Daily OpusEverything I write is freely rebloggable. Just keep the source and tell people about my books :D [Until I decide otherwise, my pronouns are Ze/Hir/Hirself. As in "Ze went to the shops to get hir medication hirself". Thank you for the respect.]
as of 22nd April 2021 we have about 16.3M new cases and a death toll of 187K . Only about 1.4% of the population has been fully vaccinated yet.
on top of that, we’ve been facing a major shortage in oxygen supply (to the point where the govt has decided to airlift oxygen from other nations), a shortage in hospital beds and services. The numbers keep rising and with the spread of the new strain, the scenario has transformed into something deadlier than ever.
our infrastructures are falling apart and we need all the help possible at this very moment so the nation can be atleast saved when there’s still a chance. I’ve already lost two of my friends, a teacher and family to the second wave and I can only imagine how much worse it can get. so i would like to take this opportunity to link in some donation posts below–
This is such an important and genuinely terrifying post. I could completely go off on the rise of anti-science, but for now I’ll just add: it isn’t just boomers that get deceived. This is a warning to all of us.
Pay ATTENTION to what you are being told. If you think you cannot be deceived, you leave yourself open to deception. Question, doubt, research research research. Learn about your personal biases, dig up any subconscious cognitive dissonance. Keep an eye on your mind.
It needs to be stressed that biases, not a lack of intelligence, is very much the issue here. Being aware of the need to fact check yourself is key: Intelligence won’t protect you from bad or unhealthy mental states, or keep you safe from cults of any sort. Intelligence will just make it easier for you to rationalize and attempt to justify the malformed tools you’ve taken/been given to yourself and others. You need to be wise enough to challenge yourself.
The family went to court just as the parent said they would. Recordings of the cruel abuse the students, and instructors, of the Alliance - run school were shown as evidence. And now these people were forced to see, and hear, everything they did to her and face their crimes. Of how Barbara would stop, turn away to hide her tears, something the cameras saw, though everyone else ignored. It wasn’t just the parents who intended to teach the instructors, the students, and their parents a lesson for such unkindness, the courts themselves intended to burn this into a memory so that students in other alliance schools, ones going through the same brutality that this young girl had endured, would finally have hope. And it would set a legal precedent known as the “Barbara Incident”. – Fighting Fit
The court watched a vibrant little girl turn to stone, pebble by pebble. A stream of daily check-in facial scans. The first day of open-faced optimism slowly morphing into a Human being barely hanging on by a thread. And then… that thread snapped, and so did young Barbera.
The evidence was plentiful. A cultural and sociology professor explaining that Humans were social animals and having a group of friends was essential to their mental health and well-being. Seemingly endless footage of Barbera trying to befriend her schoolmates and being shunned. Even more endless footage of Barbera being alone; in the playground, during group projects, at in-school social events. Hours’ worth of Barbera finding corners to hide and cry in.
“The Humans have a form of torture in which the penitent is immobilised and forced to endure regular or irregular drops of water landing on their face. One drop of water does no harm, we know this,” said the Menanis family lawyer. “It doesn’t hurt. It’s harmless. But drop after drop, incessantly, unavoidably hitting you?” Here, the lawyer held up a hag stone. It was granite, but drops of water had worn a hole straight through it. “It can wear at even the strongest.”
tumblr’s algorithm only cares about posts that are reblogged, it doesn’t count likes. posts don’t get promoted or circulated when they only have likes (the way instagram functions), only reblogs matter for increasing reach on tumblr as a platform.
support content creators.
like y'all are fuckin killing tumblr (& content creation) but okay
you think that’s not a lot of notes? that’s cute.
but yeah, tumblr’s system definitely doesn’t advantage non-popular artists, but there’s a big problem from within the community too. i have over 400 followers and i consider myself lucky when more than 2 people reblog my art, so imagine how much worse it is for people with even less followers.
reblog content creators, guys. liking posts doesn’t do anything.
THIS!
Reblog art and writing.
Seriously if you like something, SPREAD IT!
Sorry to break it to you but they’re all right. Tumblr isn’t Instagram. Likes don’t get us anywhere. Everybody’s “drop a heart and keep scrolling” mentality has murdered all of my original content sideblogs. Each and every one of them.
This is an update to climate science that many researchers would describe as a “game changer”, but it doesn’t seem to have fully entered the mainstream discussion around climate change.
While evidence from climate models used to indicate that a large amount of warming would be “locked in” even after we stopped emitting CO2, more accurate and updated models now strongly suggest that warming will level off much faster than expected once we reach net zero CO2 emissions.
“It is our best understanding that, if we bring down CO2 to net zero,
the warming will level off. The climate will stabilize within a decade
or two. There will be very little to no additional warming.
Our best estimate is zero.”
