@kate@aus.social cover
@kate@aus.social avatar

kate

@[email protected]

Here since 2016 carrying on about this and that: the future of community, trans rights, #auspol, #compostodon, growing things and health governance. Wollongong.

Images: a green marble, and orange lit clouds over an ocean horizon.

“I want to be on the side of surprise, and against the certainties of pictures and property.” - Barbara Kruger

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@kate@aus.social avatar kate , to random

Tapping all the signs: Greenland’s population is majority Indigenous, the official language in Greenland is Indigenous and connected to other Indigenous languages across the region, Greenland has an Indigenous name (Kalaallit Nunaat) and its own Indigenous Parliament. This isn’t just some random strategic bit of European territory, even if the orange buffoon thinks it would come in handy to “have it”.

@FediTips@social.growyourown.services avatar FediTips , (edited ) to random

If you know someone who wants to sign up on Mastodon and the Fediverse, you might want to suggest this guide:

➡️ https://fedi.garden

It's been reformatted to make it as easy as possible to sign up on a good reliable server.

If someone finds choice overwhelming, it suggests a good general server (which changes regularly).

If someone appreciates choice, there is a server directory with over 100 good servers organised into categories.

There is also a FAQ about signing up.

kate ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

@lianna @FediTips I love this story. As a genuine question, I’m thinking about the language used as only suggestive of “nerdy hobbies” instead of, you know, hobbies hobbies. What could have helped?

I’m wondering what will encourage people to know that there are whole communities of hobbyists in here, along with everyone else. I keep hearing “it’s all tech bros” and thinking this is a hard barrier to shift. But we are all here too, the other types.

A new platform can’t do anything about the fact that someone’s friends and family aren’t already here. But there might be other ways to imagine who is here to be found.

@kate@aus.social avatar kate , to random

I don’t know who needs this, but this Illawarra Flame Tree is showing up hard in the actual Illawarra region it’s named after.

They flower hardest when anticipating stress.

Bright red tree, really scarlet, under a grey sky in a suburban street. It’s brachychiton acerifolius, the Illawarra Flame Tree.
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@kate@aus.social avatar kate , to random

The maker culture on here is far from isolationist. What you do builds hope for others.

I watch people making, repairing, drawing, sewing, crafting knives and pots and short films and solutions and community and compost heaps and seed collections, and when my day begins all those actions and ideas stay with me.

Your labour of bothering to photograph it, alt text it, send updates about it, share frustrations and success, it’s just fantastic. You have no idea who’s watching and thinking: hey, maybe I could sew on a button after all.

@sus@timeloop.cafe avatar sus , to random

I planted a lot of bulbs today

a photo Looking down on a patch of mulchy garden where many bulbs are scattered around a small corkscrew hazel. The bulbs on one side of the tree have been buried but are exposed on the other. A bit of plastic packaging and a narrow, red handled shovel decorate the scene
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kate ,
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@sus This is a fabulous project, I love that you’re documenting it here. Watching the work of structural redesign is weirdly hope-inducing.

kate ,
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@sus That’s it, that’s it exactly.

@kate@aus.social avatar kate , to random

Gen Z gamer in my household has discovered the and is delighted by the silliness of it. I am stomping around like some ancient crone venting about the last several raptures. But truly I had forgotten that daft movie series and the whole United Nations as satanic cabal subplot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thief_in_the_Night_(film_series)

kate OP ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

I had also forgotten the satanic panic about barcodes, that played a pretty big part in 80s thinking.

https://dark-mountain.net/the-barcode-moment-part-1/

@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar aral , to random

Hi everyone,

I’ve just launched the Gaza Verified Emergency Appeal to get our remaining 8 families who are stuck in the danger zone in the North to relative safety in the South.

https://gaza-verified.org/emergency/

Based on conversations @joynewacc and I have had with them to ascertain what they need (transport, land, tents), we have set the campaign goal at $15,000.

To kick things off, I’ve made a personal donation of $1,000.

These families are living in terror under nightly bombings by Israel. Please, if you can, help them survive Israel’s ongoing genocide. And please share this as widely as you can.

Thank you!

💕

PS. The donations are being collected by our not-for-profit, Small Technology Foundation and the entire sum, minus Stripe’s fees, will be transferred to the individual fundraisers of the families. We have suspended our own fundraising for Small Technology Foundation for the duration of the emergency appeal (https://small-tech.org/fund-us/).

PS. If you keep the campaign page open, you will see the progress meter update and donations coming in in real time.

kate ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

@aral @joynewacc Thanks to you both. Done.

@kate@aus.social avatar kate , to random

Shout out of appreciation for all the work @aral and @joynewacc are doing to provide supportive care to the Palestinians of Gaza showing up here in terrifying times. Thank you both, and to everyone here who has been raising Gaza in our thoughts all along.

https://gaza-verified.org/

@potterybyosa@mastodon.social avatar potterybyosa , to Floating Is Fun
kate ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

@potterybyosa @paralithode It’s like glass!

