In Your Heart

On this day, 9 August 1956, 20,000 women in Pretoria, South Africa marched against pass laws: apartheid laws curtailing freedom of movement for Black and Indian people. The Federation of South African Women-organised demonstration delivered a petition against the laws with 100,000 signatures and the participants sang "Wathint’Abafazi Wathint’imbokodo" meaning ‘Now you have touched the women, you have struck a rock’. The protest kickstarted a wave of civil disobedience across the country over two years in which thousands of women were arrested, until leaders of the African National Congress panicked and called it off. August 9 is commemorated today in South Africa as Women's Day. More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/10880/south-africa-women's-day This story is one of hundreds featured in our book, Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance & Rebellion, available here: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/products/working-class-history-everyday-acts-resistance-rebellion-book

I kinda sympathize with Bernie’s position in the sense that you should either let a person into the country freely or not let them in at all. Guest worker programs institute a second-class status where your right to stay in the country is controlled by your employer, giving them massive leverage over you. This clearly does undercut American’s wages, even moreso than regular immigration does. At least a regular immigrant legally has all the same rights in the labor market as a citizen does.

Our technology industry has failed to provide a coherent argument for its own existence on the national stage. If this is not solved, 2028 will become a referendum on caging, killing, and looting the technology industry over the water and power libels. The popular image of the AI boom is not uncertain. Recent polling suggests the average American understands AI is a thing that wastes water, skyrockets power costs, and scams their grandparents in exchange for exposing children to deviant sexual content, sports gambling, and all other manner of sin. If the best answer to why we should not imprison technology executives, burn down data centers, and kill the american technology sector is “so we can build better chatbots for your sports betting,” voters will vote to do so. In a zero-sum world, voters do not think long term; they envy, and then they loot. We do not loot the sewage system or the power grid because we understand they are the bulwarks against chaos. We accept their costs because they hold back chaos. Does the median voter believe the same to be true about technology? Technology is the only mechanism we have for escaping the Malthusian trap. But because we have been too cowardly to articulate this, because we have substituted “rationalism” and “AGI” for a coherent theology of Progress, the state sees the industry as only a parasite to be consumed. If we cannot articulate why innovation is a moral imperative, we can expect the entire technology industry to end up like Boston. First taxed, then looted, then exhausted. And we’ll be stuck wondering where it all went.

A: ppl are dying in horrible pain!! cut yr palm open and smear the blood in the dirt if you really care!

I have been more diligent about following financial and economic news instead of just front page political stuff this year.

#part of it is just there were a lot more break-glass-in-case-of-emergency options available than people expected