intersectionalfeministnerd

[intersectionalfeministnerd]

It’s actually worse, in my opinion. He’s promising to pay foreign leaders to jail/torture US citizens in other countries because he argues that outside the US is outside of any US court’s legal jurisdiction.

The Trump regime is already arguing that US courts can do nothing about the regime violating a court order, ignoring due process and sending a legal US resident to be tortured in a foreign prison. That would be “interfering in foreign policy”. He is trying to establish zones such as prisons in El Salvador where US law does not constrain his actions even against US citizens.

Death camps in Nazi-controlled territory were established in similar zones where laws did not apply.

The Russification of the Republican Party is complete.

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"The state, which has long ranked worst in the US for child wellbeing, became the first and only in the country to offer free childcare to a majority of families

There was a moment, just before the pandemic, when Lisset Sanchez thought she might have to drop out of college because the cost of keeping her three children in daycare was just too much.

Even with support from the state, she and her husband were paying $800 a month – about half of what Sanchez and her husband paid for their mortgage in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

But during the pandemic, that cost went down to $0. And Sanchez was not only able to finish college, but enroll in nursing school. With a scholarship that covered her tuition and free childcare, Sanchez could afford to commute to school, buy groceries for her growing family – even after she had two more children – and pay down the family’s mortgage and car loan.

“We are a one-income household,” said Sanchez, whose husband works while she is in school. Having free childcare “did help tremendously”.

...Three years ago, New Mexico became the first state in the nation to offer free childcare to a majority of families. The United States has no federal, universal childcare – and ranks 40th on a Unicef ranking of 41 high-income countries’ childcare policies, while maintaining some of the highest childcare costs in the world. Expanding on pandemic-era assistance, New Mexico made childcare free for families earning up to 400% of the federal poverty level, or about $124,000 for a family of four. That meant about half of New Mexican children now qualified.

In one of the poorest states in the nation, where the median household income is half that and childcare costs for two children could take up 80% of a family’s income, the impact was powerful. The state, which had long ranked worst in the nation for child wellbeing, saw its poverty rate begin to fall.

As the state simultaneously raised wages for childcare workers, and became the first to base its subsidy reimbursement rates on the actual cost of providing such care, early childhood educators were also raised out of poverty. In 2020, 27.4% of childcare providers – often women of color – were living in poverty. By 2024, that number had fallen to 16%.

During the state’s recent legislative session, lawmakers approved a “historic” increase in funding for education, including early childhood education, that might improve those numbers even further...

When now-governor Michelle Lujan Grisham announced her candidacy in late 2016, she emphasized her desire to address the state’s low child wellbeing rating. And when she took office in January 2018, she described her aim to have a “moonshot for education”: major investments in education across the state, from early childhood through college.

That led to her opening the state’s early childhood education and care department in 2019 – and tapping Groginksy, who had overseen efforts to improve early childhood policies in Washington DC, to run it. Then, in 2020, Lujan Grisham threw her support behind a bill in the state legislature that would establish an Early Childhood Trust Fund: by investing $300m – plus budget surpluses each year, largely from oil and gas revenue – the state hoped to distribute a percentage to fund early childhood education each year.

But then, just weeks after the trust fund was established, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic.

“Covid created a really enormous moment for childcare,” said Heinz. “We had somewhat of a national reckoning about the fact that we don’t have a workforce if we don’t have childcare.”

As federal funding flooded into New Mexico, the state directed millions of dollars toward childcare, including by boosting pay for entry-level childcare providers to $15 an hour, expanding eligibility for free childcare to families making 400% of the poverty level, and becoming the first state in the nation to set childcare subsidy rates at the true cost of delivering care.

As pandemic-era relief funding dried up in 2022, the governor and Democratic lawmakers proposed another way to generate funds for childcare – directing a portion of the state’s Land Grant Permanent Fund to early childhood education and care. Like the Early Childhood Trust Fund, the permanent fund – which was established when New Mexico became a state – was funded by taxes on fossil fuel revenues. That November, 70% of New Mexican voters approved a constitutional amendment directing 1.25% of the fund to early childhood programs.

By then, the Early Childhood Trust Fund had grown exponentially – due to the boom in oil and gas prices. Beginning with $300m in 2020, the fund had swollen to over $9bn by the end of 2024...

