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#corydoctorow

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Kyle Memoir 🍉

Any act of repair a gratifying gesture of refusal and subversion these days. A poke in the eye to corporate waste and consumer lassitude.

Feeling like renegade heating engineer Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro) of ‘Brazil’ right now, having decided: eff no, not into landfill—not yet.

And how fitting: while finishing up, @pluralistic heard on CBC radio discussing DCA & right-to-repair.

details in #alttext

The internal wiring and heating element of a ‘Master Chef’ coffeemaker (not a bad machine most days) with its bottom cover removed, repair in progress. A blocked cold feed tube down to the horseshoe was the issue, probably my fault for letting something fall into the reservoir—it looked like a bit of cinnamon stick caught at the narrow point. And then broken lines, as they’d grown brittle and broke on disassembly. Note the classic bi-metallic corrosion built into the design (white oxidation where element was affixed to the underside carafe’s hot plate and brown-yellow oxidation stains where bracket clamps element)—total failure still on the way, but thwarted for the moment.
Same photo, feed and hot tubes replaced. Let’s take a sip from the first-run p-test now (production system using ‘live’ coffee vs. test water—not pee!)… Ah, yes… Taste that? Non-compliance is sweet and delicious.
#Stratford#canada#repair
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C.

Cory Doctorow's (@pluralistic) blog post for today is a speech he gave last night at the University of Toronto, the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at Innis College.

It's worth reading:

pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/urs

It connects the dots between anti-circumvention copyright laws like the USA's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) (and the Canadian copycat legislation) and the enshittification that ensues when Big Tech does ... well, practically anything. There's a specific example he uses that is horrifying. He also shows exactly how Big Tech has escaped what he identifies as the usual four factors for keeping the worst instincts of companies in check.

I agree with him that we should annul the anti-circumvention law on the books, and would go further in saying that we should explicitly enshrine in law the rights to alter, repair, remove etc. any functionality of products and services that we choose to use. I was one of the original 6,000 Canadians who submitted comments warning against the implementation of these restrictions to our government at the time, and my feelings in support of this are stronger than ever.

Give it a read.

Attached image: I think this is probably overdue.

A screenshot of a web browser showing the Mastodon interface for writing a post ("toot"). The text shown in the window so far is the first portion of the post containing the image, with the browser highlighting the spelling error it assumes for the word "enshittification". Also shown is the context menu showing the author about to use the "Add to dictionary" option for this word, so that it is no longer identified as an error.
#CoryDoctorow#DMCA#circumvention
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datum (n=1)

Not as full as the Devil's Dictionary, nonetheless Doctorow's Dictionary is accurate and useful:

The Limited Lliability Company: "a kind of immortal, artificial colony organism in which human beings serve as a kind of gut flora."

pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/urs

pluralistic.netPluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility (26 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
#CoryDoctorow#LLC#liability
Replied in thread
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datum (n=1)

👉 Do you want to your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps, who drove an Uber until midnight the night before, and skipped breakfast this morning in order to make rent?"

Nurses already had enough problems.

👉 "Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue.

The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying."

from pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/urs by @pluralistic

pluralistic.netPluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility (26 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
#nurses#nursing#healthcare
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Strypey

"National Democratic Party ... did some very good work as [Justin] Trudeau's coalition partner. They made him do a bunch of stuff he wouldn't have done otherwise, like universal dental care ..."

#CoryDoctorow (@pluralistic), 2025

craphound.com/overclocked/2025

(1/?)

craphound.comMLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing | Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
#Canada#NDP#JustinTrudeau
Continued thread
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Tuckers Nuts Resist! 🇺🇦 

🥥 Why is there never a Luigi around when you need one?
"The crimes that monsters commit in the name of ideology pale in comparison to the crimes the wealthy commit for money." --Cory Doctorow
Doctorow lays out the criminal nature of private equity companies and the Nazi-era corporate roots in their DNA.
pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plu
🥥
#PrivateEquity #CoryDoctorow #Nazis #Luigi #TuckersBalls

pluralistic.netPluralistic: The long lineage of private equity’s looting (02 June 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Continued thread
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Tuckers Nuts Resist! 🇺🇦 

🥥 Here's a link to a Cory Doctorow article in which he lays out in detail how private equity works and how it's the nearest thing to legalized theft and fraud other than Musk's continuing illegal raid of the US government:
pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plu
🥥
#USGovernment #CoryDoctorow #PrivateEquity #Theft #Fraud #ElonMusk #TuckersBalls

pluralistic.netPluralistic: The long lineage of private equity’s looting (02 June 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Public
Watson

Canadian writer, activist, and tech critic to log in as System Crash's first-ever guest host: Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic). Brian Merchant and Cory examine Elon Musk’s campaign of governmental destruction in Washington DC, how #enshittification will continue to unfold in 2025, and what, if any, hope there is for us, the humans and the users.
#bigtech #corydoctorow #democracy #internet #future #fediverse #socialweb #indieweb
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