astridhobbit

[astridhobbit]

I'm seeing a lot about "no-buy years" and the planned Feb 28 "economic blackout" and I just... have some thoughts.

All of this is great. Definitely do it. Definitely commit, as much as you can, to taking back the only power recognized by capitalism. That is, the dollars the you generate and the attention they demand.

AND

Remember that the Alabama bus boycotts lasted MORE THAN A YEAR. Remember that the French labor unions have to go on strike for WEEKS to see results. Remember that targeted boycotts are much more about making companies loose face rather than dollars, and that making noise (ie. generating media coverage) matters a great deal.

Put your usual purchases in your amazon/target cart,

abandon it,

cancel your prime membership,

then go find local stores to make your purchases at.

AND COMMIT TO MAKING THIS CHANGE PERMANENT.

This isn't about "Amazon needs to do better and then we'll give them back their money", this is about taking away Amazon's power INDEFINITELY.

Join Buy-Nothing groups and share your own resources.

Consider different solutions to problems you'd usually solve by purchasing things. (My most recent personal example is that I really needed an over-sink drying rack to keep my kid's dishes clean, but I didn't want to buy one - so I rigged something up with twine, a piece of a broken shoe rack, and some push pins).

Look to the people that capitalism has historically marginalized and harmed the most. My father-in-law (from a dirt poor Appalachian family) has a garage full of what I thought was "junk" but that man has never had to go BUY a tool, he's always got something somewhere that will do the job. Is it hording if his neighbors and family can always rely on him to let them borrow a claw hammer?

Utilize anti-cap resources - libraries, makers-spaces, repair cafes, parks.

Stop participating (as much as you can) in the economy that harms you.

Find ways to spend as LITTLE AS POSSIBLE, for AS LONG AS POSSIBLE.*

We aren't going to fix these companies, they are PART OF THE BROKEN SYSTEM.

*This doesn't apply to small businesses. Vet those people, then make sure you keep what power dollars you have circulating locally.

[astridhobbit]

i personally did not go to mine as a protest because they wouldn't allow students to bring dates of the same gender (my prom was in 2013 and in florida so).

[astridhobbit]

happy three years since the day wyatt came back just before expansion

[astridhobbit]

Mini Cross Stitched Magic the Gathering Card

[astridhobbit]

Plot armor but it’s Bruce Wayne’s wealth.

Bruce is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce does not want to be one of the richest men in world.

He starts by implementing high starting salaries and full health care coverages for all levels at Wayne Enterprises. This in vastly improves retention and worker productivity, and WE profits soar. He increases PTO, grants generous parental and family leave, funds diversity initiatives, boosts salaries again. WE is ranked “#1 worker-friendly corporation”, and productively and profits soar again.

Ok, so clearly investing his workers isn’t the profit-destroying doomed strategy his peers claim it is. Bruce is going to keep doing it obviously (his next initiative is to ensure all part-time and contractors get the same benefits and pay as full time employees), but he is going to have to find a different way to dump his money.

But you know what else is supposed to be prohibitively expensive? Green and ethical initiatives. Yes, Bruce can do that. He creates and fund a 10 year plan to covert all Wayne facilities to renewable energy. He overhauls all factories to employ the best environmentally friendly practices and technologies. He cuts contracts with all suppliers that engage in unethical employment practices and pays for other to upgrade their equipment and facilities to meet WE’s new environmental and safety requirements. He spares no expense.

Yeah, Wayne Enterprises is so successful that they spin off an entire new business arm focused on helping other companies convert to environmentally friendly and safe practices like they did in an efficient, cost effective, successful way.

Admittedly, investing in his own company was probably never going to be the best way to get rid of his wealth. He slashes his own salary to a pittance (god knows he has more money than he could possibly know what to do with already) and keeps investing the profits back into the workers, and WE keeps responding with nearly terrifying success.

So WE is a no-go, and Bruce now has numerous angry billionaires on his back because they’ve been claiming all these measures he’s implementing are too expensive to justify for decades and they’re finding it a little hard to keep the wool over everyone’s eyes when Idiot Softheart Bruice Wayne has money spilling out his ears. BUT Bruce can invest in Gotham. That’ll go well, right?

Gotham’s infrastructure is the OSHA anti-Christ and even what little is up to code is constantly getting destroyed by Rogue attacks. Surely THAT will be a money sink.

Except the only non-corrupt employer in Gotham city is….Wayne Enterprises. Or contractors or companies or businesses that somehow, in some way or other, feed back to WE. Paying wholesale for improvement to Gotham’s infrastructure somehow increases WE’s profits.

Bruce funds a full system overhaul of Gotham hospital (it’s not his fault the best administrative system software is WE—he looked), he sets up foundations and trusts for shelters, free clinics, schools, meal plans, day care, literally anything he can think of.

