#You'd be pretty good at it

[iloveacronix]

One down, another to go

@maydayissleepy MAYDAYYY MAYDAYYY HI I LOVE YOUR ACRONIX DESIGN SM BYEEEE

[bacchuschucklefuck]

typical tavern scene

[vaguely-concerned]

the barista lady in the treviso café fucking giggles every time you buy the fancy coffee lucanis likes from her btw. can't believe the game is calling out rook and me like this

[sexhaver]

i haven't bragged about the comical volume of weed i smoke/have smoked on here since my frat days but i keep seeing this specific gummy getting referenced as if it would make you see the shadow realm or give you synesthesia or something similarly dramatic, and, like, i have literally eaten more weed than this in one sitting, my plug sold me a bottle of "sizzurp" with 5g of thc in it, and i drank the entire thing at once because i was curious. you know what happened? i had the best fucking sleep of my life and woke up parched. that's all this will do to you if you eat it all at once. you won't get visuals, you won't be able to speak to your ancestors, you're going to spend approximately 45 minutes feeling stupider than you've ever felt and then timeskip to waking up disoriented on your couch 12 hours later. you don't even dream

[aroaceleovaldez]

Thalia's color is ultramarine, Jason's color is cyan, Percy's is teal, Bianca's is green, Nico's is olive, and Hazel's is gold.

The big 3 kids make a color gradient in order (Zeus [sky] > Poseidon [ocean] > Hades [underground]) hope this helps

[queerslurheritageposts]

Is there a bisexual slur I can start reclaiming I’m a he/him if that helps

may i interest you in faggot

[mattodore]

birthday boy with his birthday toy

[padmesbox]

Hangman Page birthday week → Day seven:

Happy birthday to my favorite wrestler teacher 🎉

Not taking bullshit boomer, condescending advice from nobody but giving evergreen advice that can only come from a millennial [former] teacher:

"Have a plan B [...] I think a lot of people would say like, if you have a plan B, you know, 'you can't give all to plan A, so you're gonna fail at plan A, anyway'. That's not true, I was a high school teacher and I did this, and I'm the effin' World Champion, and at one time I was a high school teacher to make it through this, I had a plan B and I don't need it anymore... have a plan B, life is much more important than, you know, what career you want to follow or what, you know, oh you want people to say about your accomplishments [...] life is much more important than that and you will need to make money to survive, so always have a plan B. That's like, what I feel, people don't press that upon people enough in telling you to chase your dreams —you absolutely, absolutely should— but to also know like you have to reckon with the fact that you probably, statistically will not make much money at this, if any. You have to know that, and you have to be okay with that [...] if you don't reckon with that like, reality, you're setting yourself up for heartbreak one way or the other"

[beaft]

relatedly, ofmd is probably the quickest i've ever gone from "this show is fun and i like it" to "dear God i have to get out of here"

[badnewswhatsleft]

TONIGHT LITTLE DARLIN'

[avoicebehindthestars]

Sometimes I feel like I'm in "Being John Malkovitch".

I mean, "right, I finished reading about rockstar Crowley and headmaster Aziraphale, so while I'm waiting to see what Crowley's going to do with the Aziraphale-coded cat, how figure skaters Crowley and Aziraphale are going to react to having to share the ice rink, and where the night heat is going to take the lighthouse keeper Crowley and the ornitologist Aziraphale, I can find out what the time-travelling Crowley is up to with his angel. And after that, I'm going to get back to the hungover Crowley and Aziraphale in the California wine country, and when I finish that one (probably with some breaks for the time-travellers and maybe the astronomers), perhaps I could look for 19th century ghosts with the demon Crowley and angel Aziraphale :D"

See what I'm talking about?

[cicaklah]

get ready for my thoughts on yaoi UBI

So I’ve kvetched about UBI in the tags for long enough someone finally asked me what I was going on about so here we go! 

I will start with some caveats: 

I am British, and so I can only speak about the British specifics.

I have for the past twelve years worked as a professional health economist, and health economics is based on social welfare theory (specifically growing out of Arrow’s work in the 1960s and Sen’s work in the 80s/90s). I literally could talk forever about this, but I won’t. If you want to know more, read the pretty good wikipedia article on welfare economics.

But fundamental to welfare economics is two things: if we make a great big change, do the benefits outweigh the costs? And does the change make a fundamental change for good? (aka cost-benefit analysis and pareto efficiency).

The other thing you need to know about me is that I don’t like activists very much, because they never have to show their working, and my entire professional life is showing my working, and critiquing other people’s working. We all have ideas mate, show me the plan! I love a plan! and this isn't coming from anything but personal experience; I have been to talks by UBI activists before, including ones by economists, but I have never had the case made to me that UBI would be either cost-beneficial OR approach pareto efficient. In fact, it usually reminds me of arguments that are based on some other imaginary world, and then I get so annoyed I want to scream. 

