Today he reached a personal goal - https://pthorpe92.github.io/humor/How-to-get-on-hackernews-f...
How I got here
151–160 of 373 posts
Re: How I got here
#152> Who else has an opportunity to spend 12+ hours a day learning something for years? With no other obligations or responsibilities? Totally tangential, but this prison article reminded me of a short story by Cory Doctorow about a monastery for programmers. I imagined living in a room about the size of my home office, a bed, a desk, a decent MacBook Pro and a high-speed connection and just hanging out on the Internet…
I managed to read over 800 books when I was locked up. Every famous book by every famous author. I read it.
Nice! Which ones stuck with you the most?
Re: How I got here
#153> Who else has an opportunity to spend 12+ hours a day learning something for years? With no other obligations or responsibilities? Totally tangential, but this prison article reminded me of a short story by Cory Doctorow about a monastery for programmers. I imagined living in a room about the size of my home office, a bed, a desk, a decent MacBook Pro and a high-speed connection and just hanging out on the Internet…
link to the Cory Doctorow story, "The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away", for anyone else who's interested: https://www.tor.com/2008/08/06/weak-and-strange/
I also highly recommend _Anathem_, by Neal Stephenson if the STEM monastery theme is interesting to you.
Re: How I got here
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok. If there are thousands, can you give three examples of companies that are designed to profit off of incarcerated individuals rather than rehabilitate them?
I'm not defending this. It's not an argument, it's a fact. If you're not afraid of the idea, look it up. Part of the problem here is never bucking back against what we've been taught and doing our own exploration.
I'm asking for facts. Surely if there are thousands of examples, three exploitative companies shouldn’t be too difficult to find.
Re: How I got here
#155The apparent lack of opportunities for anyone is easy to solve with Dorm Room Welfare: Open free dorms next to the campuses of community colleges. Anyone who is physically able to live on their own, but who can not afford to live on their own can move in and live there as long as they are working towards being economically self sufficient. Working towards being economically self sufficient can mean passing academic c…
This sounds like the deal I have had with my (young-adult) kids (who live at home).
Re: How I got here
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I managed to read over 800 books when I was locked up. Every famous book by every famous author. I read it.
Can you suggest one or two recommendations? Maybe one that surprised you and one that lived up to the hype?
Ha! My favourites that I remember are The Martian, 3-Body Problem, Wild, 1Q84. I wish I could remember them all. I wrote down the names of all 800 as I was reading them but the documents all went up in a building fire last year.
Re: How I got here
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I managed to read over 800 books when I was locked up. Every famous book by every famous author. I read it.
Nice! Which ones stuck with you the most?
Ha! My favourites that I remember are The Martian, 3-Body Problem, Wild, 1Q84. I wish I could remember them all. I wrote down the names of all 800 as I was reading them but the documents all went up in a building fire last year.
Re: How I got here
#158Awesome and amazing.
Re: How I got here
#159>> the success of the Maine model of corrections should highlight the absolutely embarrassing lack of opportunities in the rest of the system Very well said. And I am glad we have a model now, if one was ever needed. I hope other prison systems take note.
Seems like a good idea, but from the article it sounds like a lot of the difference between Maine and his earlier prisons was the culture that existed amongst the prisoners themselves. Obviously prison officials can try to influence this (indeed, it sounds like the authors transfer to Maine was an attempt to do that), but it seems like the kind of thing that's hard to do with just, like, correspondence college degree programs and the like.
Re: How I got here
#160What blew my mind is that ~667/100000 or ~.67% of Americans are incarcerated according to the numbers in this post and the population according to the German Wiki page for the US. Wikipedia says it's .531% on the English language website, .629% on the German site. (Don't know which year for either or if juvenile detention is counted on German site.) That is A LOT! A LOT!
It's largely a function of the much higher rate of violent crime in the United States