#hire local service provider

[lifeservice]

Life Service is a leading service platform to hire local service provider. If you are searching for the best service provider for all of your domestic duties. Here you will get qualified electricians, technicians, teachers and engineers. For more information, visit our website.

[iampikachuhearmeroar]

dear employers,

if you're running a meet and greet/information day event, and doing interviews on the spot, there..... when you have an EOI form for it, it should just be "i'm interested in attending this event, thanks". I should NOT have to have to upload a whole ass resume and cover letter.. and then answer bs questions like "this position is very KPI driven. please tell us your past experience of achieving kpis" and "what's your perfect workplace like?" for fucks sake. if we're meeting at an event, in person, have a look at my resume and cover letter there instead. I shouldn't have to express interest for the event with my resume.

thanks.

[wacky-world-inflatable-hire]

Little Bouncy Castle Hire: The Best Way to Make Your Party Unforgettable

Are you planning a fun-filled event for your little ones and looking for the perfect entertainment? If so, a little bouncy castle hire is a fantastic option! Whether it’s a birthday party, a family gathering, or just a fun afternoon in the garden, a bouncy castle can bring joy and excitement to any occasion. In this blog post, we will walk you through everything you need to know about hiring a little bouncy castle and why it’s the perfect choice for your next event.

Why Choose Wacky World Inflatable Hire?

When hiring a bouncy castle, you want to make sure you’re choosing a service that’s reliable, affordable and offers high-quality equipment. That’s where Wacky World Inflatable Hire comes in. They offer a wide range of bouncy castle hire services to make your event special.

Wacky World is known for providing clean, safe, and fun inflatables that are perfect for kids. They cater to various events, from birthday parties to school functions, offering a variety of sizes and themes. Whether you’re hosting a small gathering or a larger party, their bouncy castles can accommodate all kinds of occasions.

How to Rent a Little Bouncy Castle: Step-by-Step

Renting a little bouncy castle is easy, and we’ve broken it down into a simple, step-by-step process to help you:

1. Check Availability

Before you get too excited, check if the little bouncy castle you want is available on your desired date. Many companies, like Wacky World, offer an easy online booking option that allows you to check availability in real time. This makes the process quick and hassle-free.

2. Choose the Perfect Size

Think about the space available at your venue. Wacky World offers a range of sizes, including mini versions ideal for smaller gardens or indoor spaces. Their kids’ bouncy castle hire service ensures that the castles are safe for children while still having lots of fun.

3. Reserve Your Castle

Once you’ve chosen the size and date, it’s time to reserve a little bouncy castle. Simply fill out the booking form on their website, and you’ll receive a confirmation. The best part is that you can reserve a little bouncy castle without leaving your home!

4. Plan Your Event

After booking, all you have to do is prepare for your event. The company will take care of the delivery and setup of your little bouncy castle. Some services even offer same-day bouncy castle hire, so if you’re planning something last-minute, you can still get the fun started!

5. Enjoy the Fun

On the day of your event, the bouncy castle will be delivered, set up, and ready for action. Sit back, relax, and watch as your kids jump and play. Wacky World ensures that the castles are safely set up and regularly maintained, so you don’t have to worry about a thing.

6. Pack-Up and Collection

After the fun, Wacky World will return to safely pack up and collect the bouncy castle. You can enjoy your event without the stress of dealing with the equipment afterward.

Affordable Bouncy Castle Hire: Fun Doesn’t Have to Be Expensive

One of the best reasons to consider affordable bouncy castle hire is that it fits into most event budgets. The cost of hiring a little bouncy castle is generally very reasonable, especially when you consider the hours of fun it will provide. Wacky World offers competitive pricing, and their transparent pricing structure means you know exactly what you’re paying for.

You can find bouncy castles for hire in South Ribble or local bouncy castle hire in Preston. Many services also offer flexible rental periods, so you only pay for the time you need.

Why Choose Local Bouncy Castle Hire?

Choosing a local bouncy castle hire service like Wacky World comes with several advantages. Local services can offer quicker delivery times, and you’ll often find that they have a better understanding of your area’s specific needs.

For instance, if you’re based in Preston or South Ribble, a local bouncy castle hire in Preston means that the company can get to you faster and provide a more personalized experience. Plus, local inflatable hire in Preston means you can support small businesses in your community while ensuring your event runs smoothly.

Customer Reviews: The Proof is in the Feedback

When hiring a bouncy castle, it’s always a good idea to check customer reviews before booking. Wacky World Inflatable Hire has received plenty of positive feedback for its trusted bouncy castle rental providers and our excellent customer service.

Reading customer reviews for Wacky World Inflatable Hire will give you an idea of the quality of service and products we offer. Happy customers often highlight the friendly and professional staff, the excellent condition of the inflatables, and the smooth booking process.

You can also check for top-rated bouncy castle hire services in your area to ensure you’re making the best choice. A reputable company like Wacky World Inflatable Hire makes sure that your bouncy castle is delivered on time and in perfect condition.

More Than Just Fun: The Benefits of a Bouncy Castle

A bouncy castle for kids is more than just entertainment. It encourages children to be active and helps them develop coordination and balance. Plus, it’s a great way to burn off energy in a safe, supervised environment.

By hiring a little bouncy castle, you’re giving children a chance to engage in healthy, active play that they’ll love. Whether they’re jumping, bouncing, or sliding, the fun never ends!

Conclusion: Make Your Event Memorable with a Little Bouncy Castle Hire

Hiring a little bouncy castle for your next event is an easy way to bring joy to kids and make your party unforgettable. With a simple booking process, affordable bouncy castle hire, and reliable local providers like Wacky World Inflatable Hire, it’s never been easier to plan a fun and exciting event.

From bouncy castles for hire in South Ribble to local bouncy castle hire in Preston, the options are endless. Don’t forget to check customer reviews to ensure you’re getting the best service possible.

So why wait? Reserve your little bouncy castle today and get ready to create memories that will last a lifetime!

[vivekbsworld]

Your Comprehensive Guide to Car Hire Services in Calicut

alicut, also known as Kozhikode, is a city steeped in history and natural beauty, making it a popular destination for travelers exploring Kerala. Whether you’re visiting for business, leisure, or to delve into the rich cultural heritage of the Malabar region, having access to a reliable car hire service can greatly enhance your experience. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about car hire services in Calicut, ensuring you make the most of your visit.

Advantages of Car Hire in Calicut

Renting a car in Calicut offers numerous benefits:

Flexibility: Enjoy the freedom to explore Calicut and its surrounding areas at your own pace, without relying on public transportation schedules.

Convenience: Easily access attractions, markets, and restaurants that may not be easily reachable by other means of transport.

Comfort: Travel in comfort with the convenience of having your own vehicle, especially useful for families or groups.

Exploration: Discover off-the-beaten-path destinations and scenic routes that may not be covered by tour packages.

Top Car Hire Services in Calicut

Here are some reputable car hire services in Calicut to consider:

Savaari Car Rentals: Offers a wide range of vehicles including economy cars, sedans, SUVs, and luxury cars. They provide both local and outstation travel options with competitive pricing.

Zoomcar: Known for its self-drive car rental services, Zoomcar provides flexibility with a variety of vehicles from hatchbacks to SUVs. Ideal for independent travelers looking to explore Calicut on their own terms.

Myles Cars: Provides both self-drive and chauffeur-driven car rental options with a diverse fleet that caters to different budgets and preferences. They offer convenient booking options and reliable service.

Avis India: Specializes in premium car rentals with a focus on comfort and style. Avis offers a range of cars including luxury sedans and SUVs, perfect for business travelers or those seeking a touch of elegance.

Carzonrent: Offers dependable car hire services with a variety of car models available for short-term and long-term rentals. They ensure customer satisfaction with competitive rates and flexible rental plans.

How to Choose the Right Car Hire Service

Vehicle Selection: Consider the size of your travel group and the type of terrain you plan to cover. Choose a car that suits your comfort and luggage requirements.

Rental Terms: Review the terms and conditions carefully, including insurance coverage, mileage limits, and any additional fees or charges.

Booking Process: Book your rental car in advance to secure availability, especially during peak travel seasons or for specific vehicle models.

Conclusion

Renting a car in Calicut provides the freedom and flexibility to explore this captivating city and its scenic surroundings at your own pace. Whether you’re visiting historical sites, enjoying local cuisine, or simply soaking in the coastal beauty, having a rental car ensures you maximize your time and make lasting memories.

Call to Action

Ready to embark on a memorable journey through Calicut? Explore the car hire options mentioned above and book your ideal vehicle today to start your Kerala adventure with convenience and comfort.

[sensationsoftwaresolutions]

Law Firm Local SEO – Local SEO Tips for Lawyers and Attorneys

In the fast-paced digital age, local law firms are recognizing the importance of dominating the online sphere to attract potential clients. Sensation Solutions, a renowned local search engine optimization company, provides invaluable services in this context. Outranking the competition and appearing first in search results can significantly impact the success of legal services. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore actionable local SEO tips tailored for lawyers and attorneys, ensuring your firm not only climbs the Google ranks but also converts online visibility into increased business.

Understanding the Importance of Law Firm Local SEO

Local SEO optimization is crucial for law firms because it enhances their visibility and presence in local searches, making them more accessible to potential clients within their geographical area. When individuals seek legal services, they often include location-specific qualifiers in their search queries, such as city or region names. Law Firm Local SEO ensures that a law firm’s online assets, like its website and Google Business Profile, are optimized for these local searches.

By focusing on local SEO, law firms can:

Target Relevant Audience:Local SEO Allows Law Firms To Target Potential Clients In Their Immediate Vicinity Who Are Actively Searching For Legal Services. This Ensures That The Firm’s Online Visibility Aligns With The Needs Of Its Local Community.

Compete Effectively:In The Competitive Legal Landscape, Local SEO Helps Law Firms Stand Out In Local Search Results. It Allows Them To Compete More Effectively Against Other Firms Vying For The Attention Of Local Clients.

Appear In Local Pack Results:Local SEO Significantly Increases The Chances Of A Law Firm Appearing In The Local Pack, A Coveted Section In Google’s Search Results That Showcases Businesses Related To A Specific Local Search. This Prime Placement Can Lead To Higher Click-Through Rates.

Build Trust And Credibility:When A Law Firm Appears Prominently In Local Search Results, It Builds Trust And Credibility With Potential Clients. The Visibility In Local Searches Signals To Users That The Firm Is Relevant And Accessible In Their Community.

Improve Online Reputation: Local SEO Involves Managing Online Reviews And Maintaining Accurate Business Information. Positive Reviews And Consistent Information Contribute To A Positive Online Reputation, Influencing Potential Clients’ Decision-Making.

Enhance User Experience: Optimizing For Local SEO Often Involves Improving The Overall User Experience On The Law Firm’s Website. This Includes Ensuring The Site Is Mobile-Friendly, Loads Quickly, And Provides Relevant And Localized Content.

Optimize Your Google Business Profile for Law Firm Local SEO

Your Google Business Profile serves as the digital face of your law firm, and when managed by experts like Sensation Solutions, a firm specializing in offering services to law firms, it becomes a powerful tool for attracting clients. Here’s a comprehensive guide on how to optimize your Google Business Profile for the best results:

Accuracy Is Key:Ensure That All Information On Your Google Business Profile Is Accurate And Up-To-Date. This Includes Your Law Firm’s Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP), Business Hours, And Any Other Relevant Details. Consistency Across All Online Platforms Is Crucial For Credibility.

