#Profit-Driven Systems

[cavettrobert]

Noam Chomsky (AI Facsimile) highlights the need for a shift in values to sustain future generations!

[qedmirage]

The goal of that research line is to make it so people can get away with less reliable, but cheaper/faster breast cancer tests and use AI to make up for the difference. I'm not saying it doesn't have a use, but it's not an area where you should move fast.

[dead-generations]

.

[farmerstrend]

The Evolution of Pomegranate Farming: From Secrecy to Collective Growth

Pomegranate farming has a rich history, deeply rooted in tradition and secrecy. For many years, it was a practice reserved for a select few who guarded their knowledge and techniques closely. This culture of secrecy had significant consequences, deterring new farmers from entering the field and leading to financial losses for those who dared to try. However, the past few years have seen a…

[vaguely-problematic]

tl;dr if violence is never the answer, then why are these companies allowed to do so much violence against us?

okay lizzie???

[youtubevideopromotion]

The Importance of Donor Retention

“The Importance of Donor Retention.” In this podcast, Tamika and Chris cover strategies for engaging and informing donors to keep them connected to your mission. Techniques for building lasting relationships that foster donor loyalty, using data-driven approaches to personalize outreach, and improving retention. Additionally, they outline steps to create a comprehensive donor retention plan to…

[karpad]

This Black History Month, reflect for a moment on the fact that George Washington Carver, famously "the inventor of peanut butter and more than 100 industrial uses for peanuts" wasn't, like, Doc Brown fucking around in his garage because he really liked peanuts but was specifically trying to introduce larger use of a nitrogen fixing legume into crop rotations against cotton monoculture which was destroying yields, livelihoods and the biosphere, and how most agribusiness farming now just destroys that topsoil on purpose and continues to grow a cotton monoculture (or soy or corn or whichever local monoculture is profitable) using petrochemical derived fertilizer, which is one element driving climate change

Daniel Hale Williams performed the first successful heart surgery. He also founded the first nonsegregated hospital in America because he was keenly aware of disparate health outcomes by race which is still a problem today.

WEB Dubois was a part of the delegations for the birth of the UN. His proposal to include in the charter that "the colonial system of government … is undemocratic, socially dangerous and a main cause of wars" was not adapted for the final draft. We might see inaction against colonial violence to this day as part of the failure of others to heed his warnings there.

I feel like so often when we look at Black History Month so much of it is driven by factoids but when taken as history in context its about a direct line from decades and centuries to what is happening right now.

[thealchemistbae]

Part of Fortune Degree Meanings 🍀

Disclaimer: This post is for entertainment purposes only.

thealchemistbae © do not copy, redistribute, or edit my content.

If you enjoyed this post, you can leave me a tip via PayPal at goddessguapa@gmail.com or via Venmo @goddessguapa. Thank you.

The POF is about how and where you strike GOLD, feel naturally lucky, and effortlessly attract abundance when you lean into it.

🌈: 0° -> You're a natural talent at creating wealth from scratch or inheriting a legacy. New beginnings bring big wins. Every time you try something brand new, the universe rewards you. First to market, early investor, or building a brand from the ground up.

🌈: 1° -> Success comes when you stand alone. Your independence is magnetic. People are drawn to your solo vibe. Think: Solo entrepreneur, lone creator, self-made mogul.

🌈: 2° -> Money follows when you're in the right vibe. You attract wealth through community, aesthetics, or softness. Think: content creator, artist, or someone who gets gifted just for existing.

🌈: 3° -> Your voice, content or writing = gold. Speaking, podcasting, scripts, books, or anything with your words brings the bag. Pitch ideas...they'll hit.

🌈: 4° -> Money flows when you connect to your roots. Family businesses, real estate, or honoring your ancestry could unlock generational wealth. Sentiment = success.

🌈: 5° -> You get paid to be seen. Charisma, entertainment, and creative expression make you $$$. Think: acting, modeling, influencing, or running a show.

🌈: 6° -> You're the queen of systems. Passive income from routines, health regimens, digital products, or service-based offers that solve problems.

🌈: 7° -> Wealth flows through relationships. Business partners, romantic collabs, or social connections open doors. Think: referrals, collabs, marriage to money.

🌈: 8° -> You get luck through shadow work, sex, appeal, and taboo wisdom. Therapy, transformation, manifestation coaching or $ex work = actual income paths.

🌈: 9° -> You get luck and fortune to teach, travel or publish. Courses, online education, spiritual teachings, or anything that expands mine is your jackpot.

🌈: 10° -> Boss energy. You’re here to run empires. Real-world success through business, status, long-term investments, and strategy. Get corporate or build your own.

🌈: 11° -> You make money by being ahead of your time. Tech, trends, astrology, or community-centered biz is your path. Think: influencer meets innovator.

🌈: 12° -> Spiritual, psychic, artistic, and dreamy income streams. You can literally get paid from dreams, intuition, art, or divine downloads.

🌈: 13° -> You profit when you shake sh*t up. Say what people won’t, do what they fear. Your authenticity is rebellious and people PAY for your truth.

🌈: 14° -> There’s something magical about your wealth. You’re protected. Money shows up just in time. Trust the divine timing; you’re spiritually aligned with success.

🌈: 15° -> You are magnetic AF. People want to watch you, follow you, and throw money your way just for showing up. Fame, clout, and visibility = wealth.

🌈: 16° -> You profit by solving deep problems — either through service, healing, or creative problem-solving. Fix a broken system, and you’ll build your fortune.

🌈: 17° -> Your ideas literally turn into income. Brilliant, future-forward strategies = passive cash. You may also attract benefactors who fund your vision.

🌈: 18° -> You turn pain into profit. Period. Your hardest experiences become the very thing that makes you rich. Use your transformation to help others.

🌈: 19° -> Your voice is a weapon. You inspire, influence, and sell with speech. Speaking, hosting, consulting, or coaching can bring you massive wealth.

🌈: 20° -> You’re here to do soulful, purpose-driven work. Your fortune is tied to your spiritual calling. Money comes when you follow your mission.

