SDF Chatter

If you were tasked with building a panopticon, your design might look a lot like the information stores of the U.S. federal government—a collection of large, complex agencies, each making use of enormous volumes of data provided by or collected from citizens.

The federal government is a veritable cosmos of information, made up of constellations of databases: The IRS gathers comprehensive financial and employment information from every taxpayer; the Department of Labor maintains the National Farmworker Jobs Program (NFJP) system, which collects the personal information of many workers; the Department of Homeland Security amasses data about the movements of every person who travels by air commercially or crosses the nation’s borders; the Drug Enforcement Administration tracks license plates scanned on American roads. And that’s only a minuscule sampling. More obscure agencies, such as the recently gutted Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, keep records of corporate trade secrets, credit reports, mortgage information, and other sensitive data, including lists of people who have fallen on financial hardship.

A fragile combination of decades-old laws, norms, and jungly bureaucracy has so far prevented repositories such as these from assembling into a centralized American surveillance state. But that appears to be changing. Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency have systematically gained access to sensitive data across the federal government, and in ways that people in several agencies have described to us as both dangerous and disturbing. Despite DOGE’s stated mission, little efficiency seems to have been achieved. Now a new phase of Trump’s project is under way: Not only are individual agencies being breached, but the information they hold is being pooled together. The question is Why? And what does the administration intend to do with it?

Typical pattern: "Scientists find something strange when they look at a common whatever - and it's not good!"

This kind of crap used to be the style of little blurbs at the side or the bottom of an article, but it's in the headlines now. Until you click the headline you don't even really know what the article is about anymore - just the general topic area, with maybe a fear trigger.

Clicking on the headline is going to display ads, but at that point the goal isn't to get you to buy anything yet, it's just to generate ad impressions, which the content provider gets paid for regardless of whether you even see the ads. It's a weird meta-revenue created by the delivery mechanism, and it has altered the substance of headlines, and our expectations of what "headline" even means.

Nice to finally hear some small positive news from here on terf island.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/62575235

I was hoping one would have a heart that says "Mom" inside, but I guess a pattern of dots is a start...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28791881

hmmm

Seems like Airplane is the only way to disable network connectivity other than keeping it unplugged so it dies

In a highly scientific straw poll of the folks over at Ask Car Guys, pickup truck drivers voted on their pick for the “Worst Pickup Truck of All Time.” Take a look, it wasn’t even close.

(I CAN'T BELIEVE THERE IS CYBERSTUCK ON LEMMY AND NOBODY TOLD ME. AW, HELL, IT'S ON NOW )

I was hoping one would have a heart that says "Mom" inside, but I guess a pattern of dots is a start...

Across the country, a troubling trend is accelerating: the return of institutionalization – rebranded, repackaged and framed as “modern mental health care”. From Governor Kathy Hochul’s push to expand involuntary commitment in New York to Robert F Kennedy Jr’s proposal for “wellness farms” under his Make America Healthy Again (Maha) initiative, policymakers are reviving the logics of confinement under the guise of care.

These proposals may differ in form, but they share a common function: expanding the state’s power to surveil, detain and “treat” marginalized people deemed disruptive or deviant. Far from offering real support, they reflect a deep investment in carceral control – particularly over disabled, unhoused, racialized and LGBTQIA+ communities. Communities that have often seen how the framing of institutionalization as “treatment” obscures both its violent history and its ongoing legacy. In doing so, these policies erase community-based solutions, undermine autonomy, and reinforce the very systems of confinement they claim to move beyond.

Take Hochul’s proposal, which seeks to lower the threshold for involuntary psychiatric hospitalization in New York. Under her plan, individuals could be detained not because they pose an imminent danger, but because they are deemed unable to meet their basic needs due to a perceived “mental illness”. This vague and subjective standard opens the door to sweeping state control over unhoused people, disabled peopleand others struggling to survive amid systemic neglect. Hochul also proposes expanding the authority to initiate forced treatment to a broader range of professionals – including psychiatric nurse practitioners – and would require practitioners to factor in a person’s history, in effect pathologizing prior distress as grounds for future detention.

This is not a fringe proposal. It builds on a growing wave of reinstitutionalization efforts nationwide. In 2022, New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, directed police and EMTs to forcibly hospitalize people deemed “mentally ill”, even without signs of imminent danger. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom’s Care courts compel people into court-ordered “treatment”.

Full Article

Ralph was a mixed race guy who was living as a husband to a woman named Mamie in 1906, but eventually took a liking to a gal named Dorothy and decided to get proper married. Wisconsin had a eugenics test (eugenics was hella popular in the US - that’s where the Nazis learned it from) you had to take before you got married.

Ralph passed the blood test with zero problems, and got legally married to Dorothy. Mamie got jealous, and then outed him to the authorities.

I’ve been reading True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the 20th Century. We have always been here.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/26/support-for-ukraine-russia-war-yougov-poll-survey

Went to Detroit for a concert this weekend. Had an absolute blast, and swung a record shop this morning on my way hom to pick up a little Motown! I've been hoping to get some more funk and soul music in my collection, so i grabbed this one since it's an older pressing and my local radio station plays the 4 Tops all the time so i know them well.

Motown scares me a bit since they were such a single heavy label, so they're aren't really "essential" albums like other genres, it's mostly greatest hits comp albums and singles, and I'm not ready for 45's yet. Anyone else around here collect funk/soul albums to give some advice? I live along the I-75 corridor which was so essential to the genre so i want to expand out on them in the future.