Gotham continues to be a shithole. Bruce Wayne continues to be richer than god against his Batman-ingrained will.

Oh, and Bruice Wayne is no longer viewed as solely a spoiled idiot nepo baby. The public responds by investing in WE and anything else he owns, and stop doing this, please.

Bruce sets up a foundation to pay the college tuition of every Gotham citizen who applies. It’s so successful that within 10 years, donations from previous recipients more than cover incoming need, and Bruce can’t even donate to his own charity.

But by this time, Bruce has children. If he can’t get rid of his wealth, he can at least distribute it, right?

Except Dick Grayson absolutely refuses to receive any of his money, won’t touch his trust fund, and in fact has never been so successful and creative with his hacking skills as he is in dumping the money BACK on Bruce. Jason died and won’t legally resurrect to take his trust fund. Tim has his own inherited wealth, refuses to inherit more, and in fact happily joins forces with Dick to hack accounts and return whatever money he tries to give them. Cass has no concept of monetary wealth and gives him panicked, overwhelmed eyes whenever he so much as implies offering more than $100 at once. Damian is showing worrying signs of following in his precious Richard’s footsteps, and Babs barely allows him to fund tech for the Clocktower. At least Steph lets him pay for her tuition and uses his credit card to buy unholy amounts of Batburger. But that is hardly a drop in the ocean of Bruce’s wealth. And she won’t even accept a trust fund of only one million.

Jason wins for best-worst child though because he currently runs a very lucrative crime empire. And although he pours the vast, vast majority of his profits back into Crime Alley, whenever he gets a little too rich for his tastes, he dumps the money on Bruce. At this point, Bruce almost wishes he was being used for money laundering because then he’s at least not have the money.

So children—generous, kindhearted, stubborn till the day they die the little shits, children—are also out.

Bruce was funding the Justice League. But then finances were leaked, and the public had an outcry over one man holding so much sway over the world’s superheroes (nevermind Bruce is one of those superheroes—but the public can’t know that). So Bruce had to do some fancy PR trickery, concede to a policy of not receiving a majority of funds from one individual, and significantly decrease his contributions because no one could match his donations.

At his wits end, Bruce hires a team of accounts to search through every crinkle and crevice of tax law to find what loopholes or shortcuts can be avoided in order to pay his damn taxes to the MAX.

The results are horrifying. According to the strictest definition of the law, the government owes him money.

Bruce burns the report, buries any evidence as deeply as he can, and organizes a foundation to lobby for FAR higher taxation of the upper class.

All this, and Wayne Enterprises is happily chugging along, churning profit, expanding into new markets, growing in the stock market, and trying to force the credit and proportionate compensation on their increasingly horrified CEO.

Bruce Wayne is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce Wayne will never not be one of the richest men in the world.

But by GOD is he trying.

[astridhobbit]

having taught preschool for a long time one of the (many) things that always bothered me about conservative values is the rallying cry of "protecting the children". in my experience in the classroom, these parents often present with a strange dichotomy of "fear-of-the-hypothetical-sexual" versus their casual and comfortable acceptance of real violence.

you will listen to a parent merrily tell you: oh i think spanking is the way to go. sometimes they will even suggest you, the teacher, spank the kid if this infant misbehaves - it makes the hair on your neck stand up. you, meanwhile, have never needed to injure a child to control a classroom of 30 of them.

this is very often the same parent who is mortified about the body. they can handle their child's mortification, but not their own. simple, basic-use plain language for genitals is abhorrent to them. "that dog has a penis" - a neutral statement, just a child making an observation like any other - is usually punished or treated as a swear word. the child (particularly a girl child) is taught to refer to their own body in objectification: "my cookie" "my button" "my ding-dong" or other obfuscations.

this is, according to many conservatives, an effort to "protect the innocence" of children. the implication here is that even an acknowledgement of body parts is tantamount to pornographic depictions of sex. (it additionally implies, of course, that sex or any age-appropriate acknowledgement of sex cannot be innocent or without sin - but we will leave that discussion for a different post). teachers, however, on our ever-dissolving islands of sanity, want you to know that plain language can protect children, as it gives them the ability to discuss their own bodies (and potentially any abuse).

it will not surprise you these fearful parents are very often the same parents who are wild-eyed about the acknowledgement of gay or trans individuals. not even in an in-depth discussion - we aren't allowed to mention that nonbinary people exist.

the parent often wails at me. they cannot conceptualize having that conversation with the child. how will they tell their kid about gay people! any discussion on this matter will encourage their child to be depraved, lose their innocence, "turn gay" or somehow otherwise perverted.

any teacher here will roll their eyes. kids don't actually care, unless you make them care. i wish we could make them care - that there was some magic switch to flip where i could force them to have the same passion for math as they have for pokemon. children do not have the same shame parents have until you teach them to.

the conversations these parents fear so much are incredibly, painfully easy. you say, "yeah, some people have two dads, or a stepdad and another dad. some people have two moms. some people have a mom only. families can look very different, but what's important is that you're loved and safe." you say, "yes, that is a vagina. yes, that is a penis. yes, a penis like on your dog. let's leave our clothes on during school, please, we've talked about this." you say, "thank you for telling us your daddy used to be a girl. that's very special. however, we're talking about math right now."

