cos

Time to take another stab at seeing if some people will read and comment somewhere other than Facebook!

Almost a full year since the last time I posted here, but the harmfulness of Facebook's influence has been much more in the news in that year, and people are talking about it more, so maybe people are more ready to broaden their post&comment flavored social media now?

• Hire interns for the National Park.


• Fund trail repairs and facility maintenance.


• Organize cleanups and invasive species removal.


• Run activities for visitors, like guided walks.


• Fund research and conservation projects.

• The MA Senate added several important protections for immigrants to the state budget, by a large majority. We really need this now! But the House wouldn't even bring those measures to a vote, so the House version of the budget didn't have them. As chair of Ways & Means Committee, Sanchez was one of the leaders of the conference committee to work out the final budget from the House and Senate versions - and the immigrant protections weren't there. He said there was no "consensus", but we're pretty sure there was a very solid majority for these provisions in the House, just as in the Senate (if only there had been a vote, maybe we'd know!). Baker clearly didn't like it, and maybe some conservative Democrats in the House didn't either, and because of Sanchez and speaker DeLeo, they were saved from having to actually take a stand one way or the other. Baker's shiny image would've been tarnished if he vetoed the budget over his objections to protecting immigrants, but signing it might have hurt him with his base, so Baker I'm sure is happy to be able to evade that. But now we have another year without these protections.


• State law gives state employees the right to collective bargaining, but due to a technicality, public defenders aren't considered covered by that definition, even though they are paid by the state. So they can't unionize. They're severely underpaid, their case loads are too high, and there's lots of attrition. A very simply and straightforward bill to clarify that they have the same right to unionize as anyone else who works for the state, just sat in Ways & Means for the entire session. Despite a flurry of phone calls (including a few from me) in the final week, when many bills get reported out of committee, this one was stuck there and never got a vote.

• Clear separation between different entries, in the form of a wide colored divider bar across the page. On LJ that bar was also where the title of the next post would be, but I don't need that specifically; just a clear visual separation between posts.


• Userpics did not take up their own vertical space. Instead they appeared on the left sidebar, next to the post. [Edit: This is especially bad on comments; I want userpics not to take up vertical space in the comment section either.]


• I could pick a unique combination of foreground and background color for each person. The post itself didn't appear in that combo, but the post was outlined by the background color, and the post title and person's username would appear in the foreground color I chose. This let me easily "recognize" whose post I was looking at by color.