Vesna Manojlovic @becha@v.st

What do you wish you had known?
"Life is unfair: it drives me crazy, because I want it to be fair, but obnoxious backstabbing people do well for themselves while really nice deserving people don’t do as well as they should, but this will never change, & you have to not let it bother you too much. The best thing you can do is try to help other people by mentioning their contributions whenever you get a chance

2/2
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/radia-perlman-dont-call-me-the-mother-of-the-internet/284146/

#WomenInTech #WomenInSTEM #Design #StrongWomen #Tech #STEM

❓A friend of mine just asked me "what is a 49-3?" and despite International press covering quite in depth the ongoing political crisis in France, it made me feel like adding here my personal take on it, in case you were wondering.

(Long thread. As always: check your sources and correct me if I am wrong ;)) )

#FR #France #FRPol #Retraites #RerformeDesRetraites #Pensions #Protests #EN

🧵 1/17

May first is hiring for a remote role! https://mayfirst.coop/en/jobs

#equality

This is a very sensible opinion piece printed in Toronto's Globe and Mail...
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"No, electric cars are not the magic pill to save us from climate change"

Electric vehicles have gotten a lot of attention in recent years as a potential solution to our ever-growing emissions problem and the resulting climate change it contributes to. Eliminating tailpipe emissions will drastically reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by our transportation sector. It’s also true that some challenges with electric vehicles are slowly being overcome with technological advancements and cleaner energy production.

But there’s just one nagging issue that no amount of technical innovation can solve: Electric cars are still cars. Outside of tailpipe emissions, they come with all the problems of cars, whether those problems relate to the environment, social equity or public health.

The focus on electric cars stands in the way of truly transformative change: better public transit and better laid-out cities that encourage active modes of getting around, such as cycling.

Personal vehicles are like compact living rooms – two armchairs and a sofa in a big metal box. They require a large amount of room to travel around and to store both at home and at the destinations we visit. This means that we end up setting aside a large amount of space in our cities for cars.

More space for cars (think highways and parking lots) means putting the destinations we actually want to reach farther apart. If things are farther apart, they are harder to walk, cycle, or take transit to and driving quickly becomes the more feasible and attractive option.

In short, electric cars, just like gasoline ones, would continue to warp the layout of our cities. It’s a vicious cycle: Cars make the job of public transit harder and therefore make driving even more attractive.

But there is another way.

We know that investment in frequent, safe, and reliable public transit services will attract more people to use them. If more people use these alternatives, less space is needed for cars, and the closer together we can place our destinations. When cities are designed for shorter trips, people can spend more time enjoying themselves at their destination instead of spending time traveling. As a result transit becomes more competitive with the personal vehicle, and the upward spiral continues.

The problem is not that our cars depend on gasoline. It’s that we depend on our cars. Electrifying our vehicles is a small step toward a livable future, but transforming how we get around cities by truly investing in transit would be a giant leap.
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FULL ARTICLE -- https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-electric-cars-emissions-climate-change/

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #WarOnCars #BanCars #Transit

#Klimakrise #Klimakatastrophe

Letzte Hoffnung Regen

Hydrologin zur Lage in Europa: "die Situation finde sie 'extrem unheimlich'."

Wir sehen gerade in Echtzeit, wie sich unsere Lebensgrundlagen auflösen.

Wir haben unserer Umwelt vor langer Zeit den Krieg erklärt, lange hatte das wenig Folgen. Jetzt beginnt die heiße Phase. Wir werden sehen, wer der/die Stärkere ist.

Und die Politik streitet sich um E-Fuels, Tempolimit, Abstandsregeln und LNG-Terminals.

Meine Fresse.

https://www.spektrum.de/news/duerre-in-suedeuropa-letzte-hoffnung-regen/2115330

"Books are like bicycles: You travel under your own power and proceed at your own pace, your riding is silent and will not pollute, no one is endangered by your journey—not frightened, maimed, or killed—and the exercise is good for you."
—William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts.

@kimschulz also many questions sprout:

why work? what work? in the ages of allegedly (or practically) replacing human productivity by machine productivity?

and when people work and still can't make it while mega-profits trickle only in shareholders' pockets?

In times of economic and environmental crisis, ppl ask themselves these question: what value in work? shouldnt we be doing something better: caring for elders, planting trees, etc.

All these questions emerge from the FR anger right now.

📉This guy whom the World still looked at recently as a charismatic champion, a young prince of neo-liberalism, with a bright banker's smile who could sell you anything... is behaving like a delusional, cornered, pyromaniac emperor at the end of his reign.

9 votes were missing for the government to be dismissed yesterday, but in practice it is already gone.

Such major political crisis. Wow. Much amaze.

#Solidarity with all the strikers, protesters and those who support them.

17/17 EOT

🔥So here we are: protests every day in dozens of cities, going sometimes deep into the night, with fire everywhere and a completely overwhelmed and lost police.

Long-lasting strikes in transports, energy, garbage collection.

Blockades of logistical centers and key points of infrastructure.

Macron could at any time stop
that, withdraw the law and say "I heard you".

Instead he is absent, in a bunker looking at the country burning in realtime, sweating his underpants. What a waste.

15/17

🤬Last Thursday (the 16th of March 2023), it was clear that the government would use the article 49-3 to bypass the vote of the Parliament.

It got used the day after and triggered a unanimous outrage. Even conservative, centrist and otherwise bourgeois observers got angry at the method (at least) and at the arrogance of an isolated and cornered power.

https://invidious.flokinet.to/watch?v=zaZ1rMobNVo
(fascinating angry comment of middle-age guy "earning good money" supporting protest and anger)

12/17

🙊So here you have a government lying openly about the President's reform: It will be "social", "just" and "fair" will "help the women", will ensure "every pensioner gets 1200" is a "left-wing reform", to "save the pension system against its inevitable collapse" (all these things have *actually* been said!), while the truth is: It is taking some money from the poorest while massively redistributing to the richest. And lying and lying again about it.

5/17

DNS Hackathon 2023 in Rotterdam, with sustainability as one of the challenges.

*23 March* is application deadline!

Another IPCC report, another stark warning https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/03/20/climate-change-ipcc-report-15 #climate #IPCC

Some rather striking graphics to go with the report as well:

Super proud/excited to share our paper "Pygmalion Displacement: When Humanising AI Dehumanises Women" wherein we develop a lens to help us trace a type of harm towards women within/by AI as a field & as a technology: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/jqxb6

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Key Climate Solutions 👇👇

Possibly *the* key graphic in the new IPCC report.

please vote for your favourite background (tissue) color, for this year's BattleMesh t-shirt: https://framadate.org/PMu44sBiaheALdxp you can vote until Tuesday night, then we will prepare a new poll for deciding the foreground (printing) color