#teche county

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Shrine to Longfellow's "Evangeline" in Acadia,” Brantford Expositor. March 28, 1930. Page 12. --- Memorial Chapel and Statue of Evangeline, at Grand Pre, the locale of Longfellow's well-known poem, "Evangeline." A pilgrimage to this spot, sacred to descendants of the Acadians, will be made this summer by 200 residents of the Teche country, South Louisiana, the district to which the greater number of the Acadians were taken when they were forced to leave their native land in 1775 -(S. N. S..)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Prison-tech company bribed jails to ban in-person visits

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Beware of geeks bearing gifts. When prison-tech companies started offering "free" tablets to America's vast army of prisoners, it set off alarm-bells for prison reform advocates – but not for the law-enforcement agencies that manage the great American carceral enterprise.

The pitch from these prison-tech companies was that they could cut the costs of locking people up while making jails and prisons safer. Hell, they'd even make life better for prisoners. And they'd do it for free!

These prison tablets would give every prisoner their own phone and their own video-conferencing terminal. They'd supply email, of course, and all the world's books, music, movies and games. Prisoners could maintain connections with the outside world, from family to continuing education. Sounds too good to be true, huh?

Here's the catch: all of these services are blisteringly expensive. Prisoners are accustomed to being gouged on phone calls – for years, prisons have done deals with private telcos that charge a fortune for prisoners' calls and split the take with prison administrators – but even by those standards, the calls you make on a tablet are still a ripoff.

Sure, there are some prisoners for whom money is no object – wealthy people who screwed up so bad they can't get bail and are stewing in a county lockup, along with the odd rich murderer or scammer serving a long bid. But most prisoners are poor. They start poor – the cops are more likely to arrest poor people than rich people, even for the same crime, and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to get convicted or be suckered into a plea bargain with a long sentence. State legislatures are easy to whip up into a froth about minimum sentences for shoplifters who steal $7 deodorant sticks, but they are wildly indifferent to the store owner's rampant wage-theft. Wage theft is by far the most costly form of property crime in America and it is almost entirely ignored:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-us-workers-employees

So America's prisons are heaving with its poorest citizens, and they're certainly not getting any richer while they're inside. While many prisoners hold jobs – prisoners produce $2b/year in goods and $9b/year in services – the average prison wage is $0.52/hour:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

(In six states, prisoners get nothing; North Carolina law bans paying prisoners more than $1/day, the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly permits slavery – forced labor without pay – for prisoners.)

Likewise, prisoners' families are poor. They start poor – being poor is a strong correlate of being an American prisoner – and then one of their breadwinners is put behind bars, taking their income with them. The family savings go to paying a lawyer.

Prison-tech is a bet that these poor people, locked up and paid $1/day or less; or their families, deprived of an earner and in debt to a lawyer; will somehow come up with cash to pay $13 for a 20-minute phone call, $3 for an MP3, or double the Kindle price for an ebook.

How do you convince a prisoner earning $0.52/hour to spend $13 on a phone-call?

Well, for Securus and Viapath (AKA Global Tellink) – a pair of private equity backed prison monopolists who have swallowed nearly all their competitors – the answer was simple: they bribed prison officials to get rid of the prison phones.

Not just the phones, either: a pair of Michigan suits brought by the Civil Rights Corps accuse sheriffs and the state Department of Corrections of ending in-person visits in exchange for kickbacks from the money that prisoners' families would pay once the only way to reach their loved ones was over the "free" tablets:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/jails-banned-family-visits-to-make-more-money-on-video-calls-lawsuits-claim/

These two cases are just the tip of the iceberg; Civil Rights Corps says there are hundreds of jails and prisons where Securus and Viapath have struck similar corrupt bargains:

https://civilrightscorps.org/case/port-huron-michigan-right2hug/

And it's not just visits and calls. Prison-tech companies have convinced jails and prisons to eliminate mail and parcels. Letters to prisoners are scanned and delivered their tablets, at a price. Prisoners – and their loved ones – have to buy virtual "postage stamps" and pay one stamp per "page" of email. Scanned letters (say, hand-drawn birthday cards from your kids) cost several stamps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Prisons and jails have also been convinced to eliminate their libraries and continuing education programs, and to get rid of TVs and recreational equipment. That way, prisoners will pay vastly inflated prices for streaming videos and DRM-locked music.

