#Used Garbage Trucks

[kirrbee]

*that's it, i sentence you to the baby swing!

*dont stare at this creature for too long or he dies of shame 😢

[madlichen]

[jangillman]

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A post shared by ⭐️ Sylvia | Daughter of Liberty (@simplipolish)

[rubberbandballqueen]

How was Taiwan?

it was good!!!!

i had my donut stolen by a monkey with its little grabby hands, studied the fonts they use on road signs over there, ate some really good fruit that is either unavailable in the states (蓮霧) or just Not The Same (buddha's head), HAD SOME RANDOM GUY CLAIMING TO BE A JOURNALIST COME UP TO ME AND GIVE ME HIS CALLING CARD AND INSIST I CALL HIM IF I EVER GOT IN TROUBLE WITH THE POLICE??, executed Tumblr Code In Real Life when i met up with a Beloved Mutual for the first time and had like this ginormous smoothie like a whole fucking goblet just a massive smoothie chalice at the cafe we hung out in, rode the train AND the subway a couple times, tried to look up a bunch of music ultimately too obscure to be found by the shazam app, photographed several dozen flowers, and then seem to have left my school ID behind after i had to hang my jacket out to dry the night before we left c':

[etcnnante]

anyone else have internet so bad it caused a sinkhole in your driveway

[solradguy]

I know exactly how to write code doesn't work in HTML and CSS through the power of over 1000 Neocities page edits

[cynicalclassicist]

And yet people go on about him being a very stable genius. It is all a show with him. He is not one of the people.

Performative waste.

Putting on a McDonald's uniform.

Putting on a reflective vest.

The condescension and superiority are implicit. Trump is not you. He is mocking your struggles for two minutes and a photo-op.

[news-buzz]

Donald Trump climbs into rubbish truck in stunt to name out Biden, Harris - Nationwide Information Buzz

Donald Trump, no stranger to trash speak, climbed right into a rubbish truck decked out together with his marketing campaign decals Wednesday, an obvious response to President Joe Biden showing to name his supporters “rubbish” earlier this week. The day-before-Halloween cosplay happened throughout a marketing campaign cease in Wisconsin. Trump departed his personal aircraft in Inexperienced Bay…

[spikeyjo]

Almost got plowed down by a garbage truck 😂

[maerynaire]

"Boy! I sure can't wait to live in my 350k 2 story house that somehow packs 5 bedrooms into the top floor and has a 2 car garage that takes up half the bottom floor in a cramped neighborhood full of people I don't talk to that acts as a heat sink and makes me want to kill myself and leave my 2 children inside of it all day and only do scheduled 'family fun' once a week! Also I'm going to only ever park my car in the fucking street because I think that the 30 seconds it takes to put my car in the garage or driveway are seconds that I could be ignoring my family that I willingly decided to have!" -thousands of middle class americans the nation over

[awkward-teabag]

One of the reasons for their surge in popularity is just that: They can haul cargo.

Modern, US-style pickups don't have the bed space and are too high to comfortably load, so people who need or want to move cargo are moving toward old pickups or vans. No need to deal with straps or ramps when you're moving something maybe a foot versus doing the same from about chest height.

You also don't have to worry about rain, wind, or people stealing stuff if it's in a van. There's a reason why so many tradespeople use vans instead of modern trucks.

You can also see the road in front of you in a van instead of the modern truck where your blind spot is a dozen feet in front of you before you can see the road so gods help anyone who's below hood height (e.g. toddlers, people in chairs, cyclists) who you have no idea is there.

You can also fit more people in a van. "Soccer mom's van" may be a bit of a trope and looked down on but you could fit half or more of the team in a van and all the equipment you need in one. And because of how van doors are, everyone can easily get in or out.

And if someone needs a mobility device, there's plenty of room for one of those, too.

And as mentioned, they provide a safe place to sleep and while not the most comfortable (unless you have a proper sleeping surface) is far more comfortable to sleep in compared to in a seat. There's also room for clothes and such which, again, is protected from the elements and not easily stolen.

