Okay, do y'all know what "Home Children" are? 🙋‍♂️

I'm a 🇨🇦 history nerd, and literally had no idea what this was until this morning.

It turns out it's a weird and twisted part of history, 🇨🇦 plays an active role in hiding.

🧵👇

2/ Basically if you were an orphan in the UK or commonwealth, you were rounded up and used as a slave.

This also happened to poor families that were tricked into giving up their kids "temporarily" into better care, only to come back and find out their kids were gone.
3/ Eventually there was too many kids, so they decided they would export them.

"Parents" in countries like Canada would go to homes, pay an "adoption fee," and get kids under indentured contracts.
4/ Indentured contracts are when someone is forced to work, beaten, and often compensated with a minor wage withheld until they complete the job.

It's slavery. Except owners also have incentive to work the person to death before the contract was up, so they don't have to pay.
5/ Anyway, so Canada brought in over 100,000 of these kids to work on farms, factories, etc. This happened until 1948.

These adoption agencies were also pioneers in customer service. You could return the kid at anytime as well.

Coincidentally also avoiding paying the kid money.
6/ It also turns out "orphan" is a loose use of the term.

One organization specializing in reuniting these families estimates fewer than 12% were actually orphans. The rest were stripped from intact families as labor, with a fake story for history.

https://t.co/wEO4EqVTxP
7/ To give an idea of the scale, it's estimated one in ten Canadians are from the bloodline of Home Children.

They just don't know it, because many immigrant children at the time thought it was just how things were, and it would be embarrassing if it wasn't.
8/ Most of this was hidden until around ~2007. The UK and many other countries acknowledged this was an atrocity, and apologized.

Not Canada. In 2010, the then minister of foreign affairs refused to apologize.

Jason. Fucking. Kenney. 🤦‍♂️

https://t.co/nkUSx3JNH1
9/ and technically, Kenney wasn't wrong. Canadians aren't interested in the story of Home Children.

Most would rather pretend Canada is and has always been perfect, never having slavery. Morally superior to those Americans. 🙄
Seriously though. If you don't read the Star article, just read this lede to get an idea of where the government's at.

For American friends, this is the guy that was elected to now run a whole province.

More from History

You May Also Like

1/ Some initial thoughts on personal moats:

Like company moats, your personal moat should be a competitive advantage that is not only durable—it should also compound over time.

Characteristics of a personal moat below:


2/ Like a company moat, you want to build career capital while you sleep.

As Andrew Chen noted:


3/ You don’t want to build a competitive advantage that is fleeting or that will get commoditized

Things that might get commoditized over time (some longer than


4/ Before the arrival of recorded music, what used to be scarce was the actual music itself — required an in-person artist.

After recorded music, the music itself became abundant and what became scarce was curation, distribution, and self space.

5/ Similarly, in careers, what used to be (more) scarce were things like ideas, money, and exclusive relationships.

In the internet economy, what has become scarce are things like specific knowledge, rare & valuable skills, and great reputations.
Recently, the @CNIL issued a decision regarding the GDPR compliance of an unknown French adtech company named "Vectaury". It may seem like small fry, but the decision has potential wide-ranging impacts for Google, the IAB framework, and today's adtech. It's thread time! 👇

It's all in French, but if you're up for it you can read:
• Their blog post (lacks the most interesting details):
https://t.co/PHkDcOT1hy
• Their high-level legal decision: https://t.co/hwpiEvjodt
• The full notification: https://t.co/QQB7rfynha

I've read it so you needn't!

Vectaury was collecting geolocation data in order to create profiles (eg. people who often go to this or that type of shop) so as to power ad targeting. They operate through embedded SDKs and ad bidding, making them invisible to users.

The @CNIL notes that profiling based off of geolocation presents particular risks since it reveals people's movements and habits. As risky, the processing requires consent — this will be the heart of their assessment.

Interesting point: they justify the decision in part because of how many people COULD be targeted in this way (rather than how many have — though they note that too). Because it's on a phone, and many have phones, it is considered large-scale processing no matter what.