New Mexico has long had one of the highest “official poverty rates” in the nation.

But using a metric that accounts for social safety net programs – like universal childcare – that’s slowly shifting. According to “supplemental poverty” data, 17.1% of New Mexicans fell below the federal “supplemental” poverty line from 2013 to 2015 (a metric that takes into account cost of living and social supports) – making it the fifth poorest state in the nation by that measure. But today, that number has fallen to 10.9%, one of the biggest changes in the country, amounting to 120,000 fewer New Mexicans living in poverty.

New Mexico’s child wellbeing ranking – which is based heavily on “official poverty” rankings – probably won’t budge, says Heinz because “the amount of money coming into households, that they have to run their budget, remains very low.

“However, the thing New Mexico has done that’s fairly tremendous, I think, is around families not having to have as much money going out,” she said.

During the recent legislative session, lawmakers deepened their investments in early childhood education even further, approving a 21.6% increase of $170m for education programs – including early childhood education. However, other legislation that advocates had hoped might pass stalled in the legislature, including a bill to require businesses to offer paid family medical leave...

In her budget recommendations, Lujan Grisham asked the state to up its commitment to early childhood policies, by raising the wage floor for childcare workers to $18 an hour and establishing a career lattice for them. Because of that, Gonzalez has been able to start working on her associate’s in childhood education at Central New Mexico Community College where her tuition is waived. The governor also backed a house bill that will increase the amount of money distributed annually from the Early Childhood Trust Fund – since its dramatic growth due to oil and gas revenues.

Although funding childcare through the Land Grant Permanent Fund is unique to New Mexico – and a handful of other states with permanent funds, like Alaska, Texas and North Dakota – Heinz says the Early Childhood Trust fund “holds interesting lessons for other states” about investing a percentage of revenues into early childhood programs.

In New Mexico, those revenues come largely from oil and gas, but New Mexico Voices for Children has put forth recommendations about how the state can continue funding childcare while transitioning away from fossil fuels, largely by raising taxes on the state’s wealthiest earners. Although other states have not yet followed in New Mexico’s footsteps, a growing number are making strides to offer free pre-K to a majority of their residents.

Heinz cautions that change won’t occur overnight. “What New Mexico is trying to do here is play a very long game. And so I am not without worry that people might give it five years, and it’s been almost five years now, and then say, where are the results? Why is everything not better?” she said. “This is generational change” that New Mexico is only just beginning to witness as the first children who were recipients of universal childcare start school."

-via The Guardian, April 11, 2025

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I once explained housing-first to a coworker by emphasizing how much less expensive it is than leaving people unhoused in the US. We spend so much money on emergency healthcare for the unhoused, for example, because many—even if they work—can’t afford their basic meds or a doctor’s visit, so they don’t get care until it’s life-threatening. Or we pay our police to hassle them, arrest them for vagrancy, book them overnight, then release them back onto the street. It would be so much smarter and more cost-effective to just give each chronically unhoused person a free apartment.

After I finished my rant, my coworker raised his eyebrows and said, “More importantly, it’s the right thing to do.”

So here it is: Housing is a basic human right. Housing-first is the right thing to do. If you want to talk logistics about how we can afford it, I’ve got some thoughts, but that’s not the important bit.

"Since 2008, homelessness rates in Finland have dropped by 75%. 

It’s a feat that is even more remarkable when noting that their method of counting — and defining homelessness — is much more inclusive than other leading countries. 

In Finland, for example, homelessness statistics include individuals temporarily living with friends and relatives, living in an institution, staying in hostels, congregate shelters, and “rough sleeping” outside on the streets. 

Their complex method of counting homeless populations goes hand-in-hand with the country’s “Housing First” method of approaching homelessness, by recognizing that homelessness is not a black-and-white discussion — it’s a systemic issue that can manifest in a variety of ways. 

In 2017, the Y-Foundation — which promotes social justice by providing affordable housing to low-income families as Finland’s “fourth-largest landlord” — released a 128-page report on successful Housing First policies. 

The foundation said that Finland’s success in lowering homelessness rates can largely be attributed to the country’s “Name On The Door” approach, which was introduced to Finland’s Minister for Housing in 2007. 

The methodology made a sound argument for ending homelessness from a moral, legal, and economic perspective. 

