https://usefathom.com/
https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

Fathom is a new no nosense analytics platform that is thereby fully GDPR compliant and stores no identifiable user information. It's fully open source, with self-hostable and paid options, and shows great overviews of page views and top referrers.

They have a live demo running the stats for their main site available at https://stats.usefathom.com/#!last-7-days

I've been thinking about this for a while; working conditions in the U.S.A., stagnant wages, the growing power of the corporation, and the waning power of the worker. It seems to me that to speak of unionizing in the workplace is so taboo, so fraught with risk of retaliation from the employer, that we need to do something different.

What if we took an active role in speaking about, supporting, and encouraging people of a completely different industry to our own to unionize? If the employers come down on the leaders, well hey, they don't work in that field.

So, what do you think?

I'm a teacher, and two years ago I had a student come out to me as trans. He recommended the book The Other Boy by M.G. Hennessey to me, saying that it was the first book he'd read that was about someone like himself. The same goes for another student with John Green & David Levithan's Will Grayson, Will Grayson. Another student this year shared a similar sentiment about Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World by Ashley Herring Blake.

I don't know how well-known this is outside of educators, but there has been a recent explosion of books for middle grade and young adult audiences that have openly queer characters and themes. When I was growing up we pretty much had only Annie on My Mind, and even then there was a good chance it wasn't stocked in the library. Now there are hundreds of books published each year and available in school libraries across the country.

This is great for two reasons:

1. I've had many students who have been able to read about characters that they can directly identify with.

2. I've had many students who do not identify as queer (to the best of my knowledge) read and empathize with these characters.

I can't say whether it's because of the books or if the books are simply an indicator of changing social norms, but I've watched acceptance of queer individuals of all types increase over my years in the profession.

Last week was Banned Books Week, and our librarian gave a small presentation to the students about why books get challenged or banned and gave some prominent examples. When she brought up Drama by Raina Telgemeier and mentioned that one of the reasons it was challenged was for "including LGBT characters," my class's response was audible shock. Ten years ago, the response would have been laughter or derision.

Students self-select books from the library for free reading, and I'm always checking in with them to see what they've picked. Right now, I have a student reading Alex Gino's George, one reading the aforementioned The Other Boy, and another reading The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater. I have no idea how these students identify, but honestly, it doesn't matter. The fact that they were able to check those books out and read them is pretty powerful to me. The fact that they chose them on their own is also pretty awesome. Nobody is making students read books about queer characters. They're choosing to!

In fact, one of my favorite things to hear from students about books like those is that they were "boring." Why? Well, because that's pretty much the default adolescent response to any book these days (let's be honest: it's hard for reading to compete with Fortnite), but mostly because it means the student is reading the story free from any prejudice. The book is not seen as inflammatory or controversial or even brave. It's just a story about any regular person--the kind that many kids often find, in this day and age, boring.

And, for someone who's spent a lot of his life having his identity made by others to be A Significant Issue, it turns out boring is a pretty cool thing to be.

I volunteer with several small nonprofits. A few weeks ago, one of them got a spam message from a "volunteer" offering to create a free website for the organization and disclosing a connection to DonorComplete. There was no unsubscribe link. I hit Google, which eventually led me to a thread on TechSoup where I commented with what I had found to that date under the same user name: http://forums.techsoup.org/cs/community/f/24/t/43439.aspx This & other results showed that the "free" website is linked to historically very expensive hosting (historically , ~ $20-$40/mo, now showing about $10/mo) for a static website with very limited support or options.

My research continued intermittently, but there appears to be a network of over 100 domains (active, expired, dormant and/or returning server errors) connected to spam efforts over roughly the last 6 years, questionable marketing tactics dating back to ~ 1998, 4 overlapping corporations with one man as a central figure, several throwaway email addresses and a couple that seem to be dedicated & longer running, a handful of apparently dedicated servers and several shared servers with many connected domains hosted. The messages target nonprofit organizations and churches, with 4 textual variations posted via email, mailing lists, and comments. The first archived comments I found targeted FOSS project mailing lists. Based on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, many small nonprofits used their service years ago, but it looks like the spammers' services have been largely abandoned over the last few years - probably why the new campaign started ~ June.

I've filed complaints with two of the registrars, and at least one of the recently active domains appears to be in non-hosted status. Would there be any interest in my posting a thread with the details of what I've found so far (spreadsheets and mind maps in progress)? Would anyone be interested in helping me present the data in a more easily digestible format a la r/dataisbeautiful? Or can anyone recommend an easier way to report the registrant tied to the spam? I'm not trying to start a witch hunt, but these people seem to have flown under the radar for a long time, and I know many small nonprofits aren't tech savvy enough to recognize the warning signs these folks present.