Vans aren't "cool," but they are enjoying a sort of renaissance of sorts. The desirability of these boxy, cargo-hauling conveyances represents some admittedly minor hope for the future. If vans regain their ancient popularity, there is a chance that we can overthrow the dictatorship of the pickup truck and return to our traditional values as a society.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not some wacko van fundamentalist. Sure, I do get into theological arguments with Ford people about which generation of the Econoline is derived most purely from van theory, but that's on our own territory. Not something for the regular folk to see.

You have nothing to fear about me giving you a shank if you accidentally call a half-cut container truck the deeply unfunny slur that is "cube van." I won't even get mad if you prefer a hatchback. Anything that can haul cargo in an enclosed vessel, and does so often, is an honorary van in my book. And it's a good idea, before we proceed, to talk about just why vans are becoming more popular.

Vans are in fact the only houses that many people can own. Sad but true. You could live in a pickup truck, too. Nobody is denying that, but that's like living in one of those strange Arizona desert homes where there's only enough roof for your bed, a novel about libertarianism, and a small overhang to keep your ammo and canned beans dry. Just not enough enclosed area. No sense of security. Throbbing paranoia at all minutes that if you stop at the Home Depot just for a minute that someone will steal your groceries out of the bed.

Me, I like to have a nice personal space which will be largely protected if I roll the thing into the ditch doing triple the speed limit. It's bad enough already without having to walk half a kilometre back from the impact site, picking up all your strewn possessions from the roadside. Better to keep the sleeping bags, provisions, and pet chickens on the inside of the vehicle.

If there can be said to be a downside to the growth of van popularity, it is that they are more popular than ever. Demand means resale value skyrockets, which means I can't easily get a new van to replace my old one when it gets towed by the cops or love-taps the bollard in the Tim Hortons drive-thru. That's why I've started investing in motorhomes, which are the van for people who can't afford vans or houses. They just so happen to come with big-ass V8s, too, like all of the other places I've ever lived. It's like I was never evicted at all.

[foldingfittedsheets]

So several years ago I was in Taiwan with my betrothed and two of our other friends, one of whom was Taiwanese the same one who made breast milk soap. One morning we had the bewildering experience of waking up to Beethoven’s Für Elise blaring through the misty morning streets.

We sat up in utter perplexity. We went to a window and watched people trailing after a garbage truck, chucking their trash bags at it while it slowly drove down the street, speakers pumping out orchestral music.

Three of us gathered at the window staring in rapt fascination and the one native friend was like. “Guys, it’s just the garbage truck song.”

Years later I can’t hear it without thinking of the garbage trucks.

So when I was working on Kilonova in our team space with twenty some people and heard Für Elise playing briefly my head popped up and I said, “Oh! The garbage truck song!”

I planned to explain but one of my teammates heads also shot up and said, “Yes!! The garbage truck song!!” I’d forgotten she was Taiwanese and we were both suddenly bonded in our mutual joy of knowing the garbage truck song together.

We then realized the rest of the team was just staring at us like ????

[creep-girl]

dread wringer?? like. like the dead ringer from tf2

[zooophagous]

So why do you hate the advertising industry?

Hokay so.

Let me preface this with some personal history. It's not relevant to the sins of the advertising industry perse but it illustrates how I started to grow to hate it.

I wanted to be a veterinarian growing up, but to be a vet you basically have to be good enough to get into medical school. I do not have the math chops or discipline to make it in medical school. I went into art instead, and in a desperate attempt to find some commercial viability that didn't involve moving to California, I went into graphic design.

I've been a graphic designer for about seven or eight years now and I've worn a lot of hats. One of them was working in a print shop. Now, the print shop had a lot of corporate customers who had various ad campaigns. One of them was Gate City Bank, which had a bigass stack of postcards ordered every couple months to mail to their customers.

Now, paper comes from Dakota Paper, and they make their paper the usual way. Somewhere far, far from our treeless plain there is a forest of tall trees. These trees are cut down and put on big fossil fuel burning trucks and hauled to a paper mill that turns them into pulp while spewing the most fowl odors imaginable over the neighboring town and loads the pulp up with bleach to give it a nice white color.

