Coverture held that no female person had a legal identity. At birth, a female baby was covered by her father’s identity, and then, when she married, by her husband’s. 
…
Coverture is why women weren’t regularly allowed on juries until the 1960s, and marital rape wasn’t a crime until the 1980s. Today’s women encounter coverture during real estate transactions, as I did, in tax matters, and in a myriad of other situations around employment and housing. Encounters with coverture can be serious, but often they are just puzzling annoyances, one more hoop to jump. Still, the remnants of coverture are holding us back in unsuspected ways.

Source: Coverture: The Word You Probably Don’t Know But Should | National Women’s History Museum

What do you do when you can’t use an H-1B to hire someone here? You outsource to them there.

It’s not as efficient. But it’s certainly cheaper. Of course it means that all that money you would have been paying into the local economy, not to mention the investment in skills, now leaves the country.

On top of that, as you build teams outside of the U.S., it becomes easier and easier (and far cheaper) to outsource entire projects to them.

I really wish we hired more people locally. Especially junior resources. But companies make decisions based on cost. Getting rid of H-1Bs is just going to push the money somewhere else. And it’s not going to be hiring local.

That said, the whole “we’re a consulting company full of H-1Bs” is definitely not the right solution either. Especially since it tends to lock contractors into that company and makes it harder for them to get hired full-time, which ends up being bad for both your company, and the contractor.

Also note that tech isn’t the only industry relying on H-1Bs.

Rural Areas Brace for a Shortage of Doctors Due to Visa Policy

At the end of 2016 Wired declared it to be the year that we won the battle for encryption. Unfortunately, as we increasingly move towards an authoritarian State, it becomes obvious that was a very short-lived victory.

This quote in particular is disturbing, because it shows a complete lack of understanding of how systems are compromised.

The way into secure systems is in fact through the individuals that have access to them. It’s that less-secure, personal communication path that hackers often use to compromise systems. Never mind the callous determination that your individual privacy, security, and financial well-being is secondary to the government’s ability to eavesdrop.

In 2006 I took an arrangements class at Meadowlark Music Camp with the amazing vocalist, guitar player, harmonizer, and arranger, Cindy Kallett (http://cindykallet.com). I had an idea for a version of “House of the Rising Sun” that focused on Hurricane Katrina and the impact of destroying the coastline growth that protects us from floods and hurricanes, and I decided to use that as my class piece.

The amazing thing about an arrangements class where everyone is better than you, is that you get to say things like, “I’m looking for something for this tune that feels angry.” And then everyone goes around in a circle and tries different bits and pieces of stuff that you couldn’t do in a million years, and you get to pick and choose what you like and then put them all together into something far greater than you could do on your own. So I came out of it with awesome sad flute pieces from Anna Grosslein, and really angry fiddle from Lyle Hawthorne, and I asked both of them and my daughter if they’d perform it with me on the final performance night–and this was the result.

It starts off with my guitar playing a bit rocky–I was nervous! And I screw up the vocals more than once. But all and all, it conveyed the meaning and emotion I was looking for. And the audience kicked in at the end the way only the Meadowlark audience can do. So, ten years later, I decided it was time to put some imagery on it as well, and here’s the result.

• Kee Hinckley – guitar, vocals
• Anna Grosslein – flute
• Shireen Hinckley – fiddle, vocals
• Lyle Hawthorne – lead fiddle
• Meadowlark attendees – chorus

Many thanks to Cindy Kallet and the Arrangements class for all their assistance.

I originally shared this in 2007. Unfortunately it’s even more important than it was then.

Need I say more?

It’s no accident Andrew Jackson is Trump’s favorite president.

https://www.thenation.com/article/what-happened-to-the-steady-job/

A little sociology, psychology, and anthropology wouldn’t hurt either.

Originally shared by Esther Schindler

Why computer science students are demanding more ethics classes https://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark/why-computer-science-students-are-demanding-more-ethics-classes-1.4812742

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark/why-computer-science-students-are-demanding-more-ethics-classes-1.4812742