Barriers to communications

Okay, I’m ending this week with one more piece of Twitter drollery, in which a large corporation demonstrates once again that it doesn’t quite get social media.

On the other hand, it could also be an instance where a millennial once again demonstrates that social media isn’t always your best choice for communicating time-critical information. If you’ve got a phone signal, why not try, you know, calling someone? Like 911? (Yeah, there is text-to-911, but it’s not available in all areas.)

Also, it turns out that the former communications advisor to Ted Cruz may not be quite the social media maven that you’d expect. If she’d used Amtrak’s Twitter handle (including the at-sign) she might have got a response sooner than seven months on.

Names matter

On Twitter I follow not a few parody accounts. One of them is a Los Angeles comic purporting to be a childcare provider in one of the trendier LA neighborhoods:

Los Feliz Daycare tweets exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from a bastion of Left Coast correctness. Here’s one of my favorites:

Not Schrödinger

Taking a break from heavy-duty political issues, let’s move to the world of science, which—truth be known—can be just as red in tooth and claw as presidential campaigns.

Do you doubt me? Well, for instance, it turns out that a cat co-authored a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, an arm of the American Physical Society (APS).

Okay, the paper, “Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He” was published in 1975, so you might have missed it, even though it was an in-depth exploration of atomic behavior at different temperatures. Pretty riveting stuff, I’m sure, to a physicist.

It seems that the human author, Jack H. Hetherington, professor of physics at Michigan State University, had written up his research findings using the editorial first person plural. But then he realized that the journal to which he was submitting it would view it as fishy (which, in the academic world means “unpublishable”) if the paper was littered with “we”, “us” and “our”, but had only one author listed. This being back in the 1970s, Hetherington did not have word processing software, so he was faced with either retyping the entire paper or coming up with a quick fix on the front end.

So he added his Siamese cat Chester as a co-author, granting him rather more gravitas by giving him the nom de plume “F.D.C. Willard”, viz.: Felix Domesticus Chester Willard, the alleged surname referring to Chester’s father, so a legitimate patronymic.

Based on my experience with felis catus, I’ve no doubt that Chester was a contributor to the creative process. In fact, I’m betting that the hard copy submission had more than a few cat hairs on it.

Evidently when the Physical Review Letters editors found out about Chester’s antecedents, they were not amused. But by that time they’d already published the paper. And how is it that they didn’t ask for academic bona fides at the time of submission? Hetherington’s department, on the other hand, offered Chester a full-time position.

Eventually the APS found its sense of humor. Two years ago they announced that all cat-authored papers would be open-access. No word on dog-authored papers, but I guess these things take time.

Como si fuera algo malo

I learned a couple of interesting things last week, thanks to social media. First, Trump has what the media refer to as “Latino surrogates”: men (and, like the vast preponderance of Trump campaigners, they are all men) with brown skins and surnames ending in -ez, who have the unenviable job of representing to the Latino electorate (the ones who haven’t been denied registration by voter ID laws) that—everything he’s said to the contrary—Trump really doesn’t despise them as subhuman, and that he’s not planning to ruin their lives in any way.

At least not until 9 November.

And apparently these surrogates—at least the ones who’ve been allowed to speak publicly—share the Donald’s speaking style as well as his political goals. Because one of them, a guy named Marco Gutierrez, got on MSNBC and announced that if we the American people do not elect Trump, we’re going to be overrun by Mexicans, and before you know it, we’re “going to have taco trucks on every corner.”

No, I am not making that up.

I do not know who this Gutierrez person is, but I’m guessing from the way Twitter lit up that he’s every bit as out of touch with the American people as his master. Because the hashtag #TacoTrucksOnEveryCorner about broke the Interwebz. Basically we have a new manifesto for the American people, replacing that "A chicken in every pot" jobber from another Republican nominee.