They know
Of their inevitable demise
Those less fortunate
They despise
The politics that are destroying their lives
Inquisition, conquest
It was all a political contest
War torn, occupied
Exploited for all they had
Abandoned, left for dead
No political discourse, fragmented
Left to wither, to their demise
All at the whim of some rich guys

They are neck deep
The desires of the ivory tower
Are now the problems of those with no power
Mass consumption, transportation
All at the cost of their civilization
They scramble, they climb
The pleas for help are heard loud and wide
No answer
The problem is not mine
Engulfed, they weep

A man in his chair
On a balcony, willfully blind
Overlooking all this despair
A storm builds on the horizon
It is close, provokes fear
Storms have come before
They have never gotten so near
Perhaps if he had listened
He shed a tear

hey everyone! found this interesting post on /r/6perks, and i wanted to share it here and see what ideas get shared.

You wake up in a chemist's lab. In front of you is a table with 10 different-coloured pills. You may only choose 3. A warning label notifies you that taking more than 3 will cause instant combustion.

Which do you choose, and why?

🔵 Future Pill 🔵

You can see 10 years into the future or any time sooner, whenever you want. You can see any part of the world.

🔴 Xray Pill 🔴

You gain the ability to see through anything as far as you can normally see. Works at any layer.

🔸 Fly Pill 🔸

You can fly. You start at a slow speed and require time to speed up to a maximum of 100mph (161kph). You are not immune to low oxygen or harsh temperatures.

🌿 Drug Pill 🌿

You gain the ability to automatically be affected by any drug that exists as much as you want, no bad side effects.

❤ Sex Appeal Pill ❤

Anyone you want is instantly attracted to you, you are cured of and immune to STD's. Anyone who you "do" also becomes immune, and son on. Cure the world?

💠 Disease Immune Pill 💠

Gives you the ability to become immune to all harmful diseases.

💰 Money Pill 💰

You don't become rich, nor have infinite money, but it's like you do. Every time you want to do or have something, your bank account/wallet has exactly as much money as you need.

💮 Wish Pill 💮

Gives you the ability to wish for one of two things: any existing object to be teleported in front of you, or for you to be teleported wherever you want. Can only be used once a week. You get a free return ticket if you teleported somewhere. You cannot wish for other pills.

♠️ Death Pill ♠️

Gives you the ability to have any person of your choice killed, with no risk of consequence. Can only be used once every 5 weeks.

🌟 Painproof Pill 🌟

You are tougher than Wolverine after drinking green tea or eating spinach. You can still get hurt but you have Olympian-like physique, the skills of the greatest martial artists in the world, you are twice as fast, and your wounds regenerate very quickly.

Google knows a lot about its users. Facebook knows a lot about its users. FitBit knows a lot about its users. And so on.

But what happens when these companies all sell their data sets to one another? It'd be pretty trivial to link even anonymized users from set to set by looking for specific features. If I went for a run, Google tracked my location, FitBit tracked my heart rate, and Facebook tracked my status about my new best mile time, for example. Thus, Google can narrow down who I am in the other sets using pre-existing information that coincides with theirs. With enough overlap they can figure out exactly who I am fairly easily. Furthermore, each additional layer of data makes this discovery process from new data sets even easier, as it gives more opportunities to confirm or rule out concurrent info. So then when, say, Credit Karma, Comcast, and Amazon's data enter the fray, my online identity stops looking like an individual egg in each different basket but a whole lot of eggs in all in one. And they can do this across millions/billions of users--not just me!

I don't know for certain that this is a thing that happens, but... I have to assume it definitely is happening, right? How could it not? With how valuable data is and how loose protections are, this seems like a logical and potentially very lucrative step.

Right now, is there an aggregate version of "me" that exists in a data store somewhere that is a more comprehensive and accurate picture than my own self-image? After all, my memory and perception are imperfect and biased, but data stores aren't.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something!

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

don't know exactly what to title this so that'll do. this is maybe a topic that could fit in ~talk but since it's something i came up with i'll put it here for now. move if necessary. i also don't know if it will "work" in the sense that it'll generate a discussion, but we'll see. never know until you try.

anyways, i am a writer at heart and to put a long story short one of the more interesting concepts i have going on is the social/political ideology of "homaitism", an ideology which at is core opposes property entirely and seeks to establish shared ownership of everything in a society. in a more Wikipedian serse, i think this best describes the ideas at play here:

[Homaitism is] the general term applied to a collection of far-left political philosophies and ideologies which, broadly speaking, reject the ideas of property ownership and sometimes small government. Many Homaitist schools of thought advocate the establishment of a large social net, the socialization of the most important services in a society (such as those of fire, police, healthcare, and so on), and the formation of a government which serves most if not all of the needs of its people. Others resolve that this is incompatible with a Homaitist society and suggest a more communal organization to society, in which groups are formed voluntarily on the basis of need rather than through the establishment of a state authority.

i think it goes without saying that there are some significant flaws in this idea, which is primarily what i want to explore. my main questions here that i'd be interested to hear people's responses to about this, if there's anything to be said (which maybe there's not? dunno):

1. what impression you get from that as an idea. far too utopian? far too many holes to be viable? impractical but not impossible? possible on a certain level? things like that.

2. are there reservations or flaws you see beyond the obvious questions of whether this is utopian or in any way viable?

other comments about the general idea here are also welcome (especially if you think some of these ideas are dumb and contradictory and/or would not work together at all). if people don't think this is enough to go off of i'll try to post some of the more detailed writings/sketches i have which elaborate on it more.