I would literally be unstoppable if I didn’t have that persistent pit in my stomach that everyone in a room is just a little bit annoyed by my presence
I do appreciate the culture of Tumblr as a historian because on Twitter I would be expected to talk straight academia, on Instagram I would be expected to post perfectly staged photos of my reenactment costumes, on TikTok I would be expected to make videos propagating badly revised history, but here I can just whip open my laptop and tell the world that I think Thomas Jefferson was a little bitch with no context whatsoever
Yeah, sure but then we’ll ask you to expound further!
I mean that could be anything from the slavery and rape thing to the almost causing an international incident by answering the door in his slippers thing to just…putting his bed There
If everyone receives Minimum Basic Income, what happens to all the relationships where one of the individuals no longer has to depend on the other(s) to survive?
Just let that marinate for a moment.
Not just the economic landscape but the social landscape could be transformed.
Not for nothing, but this is literally part of the entire point of Universal Basic Income.
When abused people can just literally walk away, knowing they can still have enough money to live, the world will be a lot less sheltering of abusers and that is a massive fucking benefit.
It gets better than that, if we go with my ideal UBI scenario, in which we peg UBI to “enough to live in any major metropolitan city in the country” and do NOT adjust it for cost of living.
Suddenly, the poverty and scrabbling for survival of rural areas? Gone. That UBI will go a whole long fucking way out there. Suddenly, people who had to move to the cities to get jobs that paid enough? Can afford to move back. Heck, they can afford to get decent fucking broadband out there and continue working, just, not in the city. Suddenly, people who live in rural areas but want to move to the cities with like-minded people? That’s affordable, too. Suddenly, people who want to have a bigger house, but are stuck in a tiny apartment in a city? They can afford to move out to where there are bigger houses.
Universal Basic Income would realign our whole damn society, and I think it would long-term be for the better.
[ ID: tweet by athelind: “Basic Income is not a ‘solution’ to the 'problem’ of automation. It is the FULLFILLMENT of the PROMISE of automation.” /ID ]
UBI would not only give abused people the freedom to leave bad situations and end hunger and homelessness, it would force corporations to pay reasonable wages to attract people to work crap jobs, which the corpos could then deduct from their (higher, to pay for UBI) taxes, creating a positive feedback loop that encourages better pay
many would use UBI to quit abusive jobs and find better jobs even if they pay less, because their costs of living are paid for
many would start small businesses, do crafts and handiwork, create art and media, increase their education and health (physical and mental), dive into science and research, and so forth. we’d see a boom in innovation and invention, and the world would become a better place for most folks
so, to appease conservatives: the economic argument is that the economy would grow a great deal. some tests that show it works in the real world:
the only argument against UBI comes from those who’d pay greater taxes - big corporations and the ultra-rich - but they’d do fine, because now there’d be more consumers of their products and services. and if they’re not providing anything to society that would benefit from others doing better, well, they don’t deserve to benefit from society
Hey, reminder that one of the reasons humanity has been able to flourish is because we formed societies and helped support each other. Complete independence and self reliance is a myth to try to get you to buy more things. Please reach out. Please connect yourself. There is no reason you have to do things alone.
i love working at an aquarium i just witnessed a grown man with children enter the freshwater gallery and loudly exclaim “oh shit, piranhas are REAL?!?”
the delights of working with the public continue! just heard someone announce over the radios “hey we have guest wearing an inappropriate shirt that needs to be spoken to, i last saw him in sharks & rays and the shirt says ‘do milfs not drugs’ if a supervisor could take care of that that’d be great cuz he’s not being cooperative” and then a good 5 minutes later i heard a supervisor radio for security backup
this post is back on my dash again! here’s another little addendum of highlights from last weekend’s shifts:
small child with hands and face fully pressed up against the glass in front of the indo-pacific reef tank for a solid 5 mins before turning to her mom and asking ‘are they real? are they real fish??’ and squealing with delight when informed that yes, those are real life fishies and not a video. mom told me that kiddo loves to watch videos of fish on her tablet, but is always disappointed that they’re not 'real’
guy who sauntered up to me thinking he was soooo cool and funny in front of his friends and asked how easy it’d be to 'grab a penguin and run’. got visibly disappointed + upset when i responded very matter-of-factly without hesitation and without looking away from the exhibit i was assigned to watch that 'on the off chance the penguin doesn’t peck your eyes out first, the aquarists will probably get to you before security does and they’ll probably kill you.’ he apparently thought he was going to catch me off guard and get a funny reaction out of me but didnt consider that i hear that question or some variation thereof several times a day and am very tired of it.
another guy showed up with a milf shirt. this time it said MILF: MAN I LOVE FROGS. because nobody else complained about him like the first guy and because he was, unlike the other guy, not piss drunk and didn’t cause a huge scene of knocking shit over and shouting at people who took issue with his shirt, he did not get kicked out. it’s that simple!
