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I can pick up our cat, Pica without a problem but she has always fought with my husband. Just squirming so much. We've found out why.
She's a right handed cat. My husband is left handed. If you try to hold her on your left shoulder she's used to it, but try to hold her on your right shoulder? She freaks out.
I tried to pick her up "left handed" and suddenly had the same problems as my husband.
So if you have this issue, try switching.
He can now pick her up.
I was walking today and saw a window cat. I started meowing at the window cat.
All of a sudden, the owner came to the window.
She started meowing back at me. Now two humans are meowing at each other while the cat is sitting there like "wtf is wrong with you two."
Regular reminder:
If you see someone use the term "porn addict" in a conversation, they are spreading an unscientific belief about human sexuality.
I know this sounds like conspiracy myth, but between this and Ed Zitron‘s (https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/ ) and @pluralistic s writings, maybe it doesn’t matter if all of Gen AI never makes a profit, as long as it removes the ability for critical thinking. And provides a way for those in power to offload responsibility.
From: @the_roamer
https://mastodonapp.uk/@the_roamer/114910076447146257
Hey! Before we go any further — if you want to support my work, please sign up for the premium version of Where’s Your Ed At, it’s a $7-a-month (or $70-a-year) paid product where every week you get a premium newsletter, all while supporting my free work too. Also,
Putting out the call: if you own or have ever seen one of the following children's CD-ROM games, I could use your help with something I'm researching. The English versions were mainly released in southeast Asia.
* Around the World with Willy Wabbit
* Willy Wabbit Math Adventure
* Willy Wabbit Goes Green
A California-based company with ties to billionaire investor and Trump ally Peter Thiel announced plans Friday to build America’s first U.S.-owned, privately developed facility to enrich uranium in far western Kentucky.
I did a short video on this. For anyone who might need to hear, like, *logistical* reasons for why drafting people into farm work is bad.
Thread format to follow shortly.
Every farm job that CAN be automated, already is. Let's start there.
She thinks... nobody's ever tried to automate picking fruit? Really?
And then we'll talk about the "tehe we'll just make the Medicaid people work the farms" part.
Produce that's hard, OR destined for processing, can be picked by machine.
So carrots, nuts, sour cherries for pie filling, berries & grapes that will be dried, tomatoes for sauce- those are picked by machine already.
But berries, fruit, tomatoes, etc that are eaten fresh can't be automated w current technology.
I know because I worked for a lot of the startups that tried!
There's no way to pick fast enough by machine to be commercially viable, without bruising so they rot before they get to the store.
Now let's talk this whole "We'll just have the Medicaid people pick the crops!" thing.
And let's just ignore the whole "forced labor is morally bad" issue. Let's focus strictly on logistics.
A thing that kept happening to me, as a white American who worked manual labor field jobs (we are in fact out here, sorry)
is finding out I was the only fool on the crew who was there voluntarily & getting paid. Everyone else was convicts with a sentence.
So they were completely new to farm labor & didn't really want to be there. Part of the job is I was supposed to "mentor" them.
News flash: inexperienced people who don't want to be there DON'T DO GOOD WORK. Even if they want to, they don't know how.
Farmers would hire these crews bc they "didn't want to hire migrants" but also "didn't want to pay real wages."
And they were ALWAYS disappointed w the results. Slow. Sloppy. Kept breaking stuff bc they were clumsy.
No real cost savings compared to just hiring real workers.
This one Florida crew I was on had a rotating cast of 19yo weed & Xbox kids who'd been caught on minor drug charges.
They were harmless. And also, clumsy af. Big kids who had no idea where their feet were. They kept stepping on the blueberry transplants we'd just planted.
Another crew was a bunch of minors who were working as "community service" for juvie.
They all smoked, bc juvie. Tobacco is packed with plant viruses that are super contagious; can be spread just by touch. So "don't smoke in the fields" is a key farm rule.
Not only did the juvie crew not know or care. The FOREMEN didn't know or care. That's how janky this outfit was.
Hope those fields turned out ok 🙃
Ag is a real job.
It takes real skills, knowledge, & people who gaf about what they're doing.
Stop treating agriculture like society's dumping ground.
(Is this where we go watch some @ufwupdates videos of some skilled ag workers ripping through harvesting fields?)
@alienghic @sarahtaber @ufwupdates
I think we just watch videos of ice raids in crop fields until mobile bands of rebels make chains of linked arms around entire picking operations
@alienghic @sarahtaber @ufwupdates The part of this that you are missing is that there is no such thing as "able-bodied people on Medicaid" who aren't employed.
That's federal law, since the Clinton Administration, over 30 years ago. ABAWDs (able-bodied adults aged 18-64 without dependents) do *not* qualify for Medicaid, at all, unless they are employed, period.
Only children, disabled people, people with dependents who are full-time caregivers, and the elderly get a free pass.
@alienghic This doesn't even begin to address the fact that even if these putative 34 million people existed, most of them almost certainly do not exist in places where they can be employed as farm labor, because they are mostly not in locations that are suitable for modern agriculture.
