My cartoon for this weekend’s @Guardian Books.
p.s. my book ‘Revenge of the Librarians’ is out now: tomgauld.com
(guy experiencing the consequences of his actions) yeah i don’t know why these things keep happening to me i must be cursed or something
(guy who is cursed) yeah I'm sure all of these things that are happening to me are just the consequences of my actions
reminder for the twitter, reddit and tiktok migrants: please do not censor words here. if you censor them, people’s blacklists and mute functions wont work, especially for important content warnings (this goes for twitter as well altho that function is breaking over there). spell out the whole word in the post and the tags. do not use euphemism words like unalive. the algorithm here does not work that way (there is an algorithm. not everyone uses it, everyone uses the following tab).
the only time you should censor words is when you do NOT want them to show up in the tag, like if you’re saying something unkind about a ship you should not tag it or mention directly the ship name do it does not clog the tag, or if you’re mentioning a person or community who should not get attention or clout, or whose attention you do not want to attract, then censor it (the way one might on twitter to avoid term searching)
please god above can someone explain to me why we're still working on self driving cars when trains exist
"we're training them to interpret road signs!" Train goes same place every day. No road signs.
"when forced to choose between old lady and child, which is more ethical for the car to hit?" Fence around train track. Nobody on the road.
"people with disabilities preventing them from driving themselves can be independent" Yes but also. Train.
"reduces the dangers of fatigue with long distance trucking" Train.
"the technology is not yet price effective for the average driver" Train.
Seriously come on choo choo bitches let's goooooooooo
We will never invent a car that's as eco-friendly as increasing our rail infrastructure.
I'm a homosexual! I'm a homosexual! I'm a homosexual! Oh my god... they were right. I'm a homo.
BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER (1999) dir. Jamie Babbit
UPS has reached an agreement with the Teamsters union to equip its iconic brown delivery trucks with air conditioning for the first time for new units.
The agreement, announced by UPS on Tuesday, comes as the delivery giant and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters negotiate the terms of a new contract for more than 330,000 U.S. employees. (source)
Unions work, unionize.
They only just now got air conditioners?!?!?!
Yeah it’s a huge win. Those trucks are death traps on a good day. A bunch of drivers died and more got severely ill last year from heat stroke. The temperature in the back of those vans is usually 10 degrees hotter than outside. It’s terrible, and I’m so proud of my union for how harshly they’re negotiating right now. We’ve got a bunch of smaller consessions already but this one was big.
This round of negotiations is difficult. The UPS Overlords are trying very hard to keep their billions of dollars in three pockets instead of spreading the wealth we (the workers) earned for them during the pandemic’s influx of home delivery. They’re trying to give us as little as possible and spinning the news articles to make it look like they’re super generous. Meanwhile almost everyone in my warehouse is on food stamps cuz we aren’t paid shit.
The UPS Teamsters Union are currently voting on whether or not to go on strike in August, so prepare for that. Stock up on essential supplies, just in case. We’ll let everyone know how to support us when the time comes.
This job is my first time being part of a union and I never wanna go back to not having one. It’s amazing to have so much fighting power.
🎶 Solidarity Forever!! 🎶
We gotta take care of each other. It’s the only way to make the world better.
On a Wednesday morning in May, Hannah got a call from her lawyer—there was a warrant out for her husband’s arrest. Her thoughts went straight to her kids. They were going to come home from school and their father would be gone. “It burned me,” Hannah says, her voice breaking. “He hasn’t done anything to get his bond revoked, and they couldn’t prove he had.”
Hannah’s husband is now awaiting trial in jail, in part because of an anti-pornography app called Covenant Eyes. The company explicitly says the app is not meant for use in criminal proceedings, but the probation department in Indiana’s Monroe County has been using it for the past month to surveil not only Hannah’s husband but also the devices of everyone in their family. To protect their privacy, WIRED is not disclosing their surname or the names of individual family members. Hannah agreed to use her nickname.Prosecutors in Monroe County this spring charged Hannah’s husband with possession of child sexual abuse material—a serious crime that she says he did not commit and to which he pleaded not guilty. Given the nature of the charges, the court ordered that he not have access to any electronic devices as a condition of his pretrial release from jail. To ensure he complied with those terms, the probation department installed Covenant Eyes on Hannah’s phone, as well as those of her two children and her mother-in-law.
In near real time, probation officers are being fed screenshots of everything Hannah’s family views on their devices. From images of YouTube videos watched by her 14-year-old daughter to online underwear purchases made by her 80-year-old mother-in-law, the family’s entire digital life is scrutinized by county authorities. “I’m afraid to even communicate with our lawyer,” Hannah says. “If I mention anything about our case, I’m worried they are going to see it and use it against us.”
Covenant Eyes is part of a multimillion-dollar market of “accountability” apps sold to churches and parents as a tool to police online activity. For a monthly fee, the app monitors every single thing a user does on their devices, then sends the data it collects, including screenshots, to an “ally” or “accountability partner,” who can review the user’s online activities.
