YOU JUST DIDN'T TRY HARD ENOUGH. DECADENT!
Relevant! On convict labor in farming (turns out farming is hard and convicts are bad at it). Podcast courtesy Megan in some other thread.
That's a great story. I'd go see that movie, but it's hard to imagine that it could be made without somehow turning it into a story of triumph.
IT WAS TOO A TRIUMPH! TOTALLY TRIUMPHANT.
Hey, that sounds interesting. Maybe I should listen to that podcast.
CUBA, I MEAN. THE SUGAR HARVEST. PATRIOTISM, YOUTHFUL FERVOR. IT WAS GREAT.
1 After all, I showed them the way
OH YEAH SURE. NICE COMFY MINE, NO MOSQUITOES IN SIGHT. PUSSY.
@2 Not listened to the podcast, but ISTM that in at least in the US the dynamic is that companies end up having a vested interested maintaining their cheap and captive labour supply.
Was that rehab via poultry processing thing posted here or somewhere else?
10.1: The podcast says as much.
If you hate immigrants and young people, this seems like a great policy. I don't know why It isn't being tried now.
It's got just the right combination of fascism and back-to-the land socialism to play well in diner.
I HATED WHEN THAT PLAN DIDN'T COME TOGETHER.
14 - everything works better with elephants.
The shithole countries policy might be an obstacle there.
2 When I think of convicts in agriculture, I think of Rancho Deluxe. Folks should re-watch it, if for no reason other than to see how our imaginations have changed in 40+ years.
14 - everything works better with elephants.
"The world is what you make it"
The use of "re-watch" in 17 suggests a stupendously overinflated notion of the number of people who have seen or even heard of Rancho Deluxe.
I actually knew a professor at Vienna University who had been voluntold to go get the harvest in as a student back in about 1966. They were given the right to a carload of grain for their own use as a reward.
So they did a lot of hard yakka, and at the end of the day discovered that although you got a carload of grain you had to provide your own rail car to haul it away. The Soviet railways really didn't work like that so...the only thing you could do with your grain was to leave it to the vodka distillery. Which would pay you for it. In vodka.
End result: a lot of students on a 48-hour train ride with several cases of vodka each.
Or, as they call in Russia, "Tuesday."
Guilty as charged. Watch it for the first time! You'll be amazed at how foreign the 1970s are.
The past is another country. They wear really goofy clothes there.
20: USSR, or somewhere in Eastern Europe?
I spent part of a couple summers in high school working in a field, detasseling corn out in Wisconsin. Most of the teenagers working there would loose their jobs when the Mexican migrants showed up a few weeks into the summer. Because the Mexicans were soooooo much better at detasseling corn than we were.
Also, from my quick research, it looks like a car of grain is at least a few thousand bushels. That seems like a lot even for a couple months of work; possibly the story has grown in the retelling.
My dad wouldn't let us detassel corn because of the herbicides used. But it was a common job for kids in my area.
27: I read that as a car of grain for the whole group of students.
Oh heck, even in the early 80s, native-born kids couldn't be bothered to work hard. I mean, turnover in fast-food (small texas town) was >400%. I worked in a jack-in-the-box for 2.5yr, saw armies of my fellow high school students go thru. The work is hard, dirty, and sometimes dangerous (try removng the grilles from a vent-a-hood above a working fryer after 20hr of cooking .... it's pretty dangerous, and I saw a guy slip and fall, plunging his hand into the hot oil: not something you wanna contemplate). Roofing is dangerous work, too, but at least back then, it paid well. Neither pays enough to induce kids with options (like mom giving them allowance) to do it.
I"m *not* saying that kids are lazy, nor that kids these days are lazy. Rather, that the only people you're going to get, to do these jobs, are people without other options. You know, people from poverty-stricken places who need the work to eat. Change the pay, and that'll change.
That wasn't true everywhere. I worked at McDonald's for over a year, as did my siblings. Then my brother and I both did general construction labor. There's no way anything like a majority of middle class families are able to give their kids what my parents have us.
Veni Carthaginem, et circumstrepebat me undique sartago flagitiosorum amorum
A ton of my students work shitty fast food jobs. I don't think that's exclusively migrant labor by any stretch.