several people approached me very upset and very confidently told me that a fish was stuck in the rocks in the giant ocean tank and looked like it couldn’t get out. each time, i humored them and rushed over, only to see that each time the object of their concerns was our green moray, who was in fact quite comfortable in his favorite crevice and perfectly capable of moving should he so choose.
ditto of the above, but instead it’s people being dead convinced that our elderly halibut is just lying there dead in the middle of the sandy bottom exhibit. i dont exactly blame them because he is very old and has cataracts and is also a rather ugly fish, so to the unfamiliar eye he does definitely look like a rotting corpse. but that’s just how he is!
only about half the visitors who asked me about the halibut seemed to believe me when i told them that oh no, he’s not dead, we get that question a lot but he’s fine, he just rests on the bottom unless he’s being fed. i heard a lot of them loudly continue to tell other visitors that there was a dead fish in the tank as soon as i walked away. this job requires an saintly level of patience and i do not possess nearly that much so i need to pick my battles
Beavis and Butthead was blamed for a tragedy in Moraine, Ohio when five-year-old Austin Messner started a fire that burned down his family’s trailer home, killing his little sister in the process.
The local fire chief explained, “The mother says he had never played with matches or lighters prior to witnessing Beavis and Butthead and laughing about fire being fun. The mother told our investigator that Austin watched Beavis and Butthead all the time and became obsessed with playing with fire. We’re going to ask MTV to remove those segments - and if they won’t do it voluntarily, we’ll go through the powers that be and force pressure on them.”
Years later, when he was a grown man, Austin Messner said, “I literally never saw the cartoon. How could I? It was 1993, my mom was a drug addict, and we lived in a trailer park. We couldn’t afford cable! My mom called the news before the fire department.”
Remember how the world lost its fucking mind over this cartoon? Remember how they forced Mike Judge to rewrite and edit every reference to the word “fire” out of the show?
If you do, it’s time to schedule your colonoscopy. And we need to do a bone scan sooner than we think.
Wheelchair users use the word “walk” all the time when talking about how we get around! For a lot of people it feels like a natural part of speech and gets the point across fine. And I can’t believe I have to say this but it’s absolutely never ever ever an invitation to accuse (jokingly or not) someone of faking being disabled.
Context means that the following sentences all make sense about me:
I can’t walk, I can’t even weight bare.
I love going for walks!
The shops are in walking distance from my flat
I walk home from the station instead of calling a taxi!
All the wheelchair users I know will casually describe walking (or running) places in their chairs, and I’ve only met a couple of people who will regularly say “push” or “roll” or “drive” and usually only when making a point about using a chair.
And whatever you do don’t be like the smart arse station employee who “jokingly” said I must be like a TV character who famously pretends to be disabled because I said the station I was going to wasn’t far from my flat so I just walk home instead of getting a taxi.
There is a forbidden type of magic out there. It isn’t forbidden because it’s inherently evil, or forces you to lose your humanity, or requires human sacrifices - it’s just forbidden because it’s annoying as heck to fight against.
“Ma’am, I really must insist that you
pay for the room and board I’ve been giving you! It’s been a week!”
“Fine, fine,” I grumble. “I have a few options for payment: I could give you paper money, cheap gaudy jewelry, chocolate coins, spiders, some pretty seashells-”
“Spiders????” he repeats, baffled.
“Spiders it is, then,” I agree equitably, and with a wave of my hand the bed I’ve been sleeping in for the last week turns into a writhing mass of various spiders.
Worth it.
—
“Stop right there! You’re under arrest for fraud, destruction of property, and-!”
I yawn. “Didn’t
ask, don’t care.” A few gestures, and the guards’ swords are all
transmuted into spiders, and then they’re too busy to worry about little
ol’ me.
—
“You have insulted my honor and humiliated me in front of my children! I demand satisfaction! I demand a wizard’s duel!”
Shrugging, I say, “Sure, okay, whatever. Right here and now okay?”
The pompous wizard-noble blinks. “I- you don’t want to prepare? Get your wizard’s staff or anything?”
“Nah, I’m pretty good with somatic gestures.”
“Well, if you’re sure… here and now then! Have at you!” He slams his staff down on the ground dramatically, a small shockwave of fire radiating out from the impact.
So of course, I turn his staff into spiders.
“AHHHH WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK”
“So if you’re too busy screaming to cast spells, does that mean I win?”
“AUGH ONE OF THEM BIT ME”
“I’m taking that as a yes.”
—
After that, they start coming at me in waves, with cheap wands and staves and swords and bows bought in bulk, hoping to exhaust my magical reserves so they can get close enough to put a magic inhibitor on me.
