jess banks
banner
profbanks.bsky.social
jess banks
@profbanks.bsky.social
1.4K followers 700 following 3K posts
Hypercompetent polyglot know-it-all. Unrepentant SJW troublemaker. Neuroqueer teacher, mom, partner, Official Auntie, best friend, co-conspirator. An American in Aotearoa New Zealand. Always noncompliant. She/her/elle/ia
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Reposted by jess banks
A small Lofoten tourism group announces they're shutting down their guides and possibly going bankrupt thanks to the loss in revenue from chatbots that steal and rephrase their content

None of this shit is inevitable. Fuck the slimy tech bros.

www.instagram.com/p/DPyRB-tDBf...
Reposted by jess banks
“we’ve gutted our newspaper, chased off most of the talent, and turned our opinion page into a low rent WSJ clone

somehow this is not attracting new subscribers, better gut it some more”

what a disgrace
Some news: The Washington Post is preparing to cut newsroom staff even after several high profile exits. Bezos’ new opinion editor has privately told people The Post is in “severe financial distress.” Details in @status.news www.status.news/p/washington...
Pain at The Post
As morale sinks and top talent exits, staffers at The Washington Post are bracing for more pain ahead of the holidays—raising questions about Will Lewis’ leadership, nearly two years into his tenure a...
www.status.news
Reposted by jess banks
Oopsie, another big one landed. My look back at the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 for the NZ Drug Foundation. I did a lot of reading for this. The real eye-opener was the two Board of Health reports that preceded the legislation. They are flawed but also admirable. drugfoundation.org.nz/news-and-rep...
Charting fifty years of failure
50 years after it was passed into law, journalist Russell Brown plots a potted history of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975
drugfoundation.org.nz
Reposted by jess banks
"It's YOUR BBC. It's Google's YouTube" also work for PBS!

Love this simple framing for people about public goods. IT'S YOURS. YOU OWN IT.
I'm not sure if it's anyone with an account on their website or just fools like me who pay their license fee to keep the BBC funded, but they also send you a survey where they find out what the public wants from them and then try to act on it.

It is YOUR BBC. It's Google's YouTube. Remember that.
Reposted by jess banks
It is tempting to see our government as just incompetent, but they actually want to make life more miserable for most people #nzpol
Worth a look at actual weekly earnings. Note that lower quartile earnings have been well below inflation for months. This is the plan: run unemployment high, subjugate workers, go bene-bashing in the media, force people into shit, precarious jobs working for your donors. (Ends)
Reposted by jess banks
Does anyone know the batch numbers of Estradot patches under investigation?

Anyone on here having problems with them sticking? Please speak to your doctor/pharmacist if you're having problems with them, you shouldn't have to put up with breakthrough symptoms.
Oh shit, thanks for sharing this. My daughter and I are both on the same one, and even though we aren’t having too much trouble with them, neither of us should be struggling if we don’t have to.
Reposted by jess banks
What the fuck do you mean I got a longer prison sentence than Diddy
NEW YORK (AP) — Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs sentenced to 4 years and 2 months in prison in case involving sex workers, violence and ‘freak-offs’.
Oh, the ones they keep know about it. They just don’t care.
Reposted by jess banks
New ICE recruiting methods have resulted in half of this group of absolute winners failing AN OPEN BOOK TEST
Reposted by jess banks
I am begging the mainstream media to talk less about the East Wing & more about the loss of SNAP funding for the next few days.

The East Wing is gone. We can’t change that.

We *can* help people prepare for the loss of SNAP.

We can urge folks to donate to food banks.

We can give them warning.
Reposted by jess banks
Why does everyone keep calling it “The Epstein Ballroom?” Please stop repeating “The Epstein Ballroom” because it is not called “The Epstein Ballroom!” Don’t tell the news that it’s called “The Epstein Ballroom” and please don’t repost this!!!!!
Reposted by jess banks
I for one think the Epstein Ballroom will be magnificent. I love the decor theme of “what if Uday Hussein ran a Ramada Inn.” And giving it a theme song everyone will associate with it is a stroke of brilliance! “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” is very catchy.
Before I go to bed I want to share the sign I made for the strike and march today. Like a true teacher, it was 11pm inspiration and 7am execution, and I’m pleased with how it turned out. Also, it’s super nice to work at a school as a teacher aide where I’m fully respected as an educator.
Whole game and book projects were canned when Trump tariffs made it uncertain and then absolutely certain that printing/production abroad would be possible. A lot of really creative folks whose work you’ve enjoyed are really suffering.
I don’t talk about it much because the situation doesn’t really change but it’s still insane to me what an enormous amount of really talented game developers are out of work. just whole studios worth of incredible people, often people who worked on beloved games, unemployed.
Reposted by jess banks
EEK!! A live hornet nest has just been found (and destroyed) in Auckland. This is a big species of stinging wasp. We really don't want these to establish.

Please keep an extra careful eye out for unusual wasps, especially if you're in the Auckland area.

You can post photos on iNaturalist NZ […]
Original post on mastodon.nz
mastodon.nz
Nopenopenope
Yellow-legged hornets have been found Glenfield and two other spots in Auckland. We don't want these here! They're twice the size of our other introduced wasps, kill and eat honeybees and lots of native species, and have a nasty sting. www.mpi.govt.nz/news/media-r...
Reposted by jess banks
Nope.
ChatGPT’s new Atlas browser doesn’t just see what you read — it remembers it.

@eff.org’s Lena Cohen showed me it even logged “memories” of her looking for *abortion care* and her doctor’s name. Out-surveils even Chrome.

My @washingtonpost.com column: wapo.st/49bOcVC
Column | ChatGPT just came out with its own web browser. Use it with caution.
OpenAI’s Atlas promises AI-powered convenience. The price? Letting ChatGPT track and store “memories” of what you do online.
wapo.st
Reposted by jess banks
You know, there’s this pervasive view that people don’t care about climate change / are bored of it / find it overwhelming but I wrote this story this week and social media went crazy over it. People care!!!! They really care are they need a way to channel it www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...
New Zealand guts climate policy it bragged about on the world stage
The law was once held up internationally as a model of transparency. The government just weakened it.
www.rnz.co.nz
Reposted by jess banks
"In opposition politics, the loyal opposition does not need to carry around whistles to draw attention to people being disappeared off the street by masked agents of the state." We are not opposition; we are *dissidents*. www.thebulwark.com/p/we-will-te...
We Will Tear Down the Trump Palace Ballroom and Casino
Thinking like a dissident movement.
www.thebulwark.com
Reposted by jess banks
rich people telling you it's fine, it's fun, it's essential for productivity, all while a percentage of users go medically insane. more and more, i am convinced that genAi is our decade's cocaine
These motherfuckers.
Records obtained by ProPublica indicate that food banks across the country were expecting more than 27 million pounds of chicken, 2 million gallons of milk, 10 million pounds of dried fruit and 60 million eggs that never arrived.
Trump Canceled 94 Million Pounds of Food Aid. Here’s What Never Arrived.
ProPublica obtained records from the Department of Agriculture that detail the millions of pounds of food, down to the number of eggs, that never reached food banks because of the administration’s cut...
projects.propublica.org