I'm reminded of the subplot in Don't Tell Alfred where some large near-adult sons run away from Eton and find work in a packing house, paying enough to keep them fed and happy and going to rock shows regularly. Peak minimum wage era. Of course later they get bored and start stealing razors from the packages and get sacked.
Technically I don't know if that was the peak era of minimum wage in the UK. Glorious Thirty at least.
The UK didn't have a minimum wage back then. It only got one in 1998 thanks to the awful neoliberal stooge Tony Blair.
Social democratic paradise Germany only got a legally mandated minimum wage in 2015. Sector-based exceptions to the legal minimum ended on the first day of this year.
39: huh. Did they have a minimum wage at Land level? Or just not at all? Why did it take them so long?
re: 38
Indeed. Because when I was on a YTS (1989) I was on a glorious 75p per hour, or so.*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_Training_Scheme
* luckily my boss was not a dick, so once I'd been there a few months and proved myself to be OK at my job, he started paying me an additional salary on top that was 3 times the YTS salary.
40: because the system was based on national collective bargaining. since the 2000s Hartz-IV reforms there are more people outside that system, and the national minimum wage law was introduced to address that.
20/27: yes, the USSR, and no, I have made no effort to check the logistics.
42.1: thanks.
20/27: for "a carload" read "a very large amount" and I think the story rings very true.
The difficulty of transporting and storing a sufficient quantity of grain to constitute an income is a common problem in history. The Russians are hardly the first to hit on "distill it for export" as the answer.
44. "distill it for export"? I'd always heard they kept most of it for themselves.
Distill for export rodent-resistant storage.
This is just to say that I have finally reset my TIVO, after what I now reckon to be 11 years.
On topic because distilled alcoholic beverages?
What was the limit again for going off topic? Anyway alcohol was slightly involved but not spirits. I have mentioned some of my failed attempts here in the past so I thought I would report the conclusion.
This did not involve the recent object of my longings but I think my pining must have lit some kind of beacon because men have been reacting differently to me lately. I met this fellow at a social event where people are even fewer degrees of separation apart than the Irish norm so it turns out I actually know his brother.
Yay, emir! I'm glad you're being noticed and more!
40, belatedly, and in supplement to 42: The presumption was that everyone, or at least everyone who counted, was covered by the Tarifverträge, model contracts that were then mandatory throughout a sector. I'd be willing to bet that there had always been gaps -- I would look into fields dominated by immigrants and women with lower levels of education -- and those were growing larger over time.
West Germany worked very well for members of in-groups. United Germany is striving to make those benefits universal.
I met this fellow at a social event where people are even fewer degrees of separation apart than the Irish norm so it turns out I actually know his brother.
Tell me about it. Turns out my lady grew up in the same village as my sister-in-law. They hadn't seen each other in about thirty years.
The previous evening I was going to a gig to which I had got free tickets, but the friend who was to go was sick. After canvassing my own friends I put the ticket up on the event's Facebook page and just before the gig a young woman messaged me to see if it was available. Anyway she turned out to be from 3 miles away from my home village and I know her best friend's mother.
Oh yeah, but it was reassuring last night when I was flinging caution to the wind (had that clichéd conversation "I'm not bringing you home", 30 mins later of making out on a bench beside the Liffey, "okay let's go".) The other thing is that it won't be any secret from my friends group.
After all these years and all the scandals, the pope comes by and everyone still thinks, "Quick, act Catholic. Better make a baby."
She probably does but we left the bar together and walked along the quays entwined, my very drunk friend saw us and kept shouting "shift!",* also passed by several other people while snogging on bench a short while later
59: there will be none of that, thanks. Some of you may remember how I practically cockblocked myself by overbuying condoms, well, they haven't gone out of date.
It's like bureaucracy to the bureaucrats. Going through the motions is what matters, not the outcome.
60.link is great and reminds me of ttaM and me trying to come up with questions for a Scottish citizenship test:
- What meal will you have had?
- What, if anything, would you do with a semmit?
- From how high is it unwise to fling a piece?
- With whose army were we on the way to where when and why?
- Wha's like us?
- Are you dancing?
- Is bauchling a good way to avoid becoming pochled? Why or why not?
- You come home to discover a stirk in your living room. Would you:
a) offer him a cup of tea
b) open the window to get some fresh air in
c) shoo him out gently
d) call the police
e) clean it with a damp cloth?
