Treedrake

An owl winks in the shadows
A lizard lifts on tiptoe, breathing hard
Young male sparrow stretches up his neck,
                   big head, watching—

The grasses are working in the sun. Turn it green.
Turn it sweet. That we may eat.
Grow our meat.

Brazil says “sovereign use of Natural Resources”
Thirty thousand kinds of unknown plants.
The living actual people of the jungle
        sold and tortured—
And a robot in a suit who peddles a delusion called “Brazil”
        can speak for them?

        The whales turn and glisten, plunge
                and sound and rise again,
        Hanging over subtly darkening deeps
        Flowing like breathing planets
              in the sparkling whorls of
                     living light—

And Japan quibbles for words on
        what kinds of whales they can kill?
A once-great Buddhist nation
        dribbles methyl mercury
        like gonorrhea
                      in the sea.

Pere David's Deer, the Elaphure,
Lived in the tule marshes of the Yellow River
Two thousand years ago—and lost its home to rice—
The forests of Lo-yang were logged and all the silt &
Sand flowed down, and gone, by 1200 AD—
Wild Geese hatched out in Siberia
        head south over basins of the Yang, the Huang,
        what we call “China”
On flyways they have used a million years.
Ah China, where are the tigers, the wild boars,
                   the monkeys,
                      like the snows of yesteryear
Gone in a mist, a flash, and the dry hard ground
Is parking space for fifty thousand trucks.
IS man most precious of all things?
—then let us love him, and his brothers, all those
Fading living beings—

North America, Turtle Island, taken by invaders
        who wage war around the world.
May ants, may abalone, otters, wolves and elk
Rise! and pull away their giving
        from the robot nations.

Solidarity. The People.
Standing Tree People!
Flying Bird People!
Swimming Sea People!
Four-legged, two-legged people!

How can the head-heavy power-hungry politic scientist
Government     two-world     Capitalist-Imperialist
Third-world     Communist      paper-shuffling male
             non-farmer     jet-set     bureaucrats
Speak for the green of the leaf? Speak for the soil?

(Ah Margaret Mead . . . do you sometimes dream of Samoa?)

The robots argue how to parcel out our Mother Earth
To last a little longer
                    like vultures flapping
Belching, gurgling,
                    near a dying doe.
“In yonder field a slain knight lies—
We'll fly to him and eat his eyes
                    with a down
         derry derry derry down down.”

             An Owl winks in the shadow
             A lizard lifts on tiptoe
                         breathing hard
             The whales turn and glisten
                         plunge and
             Sound, and rise again
             Flowing like breathing planets

             In the sparkling whorls

             Of living light.

                      Stockholm: Summer Solstice 40072

https://poets.org/poem/mother-earth-her-whales

Not affiliated in any way with Actual Budget, but I can't recommend it enough. It's the FOSS version of YNAB pretty much so if you're a fan of envelope budgeting it's a great tool. I'd even say it has quite a few other strengths compared to YNAB (free bank syncing in the EU with more banks supported for example), and you can always be sure that your financial data stays within your reach.

I have a degree in information systems which was a mix between business and IT. While I in my initial job search was really close on heading in the direction of becoming a developer, I instead landed a role as a business systems analyst as well as working with digital transformation. So basically I'm in the land between IT and the business. I do some super light programming for the platform I'm responsible for but I feel like it's the kind of stuff you could learn in a day. I know some basic Java, Python and C# but not really enough that I'd see me landing a job that isn't a trainee developer position or a job for newly-grads where the company doesn't expect you to know anything at first.

While I don't mind the social and more business-oriented aspects of the job, I'm kinda lamenting the fact that I didn't enter into some trainee/junior dev job to sharpen up my programming skills and become a fully-fledged developer. I'd love to work fully remote and to be more flexible, e.g., not as bound to meetings and stuff which I currently am, or become a freelancer. Has anyone made a similar transition from digital transformation/adjacent areas to becoming a developer? Or am I just thinking too narrowly on what my options in this field are? Maybe there are many opportunities for fully-remote work in digital transformation, business system analysis and what not that I'm not seeing...?

As in, would they be able to access your server?

In regards to privacy... even when trying to use FOSS-alternatives and F-Droid on Android?

... and it's much, much better than I anticipated. Proton has solved so many things. I've been dual booting on a smaller partition so far, but this has convinced me to wipe the whole disk and use it for Linux only. I might still keep a dual boot in case there is some edge case, but nothing so far has been an issue. I've been running Pop_Os! which I also have on my laptop since some year back. Previously I've also always had Arch on my laptop, but always stuck with Windows for my desktop just because of gaming issues.

I think a common factor on why torrents are having a resurgence and illegal streaming services are getting more traction, is subscription fatigue. Subscription fatigue doesn't only contain itself to streaming services, movies or music, nowadays you're also expected to subscribe to every app you download. Whether it's a meditation app, a budgeting app (looking at YNAB that went from a one-time purchase to a really expensive subscription model), the Adobe suite, the MS Office suite, your Peloton bike that you've already paid hundreds of dollars for (referencing the earlier article on them establishing a startup fee for buying used bikes), or a podcast app where the money doesn't even go to the podcasters themselves.

Is there a peak for this? I feel like subscriptions are becoming more of a rule than an exception. Having the ability to directly purchase digital goods seems more like a thing of the past. It's just so stupid. But apparently people don't care? They just keep paying for this? Apparently it's still worth it for companies to establish a subscription model, even if there are no benefits for the customer, just the company. What are your thoughts? What can we do to stop it?

A lot of people feel drawn to simple living or digital minimalism because they feel a constant need to be connected and stay up to date, and feel less and less in control because of the attention economy and how algorithms are developed to maximize your attention. While the fediverse might not work in the same exploitative way as centralised services does, there's still a feedback loop that keeps you coming back.

To what extent does the problems of the attention economy on the human mind plague the fediverse? Is replacing centralised services with Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed and Mastodon just opting for a "lesser evil" in a sense? What are your thoughts?

Right now the default sort for threads is "Hot". Can I change the default somehow? I don't know if the option exists or if I'm blind, I can't find it anyhow.

I actually started on Kbin.social, but then it got shut down, Kbin died and now fedia.io seems to be the largest one running MBin. I like the interface on MBin and I guess it's good to have a diverse fediverse with different services, but at the same time, why use mbin when everyone congregates on lemmy instances? The local magazines on fedia are for the most part, quite dead, when compared to lemmy collections. In the end I feel like there aren't enough people to go around to support many more services like MBin and Piefed.