What is said by great employers of labor against agitators is unquestionably true. Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilization.

~ Oscar Wilde

. . .

Last month, a U.S. Supreme Court decision struck down federal protections for wetlands covering tens of millions of acres across the country, leaving no regulation of those areas in nearly half the states.

The court's narrowing of the Clean Water Act has left some states scrambling to enact their own safeguards and others questioning whether their regulators can handle the workload without their federal partners.

Other states, though, see the loss of federal oversight as an opportunity to roll back corresponding state laws at the behest of developers and farmers, who argue such regulations are overly burdensome.

. . .

The Federal Reserve’s decision to hold rates steady signals that central bankers believe it is time to hit pause, at least temporarily, on their aggressive campaign to tame runaway inflation.

The latest data, not to mention several other factors, however, suggests it’s time for a full stop.

. . .

I'm currently stewing on the idea of creating /c/commoning but in the meantime I'm choosing to post this here. Not directly anarchist but I do feel like understanding how ancient effective management of commons is and that re-commoning is something that should be emphasized in anarchist praxis

We are poised between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be born. Surrounded by centralized hierarchies on the one hand and predatory markets on the other, people around the world are searching for alternatives. The Wealth of the Commons explains how millions of commoners have organized to defend their forests and fisheries, reinvent local food systems, organize productive online communities, reclaim public spaces, improve environmental stewardship and re-imagine the very meaning of “progress” and governance. In short: how they’ve built their commons.

In 73 timely essays by a remarkable international roster of activists, academics and project leaders, this book chronicles ongoing struggles against the private commoditization of shared resources – often known as “market enclosures” – while documenting the immense generative power of the commons. The Wealth of the Commons is about history, political change, public policy and cultural transformation on a global scale – but most of all, it’s about commoners taking charge of their lives and their endangered resources. It’s about common people doing uncommon things.

NOTE: while there are links to buy the book on that site, I want to emphasize that the entire thing is available to read on the site under the Contents tab; as well as the link to the free epub version for download

I tend to lurk in sobriety forums as I'm not fully committed. But as someone in a dysfunctional relationship with alcohol (I'm one of those who can't stop if I get started) hearing the stories of others and seeing the support of the community is inspiring and actually does help me say no to the starting part more than I otherwise would.

And though I tend to lurk, I thought I'd make a post letting other lurkers know its ok to stick around

Overview: The article discusses the interplay between decentralized and centralized aspects of governance in the context of decentralized self- governance and shares learnings from Sociocracy For All’s (SoFA) experience, including that decentralization is an active process that requires preparation, budget, strategy, and information can act as centralizing forces, and decentralization requires different ways of thinking about responsibility and leadership. SoFA is a young membership organization founded in 2016 promoting sociocracy, a governance system with consent-based decision-making in small groups, in nonprofits and other organizations.

. . .

The Relations of Production

In the Soviet Union, property was owned juridically through the State. This is often taken as an open and shut case as to why the relations of production within Soviet enterprises can not be compared to that of a typical capitalist country. Looking to Marx, however, we find that he repeatedly emphasises the need to understand capitalism as a set of social relations, and that 'capitalists' are simply the personification of capital, or the dynamics of capitalist production.

In our own developed capitalist countries we frequently encounter bosses and managers who do not literally ‘own’ their means of production. They are, nevertheless, still clearly members of the capitalist ruling class. In Marx’s terms, these are 'functional capitalists', or "functionaries of capital"; a concept best outlined in Volume III of Capital. Marx distinguishes the so-called ‘work’ of supervising the labour process – of extracting surplus value – as fundamentally different to the labour of the working class, which produces surplus value. This is to say that, with the owner of capital “shifted outside the actual process of exploitation”, the income of the functional capitalist only appears as the “wages of management”, or administration. Despite their structural position within the relations of production, the functionary of capital – the supervisor and legal director of the labour process – comes to believe,

that his profit of enterprise - very far from forming any antithesis with wage-labour and being only the unpaid labour of others - is rather itself a wage, 'wages of superintendence of labour ', a higher wage than that of the ordinary wage-labourer, (1) because it is complex labour, and (2) because he himself pays the wages. That his function as a capitalist consists in producing surplus value, i.e. unpaid labour, and in the most economical conditions at that, is completely forgotten…[7]

And so it is with the Soviet enterprise manager, or the government official. For them, the ‘owner’ of the means of production is the State – a neat legal fiction which ‘shifts the owner of capital ‘outside’ the actual process of exploitation’; in this case into the realm of legal abstraction.

The social relations of control – and the ends to which control of production were directed – became obscured in the Soviet system. Like Marx, however, we should look past this obfuscation, and consider these individuals as personifications. In the Soviet Union, party bureaucrats and enterprise managers were functionaries of an underlying class system, wherein the property relations were that of a dispossessed class compelled to work under, and for, a de facto possessing class.

. . .

. . .

"Apart from in articles that are specifically about AI, Nature will not be publishing any content in which photography, videos or illustrations have been created wholly or partly using generative AI, at least for the foreseeable future," the publication wrote in a piece attributed to itself.

The publication considers the issue to fall under its ethical guidelines covering integrity and transparency in its published works, and that includes being able to cite sources of data within images:

"Why are we disallowing the use of generative AI in visual content? Ultimately, it is a question of integrity. The process of publishing — as far as both science and art are concerned — is underpinned by a shared commitment to integrity. That includes transparency. As researchers, editors and publishers, we all need to know the sources of data and images, so that these can be verified as accurate and true. Existing generative AI tools do not provide access to their sources so that such verification can happen."

As a result, all artists, filmmakers, illustrators, and photographers commissioned by Nature "will be asked to confirm that none of the work they submit has been generated or augmented using generative AI."

. . .

Background: https://i.postimg.cc/yxW66J1y/colorful-night-sky.jpg

... [Dr. Kishonna Gray] connected with a group of Black teens who agreed to meet her in Grant Park to show her how the game works. However, the young men were rebuffed by security in the area, their numbers and their Blackness disruptive, Gray said, to the white sensibilities of that part of the city. So the teens began heading back home to the predominantly Black neighborhood of Englewood.

Dr. Gray instead headed out to Englewood to meet them. After all, couldn’t Pokémon Go be played anywhere? Wasn’t this one of its selling points, part of what made it so exciting? “I couldn’t have been more wrong,” Gray told the conference. “When I went out there to try to find a [Pokéstop], there were none around.” She shows a slide contrasting a cluster of interactable points in the game in and around Grant Park with the dearth of them in Englewood. Well, okay, she admits, there were not quite none. “There was one,” she says. “It was a statue in the park. And it was a Confederate statue.”

. . .

NASA's Parker Solar Probe (PSP) has flown close enough to the sun to detect the fine structure of the solar wind close to where it is generated at the sun's surface, revealing details that are lost as the wind exits the corona as a uniform blast of charged particles.

It's like seeing jets of water emanating from a showerhead through the blast of water hitting you in the face.

In a paper to be published in the journal Nature, a team of scientists led by Stuart D. Bale, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and James Drake of the University of Maryland-College Park, report that PSP has detected streams of high-energy particles that match the supergranulation flows within coronal holes, which suggests that these are the regions where the so-called "fast" solar wind originates.

. . .

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/615249

A federal judge has struck down parts of Florida’s laws and policies banning gender-affirming care, saying that the bans contradict “widely accepted standards” of medical care. While the judge’s decision only affects three of the seven families of trans youth who sued state officials over the ban, legal observers say the judge’s ruling could help restore healthcare for countless trans Floridians of all ages.

. . .