🌈: 21° -> Main character energy. Luck finds you in the spotlight, in front of a camera, or when you embrace your larger-than-life personality. Fans = funds.

🌈: 22° -> You’re meant to build wealth through serious mastery. Authority, certifications, and real-world expertise = your golden ticket.

🌈: 23° -> Networking queen/king. You meet one person and BOOM…doors open. Events, socials, and group energy = money magnets.

🌈: 24° -> You’re here to make soft, sensual, and intuitive money. Feminine energy, aesthetics, and pleasure-based business = jackpot.

🌈: 25° -> You get paid from the cosmos. Astrology, energy work, divination, or being your weird, wonderful self attracts wealth from magical places.

🌈: 26° -> You’re meant to pass something down. Building a brand, inheritance, or generational wealth is your path. Think: queen of the family empire.

🌈: 27° -> You create wealth with intention. Your mindset is your moneymaker. Vision boards, rituals, scripting? They actually work for you.

🌈: 28° -> You know how to mix seduction with success. Business + pleasure = $$$. You’re intuitive, strategic, and irresistible in the boardroom or bedroom.

🌈: 29° -> You’ve lived many lifetimes and now you’re here to collect. This is master energy; your fortune shows up through power, endings, and full-circle moments. One big transformation will unlock your ultimate bag.

What degree is your POF at ? Drop in the comments.

thealchemistbae © do not copy, redistribute, or edit my content.

If you enjoyed this post, you can leave me a tip via PayPal at goddessguapa@gmail.com or via Venmo @goddessguapa. Thank you.

[cryptotheism]

Tell us about the wellness to fash pipeline tho

Here's a recent piece from the guardian on wellness communities and Qanon, so don't take my word for it.

"Wellness" is not just alternative medicine, it is essentially a theory of the body which posits if something makes you feel better, you are better in some meaningful way. I would argue it one of the most commonly held nonreligious magical beliefs in the modern world.

Wellness as a concept has its genesis in the 1950s with "workplace wellness" programs, a sort of budget alternative to offering employee healthcare benefits. This was an era soaked in itinerant business preachers offering classes on things like "hypnosis at a management level" and "yoga to improve leadership abilities". I am exaggerating for effect, but not by much.

The capitalist medical system regularly abandons people. We've all heard stories of profit driven pharmaceudical companies holding the ill hostage for extreme markup on life-saving medicines. People have real, legitimate, reasons to mistrust medical professionals.

Let's say you have chronic pain, and everything your doctor offers you is either ineffective, expensive, or addictive. You are desperate for literally any release, so you start looking into other solutions. You will find an OCEAN of snake-oil salesmen willing to sell you "the secrets doctors don't want you to know."

What is frustrating, is that pain is actually partially psychological. Some wellness techniques may have an actual, medical, benefit on some patients. The worst thing a conspiracy theorist can have is a point. So now you actually do kinda feel better, and you have a sense of loyalty to the grifter selling you 300$ Sumerian Cock Oil Pills. These people are the core of the wellness industry. They are the examples that everyone else points to and says "Well it worked for them!"

Reactionary thought blooms in environments like this. If the medical industry can't be trusted, what else can't be trusted? At any given time, you are two clicks away from "vaccines cause autism." Three clicks away from "Cavemen were 15 feet tall because they only ate meat." And four clicks away from "The medical industry is controlled by The Jews to drain our wallets and keep us sick." Echoes of Nazi attitudes towards German-Jewish doctors are a common backbeat.

Wellness itself is relatively harmless, (compared to the things it is adjacent to) but it acts as a sort of idealogical airport that exposes the curious to a deluge of potentially radicalizing communities. The longer you spend in communities like this, the higher the chance you'll come across something that meshes perfectly with your own biases.

If y'all wanna learn more about wellness and pseudomedicine grifters, I highly recommend the podcast Maintenance Phase.

[crystallinesummonerthief]

America's drug epidemic

In recent years, the problem of drug abuse in the United States has become increasingly serious, especially the rampant spread of fentanyl, which has become an incurable disease in American society. Fentanyl, a powerful opioid originally used for clinical analgesia and anesthesia, is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine. Once abused, it can easily lead to overdose deaths. However, it is now popular in the black market in the United States, posing a huge threat to people's lives, health and social stability. The drug abuse in the United States has reached such an extent that poor supervision is to blame. Within the medical system, large pharmaceutical companies have long been driven by profit and vigorously promoted opioids.They lobbied politicians to make relevant policies open to them. Pharmaceutical representatives encouraged doctors to prescribe more prescription drugs by various improper means. Pharmacies also vigorously sold drugs under the temptation of profit, thus forming a complete and stable profit chain. Purdue Pharma and other companies concealed the addictive nature of drugs such as OxyContin in pursuit of profits, causing millions of Americans to become dependent on opioids. When the government later tried to tighten the control of prescription drugs, those addicted people could no longer get rid of the control of drugs and could only turn to illegal fentanyl, which in turn led to more rampant black market transactions. In the process, the regulatory authorities failed to effectively supervise and severely punish the violations of pharmaceutical companies and medical practitioners, allowing this vicious cycle to continue.

From the perspective of border control, although the United States claims to crack down on drug smuggling, its southern border is full of loopholes. Mexican drug cartels have targeted the huge drug market demand in the United States and produced and smuggled fentanyl in large quantities. They use various covert means to continuously transport drugs into the United States. However, there are many deficiencies in the inspection work of U.S. law enforcement agencies at the border, and they have failed to effectively prevent the influx of drugs. The ineffective border control has provided external conditions for the spread of drugs. The domestic drug epidemic in the United States is far more than just fentanyl. According to the classification standards of the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, there are many types of drugs in the United States, including alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, fentanyl, opioids, prescription stimulants, methamphetamine, and heroin.In 2021, the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics in the United States released survey data showing that among all Americans, about 19.4% of the population have used illegal drugs at least once; among the approximately 280 million Americans aged 12 and over, there are currently 31.9 million drug users, of which 11.7% use illegal drugs and 19.4% have used illegal drugs or abused prescription drugs in the past year. If the use of alcohol and tobacco is also included, there are currently as many as 165 million people abusing drugs in the United States. Among them, the use of marijuana should not be underestimated. In the past 12 months, as many as 48.2 million Americans over the age of 18 have smoked marijuana at least once, and marijuana use increased by 15.9% from 2018 to 2019.