You can have had your meal and eat it too.
The answers, for anyone trying to get citizenship:
- Your tea. "You'll have had your tea" is supposedly the typical Edinburgh greeting, epitomising the city's lack of generosity.
- Put it on. It's a vest (undershirt).
- Twenty storeys. A piece is a sandwich; traditionally if you were a Glasgow kid you were out playing in the street and at lunchtime your mother threw you a wrapped-up sandwich out of the tenement window to avoid her having to come down stairs or you having to go up. The advent of high rise flats made this impractical: http://www.roblightbody.com/jeely-piece-song.html
- Ally's army (ie the Scottish football team and its supporters), 1978, Argentina, because it was the World Cup. In retrospect a high water mark of Scottish delusional optimism unmatched since the Darien project.
- Damn few and they're a' deid. Traditional Scots toast.
- Are you asking? I'm asking. Then I'm dancing. Traditional Scots mating ritual.
- Yes. Bauchling is shambling, walking in a generally relaxed and untidy way; a good way to avoid becoming pochled, out of breath and exhausted.
- c. A stirk is a young cow.
Can a vest have sleeves if it's an undershirt?
Heh.
I'd have failed the "stirk" question, as that's one I didn't know.
re: 'pochled', my usage of pochle is:
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12489167.SCOTS_WORD_OF_THE_WEEK/
i.e. if someone acquired something via underhand methods, my friends would say, "He pochled it".
See also, "plank" as in to stash something away somewhere in order to come back to it later. Planking can be a part of pochling.
That "tea" is understood to designate a meal explains the continued presence of Scotland in the United Kingdom.
It's a bit filling, if you eat the bag.
Naively, one would expect that to be emptying, what with all the fiber. A wise and subtle people, the British.
So that's where Sondheim got that line from!
I always confuse Sondheim with Soderbergh. It's going to embarrass me someday.
Hmm, interesting. I looked it up (under "pauchle" as well) and it gave meanings including "a bundle or pack-load" - which would make sense for my meaning, if you carry a pauchle you'll end up pauchled - and also "to steal, pilfer, embezzle, make off with" which fits yours.
That "tea" is understood to designate a meal
It's understood to designate one of at least three meals, depending on your regional origin and position in the wonderful British class structure. It could be your main evening meal (otherwise "dinner" or "supper"); it could be a light mid-afternoon meal with tea, cakes etc; it could be an early-evening meal with cooked food, which is followed by the late-evening "supper".
Yeah, for me, 'tea' is the main evening meal and/or the early evening meal, and not really distinguishing between the two. Supper is always the (optional) late-evening meal. Although I guess I don't really use it that way any more since I generally only have one evening meal these days, and it's late, and because my wife is not a native English (or Scottish English) speaker, that's 'dinner'.
You no longer identify as a hobbit.
To be honest, I'm a bit tall and don't have the feet for it.
Although, temperamentally, I'm down for sitting about in a nice cosy hole, smoking weed and drinking beer.
On the OP, so much for the magic of the market - apparently in the US it's a startling innovative novelty to plant crop rows in shapes that reduce combine turn time.
You don't need to harvest wheat by driving along the rows. You can plant it in lots of parallel rows and then harvest in a spiral.
65.last, *two* language tests; cows can be male?
80: well, what singular word would you use for a bovine of unspecified sex? "Gattle" is the plural, sure.
As in "what is that animal standing in the field way over there?" "It's a head".
I don't think so.
A pressing problem! It seems the closest is "beast" (1.1).
84: It's behind.
84: It's not way over there, it's very small.
It seems the closest is "beast" (1.1).
Ooooohhhhhh.
God god, how long until the Americans wake up?
I think you'd enjoy the Biskind, btw. The prehistory of the comic book wasteland in which Hollywood dwells. (Among other things.)
Labour Day, innit. They're all busy.
Each one is us having a baby. And we do it today instead of May 1st, because if we did it on May 1st, that would be full naked space communism.
full naked space communism
As as opposed to the procedural liberalism of enlightened topless Europe.
Organic food mostly tastes like regular food with not much noticeable improvement, but organic Swedish Fish are like a whole different, better candy.
95: Does organic Swedish Fish contain actual fish?