Time for tea on the porch, learning about Australia and a new park initiative that you can have a vote on

Posted By: David Fortier July 9, 2023

By David Fortier

Come Sunday morning, the couple from Australia, youngest son and partner Allison, will have been here for a week. Every morning that they have been here they have joined us on the porch for tea at 7:30 a.m. When I say been here, I mean when they haven’t been visiting family and friends. For instance, three days ago they were visiting Allison’s family, so Mary and I were on the porch ourselves. 

It’s a wonderful way to start any day, and especially fun to hear how things are different in another country. For instance, workers get a living wage, minimums are in the $25-$35 hourly range, and if a person works beyond their regular work hours or weekends, a surcharge is charged and added to their regular wages. Health care is covered.  

And of course Australians get five weeks for vacation, and no one is expected not to take their time. In other words, no one day here or there—it is a vacation, meaning a month away. Something to think about. 

And while the company where Allison works has its roots in the states, it is an international company that is experimenting with a four-day work week. It’s more than an interesting prospect. Workers have the ability to choose how to break up their weeks—take a Friday or break things up with a Wednesday, it’s up to the person.  

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Around town, the Bristol Parks Recreation Youth and Community services has opened its online portal for people to vote on two designs being proposed for the new children’s playground at Seymour Park off Riley Road. This has become a regular, and welcomed, step for the BRRYCS as it considers improvements to Bristol’s wonderful parks. Click here and follow the tabs to vote. 

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Reading/listening–I took a deep dive this week with Lex Fridman and his #387 podcast entitled “George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, A. Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God.” Hotz is a programmer (Elon Musk turned to him recently to help re-form Twitter), hacker (a wunderkind of sorts who hacked iOS—the first to remove the SIM card from the iphone–and reverse engineered Sony PlayStation 3), and the founder of comma-ai and tiny corp (companies that are behind self-driving car tech and set their sites on deep neural learning frameworks coupled with the creation of machines that decentralize tech by providing people with machines with enormous specs, respectively). 

That is all a lot to take in. Listening to the podcast, around three hours, time stolen from each day while driving or exercising, is an otherworldly experience. Covered? A.I. girlfriends along with the existence of God. Fridman is a MIT researcher, so his podcasts do get technical—don’t plan to understand everything—but hang in there long enough and you will understand more. Among his recent interviews is one with Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.  

For the Lex Fridman interview with George Hotz, click here. 

For reading, I have to recommend another column by Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times. The column is entitled “No One Can Stop Talking About Justice John Marshall Harlan.” Bouie does something that few people manage—rather than starting with second stories, he starts with firsts. For an idea of what I mean here, try this on, by reference to a familiar scenario. It’s a basketball game, the first player takes a cheap shot at another and the second retaliates. Who does the referee call for the foul? The second player. 

In this instance, Bouie identifies Harlan as the originator of a favorite quote from a court case that is used to promote an equal playing field, a colorblind one. This time around it is used as a fulcrum for the recent affirmative action case. What Bouie does is take his readers back to the sentences that precede this quote to unveil Harlan’s deep segregationist, white supremacist grounding.  

Click here for the column. 

Enjoy?

“Come Sunday morning” is intended to be a weekly review, a recounting of the past week and an anticipation of week to come. Among its features will be reviews of old and new books, sharing of favorite podcasts, some family news, Bristol events and happenings and issues surrounding education, work and community journalism. He can be reached at dfortier@bristoledition.org. 

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