This is, of course, extremely hopeful news because it means that reaching net zero emissions would be a massive, massive step in stabilizing the climate and halting climate change, potentially without additional warming locked in after the fact.
in retrospect, video rental stores *would* probably still exist today in some capacity had it not been for blockbuster. the nostalgia for the blockbuster browsing experience undermines the reality of how aggressively the chain snuffed out smaller video rental stores and would eventually become notorious for its abusive late fee collection policy once there were no significant competitors standing. the rise of streaming is often attributed to blockbusters demise, but what’s not often recognized is how netflix’ earliest (and most successful) marketing tactics were in fact advertising the absence of the aforementioned terrible late fees as opposed to the convenience of not having to go to the store. I was actually surprised to find out how much of blockbuster’s demise can be attributed to spiraling out of control as it attempted to manage viacom’s ever increasing debts than to the fact that people just naturally gravitated towards streaming (which is not to say that it wouldn’t have happened eventually, but).
see also: borders / barnes & noble with bookstores. amazon’s original pitch was probably more “look how convenient!” than it was “look, you can avoid the awful sterility of the inside of a barnes & noble!” but it’s interesting that with its aggressive tracking and tailoring of recommendations amazon is having machines do (in an impersonal and invasive way) what the staff at a local, non-chain bookstore would do, which is match their selection to your preferences
Barnes & nobles and Borders raced against each other, across the country, to oversaturate the bookstore market. This isn’t paranoia or conspiracy — it’s the same fucking model Starbucks used. Oh, your community supports three bookstores? We’re going to open five, until the little indies go under. Then we’ll close four of our own (sorry not sorry staff, enjoy competing with each other for a handful of positions!) and now you have no other choice. Movie rental chains did the same thing.
And then all these huge chain retailers have the fucking gall to weep and whine as amazon proceeds to wipe them out, and now I live in a small city where you just… can’t get stuff. If you don’t want to use amazon, if you don’t have a car to drive out to the big box on the highway, you literally can’t buy a pair of socks or an ice pack. No more pharmacies, no more bookstores, no more video or music stores… if this was plants and not retailers you’d call it monoculture, and you’d raise an alarm about how prone to catastrophic collapse monocultures are.
No one epitomizes the hollowness of the pose of the “hard-nosed businessman” than Scott Walker, the union-busting thug who, as governor of Wisconsin, signed up to give away $3b to the Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn, who promised a massive new factory.
This was an obviously bad deal right from the start. For literally decades, Foxconn had been tricking rubes like Walker into handing over vast public subsidies for electronics plants that were then drastically scaled down, or canceled altogether.
But Walker - presently joined by Trump - didn’t care. All he cared about was being able to maintain the pretence that “business-friendly” policies (smashing unions, eliminating worker protections) would attract “investment” that would make everyone better off.
The public subsidy promised to Foxconn kept on growing, rising to nearly $5b, even as Foxconn reneged on its promises, eventually refusing to say what kind of factory - if any - it would build.
Foxconn kept up the pretense of activity, though. At one point, it used all that public subsidy money to buy up or rent out a bunch of Wisconsin’s nicest urban buildings and announced that they would be “innovation centers,” which sat, empty.
Periodically, the company would announce that these innovation centers were now thriving, filled with Wisconsin startups that would plug into the Foxconn commercial/manufacturing ecosystem, but…they were still empty.
All of this commercial theater kept the deal alive, kept the subsidy money flowing, and served as a convincer as Foxconn sought out other suckers who’d hand it more public subsidy on the promise of a plant in their out-of-the-way town.
This is the *real* “art of the deal.” Foxconn let Trump and Walker run around, claiming to have brought manufacturing back to America, even as it floated trial balloons like, “What if we scrap the factory and instead export Wisconsin dairy to China?”
Walker eventually lost his job to Tony Evers, who commissioned an independent investigation to see what parts of the massive Foxconn deal could possibly be salvaged. The auditors’ conclusion was what *none of it* was viable. None of it.
But all this came years after Walker’s administration and Racine County had seized family homes near the Foxconn site to make way for a road-widening project to help the trucks that would never come reach the factory that would never be built.
People lost the homes they’d lived in for generations, all for unconvincing political theater that allowed Walker and Trump to do a little boasting and empty the public coffers into the accounts of a global tech giant best known for driving its factory workers to suicide.
Four years later, the con appears to be winding down. Foxconn has officially admitted that rather than investing $10b, it will invest $1b and instead of creating 13,000 jobs, it will create 1,454.
As David Dayen writes for The American Prospect, it’s a prelude to killing the deal altogether. Foxconn isn’t even sure what this imaginary factory will build. Maybe parts for network switches? Maybe electric cars? (My money is on dairy farms!)
Gov Evers has whittled Foxconn’s promised subsidy down to $80m, which Foxconn will have to return if it doesn’t deliver (Trump, take note: that’s how you do a deal).
But Evers couldn’t save the state from all of Walker and Trump’s foolishness. They’ve already blown $200m on “sales and use tax exemptions, state road improvements, and grants to local governments for workforce training.”
Far worse off is the village of Mt Pleasant and the County of Racine, who’ve blown $1b on the nonexistent factory, including $160m to seize and destroy their residents’ family homes, and $117m to run power to the empty site where no factory will be built.
The State of Wisconsin is supposed to pay the county and town 40% of that expenditure; writing in Good Jobs First, Greg LeRoy argues that the state should cover 100% of those payouts and then recoup it from Foxconn.
As Dayen says: “Rather than offering bribes to corporate giants, they’d be much better off improving their education, health care, and transportation systems, making them more attractive to businesses. That would have the dual benefit of making their cities and states nicer to live in. Wouldn’t that be a concept.”
