#annual credit report

[netincomesource]

How to Qualify for a Preapproved Chase Credit Card: Tips for Approval in 2025

You’re excited To apply for a card, ensure you meet all requirements. apply for a Chase credit card, like the popular Chase Sapphire Preferred, dreaming of travel rewards and a shiny new card in your wallet. You’ve got a solid credit score—say, in the mid-700s—no sketchy history, and you’re ready to hit “submit” on your To enhance your chances, consider the card application for the new Chase…

[gendercensus]

The 2024 Gender Census is now open!

[ Link to survey ]

The 11th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th June 2024.

It’s short and easy, about 5 minutes probably.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 40,000 responses last year.

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The 2024 survey is now closed!

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

For the curious, you can also spy on some graphs and demographic data for the incoming responses here.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

Image credit: Malachite and rhodochrosite.

[investingdrone]

Best Student Credit Cards In Australia 2024

University is an exciting adventure, but it can also be a financial tightrope walk. Between textbooks, rent, study supplies, and that epic weekend trip to Byron Bay, managing your cash flow can feel like an impossible feat. Enter the world of Student Credit Cards! This handy guide dives deep into everything you need to know about these cards, from navigating the application process to using them…

[todaynewsonline]

How to Build Business Credit Without Using Personal Credit

How to Build Business Credit Without Using Personal Credit:- Building a successful business involves more than just having a great product or service—it requires a solid financial foundation. One crucial aspect of this foundation is business credit. Many entrepreneurs wonder how to build business credit without relying on their personal credit. In this article, we’ll explore the steps and…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

With Great Power Came No Responsibility

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in NYC TONIGHT (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN and at PENN STATE TOMORROW (Feb 27). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto's Innis College:

The lecture was called "With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It." It's the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year's McLuhan Lecture in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

And continued with a summer Defcon keynote:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump's rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system. The US used trade deals to force nearly every country in the world to adopt the IP laws that make enshittification possible, and maybe even inevitable. As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.

I'm so grateful for the chance to give this talk. I was hosted for the day by the Centre for Culture and Technology, which was founded by Marshall McLuhan, and is housed in the coach house he used for his office. The talk itself took place in Innis College, named for Harold Innis, who is definitely the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan. What's more, I was mentored by Innis's daughter, Anne Innis Dagg, a radical, brilliant feminist biologist who pretty much invented the field of giraffology:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

But with all respect due to Anne and her dad, Ursula Franklin is the thinking person's Harold Innis. A brilliant scientist, activist and communicator who dedicated her life to the idea that the most important fact about a technology wasn't what it did, but who it did it for and who it did it to. Getting to work out of McLuhan's office to present a talk in Innis's theater that was named after Franklin? Swoon!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin

Here's the text of the talk, lightly edited:

I know tonight’s talk is supposed to be about decaying tech platforms, but I want to start by talking about nurses.

A January 2025 report from Groundwork Collective documents how increasingly nurses in the USA are hired through gig apps – "Uber for nurses” – so nurses never know from one day to the next whether they're going to work, or how much they'll get paid.

There's something high-tech going on here with those nurses' wages. These nursing apps – a cartel of three companies, Shiftkey, Shiftmed and Carerev – can play all kinds of games with labor pricing.

Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue.

The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.

Now, there are lots of things going on here, and they're all terrible. What's more, they are emblematic of “enshittification,” the word I coined to describe the decay of online platforms.

When I first started writing about this, I focused on the external symptology of enshittification, a three stage process:

First, the platform is good to its end users, while finding a way to lock them in.

Like Google, which minimized ads and maximized spending on engineering for search results, even as they bought their way to dominance, bribing every service or product with a search box to make it a Google search box.

So no matter what browser you used, what mobile OS you used, what carrier you had, you would always be searching on Google by default. This got so batshit that by the early 2020s, Google was spending enough money to buy a whole-ass Twitter, every year or two, just to make sure that no one ever tried a search engine that wasn't Google.

That's stage one: be good to end users, lock in end users.

