Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Journalism's New Propaganda Tool: Using Confirmed to Mean Its Opposite https://theintercept.com/2020/09/05/journalisms-new-propaganda-tool-using-confirmed-to-mean-its-opposite/

In California’s Wine Country, Undocumented Grape Pickers Forced to Work in Fire Evacuation Zones https://theintercept.com/2020/09/06/california-fires-undocumented-farm-workers/

Covid-19 Workers' Comp Claims Are Being Held Up or Denied https://theintercept.com/2020/09/07/coronavirus-workers-compensation-claims-labor/

Too many people. The health of the environment is the key to sustaining humans. Any measures taken to save lives at a macro level is a threat to humanity. This is a hard truth that humanity isn't mature enough to accept. The only mitigator that doesn't involve people dying is moving people off planet. There is no viable solution in sight, but there is time, if we can find intelligence. #dumballover

Urban dwellers are the dupes of the ruling classes. They are always faced with the edifices of power. Easier to control dependencies of those without direct access to necessary resources. In rural areas, strong policing is required to limit access to resources, but ownership of resources not contained in walls and spread over a large area suffers from appearances of legitimacy and is much harder to police.

Money only has value, if it is the only access to necessary resources.

@LeoSammallahti Yes. I agree that the emphasis on college is unsustainable. The majority of the jobs in the USA is in the low paid service sector, and that's also where the biggest shortage lies.

@LeoSammallahti @charlag We can even carry it down to the people who ensure the labs are properly cleaned and maintained.

@LeoSammallahti @charlag Engineered software and hardware is largely responsible for rapid advances in medicine compared to the clerical and trial work that consumed a lot of time in the past. We can talk about a COVID-19 vaccine in terms of months rather than decades.

@LeoSammallahti ...resources, which has made outsourcing more attractive. If you can't measure software, you can't understand which skills best suit your needs, and you can't gauge the productivity of your workers, which is a key economic factor. You also aren't able to gauge your quality very well.

I digress.

@LeoSammallahti ...reducing costs as to cost of labor. In engineering and management, it's mostly salary and benefits cost, so it has been a slower adoption.

Hardware engineering was hit much harder than software engineering, because the costs are fully understood. Software has not adopted a viable measurement definition, so it is still "magic" to management (and unfortunately many practitioners). This same mechanism has made management view software engineers as fungible...

@LeoSammallahti Your argument for union apprenticeship makes the assumption that it's a viable option. I don't know about the UK, but Thatcher and Reagan put both on a similar course. In the USA, union jobs are hard to come by and they don't pay nearly as good as in the past.

The article doesn't mention outsourcing, which is a key factor in the decline of both union and office jobs (now including management). Outsourcing in manufacturing is due as much to looser regulations ...

Greystone Nursing Homes, Whose Executives Gave 00,000 to Trump, Are Epicenters of Covid-19 Deaths https://theintercept.com/2020/09/04/nursing-homes-coronavirus-deaths-greystone/

Police and Affordable Housing Collide in Charleston - The South's most picturesque city reckons with race and gentrification. https://inthesetimes.com/article/charleston-south-carolina-police-affordable-housing-race-gentrification

Decided to grab "Introducing Python" by Bill Lubanovic as a reference. In reading the "sell the language" chapter, I'm amazed at some outright falsehoods. Perpetuation of the terse language means more productivity myth and network wait times obviate the need for processing efficiency myth are two prominent ones.

The "look how much cleaner this looks in my language" thesis always cracks me up as well in comparing 3GLs.