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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

23 Oct

In 2017, Donald Trump declared victory. Working with the far-right Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, he had brokered a deal to bring high-tech manufacturing jobs back to America, with a new, massive Foxconn plant that would anchor the new Wisconn Valley.

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Right away, there were three serious, obvious problems.

I. Foxconn are crooks. It's not just the Apple device factories where they drive workers to suicide, it's a long history of promising to build massive factories, absorbing billions in subsidies, and then bailing.

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It's a con they'd already pulled in Indonesia, Vietnam, Brazil and in Pennsylvania. The US heist happened only four years before the Wisconsin deal (which offered $4b in subsidies!) was signed.

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Read 25 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

23 Oct

Anjelica Huston as Morticia Addams
The Addams Family (1991) | dir. Barry Sonnenfeld
seananmcguire.tumblr.com/post/632789156…

Read 7 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

23 Oct

In 1933, FDR created the Civilian Conservation Corps, which went on to employ 3m workers (5% of the US male workforce!) in projects whose benefit we still feel today: road- and trail-building, tree-planting, firefighting, infrastructure maintenance and more.

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The CCC had serious flaws - notably a policy of racial and gender discrimination - but for those who were lucky enough to qualify, it was a transformative experience, an end to the years-long terror of economic precarity and a chance to make a difference in the world.

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Millions of working-class Americans were given a chance to see their country and be immersed in the natural environment in a way that mainstreamed the principles of conservation. The beautiful outdoor spaces Americans enjoy today are the legacy of that program.

3/

Read 16 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

23 Oct

Since the earliest days of digital legal records, redaction failures have been a source of perpetual mirth and chaos. The most common failure is simply adding black boxes over text in PDFs; the text can be easily recovered by selecting the underlying text and copying it.

1/

I first encountered this in the early 2000s, and it was the stupid mistake that no one ever learned from. Not the TSA in 2009:

cryptome.org/tsa-screening.…

Not the DHS in 2016:

wired.com/2016/03/govern…

Nor Facebook's legal opponents in 2018:

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

2/

@binarybits

This 2011 study by @binarybits for @RECAPtheLaw reveals how widespread the problem was a decade ago:

freedom-to-tinker.com/2011/05/25/stu…

3/

Read 16 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

23 Oct

Not only are Americans drowning in student loans they have no hope of repaying, but it's commonly understood that student debt can't be discharged in bankruptcy. 1 in 4 bankruptcies involves student debt, and that debt is almost never discharged.

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A generation's worth of tacit conspiracies between higher-learning institutions, lenders, and educational advisors has saddled millions of Americans with crushing, punitive debt, subjected to outrageous interest rates and penalties.

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These people took out loans when they were children in hopes of attaining a middle-class life through education. They got the education, but are mired in spiralling poverty thanks to the debt they took on to get it.

3/

Read 20 tweets