#revocs corporation

[selena-lunarbright]

Kiryuuin Ragyou's alt account

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@q3k@hackerspace.pl/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

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/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this press release from the Department of the Interior:

Following an extensive public process, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland today finalized the decision to retain protections for 28 million acres of public lands across Alaska, which many Alaska Native Tribes, Native Corporations and Tribal entities have noted are vital to protecting important natural, cultural and subsistence resources. Today’s action comes in response to the previous Administration’s unlawful decision in its final days to end the longstanding protections (known as withdrawals) without sufficient analysis of the potential impacts of such a decision on subsistence and other important resources, appropriate Tribal consultation, and without compliance with other legal requirements. This sweeping action would have opened millions of acres of public lands to extractive development activities, such as mining and oil and gas drilling, and removed the federal subsistence priority from millions of acres.

The previous Administration’s decision was put on hold to ensure full consideration of the potential impacts and allow for engagement with the public and Alaska Native communities. The robust public process gathered input from Alaska Native Tribes and Native Corporations, rural and urban communities, and the public, including 19 community meetings. During the public comment period, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) heard overwhelming support for retaining the withdrawals. In total, the BLM received approximately 15,000 public comments on the draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

“Tribal consultation must be treated as a requirement – not an option – when the federal government is making decisions that could irrevocably affect Tribal communities. I am grateful to the team at the Bureau of Land Management for taking the time to ensure that we approached this decision with the benefit of feedback from Alaska Native communities, and to the Tribal leaders who shared with us the impact that a potential revocation of the withdrawals would have on their people,” said Secretary Deb Haaland. “Continuing these essential protections, which have been in place for decades, will ensure continued access and use of these public lands now and in the future.”

Today’s announcement builds on the Biden-Harris administration’s actions to conserve millions of acres of lands and waters in Alaska, including implementing maximum protections for more than 13 million acres of Special Areas in the western Arctic, protecting approximately 2.8 million acres of the Beaufort Sea to place the entire United States Arctic Ocean off limits to new oil and gas leasing, and preventing irrevocable harms to Tribal subsistence uses and permafrost at the base of the iconic Brooks Range by rejecting the Ambler Road proposal.

These withdrawals, established pursuant to Section 17(d)(1) of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), stretch across BLM’s Bay, Bering Sea-Western Interior, East Alaska, Kobuk-Seward Peninsula and Ring of Fire planning areas.

Today’s decision does not impact acres already available for selection by eligible individuals under the Alaska Native Vietnam-era Veterans Land Allotment Program. Secretary Haaland has made these lands available to the approximately 1,900 Alaska Native Vietnam-era Veterans eligible to select their 160-acre land entitlement under the Dingell Act.

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]

So, there’s been a lot of talk about Wizards of the Coast’s leaked documents about their intent to repeal the Open Gaming Licence and whether their intent to do so retroactively is legal and/or will work. And hey, I’m a gaming blog, I can have my own two cents. Four years ago, Hasbro decided they were going to double the money they were making from their subsidiary company WotC in five years time. They did it in three years, so their response was to try double it again in another three years. If you ask a serious Magic The Gathering player how that’s been over the last few years they’ll probably have some opinions about how that’s been going for them. The continued extraction of every last cent from gamers has been building up for a while and there is no reason to believe it will slow down.  The OGL nonsense is clearly the latest in a series of desperate cash extraction measures because WotC kind of don’t have options. It’s mostly run and staffed by people who like the hobbies they sell and care about them, but when you’re owned by a giant corporation who’s shares are then mostly owned by big financial investment corps, you don’t get a choice. If you’re upset or confused about it, don’t give them any money and play other games that aren’t owned by WotC. Give your money and exposure to companies that aren’t pulling this shit and aren’t owned by megacorps who can pressure them into doing it in the future becuase they saw WotC get away with it. What does the OGL revocation mean for the future of D&D? If you get into a different system now, you won’t have to care. Dungeon World is practically open source so no chance of this happening there if you really want that sweet D&D flavour. If SJ Games was going to sell out hard they’d have done it a decade ago. World of Darkness is mostly not even made by racists anymore so we can enjoy those without being cancelled again. Or play second ed D&D from before it was aquired by WotC in the first place, which won’t be much fun but it will be funny.

[theambitiouswoman]

Hi!

Thanking for answering my ask,

If you don’t mind I would love it if you could get into the tax part, I just want to know as much as I can. 😆

Ok this is fun, prepare to have your mind blown.

I have to disclose that I am not a financial advisor or an accountant <3

Trusts: You want to consider purchasing the properties under a trust. Tax implications can vary under trusts. Revocable living trust will allow you to be treated as the owner, but in an irrevocable trust, it is a separate entity. In some structures, you would only pain capital gains, which can also be transferred to a separate trust, and you do not end up paying capital gains on the property. You do this with a charitable remainder trust. Generally, if a property is held in a trust, rental income generated from that property is typically subject to income tax. The trust itself may be responsible for paying those taxes, or the tax liability might pass through to the beneficiaries, depending on the type of trust and its specific provisions. This will change the amount you would pay in taxes. If the property was purchased as a primary home, there could also be capital gain exceptions depending on the trust. Your income affects the rates you pay on specific trusts. Before I continue, I want to suggest speaking to an actual attorney, not an accountant. Most are not knowledgable or equipped to properly guide you here. Same as with traditional, in a trust you can deduct property related expenses like mortgage interest, property taxes, maintenance costs, and depreciation, from the rental income. This can help reduce the taxable income generated by the property.

IRA's: You can use a self directed IRA or other retirement accounts to invest in real estate. The gain from these investments grow tax deferred within your account. This is something you should also consider doing.

Depreciating assets: Real estate can depreciate overtime. This doesn't include land. But when it depreciates, you can deduct the properties cost. This would offset the income you would pat taxes on.

1031 Exchange: Filing a 1031 will allow you to defer paying capital gains on an investment property when it's sold, as long as another "like kind" property is purchased with the profit gained from the sale.

Mortgage Interest Deduction: Interest paid on mortgages for investment properties can be deducted.

