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why stuff breaks

edited July 2012
as a man of little means and many fancy music tools, from my car to my computer to the myriad of small mass-made electronics i use to make music, i am constantly worried about Stuff Breaking.
i try to be really fucking careful all the fucking time
but shit breaks anyway

just this weekend i found out one of my powered speakers (mackie 15" Thump) is not working. they are the cheapest powered speakers mackie makes at around $350ish each, are very light, loud enough and fun to use for DJing, playing shows, band practice. they were my main xmas gift from my parents at the beginning of 2011....

bummed that i can't afford to take it to an electronics shop to get it appraised/fixed right now. plus they will probably tell me i bought made in china junk and i deserve for it to break on me. shoulda bought something more hand made high quality built to last

which makes me think about, and i was already thinking about anyway - planned obsolescence
do you guys believe in this conspiracy?
do we live in a disposable world?

i am obsessed with fixing stuff myself or protecting it from breaking
but shit breaks anyway
i love gaffers tape
people used to love duct tape for the same reasons
sarah bought me some Sugru http://sugru.com/ so i can fix things

i always think about the batteries (saw yr fb link, dr j) and the resources that electronics are made of. all the plastic in the ocean (just watched that Vice Documentary on the plastic in the ocean, depressing)

its so fucked i generally think it pretty futile to even be diligent about city-wide recycling programs
all the energy used to recycle stuff and shit doesnt even get THAT re-used

im not the dude bringing in glass jars to the co-op and buying only in non-packaged bulk
(though we all should be)
i do have a tendency to save glass jars to use as jugs later

im not vegan
most of the time i feel like there is nothing i can do, nothing we can do, nothing to be done about it


but then my electronics that some series of over-worked under paid fucking 10 year olds made in china using rare earth elements raped from the earth of africa breaks and im like YO WHAT THE FUCK

and then i think of the 5 men huddled over a 1950s american car in cuba and they get that shit running and im like

damn

i wish i knew how to do soldering better, like when i had that factory job testing guitar pedals in new york but i just got shocked by 220 really bad and was like FUCK that shit


Comments

  • edited July 2012
    are these new types of lightbulbs made from totally earth rape chemicals and minerals and if i touch the insides will i die from cancer even though the light bulb lasts 10 times longer?

    im confused

    my prius and my dog's carbon footprint info-graphics

    im confused

    legalize hemp so i can weave a bag to walk to the store and put my local grains and greens in

    will the "modern industrialized world" implode in our lifetime?

    will monsanto's genetically modified to only sprout once seeds get into the general seed stock and ruin our chances of "post-fall" survival?

    will the world seed-bank lose funding?


    i sure wish my powered speaker hadn't have broken

    how many mackie 15" thump speakers are sitting in suburban cul de sac garages not even being used

    are amazon shipment centers involved in inhuman factory environments

    is the shower hot enough in those houses with water heated by solar panels?

    should i just live in a shipping container with solar power, solar paint, exercise bike power?

    i think about the facebook server farms, the google server farms on their own power-grids

    should i just send a letter via bike messenger relay?

  • sitting in a toxic waste dump eating trader joes organic flax seed tortilla chips
    (subsidized soy/corn industry)

    is it safe or stupid to make all this corn?
  • edited July 2012
    i believe in planned obsolescence as a conspiracy
    i also believe new technologies that seem so great (plastic) end up accidentally creating the sense of fatalism about everything breaking. Everything breaks when it's made of plastic; not really true (or as true) for earlier things made of metal and glass.
    you ever use a 1950s blender? Shit is unstoppable. Weighs like 100 pounds. Not to mention, like, clay pots from ancient egypt that still hold water or whatever
    My dad always talks about this, how he used to be able to tinker with cars and fix them but not anymore because they're all computers now
    I don't know
    I am one of those people who brings in my own jugs/jars/sacks and buys everything bulk but I do it more like for karma or just personal feel-goodness (it feels bad to generate waste, to me, I prefer to own the same things for as long as possible, I've had the same olive oil jar for 5 years), than for any sense that I am actually "making a difference." Lets get real. Driving our cars vs. BP dumping eleven billion gallons of pure oil directly into the ocean. We put it all on the consumer, consumer choices--pick organic diapers instead of non-organic, that equals no more global warming!--when really our world is being destroyed by massive corporations we have no control over because we've allowed them to become entities, unstoppable forces, we've allowed them to become bigger than any one person

    total SkyNet vibes
    Terminator movies just anthropomorphize something that has already literally happened