The icing on the cake? If the prison changes providers, all that data is wiped out – a prisoner serving decades of time will lose their music library, their kids' letters, the books they love. They can get some of that back – by working for $1/day – but the personal stuff? It's just gone.

Readers of my novels know all this. A prison-tech scam just like the one described in the Civil Rights Corps suits is at the center of my latest novel The Bezzle:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Prison-tech has haunted me for years. At first, it was just the normal horror anyone with a shred of empathy would feel for prisoners and their families, captive customers for sadistic "businesses" that have figured out how to get the poorest, most desperate people in the country to make them billions. In the novel, I call prison-tech "a machine":

a million-­armed robot whose every limb was tipped with a needle that sank itself into a different place on prisoners and their families and drew out a few more cc’s of blood.

But over time, that furious empathy gave way to dread. Prisoners are at the bottom of the shitty technology adoption curve. They endure the technological torments that haven't yet been sanded down on their bodies, normalized enough to impose them on people with a little more privilege and agency. I'm a long way up the curve from prisoners, but while the shitty technology curve may grind slow, it grinds fine:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The future isn't here, it's just not evenly distributed. Prisoners are the ultimate early adopters of the technology that the richest, most powerful, most sadistic people in the country's corporate board-rooms would like to force us all to use.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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[humanoidhistory]

Reels of data tape at Los Angeles County’s computer center in Downey, California, 1976. Photo by Cal Montney.

[galaxseacreature]

I truly believe that genres are constructed categories that cannot be defined to universal satisfaction without overlap and attempts to do so are generally misguided and often serve to hamper discourse

At the same time, book group saying the next read would be a scifi book only to choose a technothriller makes me want to commit great violence

[broke-on-books]

Me months ago: omg easy science gened! I like maps I can def make maps this will be great

Me now: *trawling through a 2180 page pdf listing every mailbox in the UK* how the fuck do I turn this into a data layer

[bythorneparanormalsocietyint]

ALTERNATE SIGHTING REPORT FOR THE APPLICABLE COUNTY/IES : MANDELA

- Flawed Impersonator found roaming the back alleys of local tech store. Any further information on this alternate or related incidents would be appreciated. Approach at your own risk, and with EXTREME caution.

[bymcr]

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[lies]

Duruflé's Requiem — Choir of Trinity College Cambridge

[cecelovegood]

I’m literally living on a diet of lemon tea and cough drops right now

[iheartvmt]

Ugggghhhhh canine influenza outbreak in the state, so of course now all the brands of the vaccines are on backorder 🙄

[starfieldcanvas]

it could still be relevant information if there had been a large spike in consumption since the introduction of commercial generative AI, but santa clara county hasn't put out energy consumption numbers for 2023 or 2024 yet so i can't actually tell.

however, if you ask santa clara why its energy utility bills are going up, they will specifically tell you it is because they're upgrading the local energy grid for improved reliability and it has fuck-all to do with increased energy consumption:

long-term, yes, it does seem likely that AI will consume way more power than it's worth, both in a subjective sense and in a financial sense (as even the financially-motivated Goldman Sachs has noted) but right now? it will not be noticeably impacting anywhere that already had high energy draw and a lot of data centers, like silicon valley. california water has been getting more expensive every single year since the droughts started well over a decade ago; AI is only a fraction of the water misuse we're dealing with here, and it's almost certainly a mistake to focus your ire there instead of on far more impactful problems like agricultural overuse.

Articles about AI causing the US to backslide on coal and gas are behind a lot of different paywalls, but after digging through multiple Futurism articles on AI to Bloomberg to the Sierra Club, I found the Sierra Club's report from October 2022—an entire month before ChatGPT went live—and the Sierra Club is extremely clear that even then, many of the US energy companies who had promised to close gas and coal plants had in fact been talking out of their asses and had made no significant progress towards shutting down anything!