“The ethical perspective means that homelessness has to be eliminated because human dignity belongs to everyone. A home is a human right,” the Y-Foundation surmised.  

“The legal perspective emphasizes, for example, that according to the Constitution of Finland, anyone who is unable to acquire the necessary security for a dignified life is entitled to essential subsistence and care.”

“Eliminating homelessness is also a worthwhile investment in terms of the social economy,” the nonprofit added. “The report states that the economic conditions for eliminating long-term homelessness were better than ever (in 2007).”

Reducing homelessness has been a source of pride for the country’s leaders for nearly two decades...

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Helsinki Mayor Juhana Vartiainen said that Housing First is “the right way to fight the problem of homelessness.”

“That’s really the fundamental idea of our policy,’ Vartiainen said, “if we give people a home, there will be very positive side-effects.”

In the last year, national cuts to income, social security, and housing support have resulted in the first notable change to homelessness trends in over 11 years. 

Even with the slight rise in homelessness seen locally in 2024, Finland estimates that 3,806 citizens are currently experiencing homelessness (about 0.06% of the Finnish population).

In comparison, over 771,480 Americans were counted as unhoused in January 2025 (about 0.2% of the US population). 

Regardless of short-term challenges, the “Housing First” approach is still at the core of the organization’s mission. 

The Y-Foundation’s head of international affairs, Juha Kahila, told The Globe and Mail: “When people have a roof over their heads, they can overcome the challenges they have in their lives and not have to worry about where they will sleep that night or where they will live next month.”"

-via GoodGoodGood, April 18, 2025

[intersectionalfeministnerd]

Might also want to look up the definition of illegal and unconstitutional orders now, in case that definition happens to go missing or be altered in the future.

If you're in the US military or National Guard, and are given an illegal or unconstitutional order, the GI Rights hotline (1-877-447-4487) is there to help give you the support you need to do the right thing by refusing it. It would be good to think about this now before it becomes a live issue for you and it would be smart of you to memorize that number.

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Also, if you ever get suspicious about what’s happening in your AI kitchen and ask your trusted friend Google what’s going on with all your customers dying of mercury poisoning and getting their credit card info stolen, it will reassure you.

No, there’s nothing sketchy going on. A hotcob is a particularly efficient stove design and a produceslicer is the best way to cut fruits and vegetables. Both are completely standard in the industry and are used by 100% of five-star restaurants. There has never been a single issue reported with either product in the 35 years they’ve been on the market. How does Google know this? Because it’s just confidently reading you the lies posted on the fraudulent product’s page, with *no indication* that it might be from a biased source.

LLM Gen AI is just really sophisticated autocomplete, folks. It can’t even lie, because it has no idea that the words it’s stringing together have meaning. It does strip search results of all context, though.

“Slopsquatting” in a nutshell:

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal, that’s how you get math packages and stuff but

2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but

3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So

4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/

[intersectionalfeministnerd]

I fucking hate that the general response to RFK Jr's eugenist take on autistic people is "autistic people do pay taxes, autistic people do work, autistic people do date!"

Some autistic people don't and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life. Some autistic people do need constant help and support and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life.

Once again we're falling in the right wing trap of :

They make a hateful, fascist statement

Instead of focusing on the fact that it is hateful and fascist we try to show them that they are factually wrong

We throw our own allies and the most vulnerable of us under the bus in the process

We legitimise an only slightly less hateful, fascist view as we go

They have completed their goal of making us accept the still hateful, fascist second version, hurrah. What a victory.

Right now what we're getting to with that is that autistic people who can work and pay taxes are okay, and the others aren't. Fuck this shit.

Same thing happens with the people who are being deported ("they have a visa!", "they didn't even have a criminal record!" -> even if they didn't have a visa, even if they did have a criminal record, deporting them and detaining them in what's essentially a concentration camp wouldn't be okay, you absolute tools of fascism.)

[intersectionalfeministnerd]

On April 16th 2025 the US federal government has proposed to change the interpretation of the endangered species act so that it no longer protects habitat.

This is open for public comment until the end of May 19th. Please comment and make your voice heard.

Wildlife need their habitat. If the ESA redefines harm so that habitat is no longer protected, the implications for wildlife would be catastrophic.