They did not expect my reserves to be as vast as they were, not did they expect me to be able to transmute the inhibitors themselves into spiders.
“Didn’t you take Magic Basics in wizard college?” I yell at the panicking mages. “Inhibitors aren’t immune to magic until the moment they activate! Serious weak point in the design, tell your magitechnicians to fix that!”
—
So of course they try assassins next.
Poison fails, because I transmute any food and drink I get into spiders and then transmute them back. Pretty easy way to get rid of poison.
So then they try knives in dark alleys. The knives bruise through my full-body spider-silk outfit, but do not penetrate, and they only get one shot before they have bigger problems.
Next is killing me in my sleep. None live to report back that the human-shaped lump under the blankets is actually a mass of highly venomous spiders.
The kingdom throws everything it has at me, and I continue to walk away, heralded by the chittering of spiders and the screams of everyone else.
—
Finally, I stand before the king himself in his overly opulent throne room, and by now he is a broken shell of a man in the face of my unorthodox tactics.
Good.
“What do you want?” he practically sobs. “You’ve singlehandedly redirected the entire crown’s budget for the next three years into replacing every weapon you’ve turned into spiders. Much more and we’ll be invaded by our neighbors! We wouldn’t be able to resist being annexed! So what can I give you to make you stop doing this?!”
I pause and pretend to consider, tapping a finger against my chin thoughtfully. “You know, you sent my brother off to war a few years back. That conflict with the Yughs up north, I believe. He didn’t want to go, so your guards forced him at spearpoint. I haven’t seen him since.”
He seizes on that, as I expected. “Yes, yes, I’ll have him returned right away! Tell me his name and I’ll honorably release him from duty and have him escorted safely home!”
“Oh?” I raise one sardonic eyebrow. “Are you able to bring back the dead now, oh wise and glorious king?”
He pales, and it’s the most satisfying thing I’ve seen in years.
“You have nothing I want,” I growl, letting the anger slip through for the first time in years. “You cannot bring him back, you cannot make up for my loss with all the riches in your kingdom. The only thing I want is to take everything from you, the way you did to me. Your kingdom will bleed out of resources, one of the neighboring countries you’ve been trying to conquer for decades now will take advantage and annex this place, and you will either be executed or forced to work for a living for the first time in your life.”
I glare at him, and he refuses to meet my eyes. “You will lose everything you ever cared about in your life. One spider at a time.”
I transmute his throne and crown into spiders (non-deadly; he doesn’t get to escape my wrath that easily), then turn and walk away, ignoring his screams and sobs.
—
And that’s why, when the Yughs finally annexed the kingdom I grew up in, they preemptively made Transarachnomancy a forbidden magical art. Not sure how they intend to enforce that, mind, but I’m not looking to challenge that. I’ve gotten what I wanted; if some other aspiring mage wants to try and follow in my footsteps, that’s not my problem.
Besides, in terms of magical skill, I’ve always been an outlier anyway. Most mages would be lucky to turn just one knife into a spider at a time; I can turn ten thousand with a few gestures. I doubt anyone will outdo my legacy.
But hey, if you want to try and surpass Georgia of the Spiders? Feel free. I’ll welcome the competition.
as a huge lover of birds, 90% of the concern against wind turbines being used for energy is literally just pro fossil fuel propaganda. birds ARE at a risk however there is a lot of strategies even as simple as painting one of the blades that reduces a lot of accidental deaths. additionally renewable energy sources will do more in favor of the environment that would positively impact birds (and all of us). one study found over one million bird deaths from wind turbines. while that is a shockingly high number and we should work to drastically shrink it, at least 1.3 billion birds die to outdoor cats on a yearly basis. it was never about caring about birds
there was a study done in 2015 that shows an even greater possible yearly divide than the 2012 one
This is why we need to keep cats indoors and switch to linux.
Friendly reminder that the “personal carbon footprint” was invented by oil companies to shift the blame of climate change to you, an average citizen, and away from the ones actually responsible. Remember that the ocean was literally on fire.
Should go without saying but never date a cop and christ never marry one. Rule of thumb if he’s legally untouchable he’s ethically unfuckable. You don’t like that cop, you like buff men in tight clothing. I can show you more of those, better ones. Take my hand.
burned honey knows what’s up
I did not know this about firemen
with the firemen theyre def cheating with each other right… like what u wanna be a fireman for so u can slide down a pole with other men
I had never heard the whole thing about firemen being cheaters. It didn’t quite make sense as a concept though, so I went digging.
What I found is that the “firemen cheat” thing is… not correct. Well, no more correct than it is to say “everyone cheats.” As far as I have been able to find with actual numbers, the cheat rate for firemen holds consistent with the national (USA) average: about 30% (this statistic includes non-sexual-intercourse examples of cheating, such as messaging, sexting, dating, etc).
