Today in Labor History November 17, 1947: Revolutionary and author Victor Serge died. Serge lived in Paris in the early 20th century, where he was loosely associated with the Bonnot gang of anarchist bank robbers, and where he collaborated with Raymond Callemin on the newspaper L’anarchie. He was in Barcelona during their anarchist uprising and contributed to the CNT’s newspaper, “Tierra y Libertad.” He went to Russia in 1918, initially in support of the communists. However, he quickly became disillusioned with the repressive, autocratic rule, criticized the party and was imprisoned. He wrote numerous books, including the classic “Birth of Our Power” and his autobiographical “Memoirs of a Revolutionist.”
It's the Day of Zeus / Jupiter's Day / #Thursday! ⚡
This solid bronze statuette of the Roman god #Jupiter (associated with #Zeus) was probably part of the domestic furnishings of a Roman 'domus' or 'villa'. The highest deity in the Roman pantheon, he is the god of international relations and guarantees the observation of treaties.
🏛️ Bronze statuette, #ancientRome, 1st century CE. Today in the Museu d’Art Medieval, #Barcelona.
Yesterday, we took a funicular (not pictured, unfortunately) and a cable car up to the Monjuïc Castle fortress. It's an impressive structure with excellent views of the city and there's an active park on the surrounding grounds, but it has a dark history. On multiple occasions, its cannon have been turned on the city below to administer collective punishment for resistance to the crown in Madrid. The fortress has also been the site of numerous atrocities. Look up the Bombardment of Barcelona (1842) for example.
Went for a little 4k run between my hotel and the Magic Fountain of Montjuïc. I even spotted some green Monk Parrots, the same as we have back home. They're actually native to South America, but have been introduced to at least two continents, without becoming disruptive to the local ecosystems. One of the first things I noticed when we arrived was their distinctive call, welcoming us. You know, if they can make a home here maybe I can, too, someday.
THE RESIDENTS OF THE SAGRADA FAMÍLIA SAY 'ENOUGH' TO TOURISM: "IT'S A THEME PARK WITH US AS EXTRAS" by Sandra Vicente (ElDiario.es, in Spanish).
""Tourism changes the daily life of the people who live in the city", says David Bondia, who assures that the Sindicatura is receiving more and more complaints related to tourism. "It's not just about one-off problems, but about issues that can impoverish your quality of life," says the Catalan Ombudsman, referring to housing and the increase in prices resulting from the overcrowding of visitors. According to the Ombudsman's report, all the effects of tourism are "interdependent" and must be dealt with as a whole. Particularly in the face of rising figures that augur a record season".
"Meanwhile, local residents like Encarna continue to dodge the tourists to go and buy bread".
This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance
@jherazob I care more about the effects than intent in this case.
#Meta's #Threads / #Barcelona / #Project92 doesn't have the ability to do anything actually negative to the #Fediverse except potentially overload small instances with a flood of traffic.
I don't get the fearmongering; lots of talk about "breaking the #Fediverse" coming from people who aren't really doing a good job of articulating how exactly a new #Fediverse software--because that's all this is at the end of the day--will break an entire network of software that already works with each other.
> Lemmy is small so it gets more feature requests than it can code up.
Why? From who? Are a lot of #Meta users who are on #Project92 / #Barcelona / #Threadsreally going to be submitting feature requests for a software that they don't use?
> Meta comes in and looks at the most requested feature that’s been put on lemmy's backlog. Let’s say it’s some mod tool. Maybe even AI mod tool that sorts comments based on sentiment analysis.
What are the chances that this is something so significant that people would be willing to switch software over it?
> use lemmy and face flood of trolls in their communities
Where are these users coming from? This is already a problem on the #Fediverse, and we already know how to deal with it.
This scenario you're pitching seems wildly implausible.
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) (ploum.net)
This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance