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lickypickystickyfree:

Glamour chicken by Clay Walker

At The Middlesex Jail, Simple Gestures Help Keep The Peace  →

It’s an old story that the state’s jails are jammed to the point of bursting, and that many of them are falling apart. Tension and trouble often follow overcrowding — that’s well reported, too. But how jailers and corrections officers treat and manage inmates can make a surprising difference. Simple gestures can have surprisingly positive consequences.

 

First there’s the human heat, as Superintendent Scott Brazis explained. “The place was built for 160,” Brazis said. “We have a court order of 200, and as I said, today we’re at 375. As of last Monday we were at 411.” In a building considered beyond repair the elevators often don’t work and the electrical and plumbing systems are bad.

But here’s the worst of it: “There is no air conditioning from the 17th floor going the way up and you will notice that as we start to walk through the facility,” Brazis said.

In the short run, the superintendent has come up with a way to manage the seemingly unmanageable — it’s the gesture of Popsicles. Yes, Popsicles.“I’m worried that people are going to think I’m either naive or being ridiculous, talking about the importance of Popsicles,” I told Brazis.“Well, people think that I was an ultimate liberal,” Brazis said, “but we came up with this idea a number of years ago. We had a staff meeting and it was unbearably hot up here, and besides fans we were thinking, ‘What could we ever do to make sure that the population know that we know how hot it was up there? And what could help?’

“These Popsicles are three cents a piece. We hand them out after lunch and after dinner, and on the really hot days — a couple weeks ago when temperatures got to be 100 — we handed them out again at night at 10 p.m.”

(Source: abbyjean)

backeis:

(Taken with picplz.)

LSAT to Nursing Moms: Need Time to Pump? Tough Titties! →

This summer, our sister organization,MomsRising, contacted us about one of their members, Ashley (she prefers that we use only her first name), a new mom who was planning to take the LSAT in October. Ashley had asked for additional break time so that she could pump breast milk for her 5 month old son during the test. (It typically takes half an hour to pump, but the LSAT only has one 15 minute break during the test). Her request was denied — when she initially called to request this accommodation, she was told she would either have to take the test under standard procedure, wean her baby in time for the October 1 test date, or opt to take the test at a later time when she was no longer breastfeeding. Seriously.

When we looked into her case, we learned that LSAC has a blanket policy of refusing such requests from women who are breastfeeding, because they are not considered “disabled.” This puts breastfeeding women at a significant disadvantage. Babies typically eat every two to three hours; if moms are away from their babies and aren’t able to empty their breasts on the same schedule, it causes pain, possible infection, and reduction in milk supply. Without sufficient time to pump, Ashley, and other moms in her position, will become increasingly uncomfortable as the test progresses—a serious distraction that could lead to a lower score, not to mention the health risks.

Because the LSAT is one of the gateways to law school admission — it is universally used by U.S. law schools as a primary admissions criterion — this policy creates a barrier to women’s entry into the entire legal profession. And law is not the only profession with this problem in its testing system. A few years ago, a woman in Massachusetts had to get a court order so that she could pump during the Medical Licensing Examination.

(Source: abbyjean)

Because the extra weight put so much strain on the train body (which was never designed to handle suchloads) trainsets suffered excessive wheel wear, cracks in the yaw damper and brake rotors, and other problems which can probably never be completely fixed. Whereas the original contract called for trains to run 400,000 miles between equipment failures, the Acela can barely manage 20,000 miles.

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How the FRA is Regulating Passenger Rail Out of Existence

I lived in NYC and traveled to Boston a lot when they were building the Acela, I remember being so excited for a high-speed train like the ones I had ridden in Europe for that route.

When the Acela actually launched it was slow and broke down a lot.  I always thought that it was Amtrak that just messed it up, interesting to see that it was actually some obscure bullshit goverment agency.

You can’t compete against the world with your hands tied behind your back.

(via siminoff)