Carry Forward: If your expenses exceed your rental income, you could have a net loss. Some of these losses can be used to offset other taxable income, while others might be carried forward to future years.

Living in the property: If you live in the property for 2 years. you can exclude a portion of the capital gains from your taxable income when you sell.

Opportunity Zones: Opportunity zones offer tax incentives, including deferring and potentially reducing capital gains taxes.

Expenses: All repair expenses can be deducted.

Installments: You can structure your sale to receive payments over time. This spreads out the capital gains and reduces tax impact.

Tax Credits: There are a ton of tax credits for investors. Would research in your state.

More deductions: Interest on a mortgage for an investment property is typically tax deductible, as are property taxes and many other expenses related to the property like Insurance premiums.

Cost segregations: You can hire someone to reclassify certain areas of your property to accelerate depreciation. This will give you a significant upfront tax deduction.

Pass throughs: Certain pass through entities (like LLCs, S Corporations, and partnerships) may be eligible for a deduction of up to 20% of their business income from rental properties.

I can keep going on this, but strongly recommend you read these books:

Loopholes of the Rich: How the Rich Legally Make More Money and Pay Less Tax 

Tax-Free Wealth: How to Build Massive Wealth by Permanently Lowering Your Taxes 

[hunter-creature]

Trans Preparedness

I'm probably not the right kind of blog to be doing this, but I go a little crazy not having a plan. A friend set up a threat model and practical steps that can be made to prepare for it. If this kind of disaster preparedness might be too much for you do not force yourself to read through this. Keeping calm and healthy is paramount above all of this.

Legal documents

Ban on legal document changes, reversion of previous changes and invalidation of updated documents. This means potentially being outed any time you present your ID. If you do update your documents, this may make it impossible to cross the border and any other checkpoints (legal or extralegal), as your documents could be invalidated. Possible criminal fraud penalty, like in florida, making the continued use of an invalidated ID risky. Risk of revocation of all legal recognition of non-binary gender.

What you can do to prepare: Consider whether it would be best to have your legal documents match your true gender or your agab. If you can’t reliably pass as your true gender, it may be prudent to have your documents reflect your agab, in the event you need to go through a document checkpoint without arousing suspicion. Also, consider that, by changing your documents, you may end up “on a list”.

Anti-trans discrimination

Rollback of anti-discrimination protections in employment, healthcare, and harassment/hate crimes.

What you can do to prepare: If you work at a corporation/franchise/small business with republican ownership or coworkers, consider updating your résumé and looking for new employment. If you do land a new job, think carefully about whether to present as your true gender or your agab while at work. Be extra cautious about coming out at your job — only do so if you can’t reliably pass as either your true gender or your agab.

If possible, save money. Pick up extra shifts. Cut back on discretionary purchases. Cancel unnecessary subscriptions. Meal prep. Organize bulk purchases with your community to share costs and get better prices. Visit your local food pantry instead of the grocery store. Etc.

One possible safeguard against healthcare discrimination is to have your medical records updated to reflect a diagnosis of intersex, rather than transgender, if possible. I’m not privy to the details, but my understanding is that there are certain diagnostic codes, genetic tests, etc that can be used to mask your transgender status while maintaining access to the same treatments.

Healthcare restrictions

Introduction of insurmountable liability for healthcare providers and expansion of malpractice definition/enforcement to make providing trans healthcare impossible. Possible criminalization of doctors prescribing HRT. Possible criminalization of HRT possession/use. It will become impossible to access HRT, except through DIY. Possible discrepancies in enforcement between states, with red states imposing “bounty hunter laws” that allow anyone to sue a person who has taken HRT.

What you can do to prepare: If you have a legal prescription for your HRT, ask your provider for a 90-day prescription. Fill it as soon as possible, and refill it once before inauguration day. Consider rationing to extend your supply.

Start thinking about what you’ll do when your stockpile runs out. Look into DIY method of HRT. Plan how you can share the cost of supplies among your community to build a larger stockpile.

Bathroom bans

National bathroom ban with possible deputized citizenry/tiplines. Could be fines or criminal penalties (jail). Either way, this makes it near impossible to go out in public, even in blue areas, because all it takes is one transphobe to turn your life upside down. This applies whether you’re in the restroom for your true gender or your agab, since we can’t count on transphobes to be consistent with enforcement (i.e. you look visibly queer so someone calls the cops on you, even though you’re in the restroom of your agab).

What you can do to prepare: Consult the Refuge Bathrooms directory to find single-occupant restrooms near you. Also submit any single-occupant restrooms you come across to the Refuge Bathrooms directory to help out others in the future. If you need to go into a gender-segregated multi-occupant restroom, try to go with a buddy or in a group for safety. Choose which restroom to use based on your outward appearance, not your internal gender.

Drag bans

May define transgender people doing any form of performance as drag, including public speaking at an event or protest, or performing live music in a venue or on the street. Possible definition of transgender people merely existing as “sexually explicit drag” in many circumstances. Possible classification of transgender people as sex offenders under this premise. May bar trans people under threat of criminal penalty from entering government buildings, airports, and schools while dressed in accordance with their gender.

What you can do to prepare: If you’re comfortable and capable of doing so, work on “passing“ as your true gender through voice training, clothing choices, hair style, and makeup. If you can’t reliably pass as your true gender, consider wearing less attention-grabbing, looser-fit, gender-neutral clothing and finding other ways to express your gender. Even if you’re wearing more body-conforming clothes, consider carrying a baggy sweatshirt or jacket to conceal your secondary sex characteristics in an emergency. Consider assembling a set of clothes associated with your agab, as well as any accessories such as a binder or packer, in case you need to “stealth” as your agab.

Additional notes

Update your passport, ID, and vaccinations. Drink water. Hug your friends. We get through this together.

[racefortheironthrone]

Would you put Louis XIV as overrated?

Oof, that's a tough one.

It's particularly hard to answer because the reign of the Sun King also saw the tenure of some of the most influential chief ministers in French history: Mazarin, and Colbert.

