Overall I thought this book was good and covered the basics of the area.

One interesting aspect that was talked about extensively was the limited ability for a person with a felony to find work. It's fairly often that a job does a background check and disallows people who have been convicted of a felony. One point that wasn't touched on was how the gig economy was affecting this. Checking with Uber, Lyft and Postmates, it appears they have all similar rules about disallowing violent or driving crimes for a period of 7 years or permently. This allows an individual to work for them after a period of time but isn't ideal in stopping the cycle of being released and having no means to earn money. It's encourging that there are limits on the catagories of felonies that they reject you for.

One aspect that I didn't understand was how HUD used to rejects applicants based on the arrests and not convictions. They issued new guidance recently that clarifies that arrests can't be the basis of denying housing. It's also shocking that they are so strict on how the rules apply to the people living in the housing in addition to the owners. HUD is often a source of low income housing and with limited work options this seems like it could limit the number of places that someone who has been involved in the criminal systems could live. Given the trouble finding work, and the trouble finding housing, this presents a depressing picture.

One thing that I was curious about that wasn't covered in the book was how many people in the USA were consider to have a criminal record. There is a study from the University of Georgia that estimates that 19 million individuals in the United States have a felony records. There is also the FBI, which defines a criminal records as having been arrested for a felony or a misdemeanor that a state sent to the FBI. The FBI says that there are 73.5 million individuals in the United States who meet this critera. These are staggering numbers given that there are only 325 million individuals in the United States of America.

Another thing that was sort of puzzling by it's absance was the lack of discussion around prosecutuer or police immunity. I'm not sure exactly why but from my view of current police issues in the United States, this contributes a fair bit to the current situation.

Overall this book was good and serves as a good introduction to the topic material. One note, I'd be curious on someone who didn't agree with the premise before picking it up thought about the book. I do suspect that maybe this book is speaking the the choir.

I recently came across this channel and it's absolutely delighted me. Rousseau has a piano that includes built in leds and combines it with simple but effective animations to display current and upcoming notes. This is perhaps the most enjoyable watching someone on the piano has ever been for me and I quickly managed to watch almost all of their videos. I've selected two pieces below. The first is by Chopin titled Etude Op. 10 No. 4 which shows how skilled of a piano player Rousseau is. The second is by Ludovico Einaudi called Nuvole Bianche which is perhaps a bit more straight forward and simple but is mesmerizing to follow the melody.

It's absolutely amazing how a little bit of paint on a flat surface can change your persepective on what your seeing. I wish that public murals were more common in general and I'm jealous that these citizens that get to walk these artworks every day. They have some other public murals so go check those out on their website.

I love both the simplicity of these images and the way they illustrate patterns.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/70003673/GEOMETRICA

Edward Burtynsky is a talanted photograher who has amazing landscape photos that truely show a great sense of scale. Look at his gallary. One of the things that I love when looking though his work is the true sense of scale of the change that we as humans have left on this earth.