We assigned a score to each utility based on its plans to retire coal, build new clean energy, and not build new gas plants. The aggregate score for all companies studied this year was 21 out of 100 — or a D — up just 4 points from the previous study. For parent companies with a climate pledge, the aggregate score in our analysis was 23 out of 100, only 2 points higher than the overall aggregate score. This suggests that most utilities’ corporate pledges are not translating into action. The companies studied account for 69 percent of remaining coal generation in the US. They have committed to retire just 28 percent of their coal generation by 2030. About half of the operating companies included in this study, 37 companies, are planning to build new gas plants, totaling nearly 38 GW through 2030. These utilities have actually increased their plans for new gas plants since our last report. This accounts for over half of the total planned gas in the US through 2030.

If energy companies are claiming now in 2024 or 2025 that they have no choice but to keep those plants open due to AI-driven demand, take those claims with a huuuuuge grain of salt, because we already knew many of them were planning to keep those plants open before they knew genAI was a thing.

Don't forget that "data centers" does not actually mean "AI data centers". One of the most energy-fucked places in the country is "Data Center Alley" in Northern Virginia, where lax regulation and poorly-thought-out tax incentives have led to, no joke, FOURTEEN UNINTERRUPTED YEARS of data center construction. And I don't mean they built a new one every year, I mean for fourteen entire years not a DAY went by where Data Center Alley was not in the process of constructing a data center. GenAI has only been a thing for just over two of those fourteen years!

So. Yeah. A lot of environmentally-conscious sources are trying to draw attention to energy waste using AI as a buzzword, but the fact is that the situation was already pretty dire, and it's very easy to make it look like that's AI's "fault" when AI is just something that could hypothetically make it worse in the future.

Idgaf if you don't want to write essays for school. I don't care if you don't want to write corporate emails yourself. I don't care if you can't draw well, I don't care if you can't write well, I don't care if you just really really want to talk to your favorite fictional character but don't want to RP with a real person because you have social anxiety or whatever

If you're still regularly using generative ai, chatgpt or midjourney or character.ai or literally whatever the fuck, im personally blaming you when my utility prices start going up.

[harriswalz4usabybr]

Tuesday, September 24, 2024 - Tim Walz

Wrapping up the final stretch of main events the campaign will be visiting Lubbock and Amarillo today. The Governor is excited too spend some time in Texas, even as the campaign events com to a close. The Governor is excited to spend some additional time in Texas after today's events come to a close because he will be doing his debate prep in Amarillo, TX. Below is the 'official' schedule for today.

Lubbock, TX Event Location: Texas Tech University Event Type: Get Out the Vote Event: Time: 10:00 - 13:00 CT *The team split up for this! Tim Walz and Beto O'Rourke went door knocking off-campus and focused on the community in Lubbock County. Stacey Plaskett and Jasmine Crockett focused on student groups on-campus meeting with various groups and doing some dorm door knocking. There was also some student influencers who we signed up for being campaign voices, like we have at other universities.

Amarillo, TX Event Location: Amarillo College Event Type: Listening Tour (Dinner Provided) Event: Time: 17:00 - 20:00 CT *During this even the campaign invited Assistant District Attorneys, District Attorneys, and law makers from across the panhandle to come and discuss their lives, challenges, and needs with us. The campaign is very invested in making sure that those enforcing the law across our great country from the cities to the most rural of counties have the resources they need. Jasmine Crockett was the moderator and Tim Walz did take questions.

~BR~

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Fulton County’s jails are in real trouble: “[Inmates] are sleeping on the floor in plastic trays. Cell doors hang off hinges, footage from one local news report shows, and leaked water pools on the floor in some areas. Last September, one person was found dead and covered in bed bugs.” The funding to buy Talitrix tracking bracelets is part of an emergency cash infusion triggered by outrage (and litigation risk) over these inhumane conditions. But the hundreds of sensors being studded throughout the county’s jails and the expensive tracking cuffs are obviously solving the wrong problems, like “how do we stop prisoners living under these inhumane conditions from erupting in violence, or taking their own lives?” (For avoidance of doubt, the right question to answer is “How do we eliminate these inhumane conditions and focus on rehabilitation?”)