While perhaps not quite as famous as a certain cardinal whose schemes kept getting foiled by the Three Musketeers, these guys were world-historically important.

Mazarin was Richelieu's political heir, and brought his predecessor's policy of using the Thirty Years War as a way to break the back of Hapsburg dominance to a successful conclusion. The Peace of Westphalia not only served as the foundation for modern international relations, but also expanded France's position in Alsace and the Rhineland - especially when Mazarin pulled off an anti-Hapsburg alliance with the new League of the Rhine.

At the same time that France was winning the Franco-Spanish War, which won them a big chunk of territory in the Low Countries around Artois, Luxembourg, and parts of Flanders, and all of the territory north of the Pyrenees Mountains including French Catalonia. It also got Louis XIV the hand of Maria Teresa, which would eventually create the catalyst for the War of Spanish Succession and the War of Austrian Succession...

And while Mazarin was doing all of this, he was also busy crushing the Fronde uprising led by le Grand Condé, which he eventually accomplished in 1653, and creating a formidble system of centralized royal government through the intendants that ended the power of the feudal nobility.

As for Colbert, he was the guy who figured out how to pay for all of this. The single biggest reason why economists need to shut the fuck up when they talk about mercantilism, Colbert was the financial and economic genius of his age. Remember all those canals I'm so crazy about? Colbert built them. Specifically, he was responsible for the Canal des Deux Mers, transforming France's economy by linking the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.

He also turbo-charged France's economic development by restructing public debt to reduce interest payments and cracking down on tax farmers, reforming (although not ultimately solving) the taxation system of the Ancien Régime by using indirect taxes to get around tax evasion by the First and Second Estate, equalizing (but not ending) internal customs duties, and putting the power of the state into supporting French commerce and manufacturing. This included significant tariffs to support domestic producers, direct public investments into lace and silk manufacturing, and the creation of joint-stock corporations like the French East India Company. (This also meant Colbert's direct promotion of the slave trade and the Code Noir in order to generate hugely profitable investments in Haitian sugar and tobacco plantations for import into France and the rest of Europe.)

This makes it a little difficult to separate out what credit belongs to these guys versus the guy who hired them. What I can say is that Louis was directly responsible for Versailles, but also for the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

[sourcreammachine]

REFORM PARTY "MANIFESTO" 2024 SUMMARY

they say it ain't a manifesto even though it is. they're tryna pretend they're not politicians even though they are. their reasoning is that they know they won't be the next government, so this is what they'd push for as opposition members - just like in the manifestos of the greens, SNP etc. but anyway, this "contract" of theirs is scant and they're running a vibes-based campaign. you don't need to see any actual policies, no no no. you already know if they're for you or not. oh, and if you think they're for you - just like all far right parties, they ain't: they're for capital, they're for vested interests, they're for cruelty. they're for the classic quasi-accelerationist burnout cycle that'll weaken the base of society and the economy and ruin fucking everything. but hey, at least there won't be no immigrants. i'm so sorry if you see them as the future: they're taking you for a ride just as you've been used time and time again, because there is no clearly accessible political solution to improving your material conditions as current politics stand, i'm sorry - that is, within the paradigm you know - there're answers just outside the tunnel-vision you've been forced into. why not take a look sometime. who knows, you might find some hope.

i'm not shitting you, though. the manifesto is not long. go read it. see for yourself the draconian horror they advocate, and will push for these five years, and will endorse with the hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of Short Money coming their way after they get into parliament. this isn't a 2015 UKIP moment, a single-issue agenda that'll flame out. even if they fail in their 2029 campaign with no votes against the tories to count on, these ideas and their influence are here to stay for the medium-term now. even if we remove the rosethorn it'll keep bleeding and bleeding and bleeding

yeah, on account of the scantness, these policies are vague. they're much more like ideas rather than proposals. the general nonsense of them has been fact-checked time and time again so i won't bother. here's just a summary of their rambling ephemeral suggestions

💷ECONOMY

revoke benefits after four months, MANDATORY acceptance of the second job offer on pain of benefit revocation, make all eligibility capability assessments in-person, mandating medical assessments, to catastrophically reduce disability benefit entitlements

raise the personal allowance to §20k/a, cutting individual taxation by §1600/a. raise it to §25k for the married

raise the second band of income tax from about §50k to §70k cutting an ABHORRENT amount of tax from the upper-middle class, far far far far far more than the tax cuts on §20k-earners

leave the World Economic Forum, plummet corporation tax from its already international tax-haven low levels, abolish any business tax for "high-street based" small businesses to create a new class of fat cat burghers, VAT refund for businesses making under §150k/a profit no matter what it is they're flogging

revoke european trade agreements and collapse trade with the mainland

massive tax breaks for defence contractors

'frontload' the child benefit system, plunging it after the child turns four

pour money into giving tourists a full refund on VAT

surge the inheritance tax threshold to §2m BUT "allow the money to be donated to charity instead" (ie allowing massive loophole scams)

massive deregulation, including on the regulation of business and employment laws as "we must make it easier to hire and fire". the manifesto also whines about "6700 eu laws" that still stand, but whines and moves on, implying a mass unbounded deregulation of industry

🏥PUBLIC SERVICES

abolish the NHS and replace it with a private voucher system

catastrophic austerity: every government department to be removed of a 5% of its funding that it must account for itself, reducing spending across the board without central planning or oversight

catastrophic statecapture: abolish civil service leadership and replace them with politicised government appointees "from the private sector"

catastrophic hike on university entry requirements and mandate many be cut to two years

catastrophic privatisation of the remaining public healthcare with surge in outsourcing and contracting, 20% total tax relief for private healthcare

statecapture the BBC with full nationalisation

comprehensive curriculum audit to impose "patriotic education": mandate "any teaching about a period or example of british or european imperialism or slavery must be paired with the teaching of a non-european occurrence of the same to ensure balance", teach children about "their heritage"

public inquiry on "the harm of vaccines"

leave the WHO

end the exemption private schools from the 20% VAT. wait, wait no hang on i've got that wrong. oh right yeah, that's labour's policy, sorry. reform says to impose a 20% TAX RELIEF ON PRIVATE SCHOOLS. sorry peasants, your tax money is funding Eton now

