Welcome back to serfdom

Colorado is going to replace illegal-immigrant workers with labour that's paid even less, which is to say, prisoners paid a token wage pulled out of our world-class prison population (per capita), which is to say, indentured servants, driving what's left of the farmer-labourer class completely out of existence. I cannot overstate the depths of my disgust at this quasifascist bullshit the Democratic-led legislature of Colorado has served up.

The first reference below is to the New York Times version of the story, which I saw first, but has moved behind a firewall. The second is the Los Angeles Times version of the same story, which is at least similar, and is publicly accessible. The third is an update from April 12th. The first 60c/day - sixty cents per day, or seven and a half cents per hour - prisoner workers are expected to be on farms in May. Yes, the farmers are paying more than that - for the moment - with proceeds going to, of course, the prison system. But it's difficult to imagine how free workers - and by free workers, I mean not prisoners - will compete.

I was going to post about this a month ago but couldn't get past "This is serfdom," so I let it sit for a while to see if I could. I still can't, which, really, makes it worse, not better. This is the kind of shit that validates Marx.

I imagine the communists reading about this will be thrilled.

( Articles below )

In other news

Music 137 (introduction to singing/voice, my "other" course this quarter) is being pretty good to me. I actually sang the high B♭ today (the one that's a half step above A880), and while it was a stacatto exercise, it was singing, not screaming, which is how I've hit that note in the past. I came home and popped off the A♭ a step below it (half-step below A880) as a sustained note, albeit a bit sloppy. It looks like a big part of my problem has been tension in the tongue, rather than the usual places. Gimmie one whole step in both directions - and the ability to hit those high notes at will and not just in exercises ^_^ -and I'll have a three-octive range, to which I can only say boo-yeah. (Edit: I keep getting which A is which wrong, partly because people keep telling me different things. I mean the second A above middle C. That one.)

Now I need to stop fucking around on Livejournal and get back to prepping for Monday's first zoology midterm. So far, this class is a big pile of facts to memorise, covered with a huge topping of abstract noun labels, which is a big fuck you with a HA HA tapdance on my memory issues. Except for yesterday, I've been studying for this test since last Sunday with about the same amount per day that I'd normally spend the couple of days before. (I did study yesterday, just not as much as I should've.) Hopefully I'll do better on the midterm than I did on the lab quiz, which I am confused by and will have to ask about, as the answer set returned when I actually took online gave me full credit, which is why I didn't take the opportunity I had to take it up to two more times, with only the last one counting. But now the grading system tells me I only seem to have gotten 4/6 possible points. These online lab quizzes don't count for much, but they're not valueless, and I don't need to be losing points for no good reason.

Anyway. Right. Study.

(ETA: HTML wants Unicode numbered characters in decimal?! What the hell?)