Whew, what a day. The news... well, for years we've needed a word for "shocking but not surprising." And maybe another for "devastating but not actionable."

And I am thoroughly exhausted from the usual 14 hours of nonstop childcare and housework.

But I wanted to share: TIL that one approach to the age-old issue of mine safety in #Appalachia is for mines to train teams of on-site emergency responders...especially timely given how little funding goes to first responders in, say, West Virginia or South Carolina...and have them compete for trophies.

Yup, today my son and I found ourselves attending a Mine Rescue Championship.

The industry may be arguably damn near obsolete and undeniably insanely corrupt and notoriously lethally brutal to its workers and basically a vestigial feudalism that doesn't belong in this century... but, this being the USA, you can win a trophy for demonstrating skill at extracting your coworkers from a deadly work site.

More power to ya, all you mine rescue volunteers. Someday history will eliminate the need for your services, but meanwhile, mad props for stepping up where it's dark as a dungeon.

#weareserfs #andsomeofusarealsoheroes
https://www.msha.gov/training/training/mine-rescue-training/mine-rescue-contests/2025-enforcement-mine-rescue-contest

Hurrah, we now officially have drinkable running water for the first time since the September floods!

See, unusually heavy rain can wash a lot of extra E. Coli and coliform bacteria into your well water. The solution? Pour a gallon of bleach into your well, and flush it. Problem is, we soon found out, if you have hard water, the chlorine in the bleach will catalyze the iron and manganese in the water to flocculate into heavy brown metallic sludge, which will choke your filters and possibly kill your pump motor. The process of pulling out the dead motor and installing a new one will also stir up a lot of the metallic sludge, further choking your filters, as will pulling the new pump out to fix the wiring that arced out. And if you live, say, here, every time you want to get your water re-tested, you have to drive to a town 45 minutes away to reach the nearest analytical chemist. And of course every time the power goes out (which is quite often with Appalachian Power) you lose your water (as well as your phone service which was all over WiFi because the southern half of this county has no cellular coverage).

Anyway, it's all finally fixed until the pipes freeze again.

#TheSimpleLife #Appalachia #weareserfs

McDonald's, Google, Apple, Facebook, Ford, Chrysler... imagine what would happen if you tried to start any of these today.

#weareserfs

@killick It looks to me like much of human history has been a struggle to build and sustain alternatives to aristocracy, and a swinging pendulum in the war between the 1% and the 99%. Making "class warfare" into a thing to be avoided at all costs was one of their greatest tricks - the working classes are colonized, occupied, and imagining any alternative is heresy.

#weareserfs
#serfingUSA

The buried lede: ten percent of the employees working FULL TIME at Disney World are homeless, many living in their cars makeshift tent camps, resorting to begging and/or sex work to survive life as a serf in the Magic Kingdom.

But yeah, on top of that shocking failure of capitalism, now they also have a governor who wants to ban them from public sight.

Anatole France: "The law, in its infinite justice, prohibits both rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges."

#weareserfs

https://insidethemagic.net/2024/03/disney-world-homeless-ban-desantis-cast-members-jc1/