🏠HOUSING

catastrophic tax breaks for small landlords

revoke the renters reform bill

abolish stamp duty (the tax on the buying of homes) under §750k and plummet it above that mark, allowing obscene wealth transfers, massive property buyup, catastrophic housing supply saturation, and the annihilation of first-time buying

🚄TRANSPORT ?

ban and abolish low emission zones

ban and abolish low traffic neighbourhoods

ban and abolish all 20mph zones except outside schools

lower petrol tax

👮FORCE

abolish the human rights act

abolish the equality act

leave the european convention on human rights

freeze "non-essential immigration", and they do not elaborate what they mean or what the policy definition is to be. so they're just gonna be rambling about ephemera to kingdom come. that's the game they're playing

10% HEAD TAX ON IMMIGRANTS via additional national insurance charge

REVOCATION OF CITIZENSHIP FROM IMMIGRANT UK CITIZENS COMMITTED OF CRIMES, without specifying whether or not this applies only to dual-citizens, meaning reform supports the mass imposition of STATELESS status, A GRAVE AND ABHORRENT CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

invade france. i'm being serious. they'd intercept and arrest small-boat crossers and 'take them back to france', violating french territorial sovereignty on both land and sea via the use of force, gravely violating international law against our neighbour

FORTY THOUSAND new police in five years, around 25% more, massively prioritise pipelining ex-military officers and enlistees into the police, abolish PCSOs and make them regular broken-windows police

labour camps for young offenders

create a US-style coast guard and begin routine patrols for migrants or foreign fishers

surge armed forces funding by the highest amount proposed by any party

"stop Sharia law being used in the UK", ie draconian monitoring of mosques, muslim community organisations, the palestine movement, and any muslim

absolute prohibition on asylum applications from "safe countries", sentencing desperate seekers to political persecution and death by mere categorical definition

increase stop-and-search powers, mandates and centrality in policing tactics, pursue broken windows policing,

MANDATORY MINIMUM OF LIFE for second violent/serious offences or ANY drug dealing, new offence for 'substantial possession of drugs'

catastrophically demolish the legalised definition of hatecrime to de facto prevent its use for any prosecution

mass prison building, convert disused military bases into prison camps

bad internet bill: massive inquiry into 'child social media use' (under their watch requiring catastrophic restrictions), renew the online safety bill as "social media giants that push baseless transgender ideology and divisive critical race theory should have no role in regulating free speech"

abolish the northern ireland framework, seemingly unilaterally, paving the way for a hard border and blowing the starting whistle on The Troubles 2

speaking of which: exempt the armed forces from human rights law

catastrophically plummet the number of student visas and prohibit international students with dependents

end funding for european defence programmes. sorry estonia looks like you're lost. oh also "the west provoked putin" so there's that

require the licensing of foreign trawlers in the eez, beginning a cold war with iceland

halve international development / foreign aid funding from its already tiny budget, with specific mention of "global quangos" (literally how many centuries has it been and antisemitism is STILL invoked by these pillocks)

🌱ECOCIDE

repeal every penny of green investment

abolish all emissions targets including for all public services

abolish all renewable energy subsidies

mandate the use of fertile land for farming, ban natural england from protecting 'farmland' land, end and ban all rewinding programmes

abolish environmental levies

catastrophic surge on oil/gas licensing and open new lithium and coal mines, and support biomass/biofuel

🗳️DEMOCRACY ?

begin trumpist restriction on the ability to vote

abolish all postal voting apart from the elderly and disabled

keep voter ID

"legislate to stop left-wing bias and politically correct ideology"

proportional commons and elected senate

🏳️‍⚧️REACTIONARY AGENDA not otherwise covered

for all transgender schoolchildren who have not been permitted a gender recognition certificate: prohibit the use of correct pronouns by any teacher, prohibit the recognition of social transitioning by any teacher, and require mandatory outing to their parents

ban all unisex toilets

"cut funding to universities that undermine free speech", with no clarification, meaning they get to bully anyone they chose

abolish the public health observatory on racial health disparities

look, yeah. the manifesto is short, their purview is open. the door is not shut. everything is on the table. their one, two, three or more MPs are going to be using your tax money to advocate anything and anything that harms migrants, queer and trans people. nonwhite citizens and any annoying political movement can and will be fair game for total attack and political annihilation. wherever the transphobic tornado goes next they will join in. it is going to be a dangerous time for us. they are going to push for absolutely anything they can to harm trans people. your country. your money. your responsibility to fight them. that is what democracy is

[eretzyisrael]

by Dion J. Pierre

McGill University in Quebec, Canada has banned its Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) chapter from using the school’s name after the campus group posted on social media a statement that cheered Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.

SPHR described Hamas’ atrocities — which included the murder of 1,200 people, numerous rapes, and taking 240 people hostage — as “heroic.”

“The university cannot be, or seen to be, associated with a celebration of the taking of civilian hostages,” university spokesperson Susan Murley told The Montreal Gazette. “This post by SPHR was antithetical to the university’s values and stands to undermine the important work aimed at bringing our community together through the Initiative Against Islamophobia and Antisemitism.”

Murley added: “The university has clearly indicated to the SSMU [Students’ Society of McGill University] that the revocation should not be interpreted as the university taking a position on the Middle East and emphasized that the university would act in exactly the same manner in regard to any club that used the McGill name when posting content of a similar nature.”

SPHR — a Canadian equivalent of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) that earlier this month accused school officials of having “the blood of 20 000 [sic] Palestinians on their hands” — is refusing to abide by the university’s order. In a statement, the group told the Gazette that it is “rejecting this name change” and charged that the ban “is just another blatant way to smear the only group on campus which is representing Palestinian students.”

McGill University has made numerous attempts to combat antisemitic speech on campus, threatening even to disaffiliate with SSMU, the school’s student government, over a referendum it scheduled to declare that Israel is conducting “genocidal bombing campaigns” in Gaza and demand that the university end partnerships with businesses described in the referendum as “complicit in genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.”