    Very hard to get out from under it, really
    you really have to take it so deep, to get out from under it. Have to live in the shipping container, not use any modern conveniences, eat like shit (actually eating stuff grown within a 10 mile radius is deeply difficult, although it can be done--you could read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle, she works through a lot of these issues. But like, news flash, growing all your own food is a FULL TIME JOB)

    like my family, we grew up in a house we built ourselves, powered totally by solar, with our own well, all self-contained

    but we had to drive 30 miles one way to get to school and jobs and groceries, and due to the remoteness of the location all the groceries were trucked in from a thousand miles away to begin with

    so like, how does that balance out?

    there is no balance. I read something about how for humanity to get back to a carbon neutral state we'd have to go back SO MANY YEARS, like CENTURIES. Like the last time humans were carbon neutral was like 1635 or something insane. Solar panels ain't gonna cut it.

    I think there will be an energy-based collapse and I think global warming is going to seriously change the entire way humans do things. I don't know how much of this will happen in our lifetime.

    It's so hard. You try to buy the organic thing but maybe it's packaged with poison ink. You try to eat local but how do you know how the animals were really treated, are you supposed to ride your bike out to the farm to check? So easy to get into Portlandia skit territory but at the same time yeah, really, you SHOULD ride your bike out to the farm to check. But nobody's gonna do that. Too many products in our lives, too many choices, ironically. I find myself intensely nostaglic for a time when people had to carry their own cup, spoon, plate everywhere with them, like if you ordered food at an inn you had to have your own utensils, or if you bought a pint of ale from a street vendor you had to stand right there and drink it out of a communal cup. Seems so reasonable. Seems so reasonable to just NOT OFFER disposable coffee cups, at a coffee place. Feel like people would get used to it in about two seconds, bringing their own cup everywhere. But we can't even get people to stop getting 3 plastic sacks at Whole Foods to carry their single bag of chocolate covered macadamia nuts

    Just read a thing about how as soon as the population of India gets access to energy that's the death knell for the planet unless we can find a way to make that energy non-carbon

    all these rich people investing money in, like, a solar panel that powers your car, neat! Thomas Friedman's bullshit about "imagine a magical robot house that does your laundry using solar power!" When really what we need is a way to KEEP INDIA FROM GOING CARBON when it finally gains mass access to energy. If they go carbon, that's it. Thomas Friedman's robot house is so decidedly not a priority but it's what gets invested in because it's fun/high profile/nobody likes talking about filthy depressing India

    Just a story in the New Yorker

    followed by some story about how soldiers are raping 10 year olds to death in the Sudan or whatever

    Another day another damn dollar

    Still I am happy and like to do fun things with my friends

    Nothing worse than a rich person complaining constantly about how terrible their life is / the world is. I never want to be this person. Do your best, acknowledge the darkness, try to make positive changes in your life that make you feel connected to the earth/world. What else can you do? You didn't ask to be born. Totally pointless to just be depressed all the time and not do anything healthy/thoughtful because everything is sad. Or like, everything is pointless, so you might as well try to do a good job, eat good food, care about your body, be mindful of the rest of the world, try to make good choices, try to be more and more thoughtful about ingredients/products/sourcing....because why not? The alternative is way more boring/useless (not caring / not doing anything). you do your best with what you've been given. Then you die someday, and after that no one remembers you were ever alive. And that's just what it means to be a human!


