The concept of having this kind of help is totally foreign to me, but with the exception of one, every family I’ve encountered that had an au pair have been two very busy high earning parents, neither of them lazy. I think you could argue that perhaps priorities have been misplaced, but not lazy.
Standing up to market manipulation and regulatory capture by platform owners and government coerced speech[1] is excellently aligned with EFF's core mission.[2]
I enthusiastically support their activities and will continue to donate.
The simple act of leaving a private social media website is enough to “alienate” people who would otherwise be supportive? Making membership in a private social media website contribute so heavily to your personal identity seems like more of a reflection on that person than anything else.
They say the typical post on X receives 3M impressions vs. 100M impressions in years past. They're a national organization, those 3M impressions might only be 100k actual people in a country of 400M. They do say that ideology was part of the motivation but it makes sense that they aren't going to invest the time in a platform that reaches a negligible number of people.
It makes sense that they use FOSS decentralized stuff like Mastodon despite the low reach; using Mastodon is an end unto itself. Twitter was just an advertising tool that wasn't working for them.
It's more a matter that managing an X account reads as an endorsement of the platform, and endorsing X is a major brand risk for the EFF. Those 100k people aren't worth it.
If your support was contingent on them being on a specific social media network, a low quality one at that, then your support was more posturing than actual support. Better to know who your real allies are and not rely on all the “I’d help but I forgot my wallet in my other social network” posers.
You’re making a whole lot of assumptions about what I wrote, and what it means. And sensing a lot of hostility. If you’re an activist organization with priorities, such as those stated by the EFF, only speaking to the people in your own political echo chamber hurts your cause.
Imagine being so chronically online that the choice of social media outlet an organization makes is enough to make them 'the other' in your mind. Its the weakest kind of brain rot.
It goes in both directions. Just have a look at blue sky. There’s no monopoly on reason by any political faction despite their own thoughts to the contrary.
I agree. They were a narrowly focused organization, which served them well IMO. Making political statements outside of that narrow lane hurts their effectiveness.
Participating in a platform where you can PAY to get your tweets to have 10x more reach is fundamentally opposed to the principles the EFF was founded on.
If you wanna be a sucker and participate in such a platform, go ahead. But don't cry when others have more principle than you
Is this the same stat where turning a person away at the border counted as a deportation during the Obama years? I’ve found the changing methodology to make comparisons troublesome
Once you get them together, sure, but it appears from TFA that this is about gathering them from mountain meadows or other far flung environs. A herd could be spread over thousands of acres, canyons, mountains, all sorts of places to be out of site.
These are operations that don’t use fences. The article mentions this is a NZ company, but the American West would have a similar issue where ranchers can run cattle on land leased from BLM. I would imagine Australia would have a similar problem to solve.
It's called a herd for a reason. Usually if you've found one cow you've found them all. In the wild any cow with genes for aloofness quickly got culled by predators.
The exceptions are the lame & sick ones, but no fancy gadget is going to bring them in; you've got to take a truck to them.
We put our cows out to pasture in the mountains in the spring/summer.
Without the fancy tech it takes about a day to gather them all up.
But you have to realize, this is a job we do once a year. Gathering the cows from the winter pasture is easy because it's a lot smaller.
This is why I said the location information could be useful. But, we used horses and anywhere the cows can go a horse can go.
> These are operations that don’t use fences.
Nope, ranchers own (or lease) the land they put their cows out to pasture on. It's all fenced.
> but the American West would have a similar issue where ranchers can run cattle on land leased from BLM.
I'm in the american west. And BLM land that is used for grazing is fenced. In fact, that's part of what you are paying for when you buy a lease from the BLM is to maintain the fence.
> Livestock theft, agricultural gear theft, is a real thing in AU/NZ as I suspect it is where you work.
I mean, I don't want to jinx it, but it's not really been an issue for us. The main theft we've had to deal with is feed theft and that was solved by switching from 50lbs bales to 1 ton bales.
> And these collars are principally targeted to dairy operations that move herds about on a daily basis.
Yeah, makes sense why it'd doesn't make sense to us. We didn't raise dairy cattle.
We did have a couple of dairy cows, but that was more for my family and a few members of the community. Not for any sort of actual real production. I could see how it'd be a time saver in that case as you do have to twice daily gather the cows to get milked.
On an IT aside, the challenge facing yard, barn, and road security cameras in Australia is parrots .. flocks of several thousand intelligent airborne can openers that follow grain rail lines and rivers and love nothing more than tearing wiring apart.
You have to build to extreme anti vandal standards.
Changing bale sizes works well to deter casual thieves .. serious shitheads turn up with their own trucks and lifting gear.
> flocks of several thousand intelligent airborne can openers that follow grain rail lines and rivers and love nothing more than tearing wiring apart.
Lol, oh that stinks. Yeah not a problem in the PNW. We have some woodpeckers that are annoying if you own wood paneled things (like barns and homes) but otherwise there's not a lot of fighting against nature beyond infections.
> serious shitheads turn up with their own trucks and lifting gear.
It may just be the location and community where I'm from that makes that somewhat unlikely. There's enough people along the roads that someone would see you trying to make off with a giant bale and where I'm from everyone waves at everyone when you drive by :).
It's a combination of being rural enough that everyone knows everyone else yet not so rural that you see the extreme sort of isolation that I believe is possible in Australia.
There's massive amounts of community support in rural Australia .. and occasional opportunistic teabags (thieves), we all wave and coordinate on fire fighting and harvests, keep an eye out for carpet baggers, and rescue outsiders that keep getting lost / stranded.
> someone would see you trying to make off with a giant bale
If you ever get into high luxury car theft, in London one crew pattern was to all wear high vis jackets, someone has a clip board, and the team lifts a high end car straight into a Faraday cage lined truck in plain and open sight.
If the alarm goes off and people look, someone on the crew just visibly shrugs and mimes putting their hands over their ears and gets back to knicking a car.
Point being, successful thieves often look like they're supposed to be doing what they're doing and they don't register .. unless someone specifically knows that hay bale and the owner of that land .. but that's an aside.
> the extreme sort of isolation that I believe is possible in Australia.
The vast majority of people in Australia live near the coast and to each other, it's quite bunched up.
My state is 3x the size of Texas, has a bit over 2 million in population now, but they mostly all live in and around Perth, the Capital city (and famously described by one US astronaut as the most isolated city on the planet) - I'm from quite some distance from that City in a region with considerably less people.
Still, I got to travel the planet doing geophysics and related things.
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