Tensions between the university and its student government resulting from extreme anti-Israel activism have persisted for some years. In March 2022, McGill officials threatened to defund SSMU after its members voted to approve a policy accusing Israel of imposing “settler-colonial apartheid” against Palestinians and backing a boycott of “all corporations and institutions complicit” in the supposed practice. SSMU advanced the measure against the objections of its own judicial board, which had repeatedly ruled that joining the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel would violate both the SSMU constitution and university’s policy on equity and inclusion.

Later, a McGill University student sued the school for allegedly reneging on its pledge to defund SSMU, and last month he won a victory when a court ordered an injunction to halt ratification of the resolution.

In the latest controversy, SSMU is charged with officially withdrawing the group’s affiliation with SPHR. The student government has so far not chosen to contest the university’s decision, according to a statement issued on Monday.

“We regret to announce that SPHR will no longer be able to use the McGill name,” its executive committee said. “We continue to take our role as liaison between student groups and the administration seriously and will continue to investigate avenues for remedial action.”

As of Wednesday, SPHR has not published new content on its accounts using the McGill University name.

[madmanwonder]

(prompt, crossover, bnha, kill la kill, love at first sight, emerald fashion) Nui falls in love at first sight with Izuku.

Nui Harime once saw love as meaningless concept and exploitable weakness in humanity. A tool to manipulate the masses like the weak-willed sheep they are.

And she thought of herself as superior to the masses of weak-willed sheep to dismiss any notion of love in her life and focus solely upon her life and goals…

“S-Sorry for bumping into you. I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

…but the moment she set her sights on him. Looking at the cute, chubby, freckled face attached to the emerald-haired, verdant-eyed boy who look no older than his early teens. Her heart skipped a beat and her mind just gone blank for a moment before it was filled with the overwhelming, overflowing emotions of love, joy and happiness that she couldn’t imagine coming.

Nui Harime, Grand Couturier of the Revocs Corporation, ‘daughter’ of Revocs Corporation's CEO and the chair of Honnōji Academy has fallen in love with Izuku Midoriya, the Ninth Holder of One for All, and the future Symbol of Peace.

[the-ravenclaw-werewolf]

I’m also interested in like other teams of villains viewing each other too. If you can pick which ones would have in this situation?

If you mean what teams would be (theoretically if done in this way) in the spin-off, then this is what I got:

Legend of Korra: The Red Lotus

Ouran Highschool Host Club: The Zuka Club

Death Note: Light Yagami and Misa Misa

Black Butler: Noah's Ark

Fullmetal Alchemist: Homunculus

Blue Exorcist: Illuminati

Hunter x Hunter: Chimera Ants OR Zoldyck Family

Kuroko’s Basketball: Tōō OR Rakuzan OR Kirisaki Daiichi

Attack on Titan: Marley Soldiers

Danganronpa: The Despair Sisters

Free!: Samezuka Swimming Club

Kill la Kill: Revocs Corporation

Haikyuu: Aoba Johsai

Food Wars!: Central Régiment de Cuisine

One Punch Man: The Monster Association

My Hero Academia: League of Villains

Mob Psycho 100: Claw

Kakegurui: Student Council

Demon Slayer: Twelve Kizuki

Dr. Stone: Tsukasa Empire

Beastars: Shishigumi

Welcome to Demon School Iruma Kun: Six Fingers

Toilet Bound Hanako-kun: Broadcasting Club

Jujutsu Kaisen: Mahito's Group

[beardedmrbean]

If Harvard Business School is successful in stripping Professor Francesca Gino of tenure, it could be the very first time any faculty member at Harvard University has lost the lifetime protection tenure offers a faculty member.

Harvard’s Office of the President notified Gino that it had begun the process of reviewing her tenure on July 28 over allegations of research misconduct, nine years to the month in which she was promoted to a full professor and granted  tenure by Harvard Business School on July 1 of 2014. HBS Dean Srikant Datar had already put Gino on an unpaid administrative leave, banned her from campus, revoked her named professorship, and prevented the professor from publishing on Harvard Business School platforms. Gino’s lawyers, who filed a $25 million lawsuit against Harvard, HBS Dean Datar and the authors of the Data Colada blog that initially alleged data fraud in her research, confirmed that the process had begun.

If Gino loses tenure, it would likely be the first time Harvard University has forcibly stripped a tenured faculty member’s position since the 1940s, when the American Association of University Professors formalized tenure rules. Tenured faculty have long been considered invincible. More often than not, professors who are under pressure from a  university administration voluntarily surrender their tenure or simply retire.

Harvard’s own rules maintain that it has the power to dismiss a tenured professor “only for grave misconduct or neglect of duty,” though it does not define those terms

The Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, noted the challenges of the process. “Gino’s tenure review promises to be a complex process, even without considering the ongoing lawsuit,” according to the Crimson. “Before the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — makes a final determination, the complaint must pass through reviews by two separate bodies. First, a Screening Committee must make an initial assessment of the claims against Gino. If it decides further action is warranted, this first committee makes a recommendation to a Hearing Committee. This second committee, composed of tenured professors, then conducts an investigation and recommends further action to the Corporation, which has final jurisdiction over tenure revocation.”

That review will occur while Gino’s lawsuit moves forward in U.S. District Court in Boston. Gino received the  notice from Harvard five days before she filed her Aug. 2 lawsuit alleging defamation, breach of contract and gender discrimination.

An award-winning behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School, Gino was first accused of fabricating data by Data Colada in July of 2021 when authors of the blog approached Harvard Business School with their allegations. According to her lawsuit, Dean Datar negotiated a secret agreement with Data Colada, putting off the publication of their posts until HBS had the opportunity to investigate the claims. After an 18-month-long investigation by a three-person committee of former and current HBS professors, the panel concluded that Gino was responsible for research misconduct. Dean Data accepted the committee’s verdict and suggested punishment on June 13th of this year. Gino has maintained her innocence throughout, raising questions about the fairness of the process as well as the harshness of the penalties imposed on her.