Captivating Business Description:Craft A Compelling Business Description That Concisely Communicates Your Law Firm’s Expertise, Values, And Unique Selling Propositions. Highlight Key Services And What Sets Your Firm Apart From Others. Sensation Solutions Recommends Keeping It Informative Yet Engaging.

High-Quality Images:Upload High-Quality Images Showcasing Your Law Firm’s Office, Team, And Any Other Relevant Visuals. Visual Content Adds A Personal Touch And Instills Confidence In Potential Clients. Regularly Update Images To Keep The Profile Fresh And Inviting.

Encourage Positive Reviews:Actively Encourage Satisfied Clients To Leave Positive Reviews On Your Google Business Profile. Reviews Play A Pivotal Role In Influencing Potential Clients, And Sensation Solutions Specializes In Strategies To Foster Positive Feedback.

Responsive Interaction: Regularly Monitor And Respond Promptly To Client Reviews And Inquiries. Engaging With Clients Demonstrates Your Commitment To Excellent Service. Sensation Solutions Emphasizes The Importance Of Responsiveness In Building A Positive Online Reputation.

Utilize Google Posts:Take Advantage Of The Google Posts Feature To Share Updates, News, And Any Promotions Your Law Firm May Be Running. This Keeps Your Profile Dynamic And Provides Valuable Information To Potential Clients.

Add Relevant Attributes: Google Allows You To Add Specific Attributes To Your Business Profile. Sensation Solutions Recommends Including Relevant Attributes Such As Specialties, Accepted Payment Methods, And Any Other Details That Can Assist Potential Clients In Their Decision-Making.

Regular Monitoring: Sensation Solutions Advises Regular Monitoring Of Your Google Business Profile Analytics. Understand How Users Are Interacting With Your Profile, The Keywords They Are Using, And Adjust Your Strategy Accordingly.

By following these optimization strategies, especially with the expertise of Sensation Solutions, your law firm can maximize the potential of its Google Business Profile. This not only enhances visibility but also significantly contributes to a positive online reputation, attracting more clients in need of your legal services.

Leverage Law Firm Local Listings Ranking Factors

A Deeper Dive into Law Firm Local Listings Ranking Criteria

Law Firm Local Listings Ranking Factors are the criteria that search engines, particularly Google, consider when determining the position of local law firms in search results. These factors play a crucial role in deciding which law firms appear prominently in the local pack or map results. Here are the key elements that influence law firm local listings rankings:

Relevance:The Relevance Of A Law Firm To The User’s Search Query Is Paramount. Law Firms With Accurate And Comprehensive Information Related To The Search Term Are More Likely To Rank Higher In Best Law Firm.

Proximity: The Physical Distance Between The User And The Law Firm Location Is A Significant Factor. Google Aims To Provide Users With Results That Are Geographically Convenient, Making Proximity A Key Consideration In Law Firm Local SEO Rankings.

Prominence: The Prominence Of A Law Firm Refers To Its Online Reputation And Visibility. This Includes Factors Such As The Quantity And Quality Of Reviews, The Overall Online Presence, And The Credibility Of The Law Firm In The Digital Space.

Consistent NAP Information: NAP Stands For Name, Address, And Phone Number. Consistency In Providing Accurate And Uniform NAP Information Across Various Online Platforms, Directories, And Your Website Helps In Establishing Trustworthiness And Improves Law Firm Local SEO Rankings.

Embrace Listing Management Tools for Law Firm Local SEO

Tools such as Semrush and Bright Local are invaluable assets for lawyers aiming to streamline their Law Firm Local SEO efforts, and Sensation Solutions recommends these tools for enhanced efficiency. These tools provide insights into your online visibility, local rankings, and even monitor your competitors. Regularly update and manage your listings using these tools to stay ahead in the Law Firm Local SEO game.

Choose an Experienced Law Firm Local SEO Agency – Hire Local SEO expert from Sensation Solutions

While listing management tools offer great insights, hiring a specialized Law Firm Local SEO agency can take your online presence to the next level. Sensation Solutions, as a Local Search Engine Optimization Company, not only focuses on effective listing management but also specializes in lead generation. A skilled Law Firm Local SEO agency understands the intricacies of legal services SEO, crafting strategies that align with the unique needs of your firm. Hire a Local SEO expert from Sensation Solutions to ensure tailored and effective strategies.

The Distinct Advantages of Partnering with an Experienced Law Firm Local SEO Agency

In the competitive landscape of Law Firm Local SEO, the decision to hire an experienced law firm local SEO agency is a pivotal move that can substantially impact your firm’s online presence and success. Sensation Solutions emphasises the advantages of this strategic choice, including specialized knowledge, effective listing management, strategic lead generation, adaptability to algorithm changes, comprehensive SEO audits, ROI-focused strategies, advanced analytics and reporting, customized approaches for legal services, proactive reputation management, and a long-term partnership commitment.

Craft Engaging Localized Content for Law Firm Local SEO

Content remains king, even in the realm of Law Firm Local SEO. Create blog posts, articles, and case studies that highlight your law firm’s expertise in specific legal areas relevant to your local audience. Use bold keywords strategically within your content, such as “Law Firm Local SEO,” to enhance visibility and appeal to search engine algorithms – a practice endorsed by Sensation Solutions for content optimization.

Prioritize Mobile Optimization for Law Firm Local SEO

Given the prevalence of mobile searches, optimizing your law firm’s website for mobile devices is no longer optional. Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites, and a seamless mobile experience contributes to higher Law Firm Local SEO rankings. Ensure that your website is responsive, loads quickly, and provides an excellent user experience across various devices – a key consideration for Sensation Solutions in its Local SEO strategies.

Foster Positive Online Reviews for Law Firm Local SEO

Positive online reviews not only boost your law firm’s reputation but also signal trustworthiness to potential clients. Actively encourage satisfied clients to leave reviews on platforms like Google, Yelp, and Avvo. Respond promptly to reviews, whether positive or negative, showcasing your law firm’s commitment to client satisfaction – a practice endorsed by Sensation Solutions for maintaining a positive online reputation.

Utilize Social Media Channels for Law Firm Local SEO

Social media is a powerful tool for building a local community around your law firm. Regularly update your social media profiles with relevant content, engage with your audience, and share insights into your legal expertise. Social signals are considered by search engines, influencing your Law Firm Local SEO ranking. Sensation Solutions recommends active social media presence as a key component of a successful Local SEO strategy.

Monitor and Adjust Your Law Firm Local SEO Strategy

Law Firm Local SEO is an ongoing process that requires monitoring and adaptation. Regularly review your analytics, track your local search rankings, and stay informed about algorithm updates. Adjust your strategy based on performance data, ensuring your law firm remains at the forefront of Law Firm Local SEO results. Sensation Solutions emphasizes the importance of staying proactive in adapting to changes for sustained success.

FAQs – Addressing Common Concerns:

Q1: How can I improve my Law Firm Google Business Profile’s visibility in Local SEO?

A1: Optimize your profile by providing accurate information, adding high-quality images, and encouraging satisfied clients to leave positive reviews. Mention “Law Firm Local SEO” strategically in your profile.

Q2: Are listing management tools necessary for Law Firm Local SEO?

A2: Yes, tools like Semrush and Bright Local simplify the process of managing your online listings, ensuring consistency and accuracy across various platforms. These tools are particularly beneficial for Law Firm Local SEO efforts.

Q3: What makes Law Firm SEO agencies preferable for listing management?

A3: Law Firm SEO agencies not only manage listings but also employ strategies to improve local search rankings and generate leads, offering a more comprehensive approach to Law Firm Local SEO. Consider hiring a Local SEO expert from Sensation Solutions for optimal results.

Q4: How long does it take to see results from Law Firm Local SEO efforts?

A4: Results can vary, but with consistent efforts, you can start seeing improvements in Law Firm Local SEO rankings within a few months. Sensation Solutions emphasizes the need for a strategic, long-term approach for sustained success.

In the competitive landscape of legal services, Law Firm Local SEO is a game-changer. By optimizing your Google Business Profile, understanding Law Firm Local Listings Ranking Factors, and utilizing effective tools and agencies like Sensation Solutions, your law firm can rise to the top of search results. Invest in Law Firm Local SEO, and watch as your online visibility transforms into increased business and client engagements.

[tinystepsforward]

autocrattic (more matt shenanigans, not tumblr this time)

I am almost definitely not the right person for this writeup, but I'm closer than most people on here, so here goes! This is all open-source tech drama, and I take my time laying out the context, but the short version is: Matt tried to extort another company, who immediately posted receipts, and now he's refusing to log off again. The long version is... long.

If you don't need software context, scroll down/find the "ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening" heading, or just go read the pink sections. Or look at this PDF.

the background

So. Matt's original Good Idea was starting WordPress with fellow developer Mike Little in 2003, which is free and open-source software (FOSS) that was originally just for blogging, but now powers lots of websites that do other things. In particular, Automattic acquired WooCommerce a long time ago, which is free online store software you can run on WordPress.

FOSS is... interesting. It's a world that ultimately is powered by people who believe deeply that information and resources should be free, but often have massive blind spots (for example, Wikipedia's consistently had issues with bias, since no amount of "anyone can edit" will overcome systemic bias in terms of who has time to edit or is not going to be driven away by the existing contributor culture). As with anything else that people spend thousands of hours doing online, there's drama. As with anything else that's technically free but can be monetized, there are:

Heaps of companies and solo developers who profit off WordPress themes, plugins, hosting, and other services;

Conflicts between volunteer contributors and for-profit contributors;

Annoying founders who get way too much credit for everything the project has become.

the WordPress ecosystem

A project as heavily used as WordPress (some double-digit percentage of the Internet uses WP. I refuse to believe it's the 43% that Matt claims it is, but it's a pretty large chunk) can't survive just on the spare hours of volunteers, especially in an increasingly monetised world where its users demand functional software, are less and less tech or FOSS literate, and its contributors have no fucking time to build things for that userbase.

Matt runs Automattic, which is a privately-traded, for-profit company. The free software is run by the WordPress Foundation, which is technically completely separate (wordpress.org). The main products Automattic offers are WordPress-related: WordPress.com, a host which was designed to be beginner-friendly; Jetpack, a suite of plugins which extend WordPress in a whole bunch of ways that may or may not make sense as one big product; WooCommerce, which I've already mentioned. There's also WordPress VIP, which is the fancy bespoke five-digit-plus option for enterprise customers. And there's Tumblr, if Matt ever succeeds in putting it on WordPress. (Every Tumblr or WordPress dev I know thinks that's fucking ridiculous and impossible. Automattic's hiring for it anyway.)

Automattic devotes a chunk of its employees toward developing Core, which is what people in the WordPress space call WordPress.org, the free software. This is part of an initiative called Five for the Future — 5% of your company's profits off WordPress should go back into making the project better. Many other companies don't do this.

There are lots of other companies in the space. GoDaddy, for example, barely gives back in any way (and also sucks). WP Engine is the company this drama is about. They don't really contribute to Core. They offer relatively expensive WordPress hosting, as well as providing a series of other WordPress-related products like LocalWP (local site development software), Advanced Custom Fields (the easiest way to set up advanced taxonomies and other fields when making new types of posts. If you don't know what this means don't worry about it), etc.

Anyway. Lots of strong personalities. Lots of for-profit companies. Lots of them getting invested in, or bought by, private equity firms.

Matt being Matt, tech being tech

As was said repeatedly when Matt was flipping out about Tumblr, all of the stuff happening at Automattic is pretty normal tech company behaviour. Shit gets worse. People get less for their money. WordPress.com used to be a really good place for people starting out with a website who didn't need "real" WordPress — for $48 a year on the Personal plan, you had really limited features (no plugins or other customisable extensions), but you had a simple website with good SEO that was pretty secure, relatively easy to use, and 24-hour access to Happiness Engineers (HEs for short. Bad job title. This was my job) who could walk you through everything no matter how bad at tech you were. Then Personal plan users got moved from chat to emails only. Emails started being responded to by contractors who didn't know as much as HEs did and certainly didn't get paid half as well. Then came AI, and the mandate for HEs to try to upsell everyone things they didn't necessarily need. (This is the point at which I quit.)

But as was said then as well, most tech CEOs don't publicly get into this kind of shitfight with their users. They're horrid tyrants, but they don't do it this publicly.

ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening

WordCamp US, one of the biggest WordPress industry events of the year, is the backdrop for all this. It just finished.

There are.... a lot of posts by Matt across multiple platforms because, as always, he can't log off. But here's the broad strokes.

Sep 17

Matt publishes a wanky blog post about companies that profit off open source without giving back. It targets a specific company, WP Engine.

Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. WP Engine has good people, some of whom are listed on that page, but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital. So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers?

(It's worth noting here that Automattic is funded in part by BlackRock, who Wikipedia calls "the world's largest asset manager".)

Sep 20 (WCUS final day)

WP Engine puts out a blog post detailing their contributions to WordPress.

Matt devotes his keynote/closing speech to slamming WP Engine.

He also implies people inside WP Engine are sending him information.

For the people sending me stuff from inside companies, please do not do it on your work device. Use a personal phone, Signal with disappearing messages, etc. I have a bunch of journalists happy to connect you with as well. #wcus — Twitter I know private equity and investors can be brutal (read the book Barbarians at the Gate). Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and that you get support. — Tumblr

Matt also puts out an offer live at WordCamp US:

“If anyone of you gets in trouble for speaking up in favor of WordPress and/or open source, reach out to me. I’ll do my best to help you find a new job.” — source tweet, RTed by Matt

He also puts up a poll asking the community if WP Engine should be allowed back at WordCamps.

Sep 21

Matt writes a blog post on the WordPress.org blog (the official project blog!): WP Engine is not WordPress.

He opens this blog post by claiming his mom was confused and thought WP Engine was official.

The blog post goes on about how WP Engine disabled post revisions (which is a pretty normal thing to do when you need to free up some resources), therefore being not "real" WordPress. (As I said earlier, WordPress.com disables most features for Personal and Premium plans. Or whatever those plans are called, they've been renamed like 12 times in the last few years. But that's a different complaint.)

Sep 22: More bullshit on Twitter. Matt makes a Reddit post on r/Wordpress about WP Engine that promptly gets deleted. Writeups start to come out:

Search Engine Journal: WordPress Co-Founder Mullenweg Sparks Backlash

TechCrunch: Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine a ‘cancer to WordPress’ and urges community to switch providers

Sep 23 onward

Okay, time zones mean I can't effectively sequence the rest of this.

Matt defends himself on Reddit, casually mentioning that WP Engine is now suing him.

Also here's a decent writeup from someone involved with the community that may be of interest.

WP Engine drops the full PDF of their cease and desist, which includes screenshots of Matt apparently threatening them via text.

Twitter link | Direct PDF link

This PDF includes some truly fucked texts where Matt appears to be trying to get WP Engine to pay him money unless they want him to tell his audience at WCUS that they're evil.

Matt, after saying he's been sued and can't talk about it, hosts a Twitter Space and talks about it for a couple hours.

He also continues to post on Reddit, Twitter, and on the Core contributor Slack.

Here's a comment where he says WP Engine could have avoided this by paying Automattic 8% of their revenue.

Another, 20 hours ago, where he says he's being downvoted by "trolls, probably WPE employees"

At some point, Matt updates the WordPress Foundation trademark policy. I am 90% sure this was him — it's not legalese and makes no fucking sense to single out WP Engine.

Old text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit. New text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.

Sep 25: Automattic puts up their own legal response.

anyway this fucking sucks

This is bigger than anything Matt's done before. I'm so worried about my friends who're still there. The internal ramifications have... been not great so far, including that Matt's naturally being extra gung-ho about "you're either for me or against me and if you're against me then don't bother working your two weeks".

Despite everything, I like WordPress. (If you dig into this, you'll see plenty of people commenting about blocks or Gutenberg or React other things they hate. Unlike many of the old FOSSheads, I actually also think Gutenberg/the block editor was a good idea, even if it was poorly implemented.)

I think that the original mission — to make it so anyone can spin up a website that's easy enough to use and blog with — is a good thing. I think, despite all the ways being part of FOSS communities since my early teens has led to all kinds of racist, homophobic and sexual harm for me and for many other people, that free and open-source software is important.

So many people were already burning out of the project. Matt has been doing this for so long that those with long memories can recite all the ways he's wrecked shit back a decade or more. Most of us are exhausted and need to make money to live. The world is worse than it ever was.

Social media sucks worse and worse, and this was a world in which people missed old webrings, old blogs, RSS readers, the world where you curated your own whimsical, unpaid corner of the Internet. I started actually actively using my own WordPress blog this year, and I've really enjoyed it.

And people don't want to deal with any of this.

The thing is, Matt's right about one thing: capital is ruining free open-source software. What he's wrong about is everything else: the idea that WordPress.com isn't enshittifying (or confusing) at a much higher rate than WP Engine, the idea that WP Engine or Silver Lake are the only big players in the field, the notion that he's part of the solution and not part of the problem.

But he's started a battle where there are no winners but the lawyers who get paid to duke it out, and all the volunteers who've survived this long in an ecosystem increasingly dominated by big money are giving up and leaving.

Anyway if you got this far, consider donating to someone on gazafunds.com. It'll take much less time than reading this did.

[maidservicesblog]

From Dust to Shine: Finding the Best Home Maid Services in India

Finding the time to thoroughly clean your home may be difficult in today's busy world of work and demanding families. There are always a few minutes to pull out the vacuum and give the area a quick once-over, but it is impossible to perform a thorough cleaning. Many people use the maid services in Jaipur provided by house cleaning businesses to keep their homes looking clean, fresh, and professionally done - and it really does make a difference.

Finding the best house cleaning service can be difficult due to the abundance of available options. The process of browsing websites, requesting quotes, and speaking with each provider could take days or even weeks to complete. Even then, you might not be certain if you are making the most of your money. You may be considering hiring a house cleaning service for a variety of reasons, and if you choose wisely, you will find that it greatly simplifies your life.

Let us discuss a few scenarios in which you might hire a house cleaner, and then we will try to assist you in selecting the best candidate. It pays to know what to look for when selecting your provider of commercial cleaning services because the market is competitive.You will discover how to make your cleaning services more affordable, when to schedule, and what to look for in a reliable house cleaning service. Make sure to read this before making any reservations if you've never hired a housecleaning service or are looking for a new housekeeping service.

Tips for Finding the Best Home Maid Services

Let us look at the best criteria you can to use to select your housekeeping service provider.

1. Local Cleaning Services

If they are a locally based service provider, that is the first thing to consider. Making a list of the many cleaning service providers that are available and operate locally might be a good place to start. A local business will be aware of your location and will not incur additional expenses by travelling from a distance. Additionally, they will have provided services to other residences in the neighbourhood, and you can always ask friends and neighbours for recommendations.

The second factor to consider is their reputation, which is another argument in favour of staying local. A company providing cleaning services in local will make every effort to deliver excellent service because they are aware that positive word of mouth will help them establish a solid reputation. By doing this, you are more likely to find a reputable business that charges fair prices and that you can contact again for additional work.

You should also visit their website, even though it might seem obvious. Nowadays, even the smallest businesses have a functional website that is easy to use, and it should include not only all their contact information and a detailed description of their services. It may also include customer reviews. Give them a call; any business that is sincere about offering you a professional service will be happy to speak with you, address all your questions, and dispel any confusions you may have. Ask if they can help if you cannot find the service you need, such as a maid service in Jaipur, as they might be able to.

2. Office or Home Services

We have only discussed home office cleaning services up to this point, but you will discover that most cleaning businesses in your area also provide other services. If you own a small business and cannot afford to hire permanent office staff, a nearby company will work with you on a schedule - most provide evening, night, and weekend options as well - so that your facilities can be kept clean, tidy, and prepared for visitors always, and at very affordable rates.

This brings us to our following question: Is the housekeeping business you are considering transparent about the qualifications of its employees? In order to ensure that you are working with a qualified team, ask about the background checks, level of training, and any accreditation that they have undergone. In order for them to be held accountable for any damage that might be caused by their actions, you also need to make sure that the work is protected by an adequate, comprehensive insurance package.

3. Natural and organic alternatives

You will discover that the best cleaning service providers also choose not to use potentially toxic, chemical-filled cleaning products in their clients' homes or workplaces. Finding a business that only uses organic cleaning products is simple; you can check their website or inquire about it when you speak with them. Many also offer an aromatherapy routine to complete the cleaning, leaving everything smelling lovely and new!

When you have kids or pets around the house, it is especially important to use organic cleaning services rather than conventional ones. Therefore, when choosing the domestic help services in Jaipur that best suits your needs, it should always be one of the questions on your short list.

Finally, we reach the section that you might have looked at first: the prices your house cleaning company offers. Do not make any assumptions. Nothing is worse than expecting the laundry to be folded when you get home and finding out it has not been done because it's not covered by their service agreement with you.

Second, if you are on a tight budget, tailoring your cleaning to fit your needs can make it a little less expensive. Here, it is advised not to choose the cheapest option out of necessity; rather, look for the company that offers the most flexibility, a service that is as close as possible to what you need, and a good track record with past clients.

CONCLUSION

When house cleaning maids or servicemen were sought after through recommendations in the past. It has recently been made simple to access, in part thanks to online maid service Jaipur. One day cleaning is a viable option for all solutions of any kind. Connect with the best housekeeping services and make your home transit from dust to shine.

[gremlingottoosilly]

Cleaning services (perv!Konig x fem!cleaner!Reader)

Konig needs help in decluttering and cleaning his house. Unfortunately for you, he takes quite a huge liking in having pretty things like you around. And he isn't very nice about it.

TW: Perverted Konig, age gap, Konig masturbates at you without consent, implied kidnapping, yandere Word count: 3754 This work on AO3

There is no shame in having a professional cleaner, König tries to tell himself. 

Yes, he is a grown man with a very dangerous job that requires having a lot of responsibility. He holds the lives of his soldiers in his hands and risks his life every day not for the sake of his country, but certainly for the sake of his wallet and the reputation of KorTac. 

Hiring a professional cleaner for his house shouldn’t make him feel humiliated and embarrassed, and he knows it. Cleaners are basically like soldiers – doing stuff that other people can’t for a certain amount of money, providing services for the clients who can afford it. Besides, it’s a support of his local community – after everything he took from the people around his town, it’s only natural that he would support this growing business of cleaning services. 

There is no shame in having some nice old lady cleaning his house and watching over it while he is too busy trying not to kill himself or drown his head in liquor after a particularly rough mission. When you lose two guys on a run that was supposed to be the quickest task possible when you’re returning home with an injury that isn’t really that serious but brings your whole mental state into a very dark place, and when you’re forced to take 3 weeks of leave in the place you hate, hiring a cleaner to take care of everything really shouldn’t make him so ashamed of himself. 

Even if he can clean his space – the house is just too big for only one of him, and his ribs still have this funny feeling of fantom bullets traveling around his guts. So, he dials up the number of the cleaning services because he is too fucking old to understand their weird website and messenger ordering, even though speaking with a human operator on the other half of the line is somewhat more humiliating that having no idea of how to use a modern interface. 