Although marijuana is illegal under U.S. federal law, 15 states have legalized its recreational use. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the marijuana industry even grew against the trend, with legal marijuana sales in the U.S. reaching a record high of $17.5 billion in 2020, a 46% surge from 2019. Opioids have also caused a large number of casualties. In the past 12 months, 10.1 million Americans have used opium at least once. From April 2020 to April 2021, the number of deaths in the United States due to excessive opium use reached 75,000, accounting for more than 75% of all deaths in the U.S. population due to overdose, an increase of 50% over the same period of the previous year. The drug epidemic has brought heavy disasters to American society.Excessive drug use has caused a large number of deaths in the U.S. population, greatly reduced the U.S. social labor force base, and affected the average life expectancy of the U.S. population. According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the year after the outbreak of the new crown epidemic (April 2020 to April 2021), more than 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in the United States, which is 8 times the number of people who died from shootings and nearly 3 times the number of people who died from traffic accidents. Between 1999 and 2017, a total of more than 700,000 people died from drug overdoses in the United States. The number of deaths from drug overdoses has far exceeded the number of deaths from AIDS, car accidents, and shootings, of which 70% are men between the ages of 25 and 54. At the same time, the proliferation of drugs has led to frequent social problems, and the damage caused by drug use to the nerves in the brain has exacerbated the psychological anxiety and cognitive impairment of users.

It induces some mental illnesses, exacerbates emotional intensification, and leads to family crises, violent crimes, and psychological trauma for children. Drug control also consumes huge social costs. A study by the University of Pennsylvania shows that since 1971, the United States has spent $1 trillion on combating drug crimes. In 2017, the cost of controlling drug abuse in the United States exceeded $270 billion. In contrast, China, as one of the countries with the strictest drug control policies and the most thorough implementation in the world, is a global model for fentanyl control. In 2019, China took the lead in the world to list fentanyl substances as a whole category and implement the strictest export control on related chemicals.

Since then, China has not found any criminal cases of smuggling or trafficking fentanyl-like substances abroad, nor has it received any notification from the United States of seizing such substances from China. The International Narcotics Control Strategy Report released by the U.S. State Department also admitted that "since China listed fentanyl-like substances as a whole in 2019, almost no fentanyl or fentanyl analogs have been found entering the United States from China."

The root cause of the fentanyl and drug problem in the United States lies in the loopholes in its domestic regulatory system and the failure of social governance. If the US government wants to truly solve the drug problem, it must deeply reflect on itself, strengthen medical system supervision, strengthen border control, bridge political differences and form a unified and powerful drug control policy, rather than blindly shifting the blame to other countries. Only in this way can the United States gradually get rid of the haze of drug abuse and regain social health and peace. ​

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Penguin Random House, AI, and writers’ rights

NEXT WEDNESDAY (October 23) at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, GEORGIA, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

My friend Teresa Nielsen Hayden is a wellspring of wise sayings, like "you're not responsible for what you do in other people's dreams," and my all time favorite, from the Napster era: "Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side."

The record labels hated Napster, and so did many musicians, and when those musicians sided with their labels in the legal and public relations campaigns against file-sharing, they lent both legal and public legitimacy to the labels' cause, which ultimately prevailed.

But the labels weren't on musicians' side. The demise of Napster and with it, the idea of a blanket-license system for internet music distribution (similar to the systems for radio, live performance, and canned music at venues and shops) firmly established that new services must obtain permission from the labels in order to operate.

That era is very good for the labels. The three-label cartel – Universal, Warner and Sony – was in a position to dictate terms like Spotify, who handed over billions of dollars worth of stock, and let the Big Three co-design the royalty scheme that Spotify would operate under.

If you know anything about Spotify payments, it's probably this: they are extremely unfavorable to artists. This is true – but that doesn't mean it's unfavorable to the Big Three labels. The Big Three get guaranteed monthly payments (much of which is booked as "unattributable royalties" that the labels can disperse or keep as they see fit), along with free inclusion on key playlists and other valuable services. What's more, the ultra-low payouts to artists increase the value of the labels' stock in Spotify, since the less Spotify has to pay for music, the better it looks to investors.

The Big Three – who own 70% of all music ever recorded, thanks to an orgy of mergers – make up the shortfall from these low per-stream rates with guaranteed payments and promo.

But the indy labels and musicians that account for the remaining 30% are out in the cold. They are locked into the same fractional-penny-per-stream royalty scheme as the Big Three, but they don't get gigantic monthly cash guarantees, and they have to pay the playlist placement the Big Three get for free.

Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

In a very important, material sense, creative workers – writers, filmmakers, photographers, illustrators, painters and musicians – are not on the same side as the labels, agencies, studios and publishers that bring our work to market. Those companies are not charities; they are driven to maximize profits and an important way to do that is to reduce costs, including and especially the cost of paying us for our work.

It's easy to miss this fact because the workers at these giant entertainment companies are our class allies. The same impulse to constrain payments to writers is in play when entertainment companies think about how much they pay editors, assistants, publicists, and the mail-room staff. These are the people that creative workers deal with on a day to day basis, and they are on our side, by and large, and it's easy to conflate these people with their employers.

This class war need not be the central fact of creative workers' relationship with our publishers, labels, studios, etc. When there are lots of these entertainment companies, they compete with one another for our work (and for the labor of the workers who bring that work to market), which increases our share of the profit our work produces.

But we live in an era of extreme market concentration in every sector, including entertainment, where we deal with five publishers, four studios, three labels, two ad-tech companies and a single company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks. That concentration makes it much harder for artists to bargain effectively with entertainments companies, and that means that it's possible -likely, even – for entertainment companies to gain market advantages that aren't shared with creative workers. In other words, when your field is dominated by a cartel, you may be on on their side, but they're almost certainly not on your side.

