There aren’t many frustrations that feel quite like the one where you saw something terrible happening, did…

There aren’t many frustrations that feel quite like the one where you saw something terrible happening, did everything you could to stop it, utterly failed to stop it, and then years later hearing people talk about how it should have been stopped.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/05/26/gchat_was_the_future_of_messaging_why_did_google_make_other_chat_products.html

This is p. good.

This is p. good.

Quote:

The top piece of advice I’d give fledgling parents (which I wish I could follow better myself) is just this: Be aware of those moments, and never turn one down. If you face a choice — a moment or a chore, a moment or bedtime, a moment or work obligations, a moment or your damn iPhone — always choose the moment. They seem abundant, sometimes too abundant, in those early years. But childhood isn’t linear; it seems to accelerate faster and faster as it progresses, and when it’s over that set of memories will be all too finite.

http://www.vox.com/2015/8/11/9127769/parenting-advice-worthless

Let’s see, #firstsevenjobs …

Let’s see, #firstsevenjobs …

1) Table busser at pizza-and-game chain.
2) Game room attendant at same chain. Also, first promotion!
3) Night auditor at a local motel chain.
4) Workstudy position in the datacenter at my university.
5) Workstudy position programming at one of the campus libraries.
6) Network / System administrator for a flight simulation company.
7) Helpdesk at AOL.

Systematic racism is alive and well in America.

Systematic racism is alive and well in America.

I live in a gentrifying black neighborhood (Bed-Stuy), and as I was coming home from work today I witnessed a moped rider being run off the street into parked cars by a white SUV. A blue striped white SUV. And the moped rider was my neighbor’s son, who with his friends tinkers with and welds together homemade mopeds. And sometimes rides them around the block, at reasonable and safe speeds, signaling, always going the correct way down the streets etc. OH SHIT.

Four cops jumped out of the SUV [which had neither siren nor lights on] once he’d been forced into a parked car, tackled him, and arrested him, then confiscated his motorbike. A pile of other cops came to watch, including an unmarked car with two plainclothes police and a big van to haul away the bike.

I caught the whole thing on video as soon as I realized what was going on [and yes, you should film, any time you see a person of color being harassed by the police]. Seriously, the escalation of force and arrest was unnecessary and did nothing to make my neighborhood safer. Had this kid been white, he’d have been pulled over with siren/lights and let off with a warning. Instead, he was ridden off the road, tackled, and hauled off for arrest.

The racism of broken windows, caught in action. And we wonder why there are so few black engineers. Because when they tinker and experiment, they’re locked up and given criminal records.