joe a wilkins
@joeonhere
tech and labor @futurism.com signal: joe.989
Xiulan Zhu worked 24 hour shifts as a home attendant for 12 years, a labor practice she compared to torture. She was on an eight-day hunger strike prior to the sit-in, and if speaker Menin doesn't introduce Intro 303, she told me she'll happily do it again.
Speakers emphasized that the current system preys on the labor of migrant women of color, particularly Chinese women, who easily become locked into lifetime careers without any kind of mobility. This particular fight, to end the 24-hour work day in NYC, has been underway for over a decade.
Tuesday marked the launch of a two week sit-in outside NYC council speaker Julie Menin's penthouse, over her refusal to pass the original "No More 24" Act (Intro 303) to end the legal 24 hour work day for home care workers in New York
A lot of people are up in arms over something I never said. My argument wasnt that you're a bad person if you as an individual use AC, but that on a systemic level it's an unsustainable way to cool the world's homes. The answer to global warming cannot be 5 billion more individual AC units
Scans from Right On: A Documentary on Student Protest (1970). Very cool little paperback documenting some 300 campus protests in 1969
New Yorkers protest the NYC Police Foundation Gala, where the cheapest seat in the house costs $2,500
All solidarity with the Bolivian people. That said I think anybody trying to understand these moments needs to be clearheaded in how they analyze a guy like Paz – he's a Reaganite neoliberal who trained at the American University in DC. He's one of our boys!
How is that a substantive material change from previous policy? It seems like a (rare) rational decision by the Trump admin keeping with well established norms
Gut wrenching story from back home, the second death at the same facility in under a week. Kudos to Metro Times on their reporting – I hope her family can pry the justice they deserve from our rotten carceral system.
Shitty consequence of the commercialization of media is that the biggest newspaper archives in the US are paywalled by investment firms. In France it's a public service run by the national library, in the US it's a for-profit enterprise run by Blackstone
We still don't know whether US military officers were using Claude when they decided to double-tap an elementary school, but corporate media and their attendant wonks are already pinning the entire thing on AI.
Guy whose personal fortune exceeds the annual GDP of 83% of the world's nations btw
Kagan-Kans does accidentally get one thing correct: the right is a lot more interested in AI. Accelerationists and reactionaries are rabidly trying to advance their class project, so of course they're excited about a technology whose main use is to concentrate power and displace labor
I have a lot of problems with Kagan-Kans' essay, mainly that it reeks of idealism. Whether LLMs 'really understand' is maybe a fun thought experiment to hash out with your boys over a beer, but it's politically secondary to the question of ownership: in whose class interest is AI being developed?
Here's the comment DropSite seems to have fired Alex Colston over, next to Ryan Grim's original missive comparing Palestinian student activists to the CIA.
This happened not even a day after DropSite's Ryan Grim defended Ezra Klein's right to spread zionist propaganda on the grounds that to deplatform and censor him would be undemocratic, problematic etc. So which is it?
For those who might have missed this, it appears DropSite reporter Alex Colston – who embedded with the Global Sumud Flotilla last year – was dropped from the publication after criticizing this obnoxious comment by cofounder Ryan Grim.