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americans will be using literally all kinds of shit but not the metric system

Things you will find on Dutch railway stations. Today: no real advertisements.

On all Dutch railway stations, there is space for advertisements. The exploitation for advertisement space is done by NS Stations, who hires a commercial partner for this task. In December 2019, the contract between NS Stations and the commercial partner was ordered unruly after court trail. Since this time, there hasn’t been a commercial partner for station advertisements, only for the screens at a limited number of stations. Since 2020, NS uses the advertisements on the stations for information about the stations or travelling with the train from NS & Prorail. On a very limited number of stations, Prorail also informs waiting passengers about their operations, on screens called SpoorTV.

means testing, government abuses 

"Means testing is just a pretext for oppressive systems", chapter 4928309:

The Dutch government organization managing welfare was secretly using tracking mechanisms (cookies, IP addresses, etc.) on their websites - which welfare recipients were required to regularly interact with to "prove that they were looking for work" and such - to algorithmically accuse welfare receivers of fraud if the algorithm believed that they were traveling outside of the country. This led to fines and withholdings.

nos.nl/artikel/2482915-uwv-ver

And notably, these are very often 'data projects', that are built from community contributions and have become "The Database That Has Everything" so simply not using them usually also isn't really an option

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I'm so tired of this pattern of "personal projects" in tech that gain a lot of recognition and adoption in communities for publishing code or an API or whatever, and then close up all the APIs/code/etc. with the excuse of "this is just a personal project and it's taking too much time", only to slam the door behind them and become an extractive commercial enterprise 6 months later, having just used those communities as their marketing launchpad without giving back

And somehow, people keep falling for this, even though the warning signs are usually there from the start, but "there's an API so it'll be fine"

“American brain worms” is a thing we talk about regularly among my friends and family here in Iceland. It’s become really noticable that people who go to study in the US come back with extremely strange ideas. Noticably anti-union, libertarian (by Icelandic standards), pro-violence in all sorts of context, etc (Iceland is a broadly pacifist country with no army). You don’t see the same massive indoctrination in people who go and study in other countries.

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Apropos of nothing, one observation I’ve heard people who used to be involved in labour negotiations here in Iceland is “people with American brain worms don’t know how to negotiate with unions”

(Paraphrasing, since the original is always in Icelandic.)

This is noticable in that you can guess with reasonable certainty, which company is run by an executive trained in the US just by how badly they are handling union contract negotiations

for international nonbinary day we should abolish borders. it only seems appropriate.

codes of conduct, moderately spicy take 

I really dislike how a lot of codes of conduct are written. It often feels like someone is trying to exhaustively enumerate bad behaviours, and it makes me wonder what purpose they think the CoC is supposed to serve.

Is it meant to serve as a legislative document, as a hammer to hit people with, to say "look, you violated rule X in the CoC"? Because that doesn't work, and just invites rule-lawyering (which makes things *worse*, because now there are 'legal' forms of abuse).

Is it meant to inform problematic participants which of their behaviours are not accepted? Because enumerating a bunch of -isms will not help; they very likely already *know* that their behaviour is not okay, they just don't care.

Is it meant to explain to unintentionally-abrasive-or-bigoted participants what they are doing wrong? Because it doesn't do that - it won't contain anywhere near enough detail to usefully learn from it.

Is it meant to keep the vibe in the community good? Because for that, you'll need to talk about the more subtly toxic things that virtually no CoC ever mentions, like debate culture and boundary violations.

Now to be clear, I think a code of conduct is *in and of itself* a good idea - and I think that it can serve legitimate purposes, like signalling to vulnerable folks what they can expect in terms of moderation, or addressing problems like debate culture.

But for deity's sake, you do actually need to think about your goals and write your CoC so that it *actually does that*, and most that I've seen just... don't. There's so much room for improvement here.

(This includes the ready-to-use CoC templates, none of which seem to have a well-defined objective that they actually meet)

Today, I want you to remember that being #nonBinary even when you suspect that you'll end up being binary (a boat I find myself in) is a valid way to be. The "transitional enby" state is still a real identity. You're not faking it.

People change. I told people I was cis male a couple years ago because that was my truth at the time. Now I say I'm trans femme non-binary because that's true right now. At some point, I suspect I'll be binary trans female. One doesn't invalidate the other.

Today seemed like an excellent day for finally getting around to this

true crime (murder of a trans woman) 

The murderer of Sabrina Houston, a trans woman from Jamaica, has just been convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison, the full amount requested by prosecutor, by a court in Tallinn.

TDOR's page on Sabrina: tdor.translivesmatter.info/rep

News report on the verdict: postimees.ee/7814607/kohus-moi

Reportedly, the perpetrator didn't deny having stabbed Sabria to death, but argued that he did it because she tried to prevent him from leaving a room that they had entered for purpose of sex when he decided to not have sex, but the court ruled that it wasn't plausible, and it was more consistent with the available evidence that he got murderously enraged and stabby upon discovering Sabrina's genital configuration instead, and on that basis, levied the full punishment as requested.

Looks like "trans panic" is an aggravating factor in Estonia, not a get-out-of-jail-free card.

The murder happened on July 9th last year, so it took just over a year to prosecute. The perpetrator has been in jail since July 12th, three days after the murder, though, albeit until now only as a suspect.

Honestly this is still making me smile, it's such a change from the usual SUPER ANGRY TERMINATOR 8000 messaging I'm used to in gaming hardware, nicely done MSI

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you can't build binaries today, no touching gcc

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