-The Shitty Tech Adoption Curve Has a Business Model

[thelensofyashunews]

REX ORANGE COUNTY RELEASES NEW SINGLE "2008" ; NEW ALBUM THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE OUT THIS FRIDAY VIA RCA RECORDS

Rex Orange County shares new single "2008" ahead of this Friday's release of his new album The Alexander Technique. The song marks the 4th taste of Rex's forthcoming album and will be performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! this coming Friday.

"2008" is representative of The Alexander Technique as a whole -- Rex's most unencumbered body of work to date, produced entirely by Rex himself alongside Teo Halm (Rosalía, SZA, Beyoncé) and Jim Reed, the latter a member of the Rex Orange County touring band since its inception. The Alexander Technique is named for a therapeutic practice in which back pain is treated to address deeper health problems, and it’s an apt name for Rex's most raw album to date: what may have begun as a simple exercise in changing the purview of his writing ended up becoming his most confessional, open-hearted album. Stripping back his sound to a skeletal mixture of stream-of-consciousness R&B and indie-folk, while retaining the orchestral lushness that’s become his trademark, The Alexander Technique marks the beginning of Act Two of Rex Orange County's career: a new chapter on which he lays everything bare, no matter how painful that might be.

“The Alexander Technique is very much a look into my own brain and experiences over the last few years – it’s almost a diary,” he says. Longer than any project he’s ever made and more musically varied, The Alexander Technique was made over a matter of years, started before and finished after 2022’s WHO CARES?; listening to it feels like watching an artist grow in real-time, and face all the attending growing pains that come alongside. “I’ve made a lot of love songs over the years, and I feel as though this is the first time I’m trying to make a project about everything in life. In my mind, it’s exactly what I’ve always wanted to make.”

The album will be followed by tours across North America and the UK in which Rex has crafted a theatrical stage show that will allow him to bring The Alexander Technique to life across multiple performances in iconic venues in nearly every market on the tour.

Listen to "2008" above now and see below for all The Alexander Technique and touring information.

[svalleynow]

Marion County High School Hosts Junior College and Career Fair

Marion County High School Hosts Junior College and Career Fair...

Marion County High School hosted a Junior College and Career Fair on Friday on the school campus. Representatives from several regional and local colleges and universities were on hand to talk to students about what programs and fields of study were offered at their respective schools. This included representatives from Chattanooga State Community College, Lee University from Cleveland, Middle…

[motherlanguageday]

Acquiring a second language why do we find it so difficult?

ADQUIRIR UNA SEGUNDA LENGUA: ¿POR QUÉ NOS PARECE TAN DIFÍCIL?

Series coordinated by Idoia Elola (Texas Tech University) y Ana Oskoz (University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)

Public Lecture given Greg Kessler (Ohio University)

Language: English (simultaneous interpretation into Spanish)

The Instituto Cervantes Manchester and Leeds presents the second edition of the lecture series: “Acquiring a Second Language: Why do we find it so difficult?”, coordinated by Idoia Elola (Texas Tech University) y Ana Oskoz (University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), a forum aimed at teachers, language studentes, parents and the general public, which will consider how we learn a second, or a heritage language. Presenters will discuss various elements and difficulties that come with second-language acquisition including: myths and realities surrounding language acquisition and age, the effect of explicit knowledge and how it can affect learning, the use of language according to the context in which it is spoken, and the effect of education on our ability to learn a second language. The first lecture will celebrate the International Mother Language Day and will be given by Greg Kessler (Ohio University).

IMLD 2024: ACQUIRING A SECOND LANGUAGE: WHY DO WE FIND IT SO DIFFICULT? DATE: 21 February 2024 TIME: 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm AGES: 18+ PRICE: Free FORMAT: Online THEME: Languages Skills ORGANISER: Instituto Cervantes

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