May 13, 2021

Apple fires man who called Bay Area women "useless baggage you'd trade for a box of shotgun shells"

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/Apple-Antonio-Garcia-Martinez-Bay-Area-women-weak-16174745.php?IPID=SFGate-HP-CP-Spotlight


A Silicon Valley mainstay was hired by Apple last month but left Tuesday after massive internal backlash from employees over large portions in his book.

Antonio García Martínez, a tech guy who previously worked at Facebook and Goldman Sachs and has contributed extensively to media outlets like Wired, was hired last month for Apple’s advertising tech division.


His book, “Chaos Monkeys,” was published in 2016 and, at the time, was met with glowing reviews from the tech media circuit for its frankness about the culture of the industry.

But the reviews largely glossed over some dubious sections in the book, highlighted in an internal letter published Wednesday by Apple employees — many of them women and people of color — who expressed vehement opposition to his hiring on the grounds that sexist statements in the book were in direct opposition to “Apple’s commitment to Inclusion & Diversity.”


There’s a line in which he says most women at Facebook are not “conventionally attractive” and a tangent about the accent of Chander Sarna, an Indian tech exec who now works at an employment startup in Sunnyvale. García Martínez also describes East Palo Alto as a “local slum.”

“Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of s—t,” reads an excerpt from “Chaos Monkeys.” “They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.”


https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/Apple-Antonio-Garcia-Martinez-Bay-Area-women-weak-16174745.php?IPID=SFGate-HP-CP-Spotlight

May 13, 2021

Northern California tree trimmer charged in deadly throat-slashings

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Northern-California-man-charged-in-deadly-16173796.php

OROVILLE, Calif. (AP) — A tree trimmer in rural Northern California has been charged in throat-slashing serial killings that left three people dead, prosecutors announced Thursday.

Ryan Scott Blinston, 37, of the small city of Oroville, was charged on Wednesday with murder, attempted murder and arson. The charges included special sentencing allegations that Blinston used a deadly weapon, attacked an elderly victim and committed multiple killings.



He was scheduled to be arraigned on the charges Thursday and could face life in prison without possibility of parole if convicted.

Blinston had been in jail since he was arrested last year and charged in another neck-cutting, authorities said.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether he had an attorney who could speak on his behalf.

Blinston was working for a tree-trimming service in Butte and Tehama counties, north of Sacramento, last May and June when he returned to the clients' homes after the work was completed and slashed the throats of the residents, according to prosecutors.

May 13, 2021

the 1900 Island. four families live like 1900 Welsh for one month

one family has 5 kids to feed... the family almost starves to death. given a bit of food to start and small garden but husbands have to fish enough to provide food.

https://www.pbs.org/video/101-cwb7sg/



available on acorn TV, not sure where else. 4 episodes. was filmed in 2019

May 13, 2021

2-Year-Old Boy Shoots Both Parents Luckily, no one was severely injured in Wednesday morning i

A Maine toddler who wandered into his parents' room Wednesday morning ended up accidentally shooting them and injuring himself, cops say, but luckily, all three are expected to recover.

The 2-year-old boy apparently spotted a gun, which was loaded, on one of the nightstands in the family's home in West Bath, picked it up, and fired it once, Sagadahoc County Sheriff Joel Merry tells WGME. That one shot did some real damage, though: The little boy's mother was hit in the leg, the dad was shot in the back of the head, and the 2-year-old himself was hurt in the face when the gun recoiled, Merry says, per WMTW.


The three were rushed to a local hospital, where they were found to have non-life-threatening injuries. The couple has another child, a 3-week-old who was also in the room but not hurt, and the baby is now being cared for by the grandmother, who lives with the family.

"How the boy was able to pick up and fire the weapon is of great concern and is being investigated," Merry says. "This situation, while disturbing, could have had an even more tragic ending." The incident has put new focus on the Maine Gun Safety Coalition's push to pass a state law that would criminalize leaving a loaded weapon out that a child subsequently uses, per WGME. An "absolute crisis," is how the group's director described Wednesday's shooting.

https://www.newser.com/story/306109/cops-2-year-old-boy-shoots-both-parents.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=uol&utm_campaign=rss_world_login

May 13, 2021

Commencement Address Was University President's Downfall

The embattled president of the University of South Carolina resigned on Wednesday, days after he delivered a commencement address marred by allegations of plagiarism and a misidentification of the school itself. In a news release, the school announced that the chairman of its board of trustees had accepted Bob Caslen's resignation, thanking him for his service.