(i've spoken about this before, but i do believe a large portion of the "protect the children" fear stems from the fact many conservatives see queerness as being solely about sex. while sex is an inherent, important part of our lives; we should be able to talk about our partners with the same neutrality as straight people do. it is so normalized for straight couples to say that they're trying for a baby - to actively admit to raw sex - but a gay person admitting to even having a partner can be very politically or professionally dangerous. and all of us have, at some point, probably met the stranger who says how does that even work about our bodies or sex, as if we owe them a dictionary on our experiences).

we have people in powerful positions in the government defending a parent's right to actively strike an (innocent) child, but horrified by their child being exposed to gay people. in certain states, parents are given almost complete free reign to abuse their child at home. often these are the same states with some of the strictest rules against sex education or queer expression. (we don't have time for the gun conversation, but you can fill in the blanks).

one phrase always ends up haunting me - when a parent defends their right to hurt their child with i lived through it and i'm just fine. isn't the point of being a parent to protect our kids from what we experienced? isn't the point to do better than the generation before us? why even have a child if you're not going to show them a better life than the one you lived?

i don't know. i was hit quite a lot. i was raised in a very strict catholic house. i don't think the hitting ever taught me anything except to lie and hide and sneak around. i was raised thinking gay was a bad word.

i still turned out like this - a person who wants to actually protect the innocent.

[astridhobbit]

NHK World has a special program on Russia noting that while Putin’s approval rating is high it is a passive high - that if the war starts to impact the population negatively in a major way it will collapse. According to the professor they had on at their current rate of spending, the dwindling labor force and inflation it can break as early as the end of the year. This may be why he’s pushing Trump to get Zelensky to ‘TAKE THE DEAL’.

According to Trump he's sitting with Zelensky today. I hope Zelensky doesn't take the deal. Dictators like Trump and Putin only understand personal consequences. Call out their bluff.

[astridhobbit]

always remember, friend,

now go in peace

This meme was inspired by the piece "Lucky 10,000" by Randall Monroe.

[astridhobbit]

[astridhobbit]

you'll like this video better with sound on

[astridhobbit]

don’t know what parent of an autistic child needs to hear this but as long as they’re not harming anyone your kid’s stimming is not a “problem behaviour”

[astridhobbit]

health reporting loves to go "this one weird trick improved all of my stress and health markers!" and the weird trick is like, go kayaking for three months or spend a month at pressure and... yeah. that will help. that's called "taking a sabbatical" and it is very good for you to have a period of rest and play and a change in your environment. I don't think it's about the kayak though

[astridhobbit]

Do you think Clark Kent's first few major articles were about the continued presence of lead pipes in parts of Metropolis' water system

[astridhobbit]

Do you think Clark Kent's first few major articles were about the continued presence of lead pipes in parts of Metropolis' water system

[astridhobbit]

So I'm having a hysterectomy on March 10th. I've wanted to do this for literally the last 20 years because my periods have always been terrible, and I finally have a doctor who's like "Ah, you are an Adult who can have Bodily Autonomy and Make Your Own Decisions About Which Organs You Want Yeeted."

I am thus asking for some help with some expenses related to surgical recovery, etc.

It'd be really helpful to have more wiggle room in the budget for getting take-out if I'm not feeling up to cooking or managing stairs, easier food I can ask Lynati to heat up for me and bring upstairs - stuff like that.

The big goal, though, is that after I recover from surgery (and am no longer at risk of bleeding on things) I'd like to replace my mattress. My mattress sucks. It has collapsed in on itself, and this is REALLY not good for my back and it hurts.

Astraea actually thinks the mattress is fabulous because it had a huge divot in the middle that is fully 6 1/2" deeper than the regular height of the mattress, so she can snug up in it and be in a little fort. She will, in fact, bite me, if I try to move her out of it.

Help me break my poor little kitty cat's heart, and help me to get a new mattress, please?

I'm not currently in dire, desperate straits, but I am disabled and on a fixed income, and everything is expensive and stressful, especially with *gestures* The Current Political Situation.

Also my friend Arin keeps saying "This is Astraea's hole, it was made for her" and I would like her to stop referencing that short story, and she will only do this if I replace the mattress.

If this is something you can help with without hurting yourself, I would really appreciate it.

The Paypal address is arintradeditforcookies (at) gmail (dot) com

Thank you.