There is no shame in asking for help, his therapist is trying to shrill it in his head all of the time and yet he is still hesitant when the cleaning professional is knocking on his door, finding this place surprisingly fast. König braces himself, thinking about all the ways he could avoid having a conversation – he drew a quick map of the place, put down the room cleaner shouldn’t be entering – his gun safe, mostly, already repeated in his head how he would greet them and swiftly extract himself from the situation. 

“Guten Tag, please, come in. This is the map of the place, don’t go to the red door on the right, don’t hesitate to ask questions, I will be on the second floor.” He takes a few wide, swift steps to his door and stops. Thinks again, overthinking, thinking too fucking much about everything, anxiously checking on his phone to read the message that yes, his cleaner is here and he should probably open the door or they would burst down the window. “Guten Tag, come in. Map of the place is here, don’t go to the red door to the right, please hesitate to ask questions, I will be somewhere around the house, lurking in the shadows” He braces himself to open the door, ready to see that sweet old lady who would spend the next 8 hours cleaning his house and then turn back another day to rinse and repeat until his house stopped looking like a place where a very, very miserable man lives. (Even if this is true) 

But, there isn’t a nice old lady with a bunch of cleaning supplies and determination to make someone’s life easier. 

But, there isn’t a cold middle-aged woman with a very professional no-nonsense attitude who wouldn’t even talk to him before going straight to work. 

But, there is a young girl. Well, not a girl, of course, if he had to guess you were somewhere around the “Too fucking young, but definitely legal” spectrum. Young enough to not be alive when he was already going to school, young enough to make him sweat, and definitely not old enough to be accepting a job where you’d have to spend so much of your life cleaning and scrubbing and sorting and…

There isn’t anything shameful in ordering a cleaning service when you genuinely need it, but you’re young and you’re pretty and he isn’t even wearing a mask because he is an old dumbass that forgot about it, and you look at him with your shiny eyes and…

Maybe, he should clean on his own – would definitely be less shameful. 

— Sir? H…hello? Good morning? Can you hear me? 

Yes, he can hear you. 

Yes, he would love to hear you every single day of his life, when he wakes up and when he falls asleep. 

— Ja. I apologize, I…thought it was mail. 

It’s a dumb excuse, but he can’t really say that he was just too fucking mesmerized by your shiny eyes and perfect hair and nice figure and basically everything about you. He has this nasty habit of imagining a future with people around him – with people who just fucking want to be left alone, and yet he still stares and looks and it’s probably ultra uncomfortable for them – but he can’t help imagining the life with every cute lady in the grocery shop or elegant lady sitting next to him on a train. 

He has a pattern – people who are not interested in him in the slightest. He has a pattern, a preference, cute girls, smart girls, popular ladies that were never even so much as looking in his direction. He could probably score someone now, having a colonel’s salary and honorably discharged payments, but he gave up on trying to find anyone. He has friends, company, has work where he spent most of his life anyway – he doesn’t need anyone, he wants to think. 

Then you waddle into his life with a bunch of cleaning supplies and a small vacuum, barely able to handle everything in your hands. He rushes to help and envelops your hands with his – you are so much smaller in comparison, he has bear-like arms and horribly big everything. he feels awkward when he gently removes everything from your arms – when he tries to help by simply putting everything on the table of the next room. 

König hated this house – it was big, it was empty, and the only reason he didn’t sell it was because Mother’s things were still locked in her old bedroom and every time he tried to clean it and evaluate the cost of the house, he decided that he will Do It Other Day. Coincidentally, all of those days were also followed by three-month minimum missions, making him utterly unable to do everything about this place anyway. 

This is why you’re here – a hired cleaner, a sorter, you promised to de-hoard everything and see if there is anything of value. Perfect for someone like him, especially since he is paying you double for spending the whole day and a few days more in his house exclusively. 

Now, he looks at how awkward your smile is, how you fidget with the edge of the broom you brought, and how you can’t even start a conversation because he is simply staring at you, staying in the living room of this dead, almost abandoned house. Now, he looks at how cute you are, how perfect, and remembers that he didn’t score with anyone in half a year already – not even in terms of sex, the casual flirting was also forbidden since half of his unit was transferred and the new people weren’t really fun of his tough methods of breaking rookies in. 

When was the last time someone genuinely smiled at him? 

Ah, he is staring again. Scheisse. 

— Where do you want me to start, sir? 

He wonders how much he should pay you to clean him instead. Would you be gentle? Rough? Would you call him a pervert, which he is, and then slap him and yell at him for being such a horrible old dog who is ready to pounce at every pretty girl in his presence? He would do anything that would set his mind free of the thought about Mom. Her bedroom. This whole house that he can’t call home ever since he turned 6 and understood why Father was always so, so angry. 

— The living room. If it’s not too much. 

He barely stops himself from talking more – you look weird, you loom surprised, you look at him like he is fucking stupid and, in fact, he is. Of course, it wouldn’t be too hard for you, you’re his clean, for fucks sake. You come here to clean, you get good money for it, he shouldn’t feel guilty for using your services because, in some way, he actually provides you with a job and a cute thing like you shouldn’t go to other houses, with old perverts that can do unspeakable things with the adorable worker. 

Ah, yes, perverts like him. God, he is hopeless. 

— Alright. Do you want to note something, like if there is anything I shouldn’t touch? 

He would allow you to take your adorable, yellow glow-wearing hands to get into his personal savings and all of his bank accounts, if you’d want to. He curses under his breath, hating how professional you are – hard worker, perfect, simply a fantastic person who deserves more than working for him. You aren’t trying to shy away from the job and he almost resents you for it. 

You’d make a good soldier, he thinks – you’re able to hear the orders and oblige to them, you’re obedient and came even before the discussed time. You’d make such a perfect private for his unit, he observes. 

Ah, right, he was supposed to answer you. Shit. 

— No. Just don’t go to the second room on the left. 

— Alright. Anything else? 

He grumbles under his breath, trying to get into the right headspace to deal with someone like you. König knows it’s rude, to just ignore and leave you like this – but if he were to stay in he same room as you, he would do something horrible, disgusting, and completely dishonorable to you. So, he leaves – escapes – to his office. Father’s office, mostly, the only thing here that belongs to him are some documents and useless papers – and a laptop that he drags to every other room anyway. 

He doesn’t like this room, it reminds him of the worst episodes of his early childhood – yet, this is his only reserve. He doesn’t want to leave the house because the territory is secluded and if something were to happen to you, he would be the only one able to help. He also doesn’t want to leave his gun collection with you – he doesn’t want you to find it and freak out or hurt yourself. 

This is what he tells himself, at least. He wants to be there with you, in the same room preferably, but horrible for his anxiety, because he wants this illusion, phantasm of having a loving relationship. Of having a woman in his life, a lovely housewife who would cook for him, clean for him, and would be absolutely spoiled with gifts and attention. God knows he doesn’t have a romantic bone in his body – but he will carve one out of his ribs for you. 

And he only knew you for an hour tops. 

König feels like literally the worst man alive when he spread his legs and starts stroking his hard, glistening cock. He brushes over the swollen, red tip, not allowing himself to have any lube other than spit and oozing pre-cum – he tries not to cum embarrassingly quickly, thinking about your perfect gestures and smiling face. How perfect you look in your cleaning uniform – not like maids from the occasional porn he was watching, but still beautiful. Your body is perfect even with all of those ugly layers and grey fabric – and he can’t stop thinking about the sway of your hips or glimpses of your legs under your dress.

He thinks about you, bent over his couch, trying to clean the especially dirty spot on the furniture – how the material of your dress would be tight around your ass. The image makes him grunt quietly, stroking his barely wet dick even more – the pain from the dry sensation only makes the pleasure all the sweeter. He is hard, was hard for the past 10 minutes as you were introducing yourself and whatever your deal is. He is dirty, perverted, knowing only your name and your face – and he is still stroking himself, thinking about paying you extra just so you’d get on your pretty knees and suck him. Would you be sloppy, messy, get his cum all over your face so you’d have to wash it off? Would you be experienced, eager, trying to get as much seed as possible with that pretty tongue of yours? 

He is a lost cause because he hears the sounds of vacuum – you’re only a few rooms away from him, trying so hard to clean his house for him, to work through every bit of furniture and everything he acquired for the past twenty years or so – and he moans loudly, knowing that you don’t hear anything. You’re probably listening to music or some silly girl’s podcast about planets and gardens and maybe some university lectures. He’d pay for your courses, he would get you any book you want – having his salary and barely spending it made him softer in the saving habits. 

He can afford to splurge on a pretty girl who just needs a rich Austrian mercenary to sweep her off her feet. But, he is old – but, he is a monster who preys on someone helpless, using her pretty face to jerk himself off, and he doesn’t even deserve your number, although he has had it since accepting the service. 

His cock is big, angry red in his hand as he runs his finger over the bulging vein, teasing the sensitive flesh – always loud in bed, with grunts and moans of pleasure, he can barely contain himself now, only forcing his mouth shut when he doesn’t hear the sound of vacuum anymore. He strokes his dick fast, angry, and slams it into his fist, trying to make the pain last longer, so he won’t cum after a minute or two. He has the stamina to last longer – but it’s also the first time he was so horny since…he can’t even remember. 

König thinks about putting you in his bed – like a perfect housewife, you would hug his waist with your legs, would allow him to lick and grope at your tits, and won’t scream too much when he’d force his tongue inside of your precious pussy, taking every last drop of your pleasure. He wouldn’t want to be forceful, angry, you’re too precious for this and too weak for his strength – but he can imagine slamming into you in a matting press, cumming inside and not even pulling out, warming his cock in the heat of your body. 

Father would kill him for doing something so dirty in his office – but he is long dead, devil save his soul, and it’s König’s office now. Even when he barely uses it, even if he doesn’t really need this. It came in handy when he had to jerk off to the pretty cleaning girl who cleaned up after him – so, somehow, his father managed to improve his mood 15 years after he died. 

He cums with a low groan, whispering your name – he doesn’t understand how a pretty thing like you still works here and wasn’t taken by someone else already, but he would take what he can get. Never the one to get the first dibs, never being someone’s first choice – he feels terrible for thinking about you in such a low way, but his pleasure sticks to his fingers and, at this point, it’s too late to feel bad. 

Drying the tip of his dick with a tissue, he spends a good few minutes with spread legs, his soft cock laying on the chair, with cum still oozing out – such a waste, honestly, would be much better to stuff you full of his cock or even take your pretty ass, spread you slowly. Keep only the tip in, not pressuring you into anything more until you’d start moving yourself, like a good slut you will be. 

So perfect under him – the images and sounds of your voice are running through his mind, making him breathe heavily. If he was younger and had as much sex drive as before, he would already be hard – but he needs some time to relax, thinking about your pretty legs and adorable face. 

It takes him a few minutes of listening to your sweet voice to understand that you were not, in fact, a hallucination or a mystical fairy coming to make him come. You were standing outside of the office door, looking embarrassed and clearly hearing at least some of his horny mumblings – you avoid looking at him, and your fingers are trembling when you tug at the sides of your dress. Guilt immediately rushes to him again, he looks at you like a perfect treasure you are – and he is a horrible monster trying to hoard all of it to himself. 

— What is it, liebling? 

Petname goes smoothly from his tongue and he can only hope that you don’t know German – he is too embarrassed to talk to you, too anxious, his newfound shyness is a result of both your beauty and the post-nut clarity that already made him feel like a monster. He contemplates just giving you money and sending you off, paying double for the false call, and leaving you a 5-star review so you won’t get in trouble with your boss. 