  • Wow, could have used this sugru stuff in the past for this exact thing:

    image
  • btw, we lost a bunch of corn in a massive drought this year, so get ready for that backlash.
  • epic life/mind/privilege battles

    picturing Adorno asking himself, "Paper or plastic???"

    also The Goode Family, ahead of its time:

    also love to fix things and not lose them

    (sidenote poll - how many UHXrs prefer to only drink out of glass and save their jugs for this purpose?)

    grew up with dad using Shoe Goo on his sneakers for tennis post-game every sunday

    bummed I can't take my crappy $20 fan when it breaks to a little neighborhood shop and pay $5 to get it fixed on the spot.

    maybe we need to get more in the island living mind vibe? when I went to new zealand for a couple of weeks my lil bro and I drove around in a car that cost him $350, and when it broke (often) we could roll into whatever town and there would be a mechanic who would fix it within a couple of hours for under $50 (one time even welding the exhaust line right near the important whatsit) and we would keep on rolling.

    we can never win every battle, and maybe(probably) it's futile, but worth it to try and make the right choices at least some of the time. it's easy to freak yourself into a ball of apathy or never leave the house though. also the tyranny of choice is a real thing.

    tl;dr: we're all insignificant but also full of stars?
  • chris hedges
  • gore vidal
  • the koch brothers
  • This is better a talk over beers.

    How to make things that don't break - check the writings of Edwards Deming who pretty much invented quality engineering beginning in his late 20's, extending the ideas of Shewhart from Bell Labs. Most American businesses didn't get the Deming groove until the 1980's.

    Japan pursued an aggressive trade policy to dominate formerly American manufacturing target sectors. Their high quality, learned from Deming, helped. I have to get around to reading The Toyota Way sometime. Korea is turning into a manufacturing powerhouse, electronics, machinery, cars and appliances. Good quality. Same with Taiwan. Export or die.

    President Clinton enabled massive outsourcing to China when he granted them MFN trade status. Multinationals sent all their manufacturing there, and Taiwan companies sent manufacturing expertise to the mainland.

    The Chinese way is to bid a price for the initial run at a rock bottom profit, then over time reduce cost and increase profit by using less material or substituting cheaper parts. That often reduces quality. That's why stuff breaks.

    Even worse, there is also out and out fraud, and Chinese families are worried they will get poisoned by counterfeit baby formula, tooth paste and the like.

    The Apple factory in China is a Taiwan company. It is possible to manufacture quality stuff that lasts years there, like Apple, but you have to really manage in detail.

    Any competently designed manufactured good has a design life expectancy. But electronics are ridiculously made of custom short run chips. The spare parts are not designed to be available for long and you can't substitute. The theory is if you can pack everything into one chip it will be cheaper. But that also makes it unrepairable.

    It is so ridiculous hearing all this saber rattling in politics. My friend worked for a large manufacturer which made everything in Asia. She used to joke that to build a weapon, you need screws. But to build screws, you need a screw machine. We can't even build a machine to make screws here. Or ask Chris King how easy it is to get American ball bearings. Our entire budget sucking military is completely beholden to China for chips, bearings, screws, rare earth elements, I'm not sure how much steel we can make here. What's more, the boxes that make the Internet go are not made here. Little of the cell phone network equipment is made by American companies. I think the reports are exaggerated, but basically every electronic device, every part of the cloud and Internet could be susceptible to the installation of back doors in the firmware for hackers at the point of manufacture.

    Our "trade policy" is to export coal and crops with almost no labor content and import manufactured goods with high labor content. We tried with the stimulus to own cleantech, but funding for that is down and execution has been sub par. Now the coal and oil industry is out for renewables blood. How we get our butts out of this mess, no idea. We could start with an industrial policy that doesn't suffer a death of a thousand special interest knives in congress. But by the way, we elected them.


    As for the Mackies, send them an email to get the schematic, parts list and board layout, and a troubleshooting guide if they will give it up. Any tech with a meter and a scope can work from that and the inner boards are swap items if the problem isn't simple. Especially easy with a good exact same speaker to compare readings on.
  • edited July 2012
    Something sad is that if our electronic technologies lasted forever, they would feel unbelievably slow and out of sync pretty quickly.

