Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

You can't change these systems without explicitly dismantling white supremacy. That's something that White Americans don't want to contend with. Because so many other parts of life seem to magically bend around their wants and desires, they get confused about the parts that don't. This is a big problem for White liberals especially. They really thought they were fixing police brutality in 2020 by just exclaiming loudly that they wanted it to stop. But white supremacy is not under your control.

What I'm saying is that a lot of American Exceptionalism™ is based on sacrificing people. It is a very long tradition. And up until very recently, Black people were the default sacrifice. That was our explicit role in White American society. As soon as you understand that, a lot of American history starts to make way more sense.

And today starts to make more sense too. This is an America we're it's not so easy to designate groups for sacrifice. And we are finding it harder to get things done.

People like to think about racism as if it's full of malicious intent. But often it's much more banal. Most of the time it's nothing more than "if somebody has to get hurt, let it be them. Because who's gonna complain about that am I right?"

What's wild is once you actually start paying attention, you find out what we mean by "systemic". There's a story like this in every major city. Once somebody figured out this particular strategy of getting infrastructure built in a way that white constituents would accept, it spread all over.

We talk about how white supremacy requires a visible and identifiable underclass. Part of it is so that there is always a designated sacrifice so you can get what you want.
https://urbanists.social/@getalifemike/113052876190442664

Evenals vorig jaar vindt ook dit jaar weer een herdenking plaats van alle slachtoffers van dodelijk politiegeweld. De herdenking vindt plaats voor de deur van de Tweede Kamer in Den Haag, op 3 september, de eerste dag dat Kamerleden weer aan het werk gaan. https://www.doorbraak.eu/3-september-den-haag-herdenking-van-alle-slachtoffers-van-dodelijk-politiegeweld/

edit: sounds like it's safe

hey serious question can anyone tell me if the latest jacob geller video is going to give me existential dread or if it's one of his other videos?

This is not a commentary on current events, but I can't help but remember that one time at a past employer where a pair of Haskell Guys tried to RIIH the company's microservice cloud, which was written in Ruby and Python.

Mask failure is always a nonzero risk, and this is one of the challenges of one-way masking, but there is an overlooked risk factor that many folks may not know about: alcohol vapor from hand sanitizer.

The charge of the electret material in N95s is highly durable and long-lasting, but vulnerable to degradation from alcohol vapor (the exact mechanism is unknown to me, but as the reference below notes, "alcohol vapor treatment is a standard method [...] to discharge electret filters and has been widely used in previous studies.) The overlap between folks who wear respirators and folks who use a lot of hand sanitizer is pretty large, and the degradation of an N95's filtration efficiency from alcohol vapor is measurable. If you can smell the vapor, then you are pulling it through the mask and exposing the fibers.

For single use -- and with masks that have multiple charged layers -- the concern is negligible, but the erosion becomes relevant depending on the mask & reuse.

Though fomites are a remote risk with SARSCoV2, they are a concern with other pathogens, and hypochlorous acid is a viable alternative.

Reference:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/gch2.202100015

#MaskUp #WearAMask #WearARespirator #N95 #CovidIsNotOver

I don't mind a good gripe. But I always cringe when people land on "why isn't this automatic". I think one of the reasons we can't have nice things is that everybody assumes human systems are easy and wondering why someone else isn't magically making it happen for them.

This shit is not magic. You just wanna take the work involved for granted. And it ends up making you sounding very different than the high horse you started out on.
https://todon.eu/@fenneladon/113051769907560593

I wish there was something like Patreon, but for wellness checks. Like, I don’t need your coffee money, but sometimes I’d like to hear a surprise voice on the phone saying, “Hey, this is your friend GlupShitto943 from Mastodon. How’s it going? Need to vent for a bit while I’m baking?” and then I don’t feel like I’m inconveniencing anyone when I do.

Alex Gaynor on the intersection of memory safety and sandboxing: https://alexgaynor.net/2024/aug/30/impact-of-memory-safety-on-sandboxing/

There is something I will never understand from people working in global companies - not taking other people's time zones into account:

- not prioritizing asking and answering people who's day starts before yours by end of your day so they can work on it or be unblocked at the start of their day

- not prioritizing asking and answering people whose day finishes before yours earlier in your day so they can be unblocked or you can discuss it while they are still there

- not planning meetings during times when all parties are awake and working

I will never understand how this is not just automatic. 🕐🙄