You look so meek from his angle of view – he has to fight the urge to pinch your face, squeeze your cheeks, grab your waist in his firm hands, and just lift you in his arms, holding you to his bed. Maybe getting a nice set of cuffs to ensure you would never escape from him. 

— I finished with the living room and…well, I just wanted to ask if you want the decluttering work to be done today or tomorrow. 

He remembers how he basically paid you for a few days worth of work – and he smiles at exactly how perfect this decision was. Of course, you are a smart girl, a modest girl, you aren’t staying the night and would rather waste time on the road, much to his dismay, but at least he would see you for a few days already. 

He might not even let you go after. 

— Ach. Today, if it’s not too…

He stops himself again – of course, it’s not too much, you are a professional, not just a friend that comes to clean his place for a pack of beer and maybe some pizza. He doesn’t know how to talk to you, anxiety eats him whole, and he has to just avoid looking at you to avoid further embarrassment. 

— Alright. I will do it right away then. 

You smile awkwardly, your lips are twitching and he already knows that you could hear him moaning your name and sweet little praises while stroking his cock. You aren’t biting the hand that feeds you, not running away screaming at how perverted he is – poor girl, you probably need money more than you need personal safety if you’re fine with him heaving like this. If you were his, he would never allow you to be so careless. 

He moves behind you in the most dreaded room of the house. Mother’s bedroom, a room that she only used for sewing and only allowed him in when he was extra whiny after another failed fight with his bullies. All of her thighs are here – ever since she passed away, he just moved everything to one room and locked it, barely bothering to keep a key. He hates being here, almost as much as being in Father’s office — this room smells like death and old paper and you scrunch your nose in an adorable expression when you take a step inside. 

— I will divide everything into categories, alright? 

— Gut.

You look at him nervously, clearly scared that he is watching over you now. It might feel like a logical decision – after all, it was his mother’s vintage things, who knows what kind of jewelry she kept here, something that he won’t even notice gone until it’s too late. You and him both know, however, that this isn’t the reason he is looming over you. A perfect obedient thing, you deserve something better than his affection, but he still locks his gaze with yours, looking at your hands and going through various furniture pieces. 

You work like a fairy, not an ounce of laziness or exhaustion in your actions – even after you already spent a few hours cleaning his living room, you act like a Cinderella that got a bunch of magic mice up her rags. He licks his lips, looking at your perfect ass you as sit on your knees, starting with decluttering every little box there is. 

— Can I just put it back in boxes or…

You look the the contents – vintage makeup, some jewelry, head pieces that don’t look particularly expensive but were definitely well-loved. You wonder who they belong to – probably a wife, or, maybe, some of his relatives who lived here. He doesn’t seem like a married or divorced man – he does, however, look insanely lonely. 

It takes him a good few seconds to respond, too mesmerized by the little song you were humming a minute before. He imagines you in that old, chunky jewelry, some necklaces that cost more than your salary – and the thought makes him salivate. 

He smiles, leaning closer to you – hot breath on your face, you shift immediately, scared. He is so fast for someone so big, his movements are perfect and his eyes are cold – you feel the chill deep in your bones when he moves even closer, his lips almost brushing against yours. 

Suddenly, you are very aware of the fact that he locked the door to this tiny room when you both moved in. 

[chase-prairie]

NOW HIRING - Special Projects Assistant

Chicago Residency at time of job start required

Join the Rethinking Lawns Research Team (http://rethinkinglawns.com) and study the impacts of lawns and their potential alternatives in Chicago! Lead field experiments, manage experimental sites, and collect and manage data. Ideal candidate will have experience in project coordination and ecological field work.

Full description under the cut!

The Chicago Park District is seeking an experienced candidate to join our Natural Areas team, a part of the Park District’s Department of Cultural and Natural Resources. The Special Projects Assistant will be a member of the Rethinking Lawns project, a multi-disciplinary team exploring the ecological and ecosystem services benefits of traditional lawns, natural areas, and native, short-statured lawn replacement plantings. More information about the project can be found at rethinkinglawns.com. The ideal candidate will have experience in project coordination and ecological field work, preferably in a leadership capacity.

Key responsibilities include leading a team of seasonal research assistants in collecting data on plant cover, pollinator visitation, water infiltration, temperature, and soils at sites throughout Chicago and at the Chicago Botanic Garden. The Special Projects Assistant will participate in regular project coordination meetings with the research team, and oversee scheduling, coordination, communication, and data entry. They will also regularly interact with landscaping contractors, colleagues and the project team regarding installation and maintenance of plantings. Exceptional candidates will have some experience in data management, and analysis using R, and/or GIS. There are opportunities to present at local and national conferences. Local travel to field sites is required.

Desired Qualifications:

Bachelor's degree in Biology, Environmental Science, or a related field, or a combination of education and experience.

Knowledge of ecological principles and practices.

Ability to research information and prepare clear written or oral reports.

Ability to relate to field personnel and community groups, particularly in an urban setting.

Data entry, writing, computer skills.

Knowledge of contemporary research and communication practices. 

City of Chicago residency is required at time of job start.

This position is based out of North Park Village (5801 N. Pulaski Rd.) and includes frequent citywide travel.

[unsolicited-opinions]

I used to run a doctor's office. If your doctor's office hasn't explained this to you, let me do it for them.

You probably don't know how much time your doctor and their staff spend fighting with insurance companies for routine, ordinary things. The stories you see online might leave you thinking that these fights are, if not rare, maybe occasional. A sometimes sort of challenge.

Nope.

It's every day. It's all day. Your doctor's office has employees who fight with insurance companies as a full time job.

This isn't an accident or a side effect of other market forces at work - this is the deliberate, calculated plan the insurance companies have chosen to implement. They know very well it is hurting patients and providers, and they're okay with that because their priority is to maximize ROI for investors and other stakeholders. They're in the business of business, and they don't give a single fuck about human beings or health care.

They've lowered reimbursements in primary care so effectively that primary care has only survived in many parts of the US by becoming a loss leader for larger health systems. You know how the local retail store gets you in the building by selling something at slightly below cost because they know you're likely to buy more once you're inside? It's like that, a loss leader.

The health system where you get your primary care often loses money when you see your PCP, but since your PCP refers you to speciality care inside their own organization, the system makes up the money when your doctor sends you to see their own systems' surgeons, endocrinologists, dermatologists, etc.

Smaller primary care practices literally can't survive. That's why there are almost no independent family doctors any longer. That's why it is so hard to see the same provider with consistency, someone with whom you can develop trust over time, who knows you and knows your challenges. United Healthcare and it's private healthcare insurance competitors have nearly finished killing off that kind of primary care.

Larger primary care practices (30-40 providers) might still be able to make ends meet independently through economies of scale and/or what they earn by doing their own lab/testing/imaging services in-house, but that won't work much longer if current trends continue. We're headed in the direction of just a handful of vertically integrated businesses running healthcare, and they are in the business of business, not health care.

The insurance companies deliberately create administrative barriers which make it expensive for your doctor's office to advocate for you because it moves administrative costs away from the insurance company and onto your doctor's office. This results in fewer paid claims when your doctor's office can't afford to hire another full time position whose only job is to argue with insurance companies and jump through their deliberately obstructive hoops. They want your PCP to be struggling to stay open. They want your PCP unable to afford the cost of overcoming the administrative burdens they have deliberately created for the purpose of denying you the health care your doctor thinks you need.

There are other words for this, but the most appropriate one is "evil."

I don't want to glorify murder or lionize Luigi Mangione, but Brian Thompson was a ghoul, his senior team are ghouls, and the for-profit health insurance industry is a disaster for Americans, even those Americans who don't yet see the problem affecting themselves. They will.

We need universal, single-payer health coverage, just like every other wealthy nation.

We're not going to get it any time soon, and things are about to get worse for healthcare in the US.

Set aside the damage RFK Jr is likely to do to an already patchwork public health system by attacking regulations and spreading misinformation. Let's look at other ways Trump and the GOP plan to worsen health care.

1. They're going to go after Medicare and Medicaid benefits. They'll seek to lower them and raise the bar which must be cleared to receive them.

2. They're going to seek to raise the age for social security benefits (above 70!), and reduce benefits paid, so the most financially vulnerable seniors will have greater out-of-pocket costs. Those seniors are going to struggle harder with out-of-pocket costs.

3. They're going to attempt to cripple the Affordable Care Act (AKA 'Obamacare'), despite the fact that the ACA has been a HUGE money maker for the private insurance companies.

4. This administration will be run by hyper capitalist billionaires. It will seek to deregulate wherever possible and promote supply-side economics (tax breaks for the rich and large corporations) at every opportunity. United Healthcare and its competitors, which already weild an obscene, horrific amount of control over US Healthcare, are about to get substantially more power.

It's bad, folks. It's a very bad time to be sick and it's going to get worse.

Alan Grayson was right in 2009. The Republican health care plan has been and remains:

* Don't get sick

* If you do get sick, die quickly.

[blogport]

EPOXYSHİNE - DRAGON+ (3)

Epoxy floor coating is not just a practical choice for enhancing the durability of your flooring; it's also a stylish solution that can transform any space. Whether you're a homeowner looking to revamp your garage or a business owner seeking reliable commercial flooring solutions, understanding the benefits of epoxy will help you make informed decisions. As you search for "floor polishing near me," consider how an expertly applied epoxy coating can elevate your interiors while providing a long-lasting finish. 

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Furthermore, the installation process for epoxy floor coating is relatively quick, often completed within a few days. However, it’s essential to hire professionals who have the expertise and equipment to ensure a flawless application. The right team will properly prepare the surface, allowing for optimal adhesion and longevity of the coating.

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[lurkingshan]

I have been thinking about @bengiyo's point about the way the set up of Love Sea allows Fort and Peat to play with their established dynamic, and wanted to expand on why I liked it so much. I already tossed off a facetious post about this while watching the other day, but let me be clear: I am so serious about the class disparity in this show and how it shifts the power dynamics behind the typical MAME pursuer behavior.

Mahasamut is a working class man who has been hired by a mutual friend to watch over Tongrak--providing him with transportation, housing, entertainment, and whatever else Rak wants. He is doing a job, and that knowledge is explicit between them. Most people would be kind to someone who is providing a service as a guide and caretaker, but from the moment he arrives, Rak treats Mut with disdain, as Ben details in his post. Rak is a prick who looks down on the place he is staying and the people in it. He assumes Mut can't understand him and makes rude and disrespectful comments right in front of his face. He assumes he can get anything he wants from Mut by throwing piddling sums of money at him. He assumes he can use Mut for sex. And so Mut plays the part Rak has assigned him.

Every instance of Mut being sarcastic or antagonistic toward Rak in this first episode is a direct response to how Rak is treating him. Rak assumes he can't communicate with him, so Mut continues speaking in a Southern dialect. Rak assumes he can buy him, so Mut teases him about stuff he can pay him for. Rak assumes Mut wants to have sex with him and he can use that to control him, so Mut fully puts on a "dumb local" performance and pretends to be amazed at his pale and hairless body (and yes, he also invokes colorism in that act, which I do not think was at all accidental, it's part of the point). Every moment of this is informed by their class disparity, the way Rak looks down on him for it, and the way Mut refuses to bow to that.

As all of this is going on, Mut is also genuinely taking care of Rak and doing the job he has been paid to do. And the incident on the boat was not an intentional instance of messing with Rak--he just went to get some clams and had no way to know that Rak would panic like that. As soon as he saw Rak was genuinely upset, he dropped the antagonism and comforted him, even apologizing for scaring him. Mut has good intentions and is doing what he has been asked to do while also not allowing an arrogant rich man to treat him like dirt. Rak is the person holding the true power in this pairing, and he need only treat Mut like a human being to get the same in return.

