals and insects that even 2-3 year olds would make jokes about “Chernobyl mosquitos” and I wouldn’t even flinch seeing occasional giant bugs, dark frogs, weird-looking dogs.
- We’d frequently hear of nearby farms having issues with their animals being born too mutated to survive or random outbreaks from contaminated water / food. Crops would randomly fail. People would get poisoned on a regular basis. This all got less common as I grew up.
- My mother still remembers being a little girl, 10 years old, and looking outside from their balcony at the clouds blowing over from Chernobyl that day. People were told to not go outside and to shut all the windows, but not given an explanation as to why. My mother swears that the rain looked different. They weren’t able to go and buy more food for the kitchen for multiple days.
Anyway - nuclear safety isn’t a joke. I don’t understand how this level of carelessness can happen after Chernobyl and Fukushima.
https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/
@inthehands@hachyderm.io2026-01-09 20:35:22
Re “apply the pressure anyway:” that’s advice I got from…Keith Ellison.
I was part of a citizen group pressuring him to vote for the ACA when he was in the House. He met with us, and gave us an impassioned speech about universal care and how the ACA was a good first step but insufficient, relating it to the less-remembered civil rights acts of the 1950s that laid the groundwork for the big one in 1964.
Somebody from the group finally asked him, “Why are we meeting with you? You’re already convinced!”
He replied (paraphrasing here): “I •need• your pressure. I need it even if I already agree. If you’re pressuring me, then I can get on the floor of the House and say ‘My constituents are beating down the doors of my office! This has tremendous support!’ I can tell my colleagues in private about how agitated voters are. If you apply pressure, I can pass that pressure forward. I need you to do it! •That• is why you’re meeting with me.”
And now Keith Ellison is MN Attorney General. He’s already started doing the right thing. Follow his advice, and apply that pressure!
@cdarwin@c.im2025-12-07 05:38:37
If you know something about Basic Income, you may be aware that
👉one of the first proposals for a Basic Income came from Thomas Paine, hero of the American and French revolutions.
In 1797, after a stint in a French prison, Paine wrote the pamphlet
"Agrarian Justice",
⭐️which sets out an argument for taxing land and distributing the proceeds among the population at large as compensation for landlessness.
Paine’s proposal to tax land and distribute the …
@hex@kolektiva.social2025-12-01 11:09:47
Taking notes from the successes and failures of the Russian revolution, a group of anarchists (including Nestor Makhno, a Ukrainian anarchist militant who was critical in defeating the Tzar's army and who later also fought the Red Army) wrote a document titled the "Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists." This document came to be known as "The Platform." It remains one of the most important first-hand revolutionary documents, outlining a clear revolutionary plan.
I've taken this, the Viable System Model from cybernetics, and my own organizing experience, to describe an organization to confront the current set of crises.
This continues to build on the stuff I have been writing, but it's a lot less high level theory and a lot more specific.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/a-solarpunk-fractal-microservices
As always, editing notes (typos, grammar, spelling, etc) are always welcome, as are any questions. My ADHD brain tends to go a lot faster than anything else, so I have a tendency to drop words and have a lot of trouble catching them later. Between my ADHD and mild dyslexia, it can be pretty hard for me to catch when autocorrect gives me the wrong word.
A lot of folks have already been super helpful in offering their editing support, and I'm really grateful. Writing this has felt collaborative, and it should. On the one hand this comes from my own experience and research, but on the other I'm also voicing things that have come from conversations here. This has all been a bit of my voice and a bit of the federated world, and I'm really appreciating that.
@bici@mastodon.social2025-12-07 17:39:35
"Here’s a problem that’s highly likely going to get much worse, people [are] outsourcing their thinking to AI. “Many people are becoming reliant on AI to navigate some of the most basic aspects of daily life. A colleague suggested that we might even call the most extreme users “LLeMmings”"
Brilliant. From the Crank.
Read it Now
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot2026-01-02 18:30:43
One of the triggers for the Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381 was a new poll tax, levied on all adults; and particularly, the fact that the test for adulthood was having pubic hair. This led to the contractors collecting the tax systematically looking up young women's skirts.
It strikes me that one really powerful way to oppose anti #Trans legislation is to ask 'do you want the p…
@raiders@darktundra.xyz2026-01-10 15:32:27
1 Available Star Raiders Must Avoid in Free Agency https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-1-available-star-must-avoid-free-agency
@metacurity@infosec.exchange2025-10-16 10:19:57
So one of the authors of the Le Monde story about the secretive US unit called Group 78 contacted me to tell me I had misinterpreted the story published by his outlet and Die Zeit.
I explain everything in this thread on BlueSky (it's hard to thread things here).
Take a look:
https://bsky.app/pro…
@pre@boing.world2025-12-27 15:50:12
Ran the #Wrapstodon thing on this server.
"Oracle" for me again. 😒
Other than My most boosted post and a count of 1443 posts and 250 followers I don't think it means much on a tiny server. Everyone here is in the top 75% of users because there are two users. 😆
The categories are:
Oracle: “You created new posts more than replies, keeping Mastodon fresh and future‑facing.”
Social butterfly (replier): You replied far more than posting originals.
Cool‑hunter (booster): You mainly amplify others via boosts.
Pollster: You created lots of polls compared to everything else.
Lurker: You post and interact relatively little overall.
```
@samvarma@fosstodon.org2025-11-22 20:43:50
The office last night.
The casino's extremely particular about who can run their digital mixer, and they deleted the scene we had saved last time, so we had to rebuild everything from scratch, which we were not able to do in time. So for half of the first set all I could hear was the click in my ears. Electronic drum kit, no amps. I eventually got my hands on an iPad to set up a mix for myself, and then it was actually fine but I've never had to deal with that my career thus f…
