Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 742-744

Every day, millions of American workers do something dangerous to their health: they sit down.
Sitting for long periods is hard on the body. It strains the back and causes the muscles to become slack. It slows the processes that metabolize calories, increasing the risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and some cancers.
Don’t Just Sit There, Work Out at Your Desk
By ERIC V. COPAGE
New York Times
Published: December 3, 2011

Upon birth, as Mayhew described the practice in Germany at the end of the 19th century, “the wretched new-born little thing has been wound up in… ells of bandages, from the feet right, and tight, up to the neck; as if it were intended to be embalmed as a mummy.” Since these bandages were rarely changed, the infant was left in its own feces and urine, with the result, says Mayhew, that “babies are loathsome, foetid things…offensive to the last degree with their excreta [and] the heads of the poor things are never washed, and are like the rind of Stilton cheese, with dirt encrusted upon their skull.” The mothers were so frightened of their babies that they not only tied them up but often strapped them into a crib in a room with curtains drawn to keep out “lurking evils.” The results were that the infants were covered with lice and other vermin attracted to their feces, but they could not move to drive them away as infants who were not swaddled might do. The parents routinely called them “lice,” and “useless eaters” because they didn’t contribute to the family’s work until they were older, resenting their children so much that they often recalled “Rarely could we eat a piece of bread without hearing father’s comment that we did not merit it” because they did not earn their living.
The Childhood Origins of the Holocaust
Lloyd deMause

In June, President Obama announced a $500 million federal investment in manufacturing technology (including $70 million for robotics). It represents another step in developing robots that can assist with repetitious or physically stressful assembly-line tasks without posing a safety risk.
Safer robots will improve manufacturing.

Kurzweil