people on this website loves days and dates. you could make a post that says “it’s sweet fat of the hog tuesday” and people would go nuts reblogging it every tuesday
yet another horrifying story about disability tech companies taking the money of disabled people and then abandoning them. this one is about $150,000 eye implants. company went bankrupt, many patients are now without vision again and unable to remove the implants without risking their health, but having the implants in is also extremely dangerous and makes it impossible to get life saving MRIs. the company responsible did not even think to contact its patients when it was going out of business and ending support. people have devices in their brain that now do nothing except potentially kill them. there is nobody who offers replacement parts for these devices, any maintenance, and people are having their implants break without any support to fix or remove them.
fuck these companies. fuck this shit. it keeps happening. these fucking companies make products for disabled people, offer them hope, take their money, then bail. even if bailing can fucking kill people and if they used up all their money
this is why tech startups cannot replace healthcare overhauls, better benefits, more funding, and more studies. expensive, temporary technology is not the answer to accessibility. it is not feasible and it is not safe.
there is zero accountability and shit like this is always happening.
I think like, the death of Vine and Rabbit, Wikipedia constantly needing to beg for money, Discord depending so heavily on venture capital, Facebook turning towards spying on users to generate a return on all the venture capital that got them started, Adobe creative suite turning into a subscription rather than a single product you buy, the strangulation of streaming entertainment as every company pulls their content and makes it exclusive to their service, are all great examples of how like, it really doesn’t matter if something is legitimately useful, efficient, or beloved, it is next to impossible for a service to exist if it doesn’t make shareholders increasing amounts of money year after year. Which may seem like a “no duh” type of statement, but it’s a very simple window into how the profit motive makes products and services worse, not better. And how that’s not just a matter of certain companies or ceos being bad and greedy on an individual level, but is an inescapable factor of an economy where existence is dependent on generating capital.
sometimes i think about gay people who lived centuries ago who thought they were all alone who imagined a world where they could live openly as themselves who met in secret spoke in code defied everything and everyone just to exist and i’m like..i gotta sit down. whew i gotta sit down
this is why this sappho fragment hits me so hard
If this little book should see the light after its 100 years of entombment, I would like its readers to know that the author was a lover of her own sex and devoted the best years of her life in striving for the political equality and social and moral elevation of women.
“The Great Geysers of California” by Laura De Force Gordon, 1879, unearthed from a 100-year-old time capsule in San Francisco, 1979.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all our letters could be published in the future in a more enlightened time. Then all the world could see how in love we are.”