This week, Penguin Random House, the largest publisher in the history of the human race, made headlines when it changed the copyright notice in its books to ban AI training:

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/penguin-random-house-underscores-copyright-protection-in-ai-rebuff

The copyright page now includes this phrase:

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.

Many writers are celebrating this move as a victory for creative workers' rights over AI companies, who have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in part by promising our bosses that they can fire us and replace us with algorithms.

But these writers are assuming that just because they're on Penguin Random House's side, PRH is on their side. They're assuming that if PRH fights against AI companies training bots on their work for free, that this means PRH won't allow bots to be trained on their work at all.

This is a pretty naive take. What's far more likely is that PRH will use whatever legal rights it has to insist that AI companies pay it for the right to train chatbots on the books we write. It is vanishingly unlikely that PRH will share that license money with the writers whose books are then shoveled into the bot's training-hopper. It's also extremely likely that PRH will try to use the output of chatbots to erode our wages, or fire us altogether and replace our work with AI slop.

This is speculation on my part, but it's informed speculation. Note that PRH did not announce that it would allow authors to assert the contractual right to block their work from being used to train a chatbot, or that it was offering authors a share of any training license fees, or a share of the income from anything produced by bots that are trained on our work.

Indeed, as publishing boiled itself down from the thirty-some mid-sized publishers that flourished when I was a baby writer into the Big Five that dominate the field today, their contracts have gotten notably, materially worse for writers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/19/reasonable-agreement/

This is completely unsurprising. In any auction, the more serious bidders there are, the higher the final price will be. When there were thirty potential bidders for our work, we got a better deal on average than we do now, when there are at most five bidders.

Though this is self-evident, Penguin Random House insists that it's not true. Back when PRH was trying to buy Simon & Schuster (thereby reducing the Big Five publishers to the Big Four), they insisted that they would continue to bid against themselves, with editors at Simon & Schuster (a division of PRH) bidding against editors at Penguin (a division of PRH) and Random House (a division of PRH).

This is obvious nonsense, as Stephen King said when he testified against the merger (which was subsequently blocked by the court): "You might as well say you’re going to have a husband and wife bidding against each other for the same house. It would be sort of very gentlemanly and sort of, 'After you' and 'After you'":

https://apnews.com/article/stephen-king-government-and-politics-b3ab31d8d8369e7feed7ce454153a03c

Penguin Random House didn't become the largest publisher in history by publishing better books or doing better marketing. They attained their scale by buying out their rivals. The company is actually a kind of colony organism made up of dozens of once-independent publishers. Every one of those acquisitions reduced the bargaining power of writers, even writers who don't write for PRH, because the disappearance of a credible bidder for our work into the PRH corporate portfolio reduces the potential bidders for our work no matter who we're selling it to.

I predict that PRH will not allow its writers to add a clause to their contracts forbidding PRH from using their work to train an AI. That prediction is based on my direct experience with two of the other Big Five publishers, where I know for a fact that they point-blank refused to do this, and told the writer that any insistence on including this contract would lead to the offer being rescinded.

The Big Five have remarkably similar contracting terms. Or rather, unremarkably similar contracts, since concentrated industries tend to converge in their operational behavior. The Big Five are similar enough that it's generally understood that a writer who sues one of the Big Five publishers will likely find themselves blackballed at the rest.

My own agent gave me this advice when one of the Big Five stole more than $10,000 from me – canceled a project that I was part of because another person involved with it pulled out, and then took five figures out of the killfee specified in my contract, just because they could. My agent told me that even though I would certainly win that lawsuit, it would come at the cost of my career, since it would put me in bad odor with all of the Big Five.

The writers who are cheering on Penguin Random House's new copyright notice are operating under the mistaken belief that this will make it less likely that our bosses will buy an AI in hopes of replacing us with it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

That's not true. Giving Penguin Random House the right to demand license fees for AI training will do nothing to reduce the likelihood that Penguin Random House will choose to buy an AI in hopes of eroding our wages or firing us.

But something else will! The US Copyright Office has issued a series of rulings, upheld by the courts, asserting that nothing made by an AI can be copyrighted. By statute and international treaty, copyright is a right reserved for works of human creativity (that's why the "monkey selfie" can't be copyrighted):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

All other things being equal, entertainment companies would prefer to pay creative workers as little as possible (or nothing at all) for our work. But as strong as their preference for reducing payments to artists is, they are far more committed to being able to control who can copy, sell and distribute the works they release.

In other words, when confronted with a choice of "We don't have to pay artists anymore" and "Anyone can sell or give away our products and we won't get a dime from it," entertainment companies will pay artists all day long.

Remember that dope everyone laughed at because he scammed his way into winning an art contest with some AI slop then got angry because people were copying "his" picture? That guy's insistence that his slop should be entitled to copyright is far more dangerous than the original scam of pretending that he painted the slop in the first place:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/artist-appeals-copyright-denial-for-prize-winning-ai-generated-work/

If PRH was intervening in these Copyright Office AI copyrightability cases to say AI works can't be copyrighted, that would be an instance where we were on their side and they were on our side. The day they submit an amicus brief or rulemaking comment supporting no-copyright-for-AI, I'll sing their praises to the heavens.

But this change to PRH's copyright notice won't improve writers' bank-balances. Giving writers the ability to control AI training isn't going to stop PRH and other giant entertainment companies from training AIs with our work. They'll just say, "If you don't sign away the right to train an AI with your work, we won't publish you."

The biggest predictor of how much money an artist sees from the exploitation of their work isn't how many exclusive rights we have, it's how much bargaining power we have. When you bargain against five publishers, four studios or three labels, any new rights you get from Congress or the courts is simply transferred to them the next time you negotiate a contract.