@kate@aus.social avatar kate , to random

Thinking about this, and the future of global .

https://gizmodo.com/the-end-of-work-as-we-know-it-2000635294

The End of Work as We Know It

kate OP ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

And as a painful coda to Scott Farquahar’s shenanigans shared earlier by @emmadavidson , here’s the other half (apparently the less warm one) firing 150 workers by video.

Sparkly new futurey jobs? No sign.

https://mastodon.social/@campuscodi/114949668927182961

kate OP ,
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Beginning a thought about the prospect of mass global .

The definitions and thresholds of employment used by governments are way more granular than just “in work” or “has job”. So underworking is likely to be far more prevalent than the data derived from self-reported survey responses. And the vision of labour market transformation thanks to sparkly new futurey jobs is very light on detail about new job stability or income sufficiency.

https://www.abs.gov.au/methodologies/labour-force-australia-methodology/jun-2025

kate OP ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

Why think about this as not underemployment? Because underworking is a human condition with human impact, like overworking. Underwork is a social situation.

And unless the sparkly new futurey jobs show up, AI driven underworking will expand the demographic of an established and generationally impactful underworking class: working under the level of wealth creation, working insecurely, with fewer protections, weaker access to fair work provisions, solidarity or safe protest.

These are long term political choices.

kate OP ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

And the threshold of being countable as employed in Australia is one hour paid work a week, and can be not even that. So the unemployment rate references this number, not any common sense understanding of sufficient work to live on. It includes all the teenage workers 15 and up.

Within this are nested the underemployed who report themselves in a monthly survey of around 50000 Australians as employed and either having had expected working hours reduced, or preferring to work more than their normal working hours.

So this is how we get an official underemployment rate of 5.9% in Australia.

kate OP ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

Why this matters: if you hear that 150 workers have been ejected from their seats, but you just heard that employment levels are both high and stable, you might think: that’s ok, there will be another job.

But when you factor in underemployment, which includes people already losing sufficient work and people who didn’t have sufficient work to begin with, things look tougher.

Political choices that favour business and growth are long-term social choices about how we live, who gets to flourish, who gets by, who gets trapped in .

kate OP ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

US labour market data makes the news, in a predictable way, by confounding the Tantrum in Chief. The thing to notice though is that the science of estimation always makes people testy because labour market vitals feed into consumer confidence and political futures. Meanwhile behind the data, every point is a person, a family, a community.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/hiring-expected-slowed-july/story?id=124238397

kate OP ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

This from @scottsantens on UBI is detailed and clear. Work related poverty is expanding; capitalism is failing humans as well as the planet. Capitalism as a system cannot deliver us from its own intended impacts. So, something new is needed, and urgently.

https://hachyderm.io/@scottsantens/114953933943565622

kate OP ,
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Curious about how US monthly labour market data is estimated? As in Australia, sample surveys.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/04/092204.asp

kate OP ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

The US takes a granular view of “not working” in the survey period, including the subcategories of “discouraged worker” and “marginally attached to the labor force”. Among workers, “involuntary part-time workers” are what Australia would call the underemployed. This is the social experience that is rapidly becoming lifetime or even generational .

The language of labor underutilization used in US reporting moralises the problem of work, making it a problem that affects government and business rather than a social harm that affects people and communities.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm

kate OP ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

Caveat: I’m not a statistically literate person, far from it. I’m really just thinking about how employment reporting is a languaging practice, a storytelling practice, and all kinds of political vibing. Trump’s tantrums make this clear, but it was already there like climate change: however you count whatever you count, the underlying lived experience of trying to get through these times is that water is rising faster than we’re prepared for.

kate OP ,
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Quietly horrifying correlate to the rapid spread of is the triumphalism now associated with .

We need to stop treating these as separate phenomena. They are the two sides of the work coin flipping. As Levitt describes, overworkers are colluding with the business ideal of competitive advantage, but in working two jobs inside one salary they’re also ensuring the rise of involuntary part-time work.

AI will win this race.

https://financialpost.com/fp-work/howard-levitt-work-life-balance-dead-employers

kate OP ,
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Meanwhile, salaries and sign-on bonuses in the AI sector give us a glimpse of the sunlit uplands where talent is rewarded with immediate and dizzying wealth. Work redefined as elite level competitive sport aligned to willingness to show up all hours is life changing for very few whose life goal is to, I don’t know, buy islands.

But these aspirational shenanigans are not disconnected from the social crisis of , far from it.

https://www.afr.com/technology/sign-on-bonuses-of-150m-ai-talent-war-heats-up-20250701-p5mbr1

kate OP ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

“AI exists to replace workers, not empower them. Even if AI can make you more productive, there is no business model in increasing your pay and decreasing your hours.

AI is about disciplining labor to decrease its share of an AI-using company's profits. AI exists to lower a company's wage-bill, at your expense, with the savings split between the your boss and an AI company.”

Louder for the governments at the back, spruiking sparkly new futurey jobs to persuade us to siphon our remaining water to cool their data centres: replacing old jobs with new jobs is not the business model here because of course it isn’t. Short term, this is about creating both worse jobs ( @pluralistic ‘s reverse centaurs) and ultimately mass .

