More than 15,000 hotel workers are seeking higher pay, better benefits, and working conditions. This includes an across-the-board $5 an hour raise, as well as affordable healthcare and better pensions. They also are seeking a ban on the use of E-Verify, which is used to deny employment to undocumented workers and workers involved with the criminal justice system. You can follow what is happening at their Twitter.
[image description: a photo of several hotel workers]
The kind of thing a good coder wouldn’t mind seeing on their tombstone:
DEGRADED GRACEFULLY
Finally, a truly useful flashlight design! Because even just some light from one or two functional batteries is better than having not enough batteries to even close the circuit! Plus, if the contacts corrode at one spot and you don’t have the time & means to clean it, you can still get light out of the thing!
Palestinians have historically cultivated the land, not just with olive trees, but also with figs, apricots, oranges, and dates. Yet, Zionist propaganda, though a concentrated effort to steal Palestinian land, has insisted on “making the desert bloom.”
The desert has already been blooming and supporting its Indigenous population, as it has for thousands of years. Since the early twentieth century, Zionists have nevertheless co-opted the language of environmentalism and sustainability as a means of forcing the native Arab population off of the lands they covet. The Jewish National Fund (JNF), a self-described Zionist organization, has an explicit mission: to acquire land throughout Palestinian territories and plant trees—with “proud Jewish identity.” The JNF claims to have planted 240 million trees over 227,000 acres.
This tree-planting crusade is detrimental to the land. Pine trees that constitute the colonist’s imaginary of a forest in Europe replace the native plant species and change the soil’s chemistry, such that agricultural crops cannot thrive. This further displaces Palestinians, as well as the nomadic Bedouin peoples, who rely on the land for grazing their cattle. Settlers want to extract from the “blooming desert.” In contrast, the Indigenous approach to land is one of mutual respect and nourishment: the land sustains life and culture, a culture that settler-colonialism wants to erase.
To achieve this end, the Zionist occupation has used a variety of tactics to disrupt the Palestinian economy, including controlling water resources so that groves cannot be irrigated as needed, which is especially important now given the effects of the climate crisis. Additionally, the Zionists instituted a permit system that has prevented olive farmers from accessing their trees for all but a handful of days per year. This has made it difficult, if not impossible, to do necessary maintenance like pruning and weeding, greatly impacting the quality of the harvest. Most egregiously, the Zionists erected walls separating farmers from their groves, slicing up plots of land that have been in the same family for generations. Such measures have forced olive farmers to rely on olives of subpar quality. Because of the limited days that farmers are given to access their trees, they might be forced to pick the olives before peak ripeness, affecting the quality of the olive oil produced and therefore the prices that the oil will fetch.
A 1994 New York Times article summarized the struggle succinctly: “The Palestinians planted tiny olive trees; the Israeli soldiers dug them up. The Palestinians lay down in the road to block a bulldozer; the Israelis carted them off to police vans.”
I’m sorry, I don’t want to come across as harsh, but this is honestly ignorant as fuck.
I’m not gonna claim to know everything about the importance of studying dead languages, but I think I can safely say that it would probably be a really bad thing if we lost these languages to time if we didn’t have people studying them.
We can lose hundreds if not THOUSANDS of years of story-telling history if these languages end up forgotten.
I can’t put it into clear words right now because I’m busy or go int depth because I only have a common sense understanding, but I just wanted to address this. So if anybody on Tumblr who’s more qualified to speak on this kind of matter wants to explain, then please take the floor for me.
Many, many English words have Latin roots, so studying Latin can expand your English vocabulary to the point that you won’t even need to check the dictionary meaning if you can recognize its Latin roots.
Additionally, you can make up new words as needed by mashing together Dead Words.
Lots of scientific jargon use Latin and Ancient Greek exactly because they’re dead languages - the meaning of those words are set in stone. Studying those languages can help you understand and remember the extremely complex strings of words common in those topics.
Latin is the Mother of Romance languages. Just studying Latin can make it easier to adapt to the grammar rules of the other Romance languages, or even help you Frankenstein out a meaning of a simple paragraph.
All translation is a series of compromises. Even if Ye Olde Latin Text has been translated to English again and again and again, there WILL BE several points where the translator had to circumnavigate the translation to a phrase because the exact tone and concept is difficult to convey in English!!! (I am bilingual and this problem frustrates me to no end!!)
And that’s approaching this problem in good faith. We have a history of people outright lying about their translation credentials, deliberately translating a text “wrong” for their own benefit, or adding flourishes that drastically change the tone of the translation. Reviewing that 18th-century English translation of some 13th-century Latin book instead of just thoughtlessly reprinting it is vital to having a clear understanding of that book and placing it in its proper context.
We have a LOT of untranslated archived material that have text written in dead languages, Latin included. Translating these provide us history.
And last but not the least:
Things do not have to be “useful” to have value.
also dead does not mean no longer in use, it means no longer CHANGING. No new words are being added to that dictionary. That’s all it means. Latin is only dead bc new words aren’t being added to its dictionary
last week would have been the 58th birthday of bernard baran, who was imprisoned in 1984 at the age of 19 after a pair of parents failed to get him expelled from his position as a teacher’s aide via a complaint about his uncloseted homosexuality and resorted to fabricating claims of pedophilia and sexual abuse. refusing a plea bargain for 5 years that demanded admission of guilt by maintaining his innocence, he received multiple life sentences and ultimately spent 21 years in prison. a scrawny boy of less than 100 pounds whose photo was published in the newspapers, he was beaten and sexually tormented, received threatening letters and a bounty was placed on his head. his conviction came in record time despite a total lack of evidence, countless contradictory and objectively impossible stories, and preschooler child witnesses outright asking for the “prize” they were “promised” after giving their testimony. his immediate appeal was denied, and afterwards his family was too poor to continue paying a lawyer. not a single lgbt organisation chose the side of a gay teenager being subjected to a kangaroo court in the middle of the satanic panic. ultimately, his release took until 2006, a few days after his 41st birthday, when a local advocacy group successfully proved the absurdity of his trial and the deliberate manipulation of evidence. he only got to live another 8 years in freedom, bearing mental and physical damage from years of abuse and negligent medical care. he needed a full set of new teeth to replace the ones that were punched out or broken and extracted. nevertheless, he enjoyed gardening and found work as a landscaper. his record has not been cleared to this day.
