BC SOCIETY
Saved by @Alex1Powell

My grandparents were very poor. My dad was ashamed & created dumb tension about it. My grandma though always took me aside to give me a chocolate orange after Xmas gifts were unwrapped; she’d make me crack it and eat a slice before going back to Xmas fun.

 Did their poverty matter? No! Everything was out of love. My grandpa made us things from his workshop. One year he said, “We try” and 14 yo me said laughing “I know”. Gramps gave me a 1 arm hug & slapped my back with a grin. That did not go over well with dad.
He chewed me out for making them know I knew or something gay like that. My grandparents didn’t have hot water. They knew I knew. They were why I tried hard at college. My grandma came to my campus only once and gave me the “ya done gud, anon” line when she left.
Once I graduated & had a job, I got a case of Sam Adams for Xmas day with my grandpa because I wanted to drink with him when he went out for his Xmas cigar. My treat. I felt like an adult not just his grandson. We talked for an hour in his workshop with the space heater on.
Close my eyes: I can see the Adrienne Barbeau poster, the 10 hand planes on the wall & cigar boxes holding screws, nuts & nails. We started real talks then; he told me his war stories & life before grandma. We had more in common than I thought. I later named a son after him
Dad once again asked why I didn’t ask him to get the beer so my grandparents could have it in advance so people wouldn’t know. Wouldn’t know what? That they’re dirt poor and their grandson did a nice thing to share beers with his grandfather.
This plays into the Boomer desire to create situations to express sentiments and Kodak approved tableaus rather than let the organic moment happen.
This continued for the rest of my grandparents’ lives as I spent time with them on random drop ins rather than Scheduled Sanitized Moments. Not visiting on a birthday was bad. Stopping by the weekend before & after for chats, a beer or to watch a game did not make up for it.
My cousins went thru the same thing. We figured it out that the Boomer Gen wanted us there when they could clean up the old, cluttered house beforehand to pretend our grandparents weren’t poor. Xmas Eve morning was a rotation of the Boomer Gen doing this. Same on July 3rd.
When I knew my GF would be my wife I took her to see my grandparents unannounced. I warned her in the car “My grandparents are dirt poor but it’s a friendly home, the house is in better shape than when I was a kid, just brace yourself.”
The house’s condition floored her. ‘How could it be better now?!?!’ Never mattered because they loved me. Boomers didn’t get it, which is why they thought divorces & broken homes would be ok if the kids had enough material comfort. Divorced Boomers turned Xmas into a competition
All my cousins have a special Xmas thing from our grandparents. Cookie recipe, silly gift, unique tradition. My wife gets me chocolate oranges as an homage to my grandma. The video game stand I drew up, and my grandpa built for me holds many of my son’s Legos.
Christmas isn’t about $ or the staged photo. That’s why we’re a rich society but Christmas is a stressful, unnecessarily tense time. Our poorest citizens can afford tech, toys and everything or take 1,000 group selfies. What we’ve lost is understanding the intangible, the candid

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in the past when I’ve thought about this I’ve thought about it from the perspective of my own safety/comfort. And I’m good on that front; I can handle it. But now I’m thinking about it differently: thinking about the people who tell me they join or stay on twitter because of me.

Every time someone in the press refers to me as a “twitter celebrity” (actual phrase that I don’t fully understand or subscribe to but this is what people say) it means that my presence and voice are adding social cachet to a company that I find to be quite terrible.

People tell me that they learn a lot from what I have to say here, and sometimes that it’s their first or only exposure to certain ideas, histories, perspectives, etc. and I have to weigh that too. But I could post that stuff elsewhere.

We’ll see. I’m just thinking aloud for now but I’m watching closely to see what @twitter and @jack do in the coming days and how they respond to what we now know about Cesar Sayoc (beyond one really stupid tweet). Because we know it’s not just him. Big changes need to happen.
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Wrath Of Gnon
Wrath Of Gnon
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A story of inappropriate technology: in the 1970s it was decided to modernize the rice farming of Sri Lanka, whose system that had not changed much for 3000 years. The goal was to replace the water buffalo with the modern tractor, but the attempt had disastrous consequences...