For Hannah’s family, their Covenant Eyes “allies” are two probation officers in Monroe County’s Pretrial Services Program charged with scrutinizing their web activity and ensuring that Hannah’s husband does not violate the terms of his bond while using one of his family members’ devices.
Covenant Eyes doesn’t permit its software to be used in a “premeditated legal setting,” such as monitoring people on probation, according to its terms of service. But public spending documents, court records, and interviews show that courts in at least five US states have used Covenant Eyes to surveil the devices of people who are awaiting trial or released on parole.
Neither Covenant Eyes nor multiple officials in Monroe County responded to repeated requests for comment and detailed questions about the app’s monitoring.
While the use of Covenant Eyes in a criminal-legal setting likely only represents a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of people under court-ordered electronic surveillance, the stakes are still high for those required to use it. The app’s accuracy could determine whether a loved one lives at home or behind bars. Legal experts say that its use raises serious constitutional and due process concerns.
“This is the most extreme type of monitoring that I’ve seen,” says Pilar Weiss, founder of the National Bail Fund Network, a network of over 90 community bail and bond funds across the United States. “It’s part of a disturbing trend where deep surveillance and social control applications are used pretrial with little oversight.”
[...]
Jonathan Manes, an attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center’s Illinois office, says the surveillance Hannah’s family faces likely violates several of their constitutional rights. “This feels like an extraordinarily intrusive violation of the family’s First Amendment rights to be able to access the Internet and communicate without being monitored,” he says. Manes adds that because the software effectively enables continuous and suspicionless searches of the devices of people who haven’t been charged with a crime, the family’s Fourth Amendment rights were potentially violated.
Lastly, Manes points out that by indiscriminately surveilling whatever the phone is displaying, the app could collect sensitive data that includes the family’s communications with their lawyers, as Hannah feared. “It’s interfering with his right to speak in confidence with his attorney,” he says of Hannah’s husband. “It’s impeding his ability to prepare a defense and exercise that Sixth Amendment right.”
“This strikes me as quite chilling,” Manes adds. “It’s what happens when someone’s home becomes their jail cell, and now everyone they live with is subject to the same kind of surveillance as the person who is charged.”
Several legal experts expressed concern about the monitoring conditions imposed by the judge in Hannah’s husband’s case. But Phyllis Emerick, the chief deputy public defender in Monroe County, argues that because Hannah’s husband and his family consented to the surveillance, they gave up their rights to privacy. “He agreed that he would not access electronic devices in his household in exchange for release,” she says. “It was the family’s choice to continue living with him.”
Weiss, of the National Bail Fund Network, disagrees with the idea that any type of surveillance is permissible so long as a person agrees to it to avoid jail time. “Sure, they consented to this, but it’s at the barrel of a gun,” she says.
When I read the full article, it got even worse. This is absolutely frightful, and it's forcing the victim of this overreaching surveillance to pay a third party for the government to spy on the family. Very clearly violating the 4th and 8th Amendments.
i know someone who wasn't allowed to use the internet or a smartphone and every time he tried to open a bank account the police would talk to the bank and it would get mysteriously closed a week later. And every time he got hired he had to tell the police and they would go and have a talk to the employer and demand surveilance on THEM. He eventually got a job doing deliveries for cash but he wasn't allowed to do ubereats etc. because he couldn't have a smart phone or bank account.
He had a tag which malfunctioned but still got him thrown back in jail for several months during the early pandemic and eventually on appeal it was shown the tag malfunctioned but all they did was let him out after locking him up for several months for no reason.
Simultaneously they're surprised that ex-convicts have a hard time fitting back into society and rehabilitating.
because they don't want them to fit back in. they want the cycle to continue.
someone: hey I noticed this thing you did in your writing!
me, kicking my feet up flirtatiously: oh??? do you want to hear my thoughts on why I did that? do you want a play-by-play of the language choices in every related sentence? do you want an exhaustive breakdown of The Themes???
I find there is a 50/50 chance of this situation being:
a) Wow, I'm really glad you noticed that! I spent ages considering the implications and how it ties into the themes. Please let me talk to you for three hours straight about my thought process.
or
b) Erm... that thing... yeah... that was definitely a deliberate thing... I absolutely meant for that thing to be there honest
A belated birthday sketch for @mirjam-writes who requested an "i missed you so much it hurt"-sort of hug and I am weak for airbase reunions
You don't get to choose if your post is about Supernatural or not
for the redditors coming here, this is how we spread news of important events in the world, with a Destiel meme
Me + everyone in the tags so conditioned to associate this meme with breaking news that the blank template fills us with Anxiety
It’s so ominous, like where is the news? Oh fuck something big is coming and they know and aren’t telling us
i’m starting a movement to stop calling this shit “artificial intelligence” cause it’s fucking not. it’s not intelligent, and the things it produces are not informed by logical choices. it doesn’t know how to research sources for you. it doesn’t compose art thoughtfully or meaningfully.
call it machine-generated, text generator, chat bot, but it’s not intelligent.