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/114970954630564037

@kate@aus.social avatar kate , to random

I’m curious about a thing that’s appeared at the beach that I think is a rock. I feel a rock scientist will know why it has this pattern. It’s rock heavy in the hand. But it’s clay adjacent.

Anyone? I’d love to know. Please boost.

Location: east coast Australia just north of Wollongong.

Update: edited to save Osa’s notifications, but also to thank everyone who’s filling my timeline with amazing new knowledge.

The rock in a hand. The surface is cracked and each cracked patch hosts a pattern outlined by the crack and neatly repeated, like tree rings, like something drawn by hand. What is this heavy thing?

The rock in a hand. The surface is cracked and each cracked patch hosts a pattern outlined by the crack and neatly repeated, like tree rings, like something drawn by hand. What is this heavy thing?
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kate OP ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

@CaringKinderSociety @potterybyosa

That’s wild, what a find. Could it be, but how/why on the outside?

I feel like we need an ancient horn to summon geologists. (Obviously also loving all the other theories especially @emmadavidson ’s 🐉)

Or perhaps a little whistle: hello, .

@kate@aus.social avatar kate , to random

A little more on the UA government donation website: you can choose where your donation goes including non-military options like rebuilding schools, land mine clearance, medical evacuation. Even just studying the site for a while is useful.

For me it was the absolute nonsense about wearing a suit. He didn’t need a ride when this began, he doesn’t need a suit now. FFS, he is the most deliberate and constructive of political communicators. He’s not playing, and never was.

https://u24.gov.ua/

@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar aral , to random

So I’ve been speaking professionally for basically half a century now and I just woke up with a conference anxiety dream.

This time, I’m doing the closing keynote at some large festival-like event and there’s a talk right before mine.

The conference organiser (who is this Turkish guy who seems genuinely happy I’m there but also entirely overwhelmed) assures me we’ll have time to set up between talks (that alone is my nightmare, I like to have everything set up and leave it there to limit what can wrong).

Anyway, long nightmare short, the penultimate talk ends, I’m next to the organiser behind a long crowd of people, and he just starts yelling out to introduce me “And the next speaker… Aral Balkan!” I’m looking at him like “what the fuck?” He’s like “don’t worry, you got this”. That’s when I realise not only is nothing set up but that I have no idea where my bag is with my laptop. So I start frantically searching a maze-like backstage for it as the clock ticks and expectation builds and then I wake up.

And I don’t even have a fucking talk coming up!

Yeah, so, good morning… How’s your day going so far? :)

kate ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

@aral I have this dream, it’s so understandable.

@clarebee@mastodon.green avatar clarebee , to random

ever feel like you're running out of time to become smart? so much to know, so little time. trying to be content with slight progress, fractional improvement, keenly aware of the mountains of things that will remain unclimbed. is this basically a midlife crisis?

kate ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

@aral @clarebee I take the same approach: what I know is like a small rockpool by the ocean. I know details about what I know, I’m still noticing new things and sometimes I think about other rockpools. But really, right there beside me is the ocean of everything I don’t know and won’t ever know, and making peace with that is a relief.

@kate@aus.social avatar kate , to random

@justpassingthrough @adelinej

@FediTips will often pop in to help, and as their pinned toot says, is an actual human.

Hope this is helpful to your friend!

@APBBlue@thepit.social avatar APBBlue , to random

I feel like one of the biggest barriers to entry on is choosing a server. I'm on my fourth one. The right server can really affect your experience here. Is there any way this barrier could be reduced?

kate ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

@APBBlue @paninid I sat on the big server for two years when I started, then learned to server-hop.

I only use my phone first this so rely on what I can find through the small window. The biggest help to me was @FediTips , for alerting me that it could be done, and for explaining it.

Is there a regularly maintained link to a directory of welcoming smaller and-or special interest and-or regionsl instances?

@kate@aus.social avatar kate , to random

Very demoralised by everything but especially the behaviour of my employer. That line got crossed. If you work in a uni you won’t have to guess.

kate OP ,
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@aral I appreciate it. Thank you.

@bryanalexandee@mastodon.education avatar bryanalexandee , to random

@Downes @fgraver @actualham @harmonygritz @kate @cogdog I'm happy to get into detailed policies. I started with nations and one policy proposal as a first order attempt to get at what you're thinking.

kate ,
@kate@aus.social avatar

@Downes @bryanalexandee @fgraver @actualham @harmonygritz @cogdog

Historians paint a detailed picture of the most commonly done work for other reasons: care of family members, especially care of the sick, and the management of households. Associated with this is the care of the self, including care of the body and creative labour, and care of community and common good.

The 19th century campaign to bring working hours down to 8 per day without wage reduction centred on restoring the other 8 hours (after sleep), “for what you will”. Caring and householding depends on the protecting of “what you will” time, and equity in sharing its tasks and opportunities.

But now work overdraws from “what you will” all the time because of the soaring cost of the necessities of life, and the exploitation of profit by the rich who really are getting richer.

Higher education could have more to say about this too.