Stage two is when the platform starts to abuse end users to tempt in and enrich business customers. For Google, that’s advertisers and web publishers. An ever-larger fraction of a Google results page is given over to ads, which are marked with ever-subtler, ever smaller, ever grayer labels. Google uses its commercial surveillance data to target ads to us.

So that's stage two: things get worse for end users and get better for business customers.

But those business customers also get locked into the platform, dependent on those customers. Once businesses are getting as little as 10% of their revenue from Google, leaving Google becomes an existential risk. We talk a lot about Google's "monopoly" power, which is derived from its dominance as a seller. But Google is also a monopsony, a powerful buyer.

So now you have Google acting as a monopolist to its users (stage one), and a monoposonist for its business customers (stage two) and here comes stage three: where Google claws back all the value in the platform, save a homeopathic residue calculated to keep end users locked in, and business customers locked to those end users.

Google becomes enshittified.

In 2019, Google had a turning point. Search had grown as much as it possibly could. More than 90% of us used Google for search, and we searched for everything. Any thought or idle question that crossed our minds, we typed into Google.

How could Google grow? There were no more users left to switch to Google. We weren't going to search for more things. What could Google do?

Well, thanks to internal memos published during last year's monopoly trial against Google, we know what they did. They made search worse. They reduced the system's accuracy it so you had to search twice or more to get to the answer, thus doubling the number of queries, and doubling the number of ads.

Meanwhile, Google entered into a secret, illegal collusive arrangement with Facebook, codenamed Jedi Blue, to rig the ad market, fixing prices so advertisers paid more and publishers got less.

And that's how we get to the enshittified Google of today, where every query serves back a blob of AI slop, over five paid results tagged with the word AD in 8-point, 10% grey on white type, which is, in turn, over ten spammy links from SEO shovelware sites filled with more AI slop.

And yet, we still keep using Google, because we're locked into it. That's enshittification, from the outside. A company that's good to end users, while locking them in. Then it makes things worse for end users, to make things better for business customers, while locking them in. Then it takes all the value for itself and turns into a giant pile of shit.

Enshittification, a tragedy in three acts.

I started off focused on the outward signs of enshittification, but I think it's time we start thinking about what's going in inside the companies to make enshittification possible.

What is the technical mechanism for enshittification? I call it twiddling. Digital businesses have infinite flexibility, bequeathed to them by the marvellously flexible digital computers they run on. That means that firms can twiddle the knobs that control the fundamental aspects of their business. Every time you interact with a firm, everything is different: prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations.

Which takes me back to our nurses. This scam, where you look up the nurse's debt load and titer down the wage you offer based on it in realtime? That's twiddling. It's something you can only do with a computer. The bosses who are doing this aren't more evil than bosses of yore, they just have better tools.

Note that these aren't even tech bosses. These are health-care bosses, who happen to have tech.

Digitalization – weaving networked computers through a firm or a sector – enables this kind of twiddling that allows firms to shift value around, from end users to business customers, from business customers back to end users, and eventually, inevitably, to themselves.

And digitalization is coming to every sector – like nursing. Which means enshittification is coming to every sector – like nursing.

The legal scholar Veena Dubal coined a term to describe the twiddling that suppresses the wages of debt-burdened nurses. It's called "Algorithmic Wage Discrimination," and it follows the gig economy.

The gig economy is a major locus of enshittification, and it’s the largest tear in the membrane separating the virtual world from the real world. Gig work, where your shitty boss is a shitty app, and you aren't even allowed to call yourself an employee.

Uber invented this trick. Drivers who are picky about the jobs the app puts in front of them start to get higher wage offers. But if they yield to temptation and take some of those higher-waged option, then the wage starts to go down again, in random intervals, by small increments, designed to be below the threshold for human perception. Not so much boiling the frog as poaching it, until the Uber driver has gone into debt to buy a new car, and given up the side hustles that let them be picky about the rides they accepted. Then their wage goes down, and down, and down.

Twiddling is a crude trick done quickly. Any task that's simple but time consuming is a prime candidate for automation, and this kind of wage-theft would be unbearably tedious, labor-intensive and expensive to perform manually. No 19th century warehouse full of guys with green eyeshades slaving over ledgers could do this. You need digitalization.