    I think planned obsolescence is a hundred percent real. Even the clothes we wear are made increasingly poorly. There used to be a time when you could buy a wool sweater at your average store, now all those stores sell the same exact model of sweater/cardigan you used to see, but with a bunch of acrylic, nylon, rayon, viscose added. And they charge the same price, if not more. It's like the clothes look the same from a distance, but they feel different and last up to ten washes before disintegrating. Walking the aisles of Value Village, it has become harder to find clothes that are not stretched out of shape and totally faded.

    I think we've asked for it in many ways. Families renovate their kitchen and get a new fridge which will match the rest of the room better, people trade in their cars before they have to think about fixing them. Fashions change, people want the new shit. So everything might as well be disposable, the majority of people will tire of it quickly.

    I think fancy stores that sell fancy tools, garments, music instruments, stereos, are not necessarily only for rich people. I know plenty of folks who know that if they save up and get the one nice thing, it will be worth it in the long run. I think of organic/local food the same way. If I get food from local farmers, it will taste better and feel more special and nutritious. It's not always just a statement, it's an ideology.

    YT, I like what you said about your family's sustainable home 30 miles away from everything. I think of this as such a cliché of weird eighties hippie mentality. My dad and his girlfriend bought three acres in the woods of Vancouver Island and spent nearly twenty years building their dream home there. Juggling paying jobs and house building left them living in a tent with ten cats two winters in a row. Futon soaked in water and mold. As soon as the house had a roof, walls and electricity my dad got cable TV. It's like you need one extreme to deal with the other.
  • I just got some new shorts made somewhere shitty and the button was sketchy from day 1.
  • monster cables
  • edited July 2012
    The world concern/anxiety is healthy and leads to valid questions and new possibilities (if one can stave off depression and/or nihilism and/or cynicism.)

    The personal level is a good arena for practice and modeling, but it's at the social-industrial level that the quality of life is determined for the next wave of humans and beyond (@J-Dawg's kids).

    Right now the global political rhetoric and institutional incentives seem-off-the-charts wrong, but I have faith in culture and technology to affect change so quickly as to seem magical.

    (Thank goodness kids are programmed to challenge their parents' bullshit.)

    Not much time on the clock, but still in the game...

    Good people gotta connect and build. (Right now.)


    "The share of electricity produced from renewable energy in Germany has increased from 6.3 percent of the national total in 2000 to about 25 percent in the first half of 2012.[1][2] In 2010, investments totaling 26 billion euros were made in Germany’s renewable energies sector. According to official figures, some 370,000 people in Germany were employed in the renewable energy sector in 2010, especially in small and medium sized companies. This is an increase of around 8 percent compared to 2009 (around 339,500 jobs), and well over twice the number of jobs in 2004 (160,500). About two-thirds of these jobs are attributed to the Renewable Energy Sources Act[3][4] Germany has been called "the world's first major renewable energy economy".[5] In 2010 nearly 17% (more than 100 TWH) of Germany's electricity supply (603 TWH) was produced from renewable energy sources, more than the 2010 contribution of gas-fired power plants.[6]

    Renewable electricity in 2010 was 101.7 TWh including wind power 36.5 TWh, biomass and biowaste 33.5 TWh, hydropower 19.7 TWh and photovoltaic power 12.0 TWh.[7]"

    WikiP


  • edited July 2012
    I guess my one big hope for (message to?) people younger than me is that they not accept the perceived status quo as a norm worth defending. Keep challenging....
  • PNCA brought this guy to talk. His thesis is that we have enough stuff. That our quest for fulfillment by shopping is an evolutionary dead end. That global warming and resource depletion is the end game. And that if we realize that and get focused we can make a transition to a post shopping economy. So hoping we will realize doomsday sooner rather than later and get to what's next. His cred - he started by chaining himself to sewer outflow to the ocean pipes in Australia and went on to be the global head of Greenpeace. http://paulgilding.com/ He also did a TED.