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attention this is your captain speaking chag sameach pesach to all celebrating and a reminder do not open the airlock to greet elijah the vulcan rabbinic council ruled that opening the door to the room where the seder is occurring is sufficient elijah can get on a starship just fine himself he just likes to be personally invited in to your seder we dont need another incident like last year thank you

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Of course. The editor of the Atlantic might face prosecution for leaking classified information, unlike literally anyone in the administration.

For anyone who hasn't been up to date on the clown show that is the American news, I'll give a quick recap because oh boy.

So Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. One day, he gets a notification on his phone from the messaging app "Signal". He sees that he's been added to a group chat called "Houthi PC small group". He thinks nothing of it at first, until a couple days later he sees on the news that the U.S. is bombing Yemen. He takes a look and sees that he has been added to a group chat by the National Security Advisor Mike Waltz.

Plenty of government officials including vice president JD Vance were in this conversation, and they were discussing their bombing on Yemen. And Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was added by mistake.

So Goldberg approached the White House, who confirmed that he had been accidentally added to the chat. He then posted part of the conversation in a news story on the front page of his news website, omitting any classified information as to not get arrested for that level of security breach.

The response from the administration has been wild. They're all smearing the journalist, obviously, but their responses at first varied from "he made it all up" to "he must've hacked is way in" to "big deal, people add people to group chats on accident all the time". Eventually, they were put in front of Congress to testify under oath, where they said that nothing in the conversation was classified information like military hours or types of weapons used.

In response, Goldberg said "Oh, so it's not classified? Okay then! That means I can do this," and then he released the full unedited conversation. The conversation was nothing but classified information like military hours and the types of weapons used.

Not only are they communicating on private phones on third party apps as a way to circumvent the Presidential Records Act (the chat was interestingly set to auto-delete messages after 4 weeks), but it really kinda highlights the incompetence of America's leadership right now.

They're not going to win.

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I love everything about the sabotage, noncompliance and weaponized bureaucracy illustrated here, but as someone with some training in computer security, I want to highlight the essential first step:

We deleted and shredded those records and stopped tracking reading history

There are lots of ways to protect data against hackers with no legitimate access. There are ways to protect data against users with legitimate access to the system who shouldn’t be able to access the data. The ONLY way to protect data against an attacker with legitimate access to the data is to DESTROY the data or never collect it in the first place.

This recently came up in my work on medical records, where a project to collect additional gender identity information (that had been requested years ago by trans and NB patients) was finally ready for release. The data would be protected by HIPAA, our local government was liberal, our AG wasn’t interested in subpoenaing the information… for now. But the data would be preserved in backups, so if that changed in the future, the data would still exist. We considered adding the optional field with a warning, but no ‘data privacy agreement’ should end with “anything you share may be used against you in court or by the government to out you as trans and persecute you.” We’ve shelved the project until better days.

We can’t pretend this is business as usual. If you’re recording or safeguarding sensitive information—particularly immigration status and whether they’re trans or NB—make sure that the data actually needs to be recorded/preserve. Also have a plan in advance for what you’re going to do when the police ask for it without a warrant, and also what you’ll do if they have a warrant.

For no reason here is a library story

[intersectionalfeministnerd]

Whales being overhunted. The growing hole in the ozone layer. Acid rain.

All examples of serious environmental problems that required international treaties and global cooperation to fix. All problems that we pretty much fixed.

I’m not saying that averting more global climate change won’t be incredibly hard, but we’ve done incredibly hard things before. There are more people in the world than ever before: more ideas, more invention, more creativity, more ways to connect to each other and build together.

[intersectionalfeministnerd]

It’s almost like people are animals or something.

When I was in vet school I went to this one lecture that I will never forget. Various clubs would have different guest lecturers come in to talk about relevant topics and since I was in the Wildlife Disease Association club I naturally attended all the wildlife and conservation discussions. Well on this particular occasion, the speakers started off telling us they had been working on a project involving the conservation of lemurs in Madagascar. Lemurs exist only in Madagascar, and they are in real trouble; they’re considered the most endangered group of mammals on Earth. This team of veterinarians was initially assembled to address threats to lemur health and work on conservation solutions to try and save as many lemur species from extinction as possible. As they explored the most present dangers to lemurs they found that although habitat loss was the primary problem for these vulnerable animals, predation by humans was a significant cause of losses as well. The vets realized it was crucial for the hunting of lemurs by native people to stop, but of course this is not so simple a problem.