We can dispense with the notion that this fascist regime is suddenly going to start providing public housing in farming communities for farm laborers.
Everything she's saying is an obviously blatant lie.
@DrPlanktonguy @gcvsa @alienghic
Oh, please call them health camps like RFK jr talks of, where people will work off their deficiencies of depression and other forms of mental illness or gender dysphoria.
Of course, this has nothing to do with eugenicist ideas
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @DrPlanktonguy @gcvsa
Ah yes depression is treason. I will not forgot to drink my Bouncy Bubble Beverage ration Mr happiness officer.
@Star12Mt @alienghic @sarahtaber @ufwupdates I know all this, because I have been an ABAWD on Medicaid, and the restrictions only get lifted under particular economic downturn conditions, and even then, only when the Governor of a state requests the waiver, which they don't always do.
ABAWDs do not get public assistance without employment. Period.
Most recently, waivers were granted during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, but all those have since expired.
@Star12Mt Furthermore, the *only* forms of public assistance for which ABAWDs can qualify *at all* are:
Medicaid
SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, "food stamps")
and LIHEAP (Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, for heating fuel costs)
except that in 12 states only, ABAWDs can receive General Assistance (cash welfare payments, and it's not a lot).
No one is getting rich, fat, and lazy on welfare in the US. The benefits provided aren't even subsistence level.
@sarahtaber thank you for this thread!
Yet another example that there is no such thing as "unskilled labor" in general.
Yes, thank you for this thread & for kicking off such a great discussion on the basics of what it takes to do agricultural work well. 🙂
Points to a wider issue: complete divorce & chasm between real world & wherever it is Thump & his billionaire backers live. Similar to the growing gap between real value (things in the real world) & share market 'value'. 😐
@rejinl @sarahtaber
This week I heard a piece on our local NPR station where a potato farmer was interviewed; he said he can't get local workers at $17/hr.
Of course, that's just a seasonal job doing heavy physical labor outdoors in the heat, and the housing and transportation issues are real barriers. And I think his is a small farm, so not necessarily representative of the big ag operations.
Indeed, "people don't want to work" doesn't seem like a satisfactory explanation.
I’ve seen other farmers interviewed where they hired Americans. Even where you might consider the wage is pretty decent like in the $20 range. Harvesting crops, particularly fruit is a skilled occupation, as noted in the original post for this thread.
It’s so tempting to make government officials actually try the kind of work they dismiss as unskilled
I can’t remember who said it but “no one who works in Aspen can afford to live in Aspen.”
(Aspen, Colorado is home to many famous and expensive ski resorts, for those who might not know.)
@rejinl @rk @sarahtaber We once tried to define "key worker" so that we could use the definition in housing policy.
We decided that "key worker" was someone who couldn't afford to buy the house they were living in.
We excluded the 20% who were living in social housing. A further 20% *could* afford to buy the house they were living in at today's prices.
Leaving 60% of the population who would meet that definition of "key worker", which was clearly not useful for policy development. So we gave up trying to concoct a useful definition.
@rejinl @sarahtaber I picked corn in the summer time as a teen. It was a hard, hot, surprisingly itchy job, and it only paid about $5 an hour back then. I hear they pay $10.60 now. For "hard working honest" people, farmers can't seem to wrap their head around workers needing more than poverty wages.
Sorry, not all of us were gifted 2,000 acres, a few houses and $5m worth of equipment by daddy. Some of us actually work for our money.
@rejinl @sarahtaber We turned a bunch of the best near-urban farmland in the world into suburbs, kicked the farms out so far that few people can commute there, and now complain that there aren’t enough farmworkers.
A planned economy would have easily avoided this. The free market has now rendered a lot of the best farmland in the world unusable for growing crops, to build housing, and also nobody likes living in suburbs and we still have a housing crisis.
You need to understand something. Suburbia is a planned economy.
Suburbia was designed to separate housing, work and retail two separate areas bound together by very expensive transportation system. It was the concept of specializing the functions of a community, just as businessman, specialized the function of jobs and architect and city planners became influenced by those ideas.
..
But there is more to that than just that statement. The United States faced a huge social problem at the end of World War II, where we had the insanely powerful industrial base crafted for the demands of war, and millions of working men returning back into the economy when the foundation for wartime economy has ceased to exist.
Businessman and politicians were terrified of the consequences of a massive recession facing returning seasoned war veterans
Therefore, they instituted the number of programs of which are modern mortgage structure is part to finance the transition from a war time to a peace time economy, transforming all that industrial capacity to peace time use.
The other half of that equation was the institution of suburban land use. The home mortgage industry financed suburbia, and finance the transition of the wartime economy to a peace time one.
But it’s all a bubble
farmers have tried to offer $20 per hour to get 'muricans to harvest
they mostly don't last a full day
so.....let's pay our migrant workers $20 per hour because they know what they are doing, they can do the work and they work really fucking hard
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