The board last weekend refused Caslen's verbal resignation offer. It came as Caslen acknowledged taking two paragraphs without attribution from a speech by Adm. William McRaven, the Navy SEAL in charge of the mission to take out terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, the AP reports. Caslen, who delivered the address to graduates on Friday, had called that an oversight.

Caslen also referred to the school as the “University of California” during his remarks. After gasps from the crowd, he said, "Sorry about that, I owe you push-ups," per CNN. He apologized Wednesday in a note to the school’s faculty, staff, and students, saying that "when trust is lost, one is unable to lead."

Caslen’s rise to the presidency in 2019 had been met with criticism. Student and faculty leaders opposed the retired general and US Military Academy superintendent, arguing he lacked qualifications, such as a doctoral degree or university research experience, and knew little about the school. Harris Pastides, Caslen's immediate predecessor who led the system for 11 years, will now serve on an interim basis during a search for a permanent replacement, officials said.

https://www.newser.com/story/306105/university-president-quits-after-plagiarism-allegations.html

May 13, 2021

Jesuit priest resigns as president of Santa Clara university for inappropriate behavior

A Jesuit priest who delivered the homily at a Mass for the inauguration of President Biden has resigned as the president of Santa Clara University after he engaged in inappropriate behavior, university officials said on Wednesday.

An investigation by the Jesuits West Province found that the priest, the Rev. Kevin O’Brien, “engaged in behaviors, consisting primarily of conversations, during a series of informal dinners with Jesuit graduate students that were inconsistent with established Jesuit protocols and boundaries,” the chairman of the university’s board of trustees said in a statement to the university community.

“The Province also advised the Board that alcohol was involved and that no inappropriate behavior was found in any settings outside of these dinners,” the statement said.

The statement, which did not elaborate further on the behavior, said that Father O’Brien, who had been placed on leave in March, notified the board of trustees that he was resigning on Sunday, and that the board accepted his resignation on Monday.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/us/priest-santa-clara-university.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage

May 12, 2021

How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning

How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning
It is a truth universally acknowledged that elite parents, in possession of excellent jobs, want to get their kids into college.


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Educational hierarchies invite ruthless competition: Only one of us can get ahead, just as only one woman could land Mr. Darcy. So we scratch and claw to get places in the exclusive schools and colleges whose graduates fill the top jobs.

The most obvious pitfall of this competition is that only the privileged can reliably access the lifetime of schooling needed to win: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale together typically enroll more students from households in the richest 1 percent than from the entire bottom half. But even for rich applicants, a 5 percent admissions rate makes the odds of winning the college lottery much longer than Elizabeth Bennet’s odds of marrying well. The pressure to beat these odds drives even the most well-resourced applicants and their families to immoral and self-destructive schemes. In the recent Varsity Blues scandal, sophisticated and otherwise sensible people with family wealth to spare paid bribes to arrange fraudulent athletic resumes and rigged test scores for their children. Setting moral principle aside, what besides an overwhelming fear of losing caste could lead parents to think that their children’s development is best served by giving them, behind their backs, false credentials? Is this any less foolish than Mrs. Bennet’s sending a daughter off to visit a possible suitor through a rain that makes her dangerously ill, in the hope that the bad weather will force him to take her in and fall in love?

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Another pitfall of competitive education is that it distorts students’ choices of what skills to acquire. When schooling is the path to income and status, students study the subjects that yield the highest wages and the greatest prestige, inducing too many people to study finance and law and too few to study education, caregiving, or even engineering. But private wages are not the same thing as the public interest. Child-care workers, for example, give much more to society than they take from it, generating almost 10 times as great a social product as they capture in private wages. Bankers and lawyers, by contrast, capture private wages that exceed their social product—they take more than they give. The distortions reach beyond specific jobs. Art, culture, and community all make the world a much better place, but they are notoriously difficult to monetize in the market. Competitive schooling therefore drives students away from these fields. No surprise, then, that the rise of competitive education has been accompanied by a steep decline in student interest in the humanities.

