Monday Cup Of Links #57 - Hybrid work, Moa-sic Park, the Kamloops Mass Graves
There had better be consequences reparations for sending several generations of Indigenous Americans to residential schools.
Happy Monday!
Today’s missive is a little late in coming. Back when weekends were still weekends, I could spend Sunday mornings lazily writing this post, reading and rereading all the awesome links I’d saved over the week. Now, life is just an endless cycle between baby, work, and bed.
I’ve been meditating more on the thought of having to do something “forever”, and how that thinking seems to lead to the worst decisions. I’d never quit my job to pursue my dreams because I can’t imagine not having money coming in “forever”. And simultaneously, I’d never switch to a more demanding job that pays more, because I can’t imagine doing a more demanding job “forever”. People tell me to “not spoil the baby by rocking her to sleep each time” because “then you’ll have to be rocking her to sleep ‘forever’”. You won’t start mealprep this week because you can’t imagine doing this every week “forever”, so what’s the point. We won’t take help from others often because “they are not going to be around for us ‘forever’”.
Watching a baby change nearly every week or two really puts this “forever” in perspective. Sure, things don’t change that dramatically all the time, but they do change, and you’re rarely doing the same thing for more than a little.
Maybe it won’t be so stressful choosing a major in college if we told ourselves we only needed to work in that domain for ten years, and then we’ll switch to something else. Maybe doing the long commute along with writing after work would have been much simpler if I’d known I would only have to do that for three years.
I guess what I learn from this is to put an end date on things. Decisions become so much easier even with an arbitrary end date.
Onto our links!
Now that workplaces have started opening up again, the future looks like Hybrid Work, and it’s complicated. Satya Nadella put out this post about what Microsoft has learned about remote work and what it’s trying to do as people try navigating a hybrid work model.
The Upland Moa was a goofy flightless bird that went extinct in New Zealand at about the 15th century or so. Thirty years ago, they found a moa claw with flesh, skin and feathers still attached and so well-preserved it appeared to have died only recently. But it turned out, that claw was a perfectly preserved specimen of a moa that had died 3300 years ago!!!!!!
Lots of moa remains have been discovered subsequently. And now the interesting thing is that makes it a ripe candidate to bring back, Jurassic Park style. There’s plenty of DNA samples, and it can possibly be incubated from a chicken egg. I can’t wait for them to actually do it!In very disturbing news, they found the remains of more than 200 children at an “Indigenous school” in Canada. These schools were built to “civilize” the Indigenous children in Canada, from the 19th century on. The last of them closed only in 1997, so their horror is well within living memory. To them, lives of indigenous children were cheap and disposable in the face of their “civilizing” mission.
What has been striking me while reading about how these schools perpetrated genocide on the native population is how close their methods are to schools in India. If you’re Indian and reading this, let’s see how many of these you experienced:Weren’t allowed to speak in Indian languages and were forced to speak in English.
Weren’t allowed to wear your cultural markers, like flowers in your hair, or henna on your hands or bindis or tilaks.
Were forced to cut your hair short if you were male, though culturally men in your community sported long hair.
Were taught that your traditions are “backward” and “unscientific”.
Your history is taught in a way that you find it traumatic and a source of mighty shame.
My school did all of this! Now mind you, I’m not equating my schooling to what millions of children over the centuries experienced in North America, where they were “disciplined” in a way that didn’t care if they lived or died.
But it’s hard not to see that what people attempting explicit cultural genocide did, which is suspiciously similar to what we were told was “discipline”. We were supposed to speak only English because otherwise “we wouldn’t learn it”. We weren’t allowed cultural markers because “it will sow seeds of difference between students”. Short hair was mandatory for boys because it somehow made them “disciplined”.
The tragic thing is my school wasn’t even a missionary-run religious school. It was run by well-meaning people in our neighborhood doing their best. For a long time the missionary-run schools were the paragon of high standards because “their alumni are so successful”. Well, not anymore, because all the anglo-Indians with any means went away to Australia and the UK at the first opportunity, and now their alumni are just middling.
It’s insidious how this all operated. It’s somewhat withering away as different educational models become a thing, but undoing the brainwashing is a giant challenge.