Then the paper is put on yet another big truck and hauled off to the local paper depot, then put on another big truck and delivered to my print shop, where I turned the paper into postcards telling people to go even deeper into debt to buy a boat because it's almost summer. The inks used are a type of nasty heat sensitive plastic that is melted to the surface of the paper with heat. Then the postcards are put on yet ANOTHER truck and sent to the bank, which puts them on ANOTHER truck and finally into the hands of their customers, who open their mail and take one look at the post card and immediately discard it.

Heaps and heaps and literal hundreds of pounds of literal garbage created at the whim of the marketing team several times a year. And thats just one bank in one city.

I came to realize very quickly that graphic design was the delicate art of turning trees into junk mail.

And wouldn't you know it there are a TON of companies that basically only do junk mail. Many of them operate under the guise of a "charity," sending you pictures of suffering children or animals and begging for handouts and when they get those handouts the executives take a nice fat cut, give some small token amount to whatever cause they pay lip service to, and then put the rest of the cash right back into making more mailers. "Direct mail marketing" they call it.

Oh but maybe it's not so bad, you can advertise online after all. Now that there's decent ad blocker out there and better anti-virus ads usually don't destroy your computer anymore just by existing.

Except now when I search for the exact business I want on Google it's buried under three or four different "promoted search items" tricking me into clicking on them only to shoot themselves in the foot because I searched for the specific result I wanted for a reason and couldn't use those other websites even if I felt like it.

And now we have advertising on YouTube and on every streaming service, forcing more and more eyes onto the ad for the brand new Buick Envision that parks itself because you're too stupid to do it on your own.

Oh thats ok maybe I'll get Spotify premium and go ad free and listen to some podcasts- SIKE we have the hosts of your show doing the song and dance now. Are you depressed and paranoid from listening to my true crime podcast about murdered and mutilated teenagers? That's ok, my sponsor Better Help can keep you sane enough to stay alive and spend more money.

It's gotten so terrible that now you have content farms, huge hubs of shell companies that crank out video after video to get more and more precious clicks. Which if the videos were innocuous maybe that wouldn't be so awful except now you have cooking hacks that can actually burn your house down and craft hacks that can electrocute you being flung into your eyes at the speed of mach fuck so some slimy internet clickbait jockey doesn't need to get a real job.

It of course goes without saying that animals are also relentlessly exploited by clickbait companies that will put them in compromising situations on purpose to create a fake fishing hack video or even just straight up killing them for sport by feeding small animals to a pufferfish that rips them apart for the camera.

And all of this, ALL of this doesn't even touch how adveritising is the death of art in general. Queer topics, any kind of interesting art, any kind of sex or substance use topics are scrubbed clean and hidden at the behest of advertisers.

Sex education, a nude statue, topics such as racism or sexism or bigotry in general have tags purged or hidden from search, even life saving information about SDTs or drug use, because if someone saw that and complained then Verizon might sell fewer tablets and we can't fucking have that.

Conservative talking heads often bitch and moan that they're being censored on social media. The stupid part is, they're right! They are being censored! But it's not by a woke mob, it's by ATT and Coca Cola not wanting their adspace sharing screen time with their stupid fucking opinions.

However, they won't ever figure that out, because the talking heads they get their marching orders from like Tucker and Jones ALSO rely on the sweet milk flowing from the sponsorship teat and they aren't about to turn on their meal ticket so they have to come up with even stupider shit to say for the train to continue rolling.

I managed to rant this far without even getting into the ads I see for the beauty industry. The other day a botox ad described wrinkles as "moderate to severe crows feet" as if wrinkles are a symptom of a fucking serious disease! Like having a flaw in your skin is a medical problem that you need thousands of dollars of literal botulism toxin to fix! I was incandescent with anger.

Advertising is a polluting, censoring, anti educational and anti art industry at it's very core. It destroys human connections, suppresses human thought and makes us hate our own bodies. It ads no value, actively detracts from value, and serves no real purpose and I believe it should be almost if not entirely banned.

[darkarfs]

I take out my neighbor's trash sometimes, and then she calls me and says she's ordered me pizza. I'm not here to turn down a slice of pizza, but look at this hideous, dirty slice.