Word of the school’s findings quickly leaked out. A mere three days later, in a June 16th article entitled A Weird Research-Misconduct Scandal About Dishonesty Just Got Weirder, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that one of Gino’s co-authors claimed that Harvard found that one study contained even more fraudulent data than previously revealed and was now asking the journal to note this new information. It was quickly followed within 24 hours by more detailed reporting by Data Colada with the start of a four-part series examining data in four separate studies co-authored by Gino. “We wrote a report about four studies for which we had accumulated the strongest evidence of fraud,” the blog authors asserted. “We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data. Perhaps dozens.”

HBS Dean Datar sent an email to the school’s faculty on the Chronicle’s article. “Last Friday,” he wrote, “the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article describing concerns that have been raised about the research of a member of our faculty, Francesca Gino, as well as steps the School is taking with journals and co-authors to correct the scientific record. Other outlets are beginning to carry stories as well. While I know you may have questions, confidentiality is an important consideration in these matters. I realize this runs counter to our longstanding norms of transparency and communication but hope that you can appreciate and understand the reasons for this approach.

DEAN DATAR HAD THE SCHOOL’S WEBSITE MAKE CLEAR THAT  GINO WAS PLACED ON ADMINISTRATIVE LEAVE

“As reflected on Professor Gino’s public Faculty & Research page, she is now on an administrative leave. We have been taking steps to ensure that her responsibilities are transitioned-working, for example, with the Doctoral Programs leadership to support PhD students, and with the leaders of our educational programs to adjust teaching assignments. I am grateful to those of you who have stepped up to help. If you have a question about an activity or collaboration and have not yet been contacted, please let me know.

“Research integrity is and must be one of our core values as an institution. I am grateful for your unwavering commitment to advancing knowledge and for being a vital part of our vibrant research communitv.”

Many in the faculty were shocked, if not horrified. They believed Gino was a person of high integrity and would never have manipulated data in a study. In fact, every witness interviewed by the committee that investigated the charges said exactly that.

Harvard has consistently declined public comment on the case, but after Gino file her lawsuit, he wrote another email to the faculty defending his decision to discipline Gino.  ” I ultimately accepted the investigation committee’s recommended sanctions, which included immediately placing Professor Gino on administrative leave and correcting the scientific record (a measure incumbent on every responsible academic institution when research misconduct is found),” Datar wrote. “I did so after consulting confidentially with a small number of individuals at HBS and Harvard, including senior faculty members here at the School, as is permitted by our policy. The sanctions reflect a shared belief that the misconduct represented a significant violation of academic integrity and that the evidence not only met but surpassed the applicable preponderance of evidence standard. I shared my conclusions with Professor Gino and, in accordance with our policy and consistent with University practice, began implementing the institutional actions.”

Gino’s lead attorney, Andrew Miltenberg, was little impressed byDatar’s  defense. “Dean Datar’s email to faculty leaves many questions unanswered,” he told Poets&Quants. “For example, why was a brand new policy put in place in 2021 for Professor. Gino, and yet it was only now – in 2023 – being shared with faculty?,” he asks. “And furthermore, why were faculty not consulted at all on this new policy?Why specifically was Harvard abandoning its former policy and tailoring a new one specifically for Professor Gino? And why, after they rushed to put it in place, did Harvard fail to follow that policy as stated?”

DON’T MISS: WHAT FRANCESCA GINO’S HARVARD LAWSUIT SAYS ABOUT DATA COLADA’S FRAUD ALLEGATIONS or  THE ACADEMIC MOB COMES FOR A HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL THOUGHT LEADER

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Good riddance to the Open Gaming License

Last week, Gizmodo’s Linda Codega caught a fantastic scoop — a leaked report of Hasbro’s plan to revoke the decades-old Open Gaming License, which subsidiary Wizards Of the Coast promulgated as an allegedly open sandbox for people seeking to extend, remix or improve Dungeons and Dragons:

https://gizmodo.com/dnd-wizards-of-the-coast-ogl-1-1-open-gaming-license-1849950634

The report set off a shitstorm among D&D fans and the broader TTRPG community — not just because it was evidence of yet more enshittification of D&D by a faceless corporate monopolist, but because Hasbro was seemingly poised to take back the commons that RPG players and designers had built over decades, having taken WOTC and the OGL at their word.

Gamers were right to be worried. Giant companies love to rugpull their fans, tempting them into a commons with lofty promises of a system that we will all have a stake in, using the fans for unpaid creative labor, then enclosing the fans’ work and selling it back to them. It’s a tale as old as CDDB and Disgracenote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB#History

(Disclosure: I am a long-serving volunteer board-member for MetaBrainz, which maintains MusicBrainz, a free, open, community-managed and transparent alternative to Gracenote, explicitly designed to resist the kind of commons-stealing enclosure that led to the CDDB debacle.)

https://musicbrainz.org/

Free/open licenses were invented specifically to prevent this kind of fuckery. First there was the GPL and its successor software licenses, then Creative Commons and its own successors. One important factor in these licenses: they contain the word “irrevocable.” That means that if you build on licensed content, you don’t have to worry about having the license yanked out from under you later. It’s rugproof.

Now, the OGL does not contain the word “irrevocable.” Rather, the OGL is “perpetual.” To a layperson, these two terms may seem interchangeable, but this is one of those fine lawerly distinctions that trip up normies all the time. In lawyerspeak, a “perpetual” license is one whose revocation doesn’t come automatically after a certain time (unlike, say, a one-year car-lease, which automatically terminates at the end of the year). Unless a license is “irrevocable,” the licensor can terminate it whenever they want to.

This is exactly the kind of thing that trips up people who roll their own licenses, and people who trust those licenses. The OGL predates the Creative Commons licenses, but it neatly illustrates the problem with letting corporate lawyers — rather than public-interest nonprofits — unleash “open” licenses on an unsuspecting, legally unsophisticated audience.