    By the way, a climate change scientist skeptic funded by the Koch Bros to do a huge study has concluded global warming is man made and real. http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-kochfunded-climate-change-skeptic-reverses-course-20120729,0,7372823.story
  • Been reading 1932's Brave New World... good stuff, really good stuff!
    Babies are programmed (sleep hypnosis) to value the goods that the state expects to produce in the future... instilling them with a pre-planned desire. Another big thing is teaching them to desire new fashions and disdain mending... "The more stitches, the less riches. The more stitches, the less riches." I don't g.a.f., Brave New World forever! 1932!!

    That means we have known about this stuff for like a hundred years. We've known this would happen to us. I am completely cynical, depressed, and nihilistic. I hate the world so much I am not having kids. Every time I tie up my garbage sack, I have waking nightmares. I have this favorite nightmare of mutated humans digging through anaerobic land fills for organic paste to eat... "There's a warning sign on the road ahead, there's a lot of people saying we'd be better off dead" (Keep on Rockin' in the Free World by Neil Young, 1989)

  • edited July 2012
    That said... we must strive! That's the whole limit of the individual miracle of every life form, as far as I can tell. And life sure isn't limited to humanity, much as we try to drag every other species down with us. I wish we were more like bees or ants, cooperative.
  • edited July 2012
    Here's another one: "When you suspect malice, never discount incompetence." Local fundraiser said that. We like to think that we are so intelligent, that imagination and deductive reasoning have an infinite capacity for understanding. But our minds are trapped within the ape no matter which way you turn it. I don't have much faith in the material world. I think it is more practical to master astral projection through meditation than to make use of space travel in any significant way. The spirit world is the best way "out," it's the only solution that can matter.
  • Sorry, not much help... I know that is the whole point of evangelical x-chins who try to accelerate the apocalypse. So I retract my previous statements.
  • i think the only way i can even remotely deal and not just push these thoughts aside with drugs, work and consumption is to just push these thoughts aside with drugs work and consumption.

  • I'm pretty optimistic you guys. We live in the greatest point of all human history and my only lament is that I wasn't born 20 years later, or 40, or 100. I want to see the FUTURE!

    Shitty things will continue to happen and if you dwell on those it seems pretty dark. I am excited for all of it. Even the darkest shit has a silver lining. 2020.tumblr.com
  • consumption is dark
    all of us identified as types of consumers
    maybe you can forget it in our little bubble where people only buy Macs and don't really consume that much on other levels, or like "consume" meaning "spend $5 at goodwill."
    But go into the outer world
    my extended family
    my in laws
    and you see consumption at its darkest. "What Hath God Wrought" style consumption. People chaining themselves to lifelong credit card debt so they can get a new car/tv every year debt. products products products. Get a coffee machine you saw on tv and then throw it in the garbage in one year because a better ("better") one came out. No recycling, because dealing with/thinking about garbage is disgusting.

    Brave New World! So real!

    Also how the kids are programmed in their sleep to accept/embrace their class status. "I'm glad I'm a Beta. I wouldn't want to be an Alpha. I'm glad I'm a Beta." And how adults keep repeating these statements unconsciously throughout their lives. So glad not to be an Alpha! So much responsibility--being a Beta is better! All the way down to the retarded Epsilons who do all the janitorial work. So glad to be Epsilons!

    What do you make of all the weird sex stuff in that book Becko? I was trying to figure it out the other day and couldn't. Open sexual mores lead to a diminishment of individual relationship importance?

    Is it an extension of how creepy Jesus is?

    Everyone on this board should read Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, CAN NOT RECOMMEND IT HIGHLY ENOUGH, talk about prescient!!!!
  • I just want to go on another Caribbean cruise.
  • I want my MTV!!!!
  • Weird sex stuff... well let's give it a shot!

    I presume that in this time, this was one of the more blatantly shocking aspects of the book. "Children in the bushes, furtive." So we can think of it as a tool to shock the reader.

    Huxley challeges the reader to imagine a society built on like a flip image of our present institutions. The institution of marriage is a huge thing. I know 1932 is pre cold war, but one of the shocking things about Soviet Russian society was that, on its face, it declared that the roles of the sexes were outdated. Good Soviets were supposed to belong to every one, and promiscuity and birth control (including a*******) were givens. So maybe this aspect of the utopian sexuality is used as a threat. "Good English people, do you *want* to be a Commie?"