It’s hard to choose a sampling from such an embarrassment of riches but they’re all variants on wonderment around how taco truck proliferation could possibly be considered a bad thing. Viz.:

And:

One of my favorites is this meme:

via GIPHY

But in the end, here's one of the things that makes America already great:

And this:

Gratitude Monday: Worthy of their hire

Today being Labor Day, I’m expressing my gratitude for the benefits that organized labor has brought to the workplace. Yes, I’m talking labor unions. Without them, there’d be a whole lot more miserable employment conditions than exist even now.

There are basically only two reasons why you and I at this moment may not be working in sweatshops with dangerous electrical wiring, hot and cold running vermin and no toilets—unions and litigation. (I would also have added “80-hour weeks” as one of the not-any-mores, but that’s pretty much so last century.)

Business management in companies both large and small do not provide more or less sanitary and safe conditions, ventilation and some standard of minimum wage out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it because over the past 150 years unions have fought with blood and treasure for the concept that labor is part of the value-add of both products and services, and because they’re terrified that if they screw up and get sued, juries will strip their corporate assets in punitive damages like a plague of locusts ranging across Iowa.

I’m not saying that unions haven’t become part of the problem along the way—many of them are every bit as bloated and arrogant and greedy as corporate boards, and in fact these days you’d often have trouble distinguishing one stance from the other across the negotiating table. And I’m also not saying that America’s propensity toward litigiousness doesn’t suck up resources, like some cosmic Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, that couldn’t have been better spent on something like, oh, curing cancer.

But it takes the kind of jackhammer represented by Big Labor and Big Lawsuits to get the attention of the heirs of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. If you doubt this, I refer you to the history of the textile industry in America: the corporations first moved their factories from states with unions to the South (God bless those right-to-work state legislators), and then—when even minimum wage became too much for them—to Mexico, Bangladesh, China and other countries where there’s no concern about pesky things like sweatshop conditions, unsafe and unsanitary factory buildings or child labor.

And it’s not limited to schmattas, either. Twenty years ago during my sojourn in the great, cough, state of North Carolina (which is probably still electing Jesse Helms to the US Senate, corpse though he be), there was a fire in a chicken processing plant that killed 25 workers and injured 54 others. Exit doors from the factory floor had been locked, trapping the men and women in the inferno. Exactly like the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in 1911.

I’m not going to talk about the wages paid or the conditions in the factory, but the plant had never suffered a single safety inspection in its 11 years of operation, so the managers weren’t troubled by having to fork out for any, you know, protections. North Carolina is a right-to-work state, and it don’t hold with no unions. Or no worker protections.

(BTW, North Carolina’s minimum wage is $7.25 per hour which is the federal base, the lowest you can pay and still be in the United States. But the interest the legislature lacks in providing basic standards of life for its citizenry is more than made up for by its zeal in passing Byzantine voter ID laws that are specifically intended to keep much of that citizenry from voting. That’s just the way those old tobacco-empire heirs roll.)

Let me also bring to your attention the decades of work by César Chávez and the United Farm Workers to bring decent wages, as well as working and living conditions, to the men, women and children who tend and harvest the food we eat. I know that I personally find it easier to swallow fruits and vegetables when I know they aren't the product of slavery-in-all-but-name.

Labor Day was made a national holiday in 1894, in the wake of the Pullman strike, which ended after President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops to suppress the strikers. As a sop to thousands of workers who’d lost their jobs and their homes, Cleveland created a national holiday to “recognize” labor.

I find that a monumental act of condescension—declaring a holiday "for the workers", kind of like Flag Day, without any meaning behind it. It wasn’t even a paid holiday. And it was set for September to distinguish it from the international socialist/communist Labor Day of 1 May. But it played well with Cleveland’s corporate constituents.

So it’s incumbent upon us, in times where enormous inroads have been made in the gains unions won for us (I laugh at the notion of a 40-hour week, because no tech employer for the past 15 years has expected anything less than 60 hours per week from its salaried staff), to consider where we’d be if they hadn’t existed.

It’s nowhere I’d care to be, I assure you. So I am grateful today for the battles that labor unions fought. They didn’t always win, but they did move us forward.