The local Malagasy people are dealing with extreme poverty and food insecurity, with nearly half of children under five years old suffering from chronic malnutrition. The local people have always subsisted on hunting wildlife for food, and as Madagascar’s wildlife population declines, the people who rely on so-called bushmeat to survive are struggling more and more. People are literally starving.

Our conservation team thought about this a lot. They had initially intended to focus efforts on education but came to understand that this is not an issue arising from a lack of knowledge. For these people it is a question of survival. It doesn’t matter how many times a foreigner tells you not to eat an animal you’ve hunted your entire life, if your child is starving you are going to do everything in your power to keep your family alive.

So the vets changed course. Rather than focus efforts on simply teaching people about lemurs, they decided to try and use veterinary medicine to reduce the underlying issue of food insecurity. They supposed that if a reliable protein source could be introduced for the people who needed it, the dependence on meat from wildlife would greatly decrease. So they got to work establishing new flocks of chickens in the most at-risk communities, and also initiated an aggressive vaccination program for Newcastle disease (an infectious illness of poultry that is of particular concern in this area). They worked with over 600 households to ensure appropriate husbandry and vaccination for every flock, and soon found these communities were being transformed by the introduction of a steady protein source. Families with a healthy flock of chickens were far less likely to hunt wild animals like lemurs, and fewer kids went hungry. Thats what we call a win-win situation.

This chicken vaccine program became just one small part of an amazing conservation outreach initiative in Madagascar that puts local people at the center of everything they do. Helping these vulnerable communities of people helps similarly vulnerable wildlife, always. If we go into a country guns-blazing with that fire for conservation in our hearts and a plan to save native animals, we simply cannot ignore the humans who live around them. Doing so is counterintuitive to creating an effective plan because whether we recognize it or not, humans and animals are inextricably linked in many ways. A true conservation success story is one that doesn’t leave needy humans in its wake, and that is why I think this particular story has stuck with me for so long.

(Source 1)

(Source 2- cool video exploring this initiative from some folks involved)

(Source 3)

[intersectionalfeministnerd]

Sex is political, sex is art, sex is procreation, sex is entertainment, sex is violence, sex is love.

The tragedy of my life is that I keep acquiring and displaying fetish art and having to be corrected by my friends.

Most recently, a friend came over my house and saw my computer background and went, "Wow, um, I didn't know you were into that." To which I look at the picture of the well drawn muscular female minotaur in historically accurate Greek clothing and I start geeking out about how I love the detail the artist did with the clothing and I point out the period appropriate folds and pins, how the artist even inserted the native plant that was used to dye the clothing this particular shade in the background, and even how the belt has technology AND historically accurate weaving patterns on it.

Then I start explaining how I love the muscular choices of the minotaur, that I was so impressed with the artist's anatomically correct depiction of the muscles converging into the neck. That many people get an upright cow's neck wrong because cow's don't have collarbones, so it can be very difficult to merge the upper arms and a chest of a human with a cow's body. I draw her attention to the beautiful way they've merged the pectoralis major so smoothly while also staying true to how muscular they've depicted the rest of the body.

I finish up with my thoughts on the artist's bold choice to depict the minotaur as a female, and despite the underlying themes of a minotaur being violence, child murder, strength, and muscles. I segue into how unlike bulls, cow are perceived as mothers. That they are the major source of milk in human culture, and that idyllic depictions of them in a field usually depict calves frolicking nearby, yet the minotaur kills and eats children.

I finish and there is a long pause.

"Urban, this is fetish art." and she takes me to the artist's twitter and god dammit it's fetish art, not a bold statement on cultural perceptions of women and violence throughout history. I have been tricked again.

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I’ve been trying for days to think of the word for sadness from an undefinable loss, missing something that you cannot quite remember, but I seem to have forgotten it.

Enough of the trope where memory loss undoes the damage or the corruption or whatever. More content where removing memories just removes the context.

The tragedy of needing to grieve and not knowing what or who you lost or why. The angst of having trauma and being denied the awareness that it's trauma. The suspense of being different somehow and left to wonder how and when. The tension of knowing that something is off and you can't find where it hurts. The Adventure Zone gets it. Kingdom Hearts gets it.

There is an aching inside you and you don't know how it got there.

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