Hell is too cold

And he was like "we don't need to go to [town], we'll just go to the one in your town. And I said my town doesn't have a McDonald's. And he was like "okay, we'll go to the closest one". And I was like right, the one in [town]. And he said "that's twenty minutes away from your house, you really don't have one closer?" And when I confirmed that he said "well, it doesn't have to be McDonald's. It can be whatever fast food place is in your town." And I was like there is no fast food in my town. There is no food in my town period unless you want to stop for gas station hot dogs. And he was like "that doesn't make any sense. Then what do you do when you need food?" And I said I drive to [town]. And he said "every single time you need food or groceries?" And I said yeah, that's sort of how the fixed nature of buildings work. And then we drove in silence for ten minutes while this man tried to wrap his head around the fact that I had to drive twenty minutes to town to go grocery shopping.

Yeah, same.

I flatly refuse to believe such a place is possible. You're all making this up.

In their chairman Felipe Luciano's words, “So we’re on 110th Street and we actually asked the people, ‘What do you think you need? Is it housing? Is it police brutality?’" Luciano says. "And they said, ‘Muchacho, déjate de todo eso—LA BASURA!” [Listen kid, fuggedaboutit! It’s THE GARBAGE!] And I thought, my God, all this romance, all this ideology, to pick up the garbage?”

And so the young lords responded to their communities needs and they picked up the trash. This was at a time (1969) when there were literal tons of garbage lining the streets, trash collectors would pick up some garbage every now and then but would leave most of it behind, they also refused to sweep the streets, and only allotted 6 big dumpsters in that entire 40 block area. This was due to racist/classist stances held by the almost exclusively italian american trash collector union.

The young lords stepped up in this situation, they go and ask for brooms and bags from the trash collectors union and get refused and insulted. They go back later and steal the brooms and bags, and get started cleaning their neighborhoods. This is a band aid and it doesn't fix things but it does show their community these people care, these people will listen and put in the work, these people are our people, it was the basis of community organizing, building trust and responding to people's actual needs.

While this did help and build trust the problem persisted and so the young lords came up with a program they called the garbage offensive (or maybe the trash offensive i forgot). They started sweeping all of the trash onto the side of the street and waited for the trash collectors to come by, when they refused to pick it up, the young lord would pile that all into trucks and haul it off to 3rd avenue in Manhattan(a much richer whiter area that gets high traffic). They dumped the trash into the middle of the street (not just bags of trash, we are also talking furniture, broken sinks, etc.) and then hauled off and they did this almost daily. They forced people to pay attention. The whole community started to get involved in this, kids, young men and women, and older community members too. They all started to join in on dumping the trash in the richer parts of the city to make people care and pay attention.

These protests got larger and bolder, they would sometimes pile up the trash high and then light it on fire, over turn cars and make a party out of it sometimes too. Police were called and showed up and attacked as they do but the protests persisted.

The Young lords published their demands and sent them out in a press release and their demands were listened too. In that years mayoral race every single candidate had to address the trash problem and promise solutions.

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This is an important lesson that direct action often pushes reforms, if we want reforms the best way to get them is to act and make the state react to us and catch up with our demands.

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Their demands included increased sanitation workers, hiring black and puerto rican sanitation workers, increased dumpsters, increase in pay to sanitation workers, end having to pay off your sanitation workers to ensure your trash gets picked up etc. Many of these demands were met and in the coming years the trash does end up getting picked up regularly and the problem does get dealt with.

Then one night he was coming home late and got mugged by a dude with a knife.

Apparently the look on the dude's face was amazing when he went in to gut the guy for his wallet and found out he was wearing medieval armor under his hoodie.

This convenience store was notorious for getting robbed in the evenings one or two times a month, so nobody wanted to work the night shift. The one fellow, he desperately needed a job, but he was also learning how to be a heavy fighter (sword & shield) in the SCA, so he had just finished a chainmail shirt, and asked if he could wear it under his uniform shirt, so long as it didn't show. The manager was just happy that he had someone willing to work nights, and said yeah, sure, so long as it doesn't show.

Guy starts working the night shifts, things are fine, he's getting used to everything, then late one night, a guy in a hoodie comes in, and asks for a pack of cigarettes. Our guy turns to get the pack, and feels a thump on his back. Turning around, scowling, he demands, "Did you just hit me??"

Guy in the hoodie widens his eyes, goes ash-gray, and faints. Clerk can't budge from behind the counter in case this is an attempt to distract and rob. But the guy remains out coold. Confused, our clerk calls the emergency services. EMTs come along and start checking out the patient, who is still out cold on the floor. While they're doing that, one of them comes up to the counter and asks what happened, exactly.

Our man tells the EMT, "Well, he just came in, looked around, came up to the counter and asked for a specific pack of cigarettes, so I turned to get them--"

And he demonstrates by turning his back to the EMT, who suddenly starts shouting, "--Sir! Sir! Are you okay? Don't move!"

Our man feels the EMT groping his upper back, and then the EMT asks,

"What the hell are you WEARING?"

"A chainmail shirt. I have to get used to the weight of it, so I wear it a lot. Why? Is something wrong?"

"You have a KNIFE in your back!"

"Uhh...no, I don't? I mean, I don't feel hurt? He only, like, punched me or something. There's no knife back there--I mean, I'd KNOW if there was a knife back there, right?"

EMT grabs the knife and pushes on his shoulder, yanking it out. "THIS knife! I'm going to need to examine your back!"

So they manage to get him out of his uniform shirt and out of the hauberk and out of the linen shirt under it (because chainmail bites suck, plus it's not nearly as fun as a Brazilian waxjob, because my SCA friend was hairy)...and it turns out he only had a very small scratch from the tip of the knife...which had gotten lodged in the riveted links.

...That was why the guy fainted. He'd stabbed the store clerk, who had turned around angrily, knife still lodged in his back.

starting to suspect that tech bros actually just don’t know what reading is

I keep thinking about how many of these chat bots are free—for now. And of course they are! It’s a classic marketing technique when you’re trying to get your foot in the door with a novel product: let folks use it, let them get used to it, then start charging for it. You don’t have to look any further than streaming to see a very recent example of how this happens.

And it’s going to happen with AI.

There’s nothing these assholes love more than making money off of other people’s hard work. But you can’t legally charge for fanfic! So how do you get around that? You charge for a chat bot (which you trained on other people’s fanfic). You can’t charge for the content, but you can charge for the thing that produces the content.

AI is theft, and there are a whooooole lot of people gleefully looking to make a buck off of our hard work.