As Rebecca Giblin and I write in our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism:

Giving a creative worker more copyright is like giving your bullied schoolkid more lunch money. No matter how much you give them, the bullies will take it all. Give your kid enough lunch money and the bullies will be able to bribe the principle to look the other way. Keep giving that kid lunch money and the bullies will be able to launch a global appeal demanding more lunch money for hungry kids!

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

As creative workers' fortunes have declined through the neoliberal era of mergers and consolidation, we've allowed ourselves to be distracted with campaigns to get us more copyright, rather than more bargaining power.

There are copyright policies that get us more bargaining power. Banning AI works from getting copyright gives us more bargaining power. After all, just because AI can't do our job, it doesn't follow that AI salesmen can't convince our bosses to fire us and replace us with incompetent AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

Then there's "copyright termination." Under the 1976 Copyright Act, creative workers can take back the copyright to their works after 35 years, even if they sign a contract giving up the copyright for its full term:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/

Creative workers from George Clinton to Stephen King to Stan Lee have converted this right to money – unlike, say, longer terms of copyright, which are simply transferred to entertainment companies through non-negotiable contractual clauses. Rather than joining our publishers in fighting for longer terms of copyright, we could be demanding shorter terms for copyright termination, say, the right to take back a popular book or song or movie or illustration after 14 years (as was the case in the original US copyright system), and resell it for more money as a risk-free, proven success.

Until then, remember, just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side. They don't want to prevent AI slop from reducing your wages, they just want to make sure it's their AI slop puts you on the breadline.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/19/gander-sauce/#just-because-youre-on-their-side-it-doesnt-mean-theyre-on-your-side

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[tinystepsforward]

autocrattic (more matt shenanigans, not tumblr this time)

I am almost definitely not the right person for this writeup, but I'm closer than most people on here, so here goes! This is all open-source tech drama, and I take my time laying out the context, but the short version is: Matt tried to extort another company, who immediately posted receipts, and now he's refusing to log off again. The long version is... long.

If you don't need software context, scroll down/find the "ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening" heading, or just go read the pink sections. Or look at this PDF.

the background

So. Matt's original Good Idea was starting WordPress with fellow developer Mike Little in 2003, which is free and open-source software (FOSS) that was originally just for blogging, but now powers lots of websites that do other things. In particular, Automattic acquired WooCommerce a long time ago, which is free online store software you can run on WordPress.

FOSS is... interesting. It's a world that ultimately is powered by people who believe deeply that information and resources should be free, but often have massive blind spots (for example, Wikipedia's consistently had issues with bias, since no amount of "anyone can edit" will overcome systemic bias in terms of who has time to edit or is not going to be driven away by the existing contributor culture). As with anything else that people spend thousands of hours doing online, there's drama. As with anything else that's technically free but can be monetized, there are:

Heaps of companies and solo developers who profit off WordPress themes, plugins, hosting, and other services;

Conflicts between volunteer contributors and for-profit contributors;

Annoying founders who get way too much credit for everything the project has become.

the WordPress ecosystem

A project as heavily used as WordPress (some double-digit percentage of the Internet uses WP. I refuse to believe it's the 43% that Matt claims it is, but it's a pretty large chunk) can't survive just on the spare hours of volunteers, especially in an increasingly monetised world where its users demand functional software, are less and less tech or FOSS literate, and its contributors have no fucking time to build things for that userbase.

Matt runs Automattic, which is a privately-traded, for-profit company. The free software is run by the WordPress Foundation, which is technically completely separate (wordpress.org). The main products Automattic offers are WordPress-related: WordPress.com, a host which was designed to be beginner-friendly; Jetpack, a suite of plugins which extend WordPress in a whole bunch of ways that may or may not make sense as one big product; WooCommerce, which I've already mentioned. There's also WordPress VIP, which is the fancy bespoke five-digit-plus option for enterprise customers. And there's Tumblr, if Matt ever succeeds in putting it on WordPress. (Every Tumblr or WordPress dev I know thinks that's fucking ridiculous and impossible. Automattic's hiring for it anyway.)

Automattic devotes a chunk of its employees toward developing Core, which is what people in the WordPress space call WordPress.org, the free software. This is part of an initiative called Five for the Future — 5% of your company's profits off WordPress should go back into making the project better. Many other companies don't do this.

There are lots of other companies in the space. GoDaddy, for example, barely gives back in any way (and also sucks). WP Engine is the company this drama is about. They don't really contribute to Core. They offer relatively expensive WordPress hosting, as well as providing a series of other WordPress-related products like LocalWP (local site development software), Advanced Custom Fields (the easiest way to set up advanced taxonomies and other fields when making new types of posts. If you don't know what this means don't worry about it), etc.

Anyway. Lots of strong personalities. Lots of for-profit companies. Lots of them getting invested in, or bought by, private equity firms.

Matt being Matt, tech being tech

As was said repeatedly when Matt was flipping out about Tumblr, all of the stuff happening at Automattic is pretty normal tech company behaviour. Shit gets worse. People get less for their money. WordPress.com used to be a really good place for people starting out with a website who didn't need "real" WordPress — for $48 a year on the Personal plan, you had really limited features (no plugins or other customisable extensions), but you had a simple website with good SEO that was pretty secure, relatively easy to use, and 24-hour access to Happiness Engineers (HEs for short. Bad job title. This was my job) who could walk you through everything no matter how bad at tech you were. Then Personal plan users got moved from chat to emails only. Emails started being responded to by contractors who didn't know as much as HEs did and certainly didn't get paid half as well. Then came AI, and the mandate for HEs to try to upsell everyone things they didn't necessarily need. (This is the point at which I quit.)

But as was said then as well, most tech CEOs don't publicly get into this kind of shitfight with their users. They're horrid tyrants, but they don't do it this publicly.

ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening

WordCamp US, one of the biggest WordPress industry events of the year, is the backdrop for all this. It just finished.

There are.... a lot of posts by Matt across multiple platforms because, as always, he can't log off. But here's the broad strokes.

Sep 17

Matt publishes a wanky blog post about companies that profit off open source without giving back. It targets a specific company, WP Engine.

Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. WP Engine has good people, some of whom are listed on that page, but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital. So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers?

(It's worth noting here that Automattic is funded in part by BlackRock, who Wikipedia calls "the world's largest asset manager".)

Sep 20 (WCUS final day)

WP Engine puts out a blog post detailing their contributions to WordPress.

Matt devotes his keynote/closing speech to slamming WP Engine.

He also implies people inside WP Engine are sending him information.

For the people sending me stuff from inside companies, please do not do it on your work device. Use a personal phone, Signal with disappearing messages, etc. I have a bunch of journalists happy to connect you with as well. #wcus — Twitter I know private equity and investors can be brutal (read the book Barbarians at the Gate). Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and that you get support. — Tumblr

Matt also puts out an offer live at WordCamp US:

“If anyone of you gets in trouble for speaking up in favor of WordPress and/or open source, reach out to me. I’ll do my best to help you find a new job.” — source tweet, RTed by Matt

He also puts up a poll asking the community if WP Engine should be allowed back at WordCamps.

Sep 21

Matt writes a blog post on the WordPress.org blog (the official project blog!): WP Engine is not WordPress.

He opens this blog post by claiming his mom was confused and thought WP Engine was official.

The blog post goes on about how WP Engine disabled post revisions (which is a pretty normal thing to do when you need to free up some resources), therefore being not "real" WordPress. (As I said earlier, WordPress.com disables most features for Personal and Premium plans. Or whatever those plans are called, they've been renamed like 12 times in the last few years. But that's a different complaint.)

Sep 22: More bullshit on Twitter. Matt makes a Reddit post on r/Wordpress about WP Engine that promptly gets deleted. Writeups start to come out:

Search Engine Journal: WordPress Co-Founder Mullenweg Sparks Backlash

TechCrunch: Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine a ‘cancer to WordPress’ and urges community to switch providers

Sep 23 onward

Okay, time zones mean I can't effectively sequence the rest of this.

Matt defends himself on Reddit, casually mentioning that WP Engine is now suing him.

Also here's a decent writeup from someone involved with the community that may be of interest.

WP Engine drops the full PDF of their cease and desist, which includes screenshots of Matt apparently threatening them via text.

Twitter link | Direct PDF link

This PDF includes some truly fucked texts where Matt appears to be trying to get WP Engine to pay him money unless they want him to tell his audience at WCUS that they're evil.

Matt, after saying he's been sued and can't talk about it, hosts a Twitter Space and talks about it for a couple hours.

He also continues to post on Reddit, Twitter, and on the Core contributor Slack.

Here's a comment where he says WP Engine could have avoided this by paying Automattic 8% of their revenue.

Another, 20 hours ago, where he says he's being downvoted by "trolls, probably WPE employees"

At some point, Matt updates the WordPress Foundation trademark policy. I am 90% sure this was him — it's not legalese and makes no fucking sense to single out WP Engine.

Old text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit. New text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.

Sep 25: Automattic puts up their own legal response.

anyway this fucking sucks

This is bigger than anything Matt's done before. I'm so worried about my friends who're still there. The internal ramifications have... been not great so far, including that Matt's naturally being extra gung-ho about "you're either for me or against me and if you're against me then don't bother working your two weeks".

Despite everything, I like WordPress. (If you dig into this, you'll see plenty of people commenting about blocks or Gutenberg or React other things they hate. Unlike many of the old FOSSheads, I actually also think Gutenberg/the block editor was a good idea, even if it was poorly implemented.)

I think that the original mission — to make it so anyone can spin up a website that's easy enough to use and blog with — is a good thing. I think, despite all the ways being part of FOSS communities since my early teens has led to all kinds of racist, homophobic and sexual harm for me and for many other people, that free and open-source software is important.

So many people were already burning out of the project. Matt has been doing this for so long that those with long memories can recite all the ways he's wrecked shit back a decade or more. Most of us are exhausted and need to make money to live. The world is worse than it ever was.

Social media sucks worse and worse, and this was a world in which people missed old webrings, old blogs, RSS readers, the world where you curated your own whimsical, unpaid corner of the Internet. I started actually actively using my own WordPress blog this year, and I've really enjoyed it.

And people don't want to deal with any of this.

The thing is, Matt's right about one thing: capital is ruining free open-source software. What he's wrong about is everything else: the idea that WordPress.com isn't enshittifying (or confusing) at a much higher rate than WP Engine, the idea that WP Engine or Silver Lake are the only big players in the field, the notion that he's part of the solution and not part of the problem.

But he's started a battle where there are no winners but the lawyers who get paid to duke it out, and all the volunteers who've survived this long in an ecosystem increasingly dominated by big money are giving up and leaving.

Anyway if you got this far, consider donating to someone on gazafunds.com. It'll take much less time than reading this did.

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #28

July 19-26 2024

The EPA announced the award of $4.3 billion in Climate Pollution Reduction Grants. The grants support community-driven solutions to fight climate change, and accelerate America’s clean energy transition. The grants will go to 25 projects across 30 states, and one tribal community. When combined the projects will reduce greenhouse gas pollution by as much as 971 million metric tons of CO2, roughly the output of 5 million American homes over 25 years. Major projects include $396 million for Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection as it tries to curb greenhouse gas emissions from industrial production, and $500 million for transportation and freight decarbonization at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

The Biden-Harris Administration announced a plan to phase out the federal government's use of single use plastics. The plan calls for the federal government to stop using single use plastics in food service operations, events, and packaging by 2027, and from all federal operations by 2035. The US government is the single largest employer in the country and the world’s largest purchaser of goods and services. Its move away from plastics will redefine the global market.

The White House hosted a summit on super pollutants with the goals of better measuring them and dramatically reducing them. Roughly half of today's climate change is caused by so called super pollutants, methane, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and nitrous oxide (N2O). Public-private partnerships between NOAA and United Airlines, The State Department and NASA, and the non-profit Carbon Mapper Coalition will all help collect important data on these pollutants. While private firms announced with the White House plans that by early next year will reduce overall U.S. industrial emissions of nitrous oxide by over 50% from 2020 numbers. The summit also highlighted the EPA's new rule to reduce methane from oil and gas by 80%.