The perpetual/irrevocable switcheroo is the least of the problems with the OGL. As Rob Bodine— an actual lawyer, as well as a dice lawyer — wrote back in 2019, the OGL is a grossly defective instrument that is significantly worse than useless.

https://gsllcblog.com/2019/08/26/part3ogl/

The issue lies with what the OGL actually licenses. Decades of copyright maximalism has convinced millions of people that anything you can imagine is “intellectual property,” and that this is indistinguishable from real property, which means that no one can use it without your permission.

The copyrightpilling of the world sets people up for all kinds of scams, because copyright just doesn’t work like that. This wholly erroneous view of copyright grooms normies to be suckers for every sharp grifter who comes along promising that everything imaginable is property-in-waiting (remember SpiceDAO?):

https://onezero.medium.com/crypto-copyright-bdf24f48bf99

Copyright is a lot more complex than “anything you can imagine is your property and that means no one else can use it.” For starters, copyright draws a fundamental distinction between ideas and expression. Copyright does not apply to ideas — the idea, say, of elves and dwarves and such running around a dungeon, killing monsters. That is emphatically not copyrightable.

Copyright also doesn’t cover abstract systems or methods — like, say, a game whose dice-tables follow well-established mathematical formulae to create a “balanced” system for combat and adventuring. Anyone can make one of these, including by copying, improving or modifying an existing one that someone else made. That’s what “uncopyrightable” means.

Finally, there are the exceptions and limitations to copyright — things that you are allowed to do with copyrighted work, without first seeking permission from the creator or copyright’s proprietor. The best-known exception is US law is fair use, a complex doctrine that is often incorrectly characterized as turning on “four factors” that determine whether a use is fair or not.

In reality, the four factors are a starting point that courts are allowed and encouraged to consider when determining the fairness of a use, but some of the most consequential fair use cases in Supreme Court history flunk one, several, or even all of the four factors (for example, the Betamax decision that legalized VCRs in 1984, which fails all four).

Beyond fair use, there are other exceptions and limitations, like the di minimis exemption that allows for incidental uses of tiny fragments of copyrighted work without permission, even if those uses are not fair use. Copyright, in other words, is “fact-intensive,” and there are many ways you can legally use a copyrighted work without a license.

Which brings me back to the OGL, and what, specifically, it licenses. The OGL is a license that only grants you permission to use the things that WOTC can’t copyright — “the game mechanic [including] the methods, procedures, processes and routines.” In other words, the OGL gives you permission to use things you don’t need permission to use.

But maybe the OGL grants you permission to use more things, beyond those things you’re allowed to use anyway? Nope. The OGL specifically exempts:

Product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress; artifacts; creatures characters; stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements, dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions, likenesses, formats, poses, concepts, themes and graphic, photographic and other visual or audio representations; names and descriptions of characters, spells, enchantments, personalities, teams, personas, likenesses and special abilities; places, locations, environments, creatures, equipment, magical or supernatural abilities or effects, logos, symbols, or graphic designs; and any other trademark or registered trademark…

Now, there are places where the uncopyrightable parts of D&D mingle with the copyrightable parts, and there’s a legal term for this: merger. Merger came up for gamers in 2018, when the provocateur Robert Hovden got the US Copyright Office to certify copyright in a Magic: The Gathering deck:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/14/angels-and-demons/#owning-culture

If you want to learn more about merger, you need to study up on Kregos and Eckes, which are beautifully explained in the “Open Intellectual Property Casebook,” a free resource created by Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/openip/#q01

Jenkins and Boyle explicitly created their open casebook as an answer to another act of enclosure: a greedy textbook publisher cornered the market on IP textbook and charged every law student — and everyone curious about the law — $200 to learn about merger and other doctrines.

As EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kit Walsh writes in her must-read analysis of the OGL, this means “the only benefit that OGL offers, legally, is that you can copy verbatim some descriptions of some elements that otherwise might arguably rise to the level of copyrightability.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators

But like I said, it’s not just that the OGL fails to give you rights — it actually takes away rights you already have to D&D. That’s because — as Walsh points out — fair use and the other copyright limitations and exceptions give you rights to use D&D content, but the OGL is a contract whereby you surrender those rights, promising only to use D&D stuff according to WOTC’s explicit wishes.

“For example, absent this agreement, you have a legal right to create a work using noncopyrightable elements of D&D or making fair use of copyrightable elements and to say that that work is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons. In many contexts you also have the right to use the logo to name the game (something called “nominative fair use” in trademark law). You can certainly use some of the language, concepts, themes, descriptions, and so forth. Accepting this license almost certainly means signing away rights to use these elements. Like Sauron’s rings of power, the gift of the OGL came with strings attached.”

And here’s where it starts to get interesting. Since the OGL launched in 2000, a huge proportion of game designers have agreed to its terms, tricked into signing away their rights. If Hasbro does go through with canceling the OGL, it will release those game designers from the shitty, deceptive OGL.

According to the leaks, the new OGL is even worse than the original versions — but you don’t have to take those terms! Notwithstanding the fact that the OGL says that “using…Open Game Content” means that you accede to the license terms, that is just not how contracts work.

Walsh: “Contracts require an offer, acceptance, and some kind of value in exchange, called ‘consideration.’ If you sell a game, you are inviting the reader to play it, full stop. Any additional obligations require more than a rote assertion.”

“For someone who wants to make a game that is similar mechanically to Dungeons and Dragons, and even announce that the game is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons, it has always been more advantageous as a matter of law to ignore the OGL.”

Walsh finishes her analysis by pointing to some good licenses, like the GPL and Creative Commons, “written to serve the interests of creative communities, rather than a corporation.” Many open communities — like the programmers who created GNU/Linux, or the music fans who created Musicbrainz, were formed after outrageous acts of enclosure by greedy corporations.

If you’re a game designer who was pissed off because the OGL was getting ganked — and if you’re even more pissed off now that you’ve discovered that the OGL was a piece of shit all along — there’s a lesson there. The OGL tricked a generation of designers into thinking they were building on a commons. They weren’t — but they could.