    I also think that using kids specifically was not his main intention. His main intention was to dismantle the institution of marriage (a pair=an "individual" entity=separate from the state), and from there, he just goes backward. No marriage > No value of marriage > No value of sex > Sex is ubiquitous from birth.

    So, since, he is trying to propose a future where all human urges can be manipulated, we have to be confronted with the nature vs. nuture discussion. So we have to be told that every little element of our world view is constructed, and can be intentionally designed. And what could make the reader feel more powerless, more manipulated by this utopia, than for our very own personal sexuality to be designed from birth?

    Something like that??
  • edited July 2012
    "But go into the outer world
    my extended family
    my in laws
    and you see consumption at its darkest. "

    But see, this is what I mean about the (moral) distinction to be drawn between the personal level (you, me & everyone we know) and the technical/executive classes that facilitate the breakneck resource consumption of global society.

    Some of DrBill's macro-economic sketches illustrate the way that global market phenomena and their consequences are the products of policy. Stuff is cheap at Walmart, and therefore Walmart is the largest employer in 20-some states, because of a variety of policy decisions, things like: No global minimum wage; no "pricing-in" the environmental cost of carbon emissions and other toxic industrial outputs; no "pricing-in" the social and environmental costs of securing the petroleum supply chain (AKA why aren't we paying for the Iraq war with a surtax on petroleum products?)

    I'm basically trying to say that our criticism of our predicament should be directed at what Karl Marx called the superstructure and not at all the (sometimes awful!) decisions that we see people (family members!) around us making in their personal lives.

    This is why I'm ticked that massive financial fraud is no longer considered criminal activity, just part of the competitive nature of the free market, I guess, but all the crimes of less financially well-endowed folks continue to be prosecuted.

    Our superstructure fucking sucks. It seems to be slipping rapidly (since the 1980s) into a decadent, neo-aristocratic mode.

    I'm looking forward to reading Chris Hayes's recent book on this topic. See a youtube talk here.

    Also, I dug this note today on Paul Krugman's blog about how to judge economists in a time when so many of the best credentialed economists have got everything wrong.
    "Who To Listen To
    Jonathan Portes has a nice little essay, which gets better than I have at the essential issue: it’s not just about the individual track record:

    My answer to it is that policymakers and the public should listen to economists who fulfill two critera: first, they have made empirically testable predictions (conditional or unconditional – see Krugman here) that have proved, by and large, to be broadly consistent with the data; and second, they base those predictions on an analytic framework (not necessarily a formal model) that is persuasive. In other words, getting it right alone is not enough; it should be possible to show your workings – to explain why you got it right. Otherwise, your predictions may be interesting, but they tell you little about how to formulate policy.
    Quite. Place not your faith in gurus, even if they got some big stuff right — and that goes for me, too. It’s always about the model, not the man.

    Lots more interesting stuff in the piece. Go read.

    PS: One side note: One thing that’s striking in Portes’s discussion — and something I very much agree with — is the irrelevance of formal credentials. As we’ve debated how to deal with the worst slump since the 1930s, a distressing number of economists have taken to arguing on the basis that they have fancy degrees and you don’t — or in some cases that well, you may have a fancy degree too, and even a prize or two, but in the wrong sub-field, so there.

    But all this counts for very little, especially when macroeconomics itself — or at any rate the kind of macroeconomics that has dominated the journals these past couple of decades — is very much on trial. And note Portes’s praise for Martin Wolf, which I heartily second; Wolf doesn’t even have a PhD. And that matters not at all; what he has is a keen sense of observation, a level head, and an open mind, all attributes lacking in far too many of my colleagues.
  • Retail therapy:
    YT pointed out that we all identified as types of consumers. I spend most of my life living in weird extremes like buying the $100 sweater made by "real" hands then getting most of my shirts from the 50 cents bin at my local thrift store, I am a weirdo. But I also have this deep feeling, acquiring something new feels good! The feeling of fancy news socks, the feeling of getting that thing you ordered in the mail. And then this embarrassing reality: when I am depressed a simple trip to the grocery store can cheer me up. Like, buying whatever, a yogurt, a can of soup, will change the course of my day. This isn't very animal-like.