Buffalos create "wallows", pools of muddy water without which they cannot control their temperatures. Always filled with water, these wallows create many eco-services: in the dry season the become a haven for fish that then migrate back to the paddies when these fill with water.


The fish is a valuable source of proteins for landless laborers and greatly help control the population of malaria causing mosquitoes who breed in the rice paddies. The vegetation around the wallows are breeding and hunting grounds for snakes and water monitor lizards who prey...


...on rats that eat the rice and the crabs that burrow into the sides of the rice paddies eventually causing them to lose integrity, leading to collapses of entire paddy systems.


Without the water buffalo wallows, villagers no longer had a place to soak the palm fronds they needed to thatch their roofs, leading them to rely on locally made clay roof tiles, which caused massive deforestation as trees were cut down to fuel the tile kilns.
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Kelly Ellis
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So, I want to talk about how sexual harassment and fair pay are linked at Google (and beyond), because I think that's an angle that isn't being highlighted enough in the coverage of these walk-outs. I'm going to frame it largely around my personal experience there. Thread.

When I was sexually harassed by the director of the area I was working in, I was afraid to report it because I was worried that "getting him in trouble" would result in the subtle retaliation of missed leadership opportunities.

I wanted to continue working on the team I was on, because I'd gained a lot of very deep knowledge and expertise in that area, as well as reputation and camaraderie with the other folks working in that area. I didn't want to make the situation more "difficult."

To get promoted at Google, several need to happen: 1. you need opportunities for ownership and leadership above your current level (basically, opportunities to show you're working at the next level you're trying to get promoted to). The work you're "assigned" has a big impact.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
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When it's railroading time, you get railroads.

When the railroads turn into the personal satrapies of rail-barons, you get trustbusters.

A couple decades ago, it was online service time. We had the users, the telcoms systems, the computers, the modems, so we got platforms.

1/

We had that, but we lacked something important: effective antimonopoly enforcement. Lax merger laws allowed companies with access to capital markets to buy out or neutralize all their competitors, so we got monopolies.

Right on schedule, we're getting digital trustbusters.

2/

Now, some people aren't technically sophisticated, but they do understand a lot about competition law. That's how you get meat-and-taters antitrust proposals like @amyklobuchar's #CALERA, which address the structural problems with antitrust

Klobuchar's bill is hugely important. The reason we have monopolies is that we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago. Monopoly isn't a tech problem, it's everywhere from sneakers to glass bottles to pro wrestling to candy to

Klobuchar's CALERA doesn't just seek to apply antitrust law to tech - it also explicitly restores the pre-Reagan basis for fighting monopolies: we fight monopolies because they concentrate power and corrupt our politics. All monopolies are guilty unless proven otherwise.

5/
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Kurt "Masks Save Lives" Eichenwald
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For those of us suffering & dying in Texas, the sociopathy of @GOP that leads to an astonishing lack of concern about our lives by evil folk like @GregAbbott_TX @GovernorPerry @TuckerCarlson @DanCrenshawTX et al who blatantly lie about what’s happening...1

...just to score political points - and protect the profits of energy companies - is almost incomprehensible. These are people who would claim Social Security caused 9/11 if it was convenient. What caused this catastrophe is vast vast majority from gas, then coal/nuclear...2

...then wind. The ONLY source of power that is delivering more than expected in budgeting is wind. But that’s not convenient to say for the oil/gas/coal industry, so the @GregAbbott_TX @GovernorPerry @DanCrenshawTX stand atop our dead bodies lying to protect the companies...2

...shockingly, the ONLY people in a position of state/national strength are the executives with the company that manages electricity in the state, @ERCOT_ISO. But they can’t tell the whole truth, because that would entail revealing how much stupidity was done here for profit...3

...of industry by Texas @GOP. If gas/nuke/nuclear/wind had been winterized - as they are everywhere else in the country - this would have largely been prevented. But it would have cost companies money, and that would cut into profits. If the gas lines has been buried deeper...3
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