This is a great moment to start — or contribute to — real open gaming content, licensed under standard, universal licenses like Creative Commons. Rolling your own license has always been a bad idea, comparable to rolling your own encryption in the annals of ways-to-fuck-up-your-own-life-and-the-lives-of-many-others. There is an opportunity here — Hasbro unintentionally proved that gamers want to collaborate on shared gaming systems.

That’s the true lesson here: if you want a commons, you’re not alone. You’ve got company, like Kit Walsh herself, who happens to be a brilliant game-designer who won a Nebula Award for her game “Thirsty Sword Lesbians”:

https://evilhat.com/product/thirsty-sword-lesbians/

[Image ID: A remixed version of David Trampier's 'Eye of Moloch,' the cover of the first edition of the AD&D Player's Handbook. It has been altered so the title reads 'Advanced Copyright Fuckery. Unclear on the Concept. That's Just Not How Licenses Work. No, Seriously.' The eyes of the idol have been replaced by D20s displaying a critical fail '1.' Its chest bears another D20 whose showing face is a copyright symbol.]

[diallokenyatta]

Reparations is: Global Decolonization, the full withdrawal of the US Military from non-US Territories, Restoration of Global Ecosystems, Sustainable Energy, Ecological Development, Prison & Police Abolition, Imperialist War Crime Trails, Revocation of Corporate Charters, Universal Healthcare, Housing as a Human Right, Return of Stolen Artifacts, Redistribution of Land, Natonalization of Natural Resources, Repatriation, Ban on Persistent Organic Pollutants, Ban on Plastics, Cradle-to-Grave Production Cycles...etc.✊🏿 Those who have reduced Reparations to a payout of US Fiat Currency are literally Pimping the Suffering of our Ancestors for transient, depreciating paper.💵 #ADOS & #FBA are Ponzi Scams carried out by Race Traitors.🦝 #FiatAintFreedom #ProfitIsTheft #AntiCapitalist #KillCap #ClassCon #ClassWar 🎩 (at Santa Barbara, CA) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cn2SBcSPpFp/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[goetic-queen-stella]

"Oh yes, that's very threatening. Flex a few muscles and I'm supposed to be afraid?"

"I am a Marquis of Hell, my dear. I have thirty legions of Hell's armies under my command. Not to mention the sheer amount of demonic power I possess. You may be powerful in the Living World, but in Hell that holds no meaning."

"Did you think that I don't know who you are, Ryuko Kiryuin? Daughter of Ragyou Kiryuin and heiress to the REVOCs Corporation? I know all about you and the harem you keep in your little mansion."

"You have plenty of wives and girlfriends already! Hell, you even have your sister! I will not allow you to turn my beloved sister into your latest sexual conquest!"

[reality-detective]

🔥DETOX STORY OF THE MILLENIUM🔥

HOW RUSSIA GOT RID OF THE GREAT RESET PUR EVIL GLOBALIST CABAL MAFIA CORPORATIONS??

THEY KICKED THEMSELVES OUT BY

SANCTIONING RUSSIA 🇷🇺

THE LOOSER LISTS:👇

▪️Apple Pay - complete blocking;

▪️Apple - complete exit from the market;

▪️Adidas - refusal to cooperate with the national soccer team;

▪️Audi - leaving the market;

▪️AMD - a ban on the supply of microchips and soon a ban on the supply of graphics cards;

▪️British Petrolium - 20% of shares have left Rosneft;

▪️BBC - withdrawal of broadcasting licenses;

▪️BMW - closing factories, blocking deliveries;

▪️Bolt - exiting the market;

▪️Boeing - exiting the market;

▪️Chevrolet - leaving the market;

▪️Danone - market exit together with a subsidiary of Prostokvashino;

▪️Disney - cancellation of all films;

▪️Dell - exit from the market;

▪️DHL - exit from the market;

▪️Eurovision - disqualification;

Ericsson - exit from the market;

▪️Exxon Mobil - recall all specialists of Russian oil companies;

▪️FedEx - complete ban on deliveries;

▪️Formula 1 - cancellation of the tournament in Sochi;

▪️Ford - closes all stores;

▪️FIFA - disqualification of the national team for the World Cup and ban on holding international matches in the Russian Federation;

▪️General Motors - stops exports.

▪️HP - ban on imports;

▪️Harley Davidson - stop deliveries;

▪️Intel - ban on the supply of microchips;

▪️Jaguar - leave the market;

▪️Lenovo - exit from the market;

▪️MOK - cancellation of all competitions;

▪️MasterCard - discontinuation of card production, closure of several banks;

▪️Megogo - cancel all Russian films;

▪️Mitsubishi - lay off employees from 141 service centers;

▪️Microsoft Office - multiple measures being discussed;

▪️Netflix - a freeze on Russian subscriptions, halting production of Russian TV series;

▪️Nike - delivery to Russia is closed;

▪️Nestle - closes all 6 factories in the Russian Federation;

▪️OnlyFans - closure of the country;

▪️PayPal - freezing accounts for withdrawals;

▪️Paramount - movie distribution block;

▪️PornHub - content access ban;

▪️Porsche - withdrawal from the Russian Federation;

▪️Renault - exit from the market;

▪️Samsung Pay - blocking of services;

▪️Scania - exit from the Russian Federation;

▪️Shell - termination of the contract with Gazprom;

▪️Sony - film distribution block;

▪️Twitter - it is impossible to register accounts for citizens of the Russian Federation;

▪️Toyota - stop deliveries;

▪️UEFA - cancellation of the Champions League final in St. Petersburg, ban on all clubs from participating in the Champions League and the Champions League

▪️Cancellation of contract with general sponsor Gazprom;

▪️UPS - complete ban on deliveries;

▪️Universal Pictures - film distribution block;

▪️Visa - blocking of banks under sanctions;

▪️Volvo - leave the Russian Federation;

▪️Yandex - exclusion of the company's shares from listing on the New York Stock Exchange;

▪️YouTube - blocked hundreds of RF channels and their monetization;

▪️Warner Bros. - cancellation of all film distribution;

▪️Volkswagen - out of the country.

▪️Zoom - revocation of software development licenses.

Russia is already living the dream 🤔