In the early 2010s when I was first starting working as an economist, I was asked to build a model to see whether switching a disability benefit from government administered to individual administration would be cost-effective. Essentially, if you were newly in a wheelchair and you needed a ramp building up to your house, would it be better for the government to organise a contractor, or for you to be given a cash transfer and organise it yourself? The answer was that it wasn’t, but anyone who has ever had to hire a builder could have told you that, and the government didn’t have to pay my firm £30,000 to make that decision. But that is what UBI essentially is; a cash transfer where you get cash and the government gets to enjoy less responsibility.

There are 37.5 million people of working age in England. (Nearly) every single working person gets what's called a tax free allowance, where the government doesn’t claim income tax on the first £12,570. (Once you make over £120k, your allowance starts to decrease, and you lose it entirely at I think £150k)

Let’s assume that instead of just not claiming tax on this amount, the government switched to making that £12,570 your UBI. That is £471,375,000,000 just for England - just under half a trillion pounds. In cash, or nearest as in our modern economy. And not one off - Every year. 

Okay, let's say that the country does have a spare half a trillion a year (in cash) lying around. What is the benefit to switching from tax free allowance to UBI? Well, let's assume that no one stops working, so there would be the tax receipts from the 20% income tax on the £12,570, and that’s just a shade under £100 million. Not bad.

But if you’ve seen a UBI post, you will know that people like the idea because they will be able to work less. Which probably means that UBI will need to be paid for in some other way. Perhaps by cutting existing benefits. The universal credit cost is around £100 billion. So we’re still £300 billion short, and honestly, you wouldn’t cut all of universal credit anyway, probably only the unemployment benefits, but I’m not digging into the maths on that tonight. 

But, look, I am sympathetic. I am a welfarist. I genuinely believe that the economy is not just money, that welfare is happiness, it is utility, it is all the stuff that makes life worth living, and it is the responsibility of the government to maximise the welfare/happiness/utility/quality of life of the country through efficient use of taxation and other sources of money. So people give the government money and it spends it on goods and services and then people get utility, and then they spend their own money to get more utility, and ultimately we can gain intangible things that are incredibly valuable. 

But the problem is that cash is cash, cold and hard and very real. I don’t know how unlimited spare time translates into half a trillion real pound coins. I wouldn’t know how to build a model that complex and uncertain, especially as this all assumes that you can live on 12k a year, and that whatever replaces progressive taxation is equally progressive. I haven’t even touched on how having a convoluted welfare state insures it somewhat against being entirely destroyed after a change in political opinions, aka what I call the daily mail test. You think the narrative about people on welfare is bad now? But also, how would you deal with people who didn’t manage their UBI money well? What happens if there is a personal crisis?

The more I look at it, the more the existing system is actually remarkably good value for money. Individualism is expensive. Collective decision making and spending is just cheaper. 

Ultimately I don’t see the additional benefit of UBI, requiring a pie in the sky change, when it is far, far, far more cost effective to strengthen the existing regime across the board; taxation law, social safety net, childcare, working laws, education and health - all systems that are already in place, and have a thousand times higher likelihood to be pareto optimal and cost effective than trying to find half a trillion pounds of cash round the back of the sofa, while torching 150 years of progress so middle class people can write their book without having to have a job. If I was conspiracy minded I would say that UBI feels like a psy-op, trying to shut down old fashioned progress in favour of ripping it all out and starting again.

Ultimately, that is my real annoyance. It is far, far, far cheaper for the government to provide you with your new ramp for your house, and that is done through politics, but not fun moonshot politics, the hard shit that isn’t sexy.

[braceletofteeth]

Strangers From Hell Incorrect Quotes [13/?]

insp.

[kradogsrats]

anyway completely unsubstantiated (except that in both the TTRPG and the video game, dark mage characters can straight-up instakill themselves by doing too much dark magic too quickly) headcanon that somewhere between 1 in 8 and 1 in 10 dark mage hopefuls die before completing apprenticeship, but the most dangerous time is actually immediately after that, where 75% survive the first year on their own and only 50% the first five years... without someone to rein them in, they overextend and spiral into corruption burnout

some mages try to beat this grim numbers game by training two apprentices at once, but it actually still evens out because it's about 50-50 on whether they both die, given that nothing feeds both arrogance and desperation like competition

[throesofincreasingwonder]

Also hi yes I know I'm a day late but can we talk about how Mariah finally achieved her goal but is now finding her success empty without love? And how Toni was willing to let Mariah kill her because she knew how empty the championship would be without love? Mariah who scorned Toni for her weakness now feeling strangely unfulfilled for some unknown reason (love)?

[uncanny-tranny]

The funniest thing is being familiar with certain surgeons who do trans surgeries because you'll just hear "Oh, I went to this surgeon," and they're like the fifth person to say that that month