Let me just add as a final note that this is not the first time MAME has added a new layer to this antagonistic pursuer dynamic she tends to prefer in her romances. Wedding Plan was all about taking that dynamic and motivating it by a genuine queer experience, and I am glad to see her stories continuing to evolve.

[ladykailitha]

How I would do a sugar daddy/sugar baby AU. (I hope this doesn't awaken anything in me *side eyes the omegaverse*)

I've seen this well done in this fandom, I'm not saying I haven't, but of the ones I've seen they tend to be omegaverse or mafia/shady sugar daddy.

And I want thirty year old rockstar!Eddie with twink Steve. I said what I said. I think we forget that for the most part Steve isn't beefy. When he's "bulked" up, it's his clothing (Eddie's vest) or its his thighs that are "thicc". But Steve (Joe Kerry in particular out of the role) is thin.

So we have rockstar!Eddie with Corroded Coffin touring the country and doing a couple of dive bars because that's where they got their start and hitting up The Hideout, because again that's where they got their start.

Steve, who recently got kicked out of his parents house because he came out with liking men (gay, pan, bi don't care) and lost his job because again with the liking men thing (small town homophobia for the loss!)

So with his last twenty dollars, he decides to hit up on the local bar and drink away his troubles and maybe even get laid for a warm place to sleep tonight.

He gets dressed in his sluttiest clothes. Crop top, cut off booty shorts, sparkly blue sneaks.

Only he shows up on the night that Corroded Coffin is playing. After paying what he thought was a stiff cover charge (was actually a ticket to see the show) he gets in. He has less money than he hoped but he can only hope that someone is willing to buy him drinks.

He settles in next to the bar and realizes his mistake. The rest of the patrons are dressed in metal gear. Leather, black denim, and lots of chains. Steve doesn't just stick out, he sticks out like a prep in a metal concert.

But he can't afford to go anywhere else, and hopes he doesn't get too harassed tonight. So he keeps he head down and hopes of the best.

Only what he doesn't know is that he has caught the eye of the frontman and lead singer of Corroded Coffin, Eddie Munson. The fact that Steve stands out isn't a detriment, it's a perk.

He wants to find out everything about this boy who stumbled into his enclosure.

The rest of the band is rolling their eyes.

Eddie sends out one of the PAs to make sure that all of Steve's drinks go on Eddie's tab and spends the whole concert watching this guy.

After the concert Eddie sidles up to him and they get to talking. Immediately he picks up that Steve is not old enough to be there. So now he's worried he's under age.

They head out for a smoke and Steve admits that he's not twenty-five like the fake ID says, but nineteen. He shows Eddie his real ID as proof and Eddie is relieved.

They start making out and Eddie takes him to his hotel room to have sex.

In the morning, Eddie asks if he can take him home and Steve starts sobbing. He tells him about his shitty day with shitty parents and shitty boss.

And Eddie's bleeding heart immediately goes out to him and tells him to stay at the hotel for as long as he needs, order room service. Just no booze.

Steve pouts at that but agrees. That as long he stays at the hotel he won't buy booze on Eddie's dime.

Eddie gives Steve his phone number if he needs anything. He transfers the hotel room over to Steve's name, gives him a sultry kiss goodbye and leaves to finish his tour.

Steve doesn't have anywhere else to go and is not willing to look a gift horse in the mouth, so he stays at the hotel. He gets to spend time in the luxurious bathroom with it's fancy shampoos and conditioners and hot tub like bath.

He finds that Eddie keeps sending him clothes and jewelry and suddenly the rich life style that he had with his parents pales in comparison to the extravagant lifestyle Eddie is providing for him.

Through all this Steve is still looking for a job as he doesn't want to overstay his welcome. But news hadn't gotten around town that he was gay and even people he thought he could trust are telling him that they can't hire him.

Eventually he gives up. He talks to Eddie all the time and whenever he feels discouraged Eddie will send him something pretty to cheer him up.

Finally Steve catches the fairy that had been leaving things in his hotel room when he's in the shower or out on the town.

Her name is Robin Buckley and she's a summer intern. Her uncle knew a guy who knew a guy that got her the job. She actually loves it, but she has one more year of high school and her parents won't let her drop out to be a PA for a rockstar.

They're concerned that he'll take advantage of her. Robin thinks it's funny because she's gay. Steve thinks it's funny because Eddie's gay and not into under eighteen year olds.

He tells her his story and over the summer they become best friends. Robin had heard that the Harrington boy had run off so imagine her surprise when Eddie's management had her deliver things to his hotel room. Staying in a hotel room in Hawkins is hardly running away.

Eddie comes back and just continues to throw money and gifts at Steve but doesn't ask for sex again. It's not until Steve tells him that he didn't fuck Eddie for his money or even for a warm bed at that point when he went back to the hotel with him, it was because Eddie cared. And god was that sexy as hell.

When Robin graduates Eddie hires her to be Steve's PA and the pair of them get to travel the world with the band as besties.

ETA: Story here.

[thedisablednaturalist]

I dont know if it’s something youve been asked before, and i dont know how to really phrase my thoughts. But whats it like working in like environmental things well disabled? Have you met many, or any, other disabled people in the field? I’m 16, and ever since I was little I’ve had so much passion for environmental education in particular, and it was a field I wanted to go into for a long time. Sadly it seems like my body has other plans, I’m currently at a point where I might have to drop out of highschool because managing class and disability is too much, and so college feels impossible. And when it was mostly mental stuff I had thought about maybe joining americorps or something because it looked like they’ll take people with a ged and then I could still do work I care about, but I’ve only ever met one physically disabled person doing anything related to the environment and stuff (there’s a person with leg braces and a service dog who works at the local aquarium) so I never really get a chance to ask about this stuff

so idk, sorry if I’m rambling a lot and hard to understand. If it makes you feel any better I’ve cornered every environmental educator I’ve met the last year or so (and I go to a project based environmental charter school thing, so I meet a lot) and asked them a lot of questions too. Especially since my school encourages us to think about future careers and what skills we need

so idk, I want to know. What’s it like? Is it hard? What did you have to do to get the job you have now? Do you regret it, would you choose something different if you could go back? Do you have any advice?

I hope you’re having an ok day, and that I’m not too annoying, and thank you if you even took the time to read this far. -🌱

no no don't apologize, this is exactly what this blog is for. When I started my journey I couldn't find any outspoken disabled environmentalists or any resources for people like us. So I started this blog to compile resources and share what I've learned as my career has progressed. I want everyone regardless of physical or mental state to be able to pursue their passions in environmental science and conservation.

Honestly, this field has a long way to go still. Even big institutions like the Smithsonian haven't quite figured it out yet. But there is definitely a shift happening. I've been seeing so many more disabled young people interested in this field and its amazing. I saw another physically disabled student at the Smithsonian conservation biology institute when I visited as an alum a few weeks ago, and I believe I was one of if not the first person to attend as a wheelchair user (yeah they didn't know what to do with me 😮‍💨) I had a professor who directly singled me out for being a wheelchair user so you will unfortunately run into some bigots in this field.

However the federal government (im assuming you are in the US so apologies if you're not) especially during the Biden administration has been ramping up its hiring of Schedule A employees. Schedule A allows you to circumvent the competitive process through the WRP (workplace recruitment program) once you've graduated college (or GED). Schedule A can be provided by a doctor or disability counselor (My DARS office did mine, love DARS: it's free and every state has one). My manager is HOH as well as one of my new coworkers and I was of course recently hired by the EPA as well. The EPA is probably the most disability friendly place to work in our field, if not anywhere. It has its issues but I've been pretty much over-accommodated instead of under (sad I consider the minimum accommodations to feel excessive).

Here's some of the things I've learned so far:

1. My biggest advice to anyone your age wanting to get into this field is to volunteer volunteer volunteer!! You are most likely at a time where you can afford to work for free. Most environmental internships are unpaid unless you have prior experience with the organization. Try out a bunch of different experiences to find out what you like the most. I never would have thought I'd be a bug person until I did my first invertebrate stream assessment. I got into environmental science late in my college career so it took me a lot longer to figure out what I wanted to do. Get as much experience as you can while you are still supported by your parents and don't have to worry about things like rent or bills. Some organizations are trying to change this so people from lower incomes can still have the same opportunities, but it still has a ways to go. Notably zookeepers have to work either for free or for dirt cheap for a couple years before they get hired full time.

2. Be prepared to lose out on your dream job due to your disability(s). I'm going to be frank and not spout any of that "you can do anything you put your mind to" bullshit. Yes, most things CAN be done by anyone with the right accommodations, but in a field where a large percentage of the work is done physically, you will be unable to do some types of jobs. I'm not saying it's impossible to get your dream job with disabilities, but it's a very common experience for us. For example, I looked into working on a boat. In a perfect world, I'd be given limitless accommodations and time to rest but on a boat that is extremely difficult. You can't take sick days whenever you need them. This was the same thing I had to realize when I was offered my dream job in my dream location: A stream specialist field technician for the USGS in Portland Oregon. I absolutely loved working in the field, and yes there are many of us who do/did fieldwork using mobility aids. I miss fieldwork everyday. But I had to turn it down. I knew deep down I couldn't handle it, having scheduled in advance field excursions that I couldn't postpone, having to hike in difficult terrain in remote locations, even moving across the entire country, at least at the time, was improbable. I was barely holding on at my field job where I did have safety nets. I just couldn't justify the financial and physical strain as well as the risk if I wasn't able to do the job and became unemployed. It broke my heart to give it up and I'm still grieving. But I do enjoy my current job and it lets me prioritize my health. No longer do I just work and sleep because work would take up all my spoons. I've been drawing and gaming and spending more time with loved ones. It is an unfortunate fact of life that sometimes what we want isn't what we need. Being disabled means that sometimes we have to make hard decisions that abled people don't ever have to think about. It's part of the grieving process for those of us who were abled at some point. I can't speak on what it's like for those with lifelong disabilities from birth, but I know its hard for them too.

3. Ok yeah 2 was a huge bummer, but here's where it gets better: When one door with stairs closes, a door with a ramp opens. There will be other opportunities. This field isn't just fieldwork despite what most people think. You don't have to be a super strong ranger that can hike 20 miles in a day without breaking a sweat to do environmental work. The field needs people who take what the guys outside collect and analyze it, research it, visualize it, present on it, take care of it, write about it, archive it, make art of it, etc etc etc. There are so many organizations that need people who can do data analysis and administration. Working at a desk doesn't make you less of an environmentalist. Plus that's not all, you can work in a lab or work with smaller creatures like bugs or herps or fish or you could do botany or geology! You don't need to be able to go out and get them yourself to work with them. Being able to save energy during my workday allows me to pursue my passions like collecting bugs and swimming. I can volunteer with citizen science projects or conservation orgs and still do fieldwork, but because its not a job I can do it when I feel up to it, I don't have to push myself to keep going because I'm worried about being fired. I currently work as a data analyst for the EPA and I work mostly from home so I can do my work without suffering. Yea data analysis isn't my favorite thing in the world but your job doesn't have to be. Sometimes a job is something that makes you money so you can do your passions outside of it. But I am happy the work I do supports something I am passionate about (supporting states so they can clean up more sites and thus have cleaner water).