    That relationship with the extended family, the in-laws, is rough. What can you do? You try to make conscious choices about what you buy, where you buy it, trying to make rent and not blow your money on crap. And then you see your relatives and they dump all that Costco, Fred Meyer, Walmart shit on you. The dumb socks you'll never wear, the mini-brownies, the ugly bath mat, the dumb Disney baby toy, the Yankee Candle haul. It's like the efforts you've made in a year are thrown out the window. You only have so much control over it and you can't even have a discussion about it. It's too taboo, it's judgmental, it breaks hearts.

    So yeah, I guess fight the superstructure, but how?
  • all the dude ever wanted was his speakers to not break
  • edited July 2012
    Argue with it. Show how it lies. Show it how to take care of us better.

    I'm just saying one should keep one's eyes on the target.

    There are so many potential quarrels to have.

    For example: a lot of folks of color are like: who gives a fuck about sorting trash when you white liberals haven't even figured out how to keep schools open, how to keep the police from arresting people of color at 3 times the rate of whites, and of course...
    The color of a defendant and victim's skin plays a crucial and unacceptable role in deciding who receives the death penalty in America. People of color have accounted for a disproportionate 43 % of total executions since 1976 and 55 % of those currently awaiting execution. A moratorium of the death penalty is necessary to address the blatant prejudice in our application of the death penalty.

    The jurisdictions with the highest percentages of minorities on its death row:

    U.S. Military (86%)
    Colorado (80%)
    U.S. Government (77%)
    Louisiana (72%)
    Pennsylvania (70%)

    While white victims account for approximately one-half of all murder victims, 80% of all Capital cases involve white victims. Furthermore, as of October 2002, 12 people have been executed where the defendant was white and the murder victim black, compared with 178 black defendants executed for murders with white victims.
    ACLU, 2003

    My point is that society is diverse and cross-cultural diplomacy is a useful skill to develop. Figuring out how to get different kinds of people working together and clearly identifying objectives for structural change beats critique of individual behavior. That's my theory today anyway.

    Um.... sorry to break my rule YT by using you as a counter-example.

    Nothing personal...

    [eeep!]
  • edited July 2012
    Alan, I am sorry your speaker broke.

    I personally wish I didn't have to break so many pairs of headphones. I get attached to them.
  • i am definitely being bleak

    http://robwalmart.bandcamp.com/track/grass-roots


    if i believed our political system were not corrupted to their very core by the same interests that would destroy the planet in this all consuming rage of corporate/empire profiteering
    perhaps i would join forces with others in starting petitions that would slowly curve the consciousness back into the right direction
    i believe in nader
    progressive heros
    grass roots

    i like this thing where lupe fiasco says he doesn't vote.

  • edited July 2012
  • edited July 2012

  • also like when chris hedges got stoked re: OWS 99% vibes and was like: change happens real fast or not at all. arab spring vibes and shit
    twitter/fb educated/under-employed youth in the streets
    what happened to the ows vibes? oakland police force terror tactics/gentle sam adams push out the park/over-run with free-loaders/ septic issues?
    erased from the mindset of presidential election public temperature?

    MIKE! i looked at that tumblr that was a good blog with all them robots and shit

  • edited July 2012
    OWS pretty quickly reached the limits of its cross-cultural diplomacy. Turns out the 99% can't stand itself.

    2020.tumble AGREED!
  • Rob thread.
  • edited July 2012
    [I posted something but it was dumb. Nevermind.]
  • alan: those speakers if bought new in 2011 may still be under warranty. mackie usually covers stuff for 3 years.

    my genius cousin is writing a book on post-OWS stuff.
  • The lizards are making it happen, straight up.
  • purp n greeen
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