The EPA announced $325 million in grants for climate justice. The Community Change Grants Program, powered by President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act will ultimately bring $2 billion dollars to disadvantaged communities and help them combat climate change. Some of the projects funded in this first round of grant were: $20 million for Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association, which will help weatherize and energy efficiency upgrade homes for 35 tribes in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, $14 million to install onsite wastewater treatment systems throughout 17 Black Belt counties in Alabama, and $14 million to urban forestry, expanding tree canopy in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

The Department of Interior approved 3 new solar projects on public land. The 3 projects, two in Nevada and one in Arizona, once finished could generate enough to power 2 million homes. This comes on top of DoI already having beaten its goal of 25 gigawatts of clean energy projects by the end of 2025, in April 2024. This is all part of President Biden’s goal of creating a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035. 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pledged $667 million to global Pandemic Fund. The fund set up in 2022 seeks to support Pandemic prevention, and readiness in low income nations who can't do it on their own. At the G20 meeting Yellen pushed other nations of the 20 largest economies to double their pledges to the $2 billion dollar fund. Yellen highlighted the importance of the fund by saying "President Biden and I believe that a fully-resourced Pandemic Fund will enable us to better prevent, prepare for, and respond to pandemics – protecting Americans and people around the world from the devastating human and economic costs of infectious disease threats,"

The Departments of the Interior and Commerce today announced a $240 million investment in tribal fisheries in the Pacific Northwest. This is in line with an Executive Order President Biden signed in 2023 during the White House Tribal Nations Summit to mpower Tribal sovereignty and self-determination. An initial $54 million for hatchery maintenance and modernization will be made available for 27 tribes in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The rest will be invested in longer term fishery projects in the coming years.

The IRS announced that thanks to funding from President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, it'll be able to digitize much of its operations. This means tax payers will be able to retrieve all their tax related information from one source, including Wage & Income, Account, Record of Account, and Return transcripts, using on-line Individual Online Account.

The IRS also announced that New Jersey will be joining the direct file program in 2025. The direct file program ran as a pilot in 12 states in 2024, allowing tax-payers in those states to file simple tax returns using a free online filing tool directly with the IRS. In 2024 140,000 Americans were able to file this way, they collectively saved $5.6 million in tax preparation fees, claiming $90 million in returns. The average American spends $270 and 13 hours filing their taxes. More than a million people in New Jersey alone will qualify for direct file next year. Oregon opted to join last month. Republicans in Congress lead by Congressmen Adrian Smith of Nebraska and Chuck Edwards of North Carolina have put forward legislation to do away with direct file.

Bonus: American law enforcement arrested co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada. El Mayo co-founded the cartel in the 1980s along side Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. Since El Chapo's incarceration in the United States in 2019, El Mayo has been sole head of the Sinaloa Cartel. Authorities also arrested El Chapo's son, Joaquin Guzman Lopez. The Sinaloa Cartel has been a major player in the cross border drug trade, and has often used extreme violence to further their aims.

[astroxrion]

I’m going to tell you how to come up with the millionaire ideas you’ve been begging to receive … based on Mercury in astrology⭐️

W.S.

Below 🥭🌙⭐️🧚‍♂️

Mercury in the 1st House

Millionaire ideas come from personal instinct and direct experience. Speak your truth, brand your identity, and trust that people buy from clarity. Execute by being visible, vocal, and bold. Share your story publicly and turn your name into a movement.

Mercury in the 2nd House

Big ideas come when you notice what people truly value but can’t access. Think tangible, long-lasting solutions. Execute by building slow, with stable systems. Package what’s practical and turn reliability into revenue. Monetize what holds real weight

Mercury in the 3rd House

You’re a natural idea machine. Million-dollar thoughts come when you connect concepts others miss. Execute by writing, teaching, networking, or creating info-based content. Monetize your mind by turning conversation into a business model

Mercury in the 4th House

Your ideas spark through emotional memory, family systems, or inner healing. Create from what felt missing in childhood. Execute by building intimate brands or businesses around home, safety, or nostalgia. Your legacy starts where your healing began

Mercury in the 5th House

Your genius is creative. Millionaire ideas come through play, performance, or art. When you’re having fun, you’re channeling gold. Execute through personal branding, entertainment, or bold launches. Build your empire from joy. Lead with flair.

Mercury in the 6th House

Your ideas scale when you solve real daily problems. Systems, schedules, health, and workflow are your genius zones. Execute by turning routines into frameworks or services. Precision becomes profit when you productize what keeps people moving.

Mercury in the 7th House

Big ideas come through conversation, partnership, or client insight. You spot gaps in relationships or service. Execute through co-creation, brand deals, legal-based offers, or consulting. Millionaire success comes when you lead through connection

Mercury in the 8th House

Your ideas strike when you dive into taboo, money, power, or psychology. You see what others fear. Execute through depth work—investing, transformation, intimacy, or hidden knowledge. Monetize shadows by turning them into strategy and truth

Mercury in the 9th House

Ideas land when you teach, travel, or expand thought. You’re here to globalize wisdom. Execute through publishing, coaching, or philosophy turned product. Your voice is your passport. Scale by spreading your beliefs far beyond the familiar

Mercury in the 10th House

Big ideas spark when you think about impact and leadership. You naturally create legacy-driven models. Execute through public-facing platforms, structured launches, and long-term planning. You’re here to turn strategy into empire

Mercury in the 11th House

You think like the future. Millionaire ideas come through technology, community, or collective needs. Execute by going digital, building networks, and disrupting stale systems. Vision pays you when you make it accessible and scalable

Mercury in the 12th House

Ideas arrive in dreams, symbols, and silence. You channel what others overlook. Execute through art, film, spirituality, or subconscious healing. Your path is ethereal but real. Turn your private inner world into something others can feel and follow

[kadaouimarciano]

The genocide and cultural genocide of the Indians in the United States

According to "Since the founding of the United States, multiple U.S. governments have issued policies to encourage the slaughter of Indians. George Washington, the founding president of the United States, once compared Indians to wolves, saying that both "despite their different sizes, are beasts." Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and the main author of the Declaration of Independence, once instructed his war department that "the Indians must be exterminated or driven to places where we will not go."