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A social and economic order based on the immense labor incomes of extravagantly educated workers traps high-achieving students in a pitiless competition to attain meaningless superiority. The more completely people embrace education’s competitive face, the further they retreat from its deeper place in human self-actualization; no matter how skilled they get at capturing status, they never acquire a deep self-knowledge. And in this sense they remain forever uneducated. Simultaneously, the schools that focus their training on the quest for competitive advantage betray every plausible ideal of academic excellence. Instead of understanding students as people to be cultivated, competitive schooling treats them as assets to be managed and exploited. These perversions are today’s analogs to the boredom, loneliness, and disenchantment that Elizabeth Bennet feared would accompany an instrumental marriage.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/marriage-college-status-meritocracy/618795/

May 12, 2021

24 fires a day at L.A. homeless encampments a growing crisis, 54% of all fires LAFD respond to

The fire began at 3 a.m., quickly destroying the clapboard bungalow two blocks from Venice Beach. The tenant was away for the night, but her dog, Togo, succumbed after his howls of panic and pain left helpless neighbors with a memory they can’t forget.

While arson investigators have yet to determine a cause in the April 20 blaze, traumatized neighbors quickly linked it to a rash of fires in Venice’s growing homeless camps.

“We may never know for sure what happened,” next-door neighbor Francesca Padilla wrote in an impassioned email to dozens of city officials. “What we know for sure is that around my home and the school across the street from it there are people cooking on sidewalks and RV kitchenettes, burning fires to keep warm, using generators for electricity, living out of their cars, smoking and using drugs in makeshift shacks and tents.”

The angst in Venice is part of a widening tableau of fear, anger and tragedy that has become an everyday consequence of homelessness across Los Angeles.

As the number of tents, makeshift shelters and campers on Los Angeles streets has surged, so has the scourge of fire. In the three years since the Los Angeles Fire Department began classifying them, fires related to homelessness have nearly tripled. In the first quarter of 2021, they occurred at a rate of 24 a day, making up 54% of all fires the department responded to.

https://news.yahoo.com/24-fires-day-surge-flames-120009728.html

May 12, 2021

gas shortage brawl

https://www.instagram.com/p/COvyhm7nu8N/?utm_source=ig_embed

The bystander, identified only as Rashaad, tells WRAL he was waiting on line around 2pm at the Marathon gas station when a woman in a white Honda Accord attempted to cut into the long line, which didn't make other motorists happy. No one would let her in, which is when Rashaad started recording. "Who do y'all think is wrong," he writes in his caption for the video on Instagram, which shows the woman getting out of her car—after Rashaad says she hit a gray Honda CR-V—and spitting at a man driving the other Honda. The man can then be seen emerging from his car, walking over to her, and spitting on her, at which point the two start scuffling. At one point, the man appears to hurl the woman's cellphone into the street, and the Daily Beast reports the man's shirt ended up getting torn in the "scrappy fight," which went on until the police arrived. It's not clear if any arrests were made

https://www.instagram.com/p/COvyhm7nu8N/?utm_source=ig_embed

May 12, 2021

Delta issues call for volunteers to clean the Atlanta airport lounge FOR FREE - NO PAY!

With air travel picking up again, Delta Air Lines is short on workers for its loyalty lounges—and it is asking employees to help out for free.

"Just come to the ATL airport for a few hours to help with cleaning, wiping tables, running food, restocking food buffets, etc," the airline asked in an email to salaried employees at its Atlanta headquarters.

The airline issued the call for "Peach Corps" volunteers after its usual contractor couldn't get enough workers for the Atlanta airport lounges, reports Bloomberg. The email said Delta's Sky Clubs are short of 115 workers.

In a statement, the airline said it had asked for volunteers to "help meet the rapid, recent increases in customer volumes." The employees, who will not receive any pay or other compensation for their work in the lounges, will be limited to three days per month

https://www.newser.com/story/306074/delta-asks-hq-employees-to-volunteer-in-airport-lounges.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=uol&utm_campaign=rss_top