4. You'll have to learn how to advocate for yourself. Push against boundaries. Explore your options. Especially with doctors. You know yourself best, don't let anyone else define your boundaries for you, even me. If someone says you can't do something because of your disability, but you know that you actually can, tell them and be assertive about it. Many of us are seen as abrasive and rude, but to be a disabled person in a very abled centered world you gotta be. Don't let anyone hold you back because THEY feel uncomfortable. My coworkers at my old job were worried for me when I showed up to work with my crutches for the first time. But it actually made me BETTER at stream assessments (having four legs means you don't slip as much). I could do it even if I needed to take breaks and use mobility aids. Nowadays it's too much for me to be doing that but at the time it was within my limits. And sometimes, you'll overestimate yourself and end up flaring or hurting yourself. It's okay to make mistakes, it doesn't make you a bad person. At first you'll push through too much but as you learn your body's limits you'll get better at managing your disability. And sometimes a great memory is worth a week-long flare up. Its for YOU to decide what you can do.

That's all I can think of for now, I should probably get ready for bed soon. But just remember, there are more of us than they think and we can be capable, productive, and a benefit to the environmental movement no matter our ability or skills.

If you have anymore specific questions, or just need to talk, I'm always available (even if I might take a while to reply).

[ramblingoak]

Ratte Art

A little drabble set in an au where Omega runs a coffee shop called The Ghouls Den. (Thank you to the amazing @writingjourney for the art!)

~ Omega helps Copia deal with a customer that doesn't appreciate his latte art ~

Copia x GN Reader (coffeeshop au, background Terzo x Omega, nothing but fluff here, sfw, 1,300 words, not beta read)

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

Omega had owned The Ghouls Den for almost 10 years now. 

He named it after the mascot of the local college, a place that held a lot of sentimental value for him.  For almost four years he had been the captain of their rugby team.  It all came crashing down when he’d injured his knee and was told he wouldn’t be able to play his favorite sport ever again.  So he ended up being forced to fall back on the business degree he had half-heartedly been working on.  

The coffee shop was right on the edge of campus.  It was his favorite place to study and eventually the owner threw an apron at him and told him if he was gonna be there all the time he might as well earn some money.  So he slowly began to learn how to make all sorts of caffeinated beverages as well as all the ins and outs of running a coffee shop.  When he graduated the owner offered him a chance to buy the place and Omega couldn’t think of a reason to tell him no.

There was only one thing that would have stopped him from buying the place (besides a severe lack of money).  Although it wasn’t so much a thing as it was a person: Terzo Emeritus.  He and Omega had met in their first year of college and despite a rocky start it didn’t take long for them to realize they were meant for each other.  Terzo was there when Omega hurt his knee and had to face the harsh truth of never playing rugby again and Omega was there when Terzo’s father, Nihil, cut him off.

Thankfully Terzo was an extremely talented artist and with his income from selling his pieces to Omega’s income from The Ghouls Den they both lived a very comfortable life.  Terzo sometimes worked at the shop (although Omega would use the term ‘work’ very loosely), but the majority of the other employees were college students.  His newest employee was hired as a favor for Terzo.  He had waltzed into the shop one day dragging a guy behind him.  Omega had vaguely recognized him, but the sideburns and mustache were definitely new.

College is for experimentation afterall.  

He hadn’t been very confident in Copia’s barista abilities at first.  Or his customer service abilities.  The guy seemed way too anxious for his own good.  After a few extremely iffy shifts Omega had decided to schedule him with Aurora during the mornings.  The perfect companion for Copia while he learned the ropes. She was his best employee, personable and quick.  Although she was a terror with sprinkles and ever since she had started Omega had been forced to double his order for them every week to keep up with her.  

Omega’s biggest worry was how Copia would handle a rude customer.  Most of the folks that came in were pretty chill.  Everyone wanted to be nice to the people providing caffeine.  But every now and then you’d get someone that seemed to be itching for a fight no matter how stupid the reason was.  Unfortunately this morning would be the real test because Omega had been pulled out of his office by the shouts of a woman from the front of the shop.  She was squared off against Copia, wearing a business suit that probably cost more than his monthly rent.  He observed for a few moments to figure out what was going on and once he did, Omega had to turn around to hide his laughter.

“Why would I want a rat in my latte?!”

“Technically it’s on your latte.”

Poor Copia, he seemed genuinely bewildered as to why this woman didn’t like his latte art. 

“Rats are pests!  They’re disgusting!”

Copia immediately straightened up and squared his shoulders.

“Rats are actually some of the most intelligent and cleanest creatures in the world.”

“Well I still don’t want one on my latte.”  While Copia just stood frozen in place Omega could see her gear up and he knew the next thing out of her mouth was gonna involve asking for him so he decided to intervene.

“Is there something I can help you with?”

He had honed his customer service voice many years ago although anyone that knew him well enough could tell he was annoyed.  Aurora was definitely one of those because out of the corner of his eye he saw her turn around, her shoulders shaking with laughter. 

“Yes this idiot seems to think putting a picture of a rat on top of my latte was a good idea.”

He was really glad Terzo wasn’t here right now.  Terzo had a protective streak a mile wide when it came to Copia and Omega knew this woman would’ve been wearing the latte if he had heard her insult his little brother.  Omega was angry enough on his own and all of his fake niceties flew out the window.

“My apologies ma’am, I’m sorry you didn’t like the rat.  We’ll skip the art next time.”

“That’s all I get?  An apology?!  You’re not going to offer to fix it or even refund me?”  

The woman’s voice was getting more shrill with each word and the line of customers behind her was growing.  He always hated dealing with this shit, but he hated giving in to rude people more.   

“You want me to fix it?  Fine.”  Omega reached around Copia and grabbed a small straw.  He plunked it into the cup and gave it a quick stir.  As the poor rat disappeared Copia sighed next to him.  Omega clapped a hand on his back before addressing the woman again.  “There, the rat’s gone.  Next!”

No one in the shop moved for a moment as they waited to see what the woman would do.  Omega was really hoping he wouldn’t have to call campus security on her.  When she finally moved it was to dump the latte all over the counter.  With a frustrated growl she turned and started shoving past the other customers towards the door.  She had just made it outside when Aurora shoved her way in between Omega and Copia, shouting after her as loud as she could.

“Have the day you deserve!”  The woman’s gasp was cut off as the door shut behind her.  “What a bitch.  I can help the next customer!”

Aurora gave Copia a quick hug and then scooted back to her register.  Copia was quiet as he grabbed some towels and started to sop up the spilled mess.

“Hey, you ok Copia?” 

“Si, si.  I’m fine.”  

Omega was pretty sure he wasn’t fine, but he didn’t want to push.  

“Don’t let someone like that bother you.  They just enjoy making everyone around them miserable.”  Copia nodded as he finished wiping the counter off.  “But maybe don’t do any more rat art, ok?”

“Yeah, you’re prob—“

“Actually I’d love a rat on my latte!”  Omega, Copia and Aurora all turned to stare at the customer that had spoken up.  They actually appeared to be blushing a bit when their eyes met Copia’s.  With a little shrug they walked up to the counter.  “Rats are my favorite animal.”

Copia’s mouth fell open and Omega was pretty sure if this was a cartoon there would be hearts coming out of the younger Emeritus’s eyes.  Another good reason Terzo wasn’t here.  The teasing would be relentless.  Omega would have to use some of his old rugby moves to make sure Terzo didn’t try to “assist” his little brother with whatever this might be and judging by how Copia and the customer were looking at each other this was definitely going to be something.

Omega knocked his shoulder against Copia’s and gave him a wink when he looked up at him.    

“One ratte coming up.”

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

P.S. Ratte is rat in German (thank you again @writingjourney 🤣)

If you'd like to see more from this au let me know!

my masterlist

my ao3

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Twinkfrump Linkdump

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in CHICAGO (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Welcome to the seventeenth Pluralistic linkdump, a collection of all the miscellany that didn't make it into the week's newsletter, cunningly wrought together in a single edition that ranges from the first ISP to AI nonsense to labor organizing victories to the obituary of a brilliant scientist you should know a lot more about! Here's the other 16 dumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

If you're reading this (and you are!), it was delivered to you by an internet service provider. Today, the ISP industry is calcified, controlled by a handful of telcos and cable companies. But the idea of an "ISP" didn't come out of a giant telecommunications firm – it was created, in living memory, by excellent nerds who are still around.

Depending on how you reckon, The Little Garden was either the first or the second ISP in America. It was named after a Palo Alto Chinese restaurant frequented by its founders. To get a sense of that founding, read these excellent recollections by Tom Jennings, whose contributions include the seminal zine Homocore, the seminal networking protocol Fidonet, and the seminal third-party PC ROM, whence came Dell, Gateway, Compaq, and every other "PC clone" company.

The first installment describes how an informal co-op to network a few friends turned into a business almost by accident, with thousands of dollars flowing in and out of Jennings' bank account:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/TLG.html

And it describes how that ISP set a standard for neutrality, boldly declaring that "TLGnet exercises no control whatsoever over the content of the information." They introduced an idea of radical transparency, documenting their router configurations and other technical details and making them available to the public. They hired unskilled punk and queer kids from their communities and trained them to operate the network equipment they'd invented, customized or improvised.

In part two, Jennings talks about the evolution of TLG's radical business-plan: to offer unrestricted service, encouraging their customers to resell that service to people in their communities, having no lock-in, unbundling extra services including installation charges – the whole anti-enshittification enchilada:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/

I love Jennings and his work. I even gave him a little cameo in Picks and Shovels, the third Martin Hench novel, which will be out next winter. He's as lyrical a writer about technology as you could ask for, and he's also a brilliant engineer and thinker.

The Little Garden's founders and early power-users have all fleshed out Jennings' account of the birth of ISPs. Writing on his blog, David "DSHR" Rosenthal rounds up other histories from the likes of EFF co-founder John Gilmore and Tim Pozar:

https://blog.dshr.org/2024/04/the-little-garden.html

Rosenthal describes some of the more exotic shenanigans TLG got up to in order to do end-runs around the Bell system's onerous policies, hacking in the purest sense of the word, for example, by daisy-chaining together modems in regions with free local calling and then making "permanent local calls," with the modems staying online 24/7.

Enshittification came to the ISP business early and hit it hard. The cartel that controls your access to the internet today is a billion light-years away from the principled technologists who invented the industry with an ethos of care, access and fairness. Today's ISPs are bitterly opposed to Net Neutrality, the straightforward proposition that if you request some data, your ISP should send it to you as quickly and reliably as it can.

Instead, ISPs want to offer "slow-lanes" where they will relegate the whole internet, except for those companies that bribe the ISP to be delivered at normal speed. ISPs have a laughably transparent way of describing this: they say that they're allowing services to pay for "fast lanes" with priority access. This is the same as the giant grocery store that charges you extra unless you surrender your privacy with a "loyalty card" – and then says that they're offering a "discount" for loyal customers, rather than charging a premium to customers who don't want to be spied on.

The American business lobby loves this arrangement, and hates Net Neutrality. Having monopolized every sector of our economy, they are extremely fond of "winner take all" dynamics, and that's what a non-neutral ISP delivers: the biggest services with the deepest pockets get the most reliable delivery, which means that smaller services don't just have to be better than the big guys, they also have to be able to outbid them for "priority carriage."

If everything you get from your ISP is slow and janky, except for the dominant services, then the dominant services can skimp on quality and pocket the difference. That's the goal of every monopolist – not just to be too big to fail, but also too big to care.

