alyaza

alyaza OP Mod , 10 days ago to U.S. News in Massachusetts' millionaires tax revenue reaches $1.8 billion, on pace to double estimates

Massachusetts has collected about $1.8 billion from a voter-approved surtax on the state's highest earners through the first nine months of the fiscal year, the Department of Revenue said Monday in a quarterly report.

That's more than $800 million more than what the Legislature and Gov. Maura Healey planned to spend in surtax revenue for all of fiscal year 2024, raising the possibility of a sizable pot that will land in an Education and Transportation Reserve Fund and the Education and Transportation Innovation and Capital Fund, both surtax-specific accounts, once the books close.

alyaza OP Mod , 11 days ago to U.S. News in A workers’ co-op rises from the remains of a Colorado mushroom farm

ALAMOSA — Over decades starting in 1985, the Colorado Mushroom Farm northeast of Alamosa sold millions of pounds of mushrooms grown and harvested within the building’s dimmed cavern to grocery stores in Colorado. Along the way it offered year-round employment to generations of immigrant workers, many of whom came here from Guatemala fleeing civil war and searching for a better economic future.

But when the farm filed for bankruptcy in December 2022, it owed thousands of dollars in unpaid wages to employees, some of whom had been subjected to unsafe working conditions and were injured on the job.

[...]Now, some of those workers are taking charge of their futures with the help of a powerful coalition of nonprofit and government supporters as well as Minsun Ji at the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center, which works to dismantle economic systems that benefit a small few at the expense of many, especially working-class communities and communities of color.

It’s an American Dream in the making, but not without funding for an employee-owned mushroom co-op and the workers learning to navigate the hurdles of business ownership in a system that favors wealthy white entrepreneurs.

alyaza OP Mod , 11 days ago to U.S. News in Wolverines could be the next animal to come to Colorado as Polis signs reintroduction bill

always fun after the wolf reintroduction vote from a few years back. here's why they're doing this:

Colorado is considered a prime habitat for wolverines, which are listed as a threatened species across the Lower 48 states by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Wolverines were nearly eliminated from much of the United States in the 1930s, experts said, but conservation efforts have helped the animal to make a bit of a comeback. In Colorado, the last confirmed sighting of a wolverine was in 2009, when one traveled down from the Grand Tetons.

Advocates for reintroduction said Colorado is home to the largest block of wolverine-ready habitat in the Lower 48, with about one-fifth of total suitable land. Wolverines are solitary animals that favor high-alpine environments.

alyaza Mod , 11 days ago to World News in International Criminal Court applied for arrest warrants for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas's leader in Gaza for war crimes

in this case: no, they're just Filipino, and it seems to just be a contraction of Jupiter or something similarly banal. i think it would be prudent in the future to do a bit of double checking before we start accusing people of Nazis; you can easily check your assumption by just visiting their mastodon page, linked in the description of their kbin account.

alyaza OP Mod , 1 month ago to U.S. News in UAW secures historic union election win at Tennessee Volkswagen plant

if it can happen in the South, it can happen in your workplace too! you should start a union--and if you need help to that end, reach out to the AFL-CIO or, if you would prefer a more radical alternative, EWOC

alyaza OP Mod , 1 month ago to World News in Nature officially becomes a musician, earning royalties for environmental causes

this is actually quite cute, i think.

alyaza Mod , 1 month ago to LGBTQ+ in It's barely June, and the Mayor of London is causing ANOTHER pride flag discourse on the app that is Twitter

i don't think "adding race-specific stripes to a pride flag" is a bad thing, is "treating people differently based on skin tone" except in the most cringeworthy, pedantic, I See No Color way possible, or is "racist"—and i think that if you believe these things you probably will not be allowed to partake in discussions like this on our instance after today

alyaza Mod , 1 month ago to LGBTQ+ in It's barely June, and the Mayor of London is causing ANOTHER pride flag discourse on the app that is Twitter

So a pride flag that is clearly textbook racist is good and arguing against it and the people that say its better because of the racism is not allowed here

when you call them racist and imply they're segregationist for having their preference, yes, that is not allowed. that's needlessly aggressive and needlessly sectarian—and speaking personally, "having a preference for more stripes on a flag that represent marginalized communities is racist and like segregation" is just such an overstatement of the point (that i otherwise agree with, for the record—i am not a fan of the progress flag) being made that it verges into being unserious.

alyaza Mod , 1 month ago to U.S. News in Ben Gurion, founder of Israel, admits having stolen land from Arabs and that's there's no reason for arabs to make peace. See more of his behaviour on this article

this is not news and it's not US news; don't make a post like this in this section

alyaza OP Mod , 2 months ago to World News in 'Hamas mouthpiece': Netanyahu lauds new law allowing him to shut Al-Jazeera in Israel

also in Israel news today is this--the probable shutting down of Al Jazeera's operations there. Netanyahu says he'll act swiftly to request the outlet be banned under this new law

alyaza OP Mod , 2 months ago to World News in Israel accused of deadly strike on Iranian consulate in Syria

the strategy here appears to be that Israel is trying to bait Hezbollah into attacking them, which is a very sane strategy and not at all completely psychotic

alyaza Mod , 2 months ago to Chat in (EDIT: Sadness canceled, read edit) Although relatable, I feel sad beehaw wants to leave lemmy (+ I propose talking to the inital sponsor of lemmy development to get moderation issues fixed)

yeah the difficulty here really is: even if we wanted to stick around (i think the consensus is not especially) and even if we did get the mod tools we think are needed (no reason to believe this will happen), the bridge here is burned pretty definitively. i don't personally see the sense in sticking around on a place where the people stewarding the software have an actively adversarial relationship with us

alyaza Mod , 2 months ago to AskBeehaw in Now that Voyager doesn’t work, what client will you be using?

anything of importance is generally going to be mirrored on the Docs page, so for example: Beehaw, Lemmy, and A Vision of the Fediverse

alyaza Mod , 2 months ago to Politics in Dems launch 11th-hour meddling operation in Ohio GOP Senate primary

without reducing them each as persons into cartoon villains in my mind

if you "reduced them to cartoon villains" they would literally be less evil than they actually are. Republicans writ large would gladly kill billions of people if it kept the fossil fuel money going—and we know this because they are actively choosing to do that by denying climate change and making it as difficult as possible to move away from fossil fuels as we speak

alyaza Mod , 2 months ago to Politics in Dems launch 11th-hour meddling operation in Ohio GOP Senate primary

Not one person on Earth would raid the capital building for Jeb Bush.

people literally did this to disrupt the 2000 recount in Florida on behalf of George W. Bush, Jeb's careerist failbrother. you cannot seriously think this is only a populist thing