alyaza [they/she]

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she

  • 1.4K Posts
  • 890 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 28th, 2022

help-circle








  • Life expectancy in the country has now risen above the United States, to 78 years, from just 36 years at the time of the Communist revolution in 1949.

    But China’s retirement age remains one of the lowest in the world - at 60 for men, 55 for women in white-collar jobs and 50 for working-class women.

    The plan to raise retirement ages is part of a series of resolutions adopted last week at a five-yearly top-level Communist party meeting, known as the Third Plenum.














  • here are their demands from their letter calling for voluntary recognition:

    • A horizontal staffing structure across the organization
    • Two union-elected staff voting members to the Board of Directors
    • Collective hiring and separation process, including collective decision making around layoffs, reduction of hours, new hires, and furloughs
    • Full commitment to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel by December 2024
    • Standardized pay progression and yearly Cost-Of-Living Adjustment raises
    • Expanded health, commuter, paid leave benefits for all staff
    • A Curatorial Committee made up of three union-elected members in addition to the Artistic & Executive Director and the Director of Programs to approve events
    • Consolidated HR administered by a third party company
    • Two union-elected staff representatives in both the Finance and Strategic Plan committees of the Board of Directors, ensuring budgetary allocations to Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Liberation work and the maintenance and upkeep of to the theater

    will be interested to see how many of these they can win through collective bargaining






  • NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” Project 2025 reads. The proposals roughly amount to two main avenues of attack. First, it suggests that the NWS should eliminate its public-facing forecasts, focus on data gathering, and otherwise “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” which the authors of the plan imply will improve, not limit, forecasts for all Americans. Then, NOAA’s scientific-research arm, which studies things such as Arctic-ice dynamics and how greenhouse gases behave (and which the document calls “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism”), should be aggressively shrunk. “The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded,” the document says. It further notes that scientific agencies such as NOAA are “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims,” so appointees should be screened to ensure that their views are “wholly in sync” with the president’s.


  • this whole thing has been a mess so, here are some bullet points of what we expect going forward.

    most immediately: both sides of this are going to have to make peace with being uncomfortable. it is Grail’s right to argue the premise that there is ableism against people with NPD; but, it is also the right of everyone else to disagree with that, and to disagree with it for personal experience reasons. if that’s a problem for you, don’t engage with this stuff and block people, full stop. genuinely: do something else. this is our third discussion on this subject and i have seen exactly zero minds changed as a result on either side, so i doubt you’re going to be the first if you’re obstinate enough.

    if you would like more elaboration on the line we take here, please see our essay On Content Removal, and specifically this section:

    However, from a pragmatic standpoint: Beehaw is ultimately a public space - curated as it may be - and you will be exposed to content you neither agree with nor feel comfortable with as a product of that. This is perfectly fine. It is also fine to disagree with some things we allow here that you personally would not. These are normal parts of existing in public spaces with other people and using services that are not your own respectively. But that also means you must be willing to compromise or take personal action to protect yourself sometimes - our moderation cannot and will not guarantee a completely agreeable space for you.

    From a logistical standpoint: we simply cannot privilege your personal discomfort over anyone else’s, and we cannot always cater specifically to you and what you want. Your personal positions on right or wrong are not inherently more valid than someone else’s when weighing most questions of how we should moderate this space. There are often plenty of people who do not feel like you that we must also consider in moderation decisions.

    secondarily:

    • it is understandable that neopronouns (especially of the sort in play here) give people trouble, but if someone politely asks you to use their pronouns/corrects you on what their pronouns are then we’d request that you either do that or just disengage entirely. this seems pretty straightforward. you especially do not need to give your opinion on the validity of them, because it benefits nobody.
    • same deal with the word “narcissist”–if someone doesn’t want to be called that personally, honor the request, find some other agreeable word to use between you, or just don’t argue and move on with your day. there are undoubtedly more important things you could be doing besides getting into an argument over whether this is a proper ask to honor.



  • The various initiatives — known as Tempo 30 in German-speaking countries, City 30 across Europe, Love30 by the WHO and 20’s Plenty in the UK and the US, the latter referring to miles per hour — have been gaining steam in recent years. Paris and Brussels introduced a default speed limit of 30 kilometers per hour in 2021, Lyons in 2022 and Bologna in early 2024, with Milan and Parma planning to follow suit this year. Beyond the EU, Wales introduced a 20 mph limit as the default for all residential roads in September 2023, and a couple of US cities, like Portland, have begun reducing their residential speed limit to 20 mph.





  • Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works. I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.

    unless we’re compelled to, it is exceedingly unlikely we will upgrade. we are fully committed to moving off the platform so it just makes no sense to prioritize Lemmy updates.

    with respect to refederation: we already polled that with both SJW and LW months ago and were given a very definitive no, do not refederate from our userbase. only 11% and 17% of our users were in favor of refederation respectively, and majorities were fine with continued defederation from both. our defederation policy was also strongly supported. (i believe this is the first time these numbers have been posted because they were so definitively in favor of the status quo.)

    At the time that they defederated SJW, Beehaw was more that 3 times larger, at about 12k total/3k monthly users. Now, SJW is more than 5 times larger than Beehaw, which has dwindled to just 450 monthly users.

    we’re not and have never been in this for numbers so this is immaterial to us–we’ve been quite public that we’d be fine having a community of a few dozen people, because that’s what we were before the Reddit fiasco. in any case: please understand that we are not responsible for the health of the Lemmy ecosystem. and even if we were (which we reject categorically) we have definitively been told to leave the platform because of our disagreements with the Lemmy developers. bettering this platform is no longer a priority for us in any way–and it is the general opinion of the team that we wasted a lot of time prioritizing that given the developer antipathy toward us. you can read more on that here if you’d like.




  • So a pride flag that is clearly textbook racist is good and arguing against it and the people that say its better because of the racism is not allowed here

    when you call them racist and imply they’re segregationist for having their preference, yes, that is not allowed. that’s needlessly aggressive and needlessly sectarian—and speaking personally, “having a preference for more stripes on a flag that represent marginalized communities is racist and like segregation” is just such an overstatement of the point (that i otherwise agree with, for the record—i am not a fan of the progress flag) being made that it verges into being unserious.