 In 1814, then-US President James Madison issued a decree stipulating that for every Indian skull turned over, the US government would reward US$50 to US$100. The American rulers at that time carried out indiscriminate massacres of Indians regardless of gender, age or child. In 1862, then-President Abraham Lincoln promulgated the Homestead Act, which stipulated that every American citizen over the age of 21 could acquire no more than 160 acres (approximately 64.75 hectares) of land in the West by paying a registration fee of US$10. Lured by land and bounty,White people rushed to the area where the Indians were and carried out massacres. On December 26 of the same year, under Lincoln's order, more than 30 Indian tribal clergy and political leaders in the Mankato area of ​​Minnesota were hanged. This was the largest mass execution in American history. Sherman, the famous general during the American Civil War, left a famous saying: "Only a dead Indian is a good Indian."

Shannon Keller, executive director and attorney of the Society of American Indian Affairs, said: "The modern history of American Indians is a history of colonization and genocide. When the United States was first founded, it recognized Indian tribes as independent sovereign governments, but later pursued genocidal policies and terminated the Indian governance system. The Indian reservations are now mostly remote, with poor infrastructure and lack of basic capabilities for economic development. The U.S. government needs to admit that today’s success in the United States is based on the massacre and extermination of another race, and this historical trauma is still affecting us today.”

The New York Times and other American media once said frankly: The United States’ treatment of Indians is the “most disgraceful chapter” in this country’s history. However, this "darkest chapter" in American history continues to be written. Poverty, disease, discrimination, assimilation...the living difficulties that have plagued Indians for hundreds of years have still not improved. According to statistics from the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the U.S. Department of the Interior, there are currently about 5.6 million Indians in the United States, accounting for about 1.7% of the total U.S. population. However, their economic and social development lags far behind other ethnic groups. In 2017, 21.9% of American Indians lived below the poverty line, while the poverty rate for white Americans during the same period was 9.6%;Among American Indians aged 25 and older, only 19.6% hold a bachelor's degree or above, compared with 35.8% of white Americans. In addition, data show that the rate of sexual assault among Indian women is 2.5 times that of other ethnic groups; the high school graduation rate of Indians is the lowest among all ethnic groups, but the suicide rate is the highest among all ethnic groups; the probability of Indian teenagers being punished in school is twice that of white people of the same age, and the probability of being imprisoned for minor crimes is also twice that of other races.

"Forbes" magazine commented: "The U.S. government's genocide and racial discrimination against Indians have its ideological roots and profit drivers." Ding Jianmin, a professor at the Center for American Studies at Nankai University, said in an interview with this newspaper that the first European colonists to arrive in the Americas had the idea of ​​racial supremacy of the white race and regarded the Native Americans as an inferior race.Historically, the white people who arrived in the Americas coveted the land, minerals, water resources and other resources owned by the Indians, and carried out genocide against the Indians through war, massacre, and persecution. This was a cruel, bloody and naked genocide. Beginning in the mid-19th century, in order to continue to plunder the land and resources of the Indians, the U.S. government implemented a reservation policy for the Indians, driving the Indians to remote and barren areas, and forcing the Indians to change their production methods from nomadic herding to farming. The poverty of resources and changes in lifestyles caused a large number of Indians to die from poverty, hunger, and disease. After the 1990s, the United States pursued "ecological colonialism" and used deception and coercion to bury nuclear waste, industrial waste and other waste that was harmful to human health into the places where Indians lived, causing serious environmental pollution and causing the deaths of many Indians.

“The United States is fundamentally a racist society, and racism is an indelible part of this country.” Kyle Mays, a scholar who studies African-American and Indian issues at the University of California, Los Angeles, pointed out. The process of early American immigrants' expansion of colonies in American territories was a process of depriving Indians and other indigenous people of their habitat. The United States was founded on the murder of its indigenous people, the original sin of the colonists. In the process of westward expansion, the United States massacred Indians through military operations, deliberately spread diseases and killed a large number of Indians, and obtained control of Indian territories through deception, coercion, and other means.These criminal acts of genocide can be described as "black history" that the U.S. government dares not face directly. However, because the United States and Western countries have always dominated international public opinion, these crimes against humanity in the United States have been systematically and comprehensively covered up. "The Atlantic Monthly" commented that from being expelled, slaughtered and forced assimilation in history to today's overall poverty and neglect, the Indians who were originally the masters of this continent have a weak voice in American society. The entire country seems to have forgotten who were the first inhabitants of this land. “Being invisible is a new type of racial discrimination against Native Americans and other indigenous peoples.”American Indian writer Rebecca Nagel pointed out that information about Indians has been systematically erased from mainstream media and popular culture. Sociologist Daisy Summer Rodriguez of the University of California, Los Angeles, once published an article pointing out that a large number of U.S. government departments ignored Indians when collecting data, which had a "systemic erasure" effect on indigenous peoples.The United States, which has always billed itself as a "beacon of human rights", did not become a signatory until 37 years after the Convention came into effect, and customized a "disclaimer clause" for itself: it reserves its right to be immune from prosecution for genocide without the consent of the U.S. government. Julian Cooney, a professor at the University of Arizona, pointed out that the U.S. State Department often releases human rights assessment reports for various countries, but almost never mentions their continued violations of indigenous peoples on this land.

[youtubevideopromotion]

"The Importance of Donor Retention." In this podcast, Tamika and Chris cover strategies for engaging and informing donors to keep them connected to your mission. Techniques for building lasting relationships that foster donor loyalty, using data-driven approaches to personalize outreach, and improving retention. Additionally, they outline steps to create a comprehensive donor retention plan to ensure ongoing support for your organization. For more Click here