Mark Shea

I feel validated and also this just made me hate the iPhone EVEN MORE

A worker with a bucket full of olives and his hands in the olive bucket

"Joaquin" shared this pic from where he is harvesting olives in Tulare County. He earns $6.50 per bucket. “This is my 1st season and I find the work dangerous as I continuously need to go up and down a ladder rapidly to harvest the olives." #WeFeedYou

"He screams about you in his sleep ..." - a perfect spooky season interpretation of a classic that was already a little on the spooky side

Thank you—I feel like there’s a better version of the post that’s more ‘look at all the fun things we do with language, we’ll catch em all and tell you which came first’

Fragility Is Getting Scary The opposite of risk management.

As the bull market turns 3 years old and becomes ever more concentrated in a handful of companies building a speculative technology, the Trump administration is systematically removing guardrails in every major risk category. Fun.

www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/fragility-...

Simpsons did it in Treehouse of Horror for Clinton-Dole 96

Why do so many French words end in a silent x?
‘Cheveux’, ‘voix’, ‘paix’, ‘deux’, ‘mieux’, ‘faux’, ‘doux’ – the list is endless.

There’s a fascinating story behind this x’s – or actually two stories.

Click and zoom in on my new graphic to read about medieval abbreviations and imitating Latin:

I don’t know threads, but it looks like people are adding that text to their own posts for some trolling or clout reason I don’t get—someone talks about it in the replies to that post

YouTube video by GML SUPPRTSVCS The Sesame Street Baker Pratfalls * 1-10 (June 1969)

Baker pratfalls.

youtu.be/8fCFdhTQJsM?...

The primitive tortureboard Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY

I just put online the chapter from my book that talks about all the myths and mysteries about QWERTY and Dvorak.

You can read it here: aresluna.org/the-primitiv...

Tonight’s dumb napkin cartoon…

I’ve used Anthony Webster’s @ethnopoetics.bsky.social review of McWhorters Language Hoax. It’s short, and opens up a good conversation about really different disciplinary ways of conceptualizing language. Also it’s a little mean

This is a terrible take, starting with the assumption that models based on *text* accurately reflect Language, snd that Language itself is an amodal, arbitrary, symbolic system, which it’s not. Language is inherently multimodal and polysemiotic, and text is not natural language production

When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers In 1964, a program that brought migrant Mexican laborers to the U.S. ended. So the U.S. recruited American students to pick crops instead. When they saw their living conditions, strikes ensued.

In 1965, the government recruited thousands of strapping high-school boys to replace Mexican workers on farms in Texas and California.

A lot of the boys went on strike. Others quit. The program "was considered a giant failure and was never tried again."

www.npr.org/sections/the...

Every time I see something like this, I am reminded of a talk I gave where one of the other speakers was a researcher who claimed that his AI/ML algorithm could accurately read emotions based on an fine-grained analysis of someone's speech patterns. /1

Iconic warblish? Visual warblish?

Stock videos of people eating in reverse

Protest, Power, and the Violence Debate "We are told we are experiencing peace, so long as everyone is cooperating."

@prisonculture.bsky.social and I have been encouraging people to read chapter six of our book, Let This Radicalize You, which deals with the question of "violence" in social movements. We have decided to share the chapter publicly, to offer some context and grounding for the current conversation.

Post by pixelatedboat ‘I love my job as the guy who adds a fake “keep me signed in” checkbox to every website that does nothing’

THREAD. A lot of attention is rightly going to Medicaid cuts and other very bad things in Trump's bill passed by the House, but there's something else that isn't getting enough attention, that is very difficult to find in any news coverage, but that will fundamentally alter life for all of us.

A mandarin orange orchard with the protective netting over the trees

Raul shared this pic with us of an orchard after they labored to put the nets over the citrus trees. The nets ensures the flowers are not pollinated by the bees. Because of this hard work kids across America get to enjoy seedless mandarin oranges in their lunch box. #WeFeedYou

They don't need a warrant A federal kidnapping in Worcester

A report from the scene of a horrifying kidnapping on the streets of Worcester, MA today by @billshaner.bsky.social www.welcometohellworld.com/they-dont-ne...

How to Not Get Poisoned in America The minute I saw that Robert Kennedy Jr., a notorious disease-loving health crank, was going to be responsible for the nation’s health—and the health of its...

"You know, as an example, red lead was used to make cheddar... A can of coffee could be coffee, but it could be ground bone, or charred shells, or dirt." Deborah Blum on our bad food past -- and how to avoid it being our future:
buttondown.com/theswordandt...

Major Education Resource Set to Shut Down This Week The federal Department of Education maintains an open access database of more than 2 million documents dating back to the 1960s. It will cease operating Wednesday due to DOGE cuts.

ERIC database is being shut down.

I hope someone somewhere is archiving its contents now—but one comfort is that much in it was published in hard copy. But that's only comforting if libraries haven't pulped old journals...

(Still time to download stuff!)

www.governing.com/policy/major...

“Please, think about how long every hour feels for a third grader in a detention center. The wait had already been too long a week ago.”

Farm workers bent over planting lettuce

Planting lettuce requires precise work. A machine carrying 4-6 persons will drop the seedlings into pre dug holes in each row but there is a farm worker who follows behind to esnure the plants are grounded and also to catch any missed holes. #WeFeedYou

Parents of cis children who object to trans children in sports are also teaching their kids a piss poor lesson about how to lose with grace and how to recognize where we have strengths and where we do not

They are literally undercutting their kids, while attacking other kids.

Fucking losers

Oh in revised writing it’s gotta be B

B, but I think analogy with ‘in-fucking-credible’ would let me get A upon the air before I realized I had a problem with the landing