Under the Trump administration, FCC chair Ajit Pai dismantled the Net Neutrality rule, colluding with American big business to rig the process. They accepted millions of obviously fake anti-Net Neutrality comments (one million identical comments from @pornhub.com addresses, comments from dead people, comments from sitting US Senators who support Net Neutrality) and declared open season on American internet users:

https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-issues-report-detailing-millions-fake-comments-revealing

Now, Biden's FCC is set to reinstate Net Neutrality – but with a "compromise" that will make mobile internet (which nearly all of use sometimes, and the poorest of us are reliant on) a swamp of anticompetitive practices:

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2024/04/harmful-5g-fast-lanes-are-coming-fcc-needs-stop-them

Under the proposed rule, mobile carriers will be able to put traffic to and from apps in the slow lane, and then extort bribes from preferred apps for normal speed and delivery. They'll rely on parts of the 5G standard to pull off this trick.

The ISP cartel and the FCC insist that this is fine because web traffic won't be degraded, but of course, every service is hellbent on pushing you into using apps instead of the web. That's because the web is an open platform, which means you can install ad- and privacy-blockers. More than half of web users have installed a blocker, making it the largest boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But reverse-engineering and modding an app is a legal minefield. Just removing the encryption from an app can trigger criminal penalties under Section 1201 of the DMCA, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine. An app is just a web-page skinned in enough IP that it's a felony to mod it.

Apps are enshittification's vanguard, and the fact that the FCC has found a way to make them even worse is perversely impressive. They're voting on this on April 25, and they have until April 24 to fix this. They should. They really should:

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-401676A1.pdf

In a just world, cheating ripoff ISPs would the top tech policy story. The operational practices of ISPs effect every single one us. We literally can't talk about tech policy without ISPs in the middle. But Net Neutrality is an also-ran in tech policy discourse, while AI – ugh ugh ugh – is the thing none of us can shut up about.

This, despite the fact that the most consequential AI applications sum up to serving as a kind of moral crumple-zone for shitty business practices. The point of AI isn't to replace customer service and other low-paid workers who have taken to demanding higher wages and better conditions – it's to fire those workers and replace them with chatbots that can't do their jobs. An AI salesdroid can't sell your boss a bot that can replace you, but they don't need to. They only have to convince your boss that the bot can do your job, even if it can't.

SF writer Karl Schroeder is one of the rare sf practitioners who grapples seriously with the future, a "strategic foresight" guy who somehow skirts the bullshit that is the field's hallmark:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

Writing on his blog, Schroeder describes the AI debates roiling the Association of Professional Futurists, and how it's sucking him into being an unwilling participant in the AI hype cycle:

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/dragged-into-the-ai-hype-cycle

Schroeder's piece is a thoughtful meditation on the relationship of SF's thought-experiments and parables about AI to the promises of AI hucksters, who promise that a) "general artificial intelligence" is just around the corner and that b) it will be worth trillions of dollars.

Schroeder – like other sf writers including Ted Chiang and Charlie Stross (and me) – comes to the conclusion that AI panic isn't about AI, it's about power. The artificial life-form devouring the planet and murdering our species is the limited liability corporation, and its substrate isn't silicon, it's us, human bodies:

What’s lying underneath all our anxieties about AGI is an anxiety that has nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence. Instead, it’s a manifestation of our growing awareness that our world is being stolen from under us. Last year’s estimate put the amount of wealth currently being transferred from the people who made it to an idle billionaire class at $5.2 trillion. Artificial General Intelligence whose environment is the server farms and sweatshops of this class is frightening only because of its capacity to accelerate this greatest of all heists.

After all, the business-case for AI is so very thin that the industry can only survive on a torrent of hype and nonsense – like claims that Amazon's "Grab and Go" stores used "AI" to monitor shoppers and automatically bill them for their purchases. In reality, the stores used thousands of low-paid Indian workers to monitor cameras and manually charge your card. This happens so often that Indian technologists joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

Isn't it funny how all the really promising AI applications are in domains that most of us aren't qualified to assess? Like the claim that Google's AI was producing millions of novel materials that will shortly revolutionize all forms of production, from construction to electronics to medical implants:

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

That's what Google's press-release claimed, anyway. But when two groups of experts actually pulled a representative sample of these "new materials" from the Deep Mind database, they found that none of these materials qualified as "credible, useful and novel":

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643

Writing about the researchers' findings for 404 Media, Jason Koebler cites Berkeley researchers who concluded that "no new materials have been discovered":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

The researchers say that AI data-mining for new materials is promising, but falls well short of Google's claim to be so transformative that it constitutes the "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge" and "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity."

AI hype keeps the bubble inflating, and for so long as it keeps blowing up, all those investors who've sunk their money into AI can tell themselves that they're rich. This is the essence of "a bezzle": "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

Among the best debezzlers of AI are the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy's Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, who edit the "AI Snake Oil" blog. Now, they've sold a book with the same title:

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-snake-oil-is-now-available-to

Obviously, books move a lot more slowly than blogs, and so Narayanan and Kapoor say their book will focus on the timeless elements of identifying and understanding AI snake oil:

In the book, we explain the crucial differences between types of AI, why people, companies, and governments are falling for AI snake oil, why AI can’t fix social media, and why we should be far more worried about what people will do with AI than about anything AI will do on its own. While generative AI is what drives press, predictive AI used in criminal justice, finance, healthcare, and other domains remains far more consequential in people’s lives. We discuss in depth how predictive AI can go wrong. We also warn of the dangers of a world where AI continues to be controlled by largely unaccountable big tech companies.

The book's out in September and it's up for pre-order now:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/ai-snake-oil-what-artificial-intelligence-can-do-what-it-can-t-and-how-to-tell-the-difference-arvind-narayanan/21324674

One of the weirder and worst side-effects of the AI hype bubble is that it has revived the belief that it's somehow possible for giant platforms to monitor all their users' speech and remove "harmful" speech. We've tried this for years, and when humans do it, it always ends with disfavored groups being censored, while dedicated trolls, harassers and monsters evade punishment:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

AI hype has led policy-makers to believe that we can deputize online services to spy on all their customers and block the bad ones without falling into this trap. Canada is on the verge of adopting Bill C-63, a "harmful content" regulation modeled on examples from the UK and Australia.

Writing on his blog, Canadian lawyer/activist/journalist Dimitri Lascaris describes the dire speech implications for C-63:

https://dimitrilascaris.org/2024/04/08/trudeaus-online-harms-bill-threatens-free-speech/

It's an excellent legal breakdown of the bill's provisions, but also a excellent analysis of how those provisions are likely to play out in the lives of Canadians, especially those advocating against genocide and taking other positions the that oppose the agenda of the government of the day.

Even if you like the Trudeau government and its policies, these powers will accrue to every Canadian government, including the presumptive (and inevitably, totally unhinged) near-future Conservative majority government of Pierre Poilievre.

It's been ten years since Martin Gilens and Benjamin I Page published their paper that concluded that governments make policies that are popular among elites, no matter how unpopular they are among the public:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Now, this is obviously depressing, but when you see it in action, it's kind of wild. The Biden administration has declared war on junk fees, from "resort fees" charged by hotels to the dozens of line-items added to your plane ticket, rental car, or even your rent check. In response, Republican politicians are climbing to their rear haunches and, using their actual human mouths, defending junk fees:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-12-republicans-objectively-pro-junk-fee/

Congressional Republicans are hell-bent on destroying the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's $8 cap on credit-card late-fees. Trump's presumptive running-mate Tim Scott is making this a campaign plank: "Vote for me and I will protect your credit-card company's right to screw you on fees!" He boasts about the lobbyists who asked him to take this position: champions of the public interest from the Consumer Bankers Association to the US Chamber of Commerce.

Banks stand to lose $10b/year from this rule (which means Americans stand to gain $10b/year from this rule). What's more, Scott's attempt to kill the rule is doomed to fail – there's just no procedural way it will fly. As David Dayen writes, "Not only does this vote put Republicans on the spot over junk fees, it’s a doomed vote, completely initiated by their own possible VP nominee."

This is an hilarious own-goal, one that only brings attention to a largely ignored – but extremely good – aspect of the Biden administration. As Adam Green of Bold Progressives told Dayen, "What’s been missing is opponents smoking themselves out and raising the volume of this fight so the public knows who is on their side."

The CFPB is a major bright spot in the Biden administration's record. They're doing all kind of innovative things, like making it easy for you to figure out which bank will give you the best deal and then letting you transfer your account and all its associated data, records and payments with a single click:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

And now, CFPB chair Rohit Chopra has given a speech laying out the agency's plan to outlaw data-brokers:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/prepared-remarks-of-cfpb-director-rohit-chopra-at-the-white-house-on-data-protection-and-national-security/

Yes, this is some good news! There is, in fact, good news in the world, bright spots amidst all the misery and terror. One of those bright spots? Labor.

Unions are back, baby. Not only do the vast majority of Americans favor unions, not only are new shops being unionized at rates not seen in generations, but also the largest unions are undergoing revolutions, with control being wrestled away from corrupt union bosses and given to the rank-and-file.

Many of us have heard about the high-profile victories to take back the UAW and Teamsters, but I hadn't heard about the internal struggles at the United Food and Commercial Workers, not until I read Hamilton Nolan's gripping account for In These Times:

https://inthesetimes.com/article/revolt-aisle-5-ufcw-grocery-workers-union

Nolan profiles Faye Guenther, president of UFCW Local 3000 and her successful and effective fight to bring a militant spirit back to the union, which represents a million grocery workers. Nolan describes the fight as "every bit as dramatic as any episode of Game of Thrones," and he's not wrong. This is an inspiring tale of working people taking power away from scumbag monopoly bosses and sellout fatcat leaders – and, in so doing, creating a institution that gets better wages, better working conditions, and a better economy, by helping to block giant grocery mergers like Kroger/Albertsons.

I like to end these linkdumps on an up note, so it feels weird to be closing out with an obituary, but I'd argue that any celebration of the long life and many accomplishments of my friend and mentor Anne Innis Dagg is an "up note."

I last wrote about Anne in 2020, on the release of a documentary about her work, "The Woman Who Loved Giraffes":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

As you might have guessed from the title of that doc, Anne was a biologist. She was the first woman scientist to do field-work on giraffes, and that work was so brilliant and fascinating that it kicked off the modern field of giraffology, which remains a woman-dominated specialty thanks to her tireless mentoring and support for the scientists that followed her.

Anne was also the world's most fearsome slayer of junk-science "evolutionary psychology," in which "scientists" invent unfalsifiable just-so stories that prove that some odious human characteristic is actually "natural" because it can be found somewhere in the animal kingdom (i.e., "Darling, please, it's not my fault that I'm fucking my grad students, it's the bonobos!").

Anne wrote a classic – and sadly out of print – book about this that I absolutely adore, not least for having one of the best titles I've ever encountered: "Love of Shopping" Is Not a Gene:

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/04/love-of-shopping-is-not-a-gene-exposing-junk-science-and-ideology-in-darwinian-psychology/

Anne was my advisor at the University of Waterloo, an institution that denied her tenure for fifty years, despite a brilliant academic career that rivaled that of her storied father, Harold Innis ("the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan"). The fact that Waterloo never recognized Anne is doubly shameful when you consider that she was awarded the Order of Canada:

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/queen-of-giraffes-among-new-order-of-canada-recipients-with-global-influence

Anne lived a brilliant live, struggling through adversity, never compromising on her principles, inspiring a vast number of students and colleagues. She lived to ninety one, and died earlier this month. Her ashes will be spread "on the breeding grounds of her beloved giraffes" in South Africa this summer:

https://obituaries.therecord.com/obituary/anne-innis-dagg-1089534658

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/13/goulash/#material-misstatement

Image: Valeva1010 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hungarian_Goulash_Recipe.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en