• 0 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle







  • Because of all the bullshit with subsidies etc. intended for improving broadband infrastructure being abused, my dream is:

    • All the poles & lines (and access rights to them) are nationalized and then opened up for individual ISPs to service. Current ISP exclusivity contracts/agreements should be dissolved. Let them actually compete for customers with price, features and customer service.
    • The government should also offer tax-funded baseline connectivity to everyone since it’s effectively impossible to live in modern society without internet access. The provided speeds must be sufficient for a typical bloated framework-script-heavy site, all (meta)data/packets should be considered constitutionally protected private info not able to be monitored/scraped/sold.
    • Use building out and supporting the above as a useful jobs program instead of more military adjacent stuff.

  • Generally speaking, I don’t like an overly verbose acronym. It’s part of why I stop at LGBT or LGBTQ instead of going all the way to LGBTQ+, or as my government seems to want to say, LGBTQ2IA+. In my opinion, the effort to make the community more inclusive by adding more sub-communities to the acronym has the opposite effect.

    The other question/issue I have with the long abbreviation is does the order of the letters matter? It’s currently settled on L->G->B […] but is that just by tradition or does it signify some other importance [order added? relative size of community? etc]. If you remembered all the characters but couldn’t remember the sequence is it disrespectful to list them alphabetically or try to use the typical order and possibly transpose a couple? I would assume there’s a process for deciding when to add a designation to the abbreviation, how do things get decided against and what does that mean if you feel there’s something that should be included but isn’t? You wouldn’t want to gatekeep someone’s genuinely held identity, but you can’t list everything, and if you add a “everything else” then what’s the point of a list in the first place other than increased prominence in relation to “everything else”?

    It definitely feels like a more conversation-friendly catch-all (such as “queer”) is more tenable instead of constantly adding or changing designations to refer to a nebulous collective group. At its core, basically that group is anyone that considers themself not CISHET, and any extra specificity is certainly important for identity and community building but probably not needed in typical conversations/references.

    Another thought just occurred to me, how does screen reading assistive tech. deal with seeing LGBTQ2IA+ – does it just read out every character or will it try to pronounce it like a word? Either would be varying levels of jarring to the user I’d think.

    Sorry for dropping this kinda stream of consciousness rant on your comment, and I don’t consider myself part of the community so it’s really not for me to say anyway, but I was glad to see a similar sentiment against the abbreviation reflected throughout this post and particularly from your comment.