• 3 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: December 31st, 2023

help-circle


  • Some choice excerpts:

    Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California’s Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. “We worked three days and all of us are broke,” the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.

    “These [high school students] had the words and whiteness to say what they were feeling and could act out in a way that Mexican-Americans who had been living this way for decades simply didn’t have the power or space for the American public to listen to them,” [Stony Brook University history professor Lori A. Flores] says. “The students dropped out because the conditions were so atrocious, and the growers weren’t able to mask that up.”

    She says the A-TEAM “reveals a very important reality: It’s not about work ethic [for undocumented workers]. It’s about [the fact] that this labor is not meant to be done under such bad conditions and bad wages.”

    And what one dude who went through the program as a 17 year old has to say about it now:

    But he says the experience also taught them empathy toward immigrant workers that Carter says the rest of the country should learn, especially during these times.

    “There’s nothing you can say to us that [migrant laborers] are rapists or they’re lazy,” he says. "We know the work they do. And they do it all their lives, not just one summer for a couple of months. And they raise their families on it. Anyone ever talks bad on them, I always think, ‘Keep talking, buddy, because I know what the real deal is.’ "

    My reading is that it failed because there was no political will to actually provide for local-born farmers any more than immigrants. And as such, it was doomed to fail from the start.




  • the police say they are targeting the criminals responsible but cannot “arrest their way out of the problem”. They also say manufacturers and tech firms have a bigger role to play.

    Even though I fully expect the police here aren’t doing as much as they could (I mean come on, are they expecting phones to come with wiimote hand straps?) , I’m at least glad their public rhetoric is that they can’t “arrest their way out of the problem”.

    I imagine that’s poor compensation when you’ve just had your phone snatched, however.







  • Having just watched the lecture, the only classified info I can recognize is the capabilities of 80s era satellites.

    Given that, I think it’s quite a shame that the whole thing is only now available. Rear Admiral Hopper seems to have been someone who deeply understood both computers and people. The prescriptions she gives regarding “systems of computers” and “management” vs “leadership”, to name just two, are spot-on. Her lecture is quite grounded in what I’d call “military thinking”, but that’s just because she’s in a room filled with people who are of that life. In my opinion, everything she talks about is applicable to communities and businesses.

    The general gist of the entire ~90mins reminds me of Project Cybersyn in its perspective on how computers could serve society.


  • The idea is neat, and there is a certain precedent for the approach in .htaccess files and webserver path permissions.

    Still, I worry about the added burden to keeping track of filenames when they get used as stringed keys in such a manner. More plainly: if I rename a file, I now have to go change every access declaration that mentions it. Sure, a quick grep will probably do the trick. But I don’t see a way to have tooling automate any part of it, either.