That said, I have been unable to find any data that suggests the cheat rate of firefighters is any different than the national average of 30%
So what’s the deal, then? Why is there this widespread urban legend that firefighters are dirty rotten heartbreakers, even though the data isn’t there to support it?
Part of the reason seems to be confirmation bias. Because the stereotype exists, whenever it happens everyone points to it as proof that the stereotype must be true. It also gets spread around in media as a common trope, further cementing it in our collective unconscious.
It might also be that while their rate of cheating is not unusual, their rate of discovery is. Please note that this one is speculation, and I haven’t found any numbers to back it up. But consider the lifestyle of firefighters for a moment: lots of sitting around and waiting. People tend to not like silence, and so they talk. And when they run out of things to talk about, they talk about things they normally wouldn’t. Boredom does things to a person’s self control.
The comradery of firefighters is a pretty common trope as well, and people tend to share secrets with those they are close to. In your average office job, folks aren’t (usually) going to go about bragging about their sexual conquests. But in an environment where a cheater thinks everyone is on their side, where the emotional connections run deep, and where there’s a common stereotype hanging around that will lead them to think all their firefighter buddies are cheaters like them and so won’t judge them? Seems like a recipe for a self-fulfilling prophecy, to me.
Wow I love this very detailed critical response. Misinformation corrected! Do you think that the firefighters are also sucking and fucking each other as well
when I was briefly an EMT the guys at the station said EMS stood for extra marital sex bc all the EMTs were fucking each other in the station bedrooms
I wish this feeling upon everyone who wants to wear a dress, its really the best
this makes me so happy as a fat hairy guy who likes skirts and dresses i never get to see guys like me in dresses it’s always skinny twinks this makes me so happy 🥺🥺
I have to laugh at the folks in the notes claiming this is fake because “no 2-yr old is that advanced”. My guys, I work at a daycare almost exclusively with 2-3 year olds and let me tell you some of the wild shit I heard this last week alone,
“Uhhh, i ASSUME we’re going to the playground soon??” -2.5 year old girl
“[3 year old boy] pushed me because he doesn’t have a manners.” -2 yr old girl
“Did you spill your water?” “No no no no it’s not a concern” -2 yr old boy (while running away, dripping wet)
The two year-old is now a solid two and a half. Just now, he was sitting on the couch playing with his pretend flip phone and he frowned and said “for gods sake. My battery is empty.”
The other day at breakfast I asked him if he was going to eat any more of his oatmeal and he said “no, I think I’m just gonna move on with my life.”
If you don’t have a lot of interactions with young children:
Kids are smarter than you think
Six months makes a really big difference when that is 1/5 of the total time you’ve been alive
All this, and also, they can tell you lots about their favorite things. My 2 year old nephew can tell you all about Star Wars (the 8 movies he’s seen at least) and loves going out of his way to bring up how Anakin was good and bad and good again when he died. Trust me, little kids learn and mimic and reenact all the things they get attached to. Also, he named his first fish Jengo Fett, and all following fish Boba Fett, so juries still out on how much he understands clones.
Kids pick up the language that’s used around and to them. Mannerisms too. They are tiny, efficient mimics and it will come out at the WEIRDEST times. Young kids will ABSOLUTELY say all the stuff listed here.
My cousin was somewhere between two and three, and I’d just arrived at her house, and she’s animatedly telling me a story of some kind, and I listen as I make my way through the house, get to the couch, and kick my shoes off. She stops dead in the middle of her sentence, puts her hands on her hips, levels me with a glare the likes of which I haven’t seen since, and goes, “WHAT are they doing there? Do you think the box at the front door is for DECORATION?”
Her mum, standing in the kitchen and watching all this, was GOBSMACKED. Apparently she said that exact phrase more often than she realised, and her kid had picked it up verbatim and started using it on unsuspecting guests (me).
(I got up and put my shoes in the box at the front door immediately)
My family’s lore includes the time my mother offhandedly said to Cousin’s son–who was maybe five–that Cousin’s wife certainly did have strong opinions about some minor thing, and the kid let out a sigh and said, in the driest and flattest and most world-weary tone you’ve ever heard, “Tell me about it.”
once i was helping with a class of 3 year olds and during drawing time one girl asked for a lion, specifically a lioness. i drew it and she just looked in silence so thinking she wanted a more liony lion i was like “do you want me to draw a boy lion next?” and she gives me this 🤨ass affronted look and says “umm she doesn’t NEED a man.”
Kids will do three things reliably:
Repeat what they’ve heard, incorrectly and/or in the wrong context, to comic effect
Repeat what they’ve heard in exactly the correct context, which is somehow even funnier
Casually knock you on your ass with some offhand, but utterly profound, original statement