Twiddling nurses' hourly wages is a perfect example of the role digitization pays in enshittification. Because this kind of thing isn't just bad for nurses – it's bad for patients, too. Do we really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase that desperation, and thus decrease the wage they are likely to work for, is going to result in nurses delivering the best care?

Do you want to your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps, who drove an Uber until midnight the night before, and skipped breakfast this morning in order to make rent?

This is why it’s so foolish to say "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." “If you’re not paying for the product” ascribes a mystical power to advertising-driven services: the power to bypass our critical faculties by surveilling us, and data-mining the resulting dossiers to locate our mental bind-spots, and weaponize them to get us to buy anything an advertiser is selling.

In this formulation, we are complicit in our own exploitation. By choosing to use "free" services, we invite our own exploitation by surveillance capitalists who have perfected a mind-control ray powered by the surveillance data we're voluntarily handing over by choosing ad-driven services.

The moral is that if we only went back to paying for things, instead of unrealistically demanding that everything be free, we would restore capitalism to its functional, non-surveillant state, and companies would start treating us better, because we'd be the customers, not the products.

That's why the surveillance capitalism hypothesis elevates companies like Apple as virtuous alternatives. Because Apple charges us money, rather than attention, it can focus on giving us better service, rather than exploiting us.

There's a superficially plausible logic to this. After all, in 2022, Apple updated its iOS operating system, which runs on iPhones and other mobile devices, introducing a tick box that allowed you to opt out of third-party surveillance, most notably Facebook’s.

96% of Apple customers ticked that box. The other 4% were, presumably drunk, or Facebook employees, or Facebook employees who were drunk. Which makes sense, because if I worked for Facebook, I'd be drunk all the time.

So on the face of it, it seems like Apple isn't treating its customers like "the product." But simultaneously with this privacy measure, Apple was secretly turning on its own surveillance system for iPhone owners, which would spy on them in exactly the way Facebook had, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you based on the places you'd been, the things you'd searched for, the communications you'd had, the links you'd clicked.

Apple didn't ask its customers for permission to spy on them. It didn't let opt out of this spying. It didn’t even tell them about it, and when it was caught, Apple lied about it.

It goes without saying that the $1000 Apple distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for. The fact that you've paid for it doesn't stop Apple from treating you as the product. Apple treats its business customers – app vendors – like the product, screwing them out of 30 cents on every dollar they bring in, with mandatory payment processing fees that are 1,000% higher than the already extortionate industry norm.

Apple treats its end users – people who shell out a grand for a phone – like the product, spying on them to help target ads to them.

Apple treats everyone like the product.

This is what's going on with our gig-app nurses: the nurses are the product. The patients are the product. The hospitals are the product. In enshittification, "the product" is anyone who can be productized.

Fair and dignified treatment is not something you get as a customer loyalty perk, in exchange for parting with your money, rather than your attention. How do you get fair and dignified treatment? Well, I'm gonna get to that, but let's stay with our nurses for a while first.

The nurses are the product, and they're being twiddled, because they've been conscripted into the tech industry, via the digitalization of their own industry.

It's tempting to blame digitalization for this. But tech companies were not born enshittified. They spent years – decades – making pleasing products. If you're old enough to remember the launch of Google, you'll recall that, at the outset, Google was magic.

You could Ask Jeeves questions for a million years, you could load up Altavista with ten trillion boolean search operators meant to screen out low-grade results, and never come up with answers as crisp, as useful, as helpful, as the ones you'd get from a few vaguely descriptive words in a Google search-bar.

There's a reason we all switched to Google. Why so many of us bought iPhones. Why we joined our friends on Facebook. All of these services were born digital. They could have enshittified at any time. But they didn't – until they did. And they did it all at once.

If you were a nurse, and every patient that staggered into the ER had the same dreadful symptoms, you'd call the public health department and report a suspected outbreak of a new and dangerous epidemic.

Ursula Franklin held that technology's outcomes were not preordained. They are the result of deliberate choices. I like that very much, it's a very science fictional way of thinking about technology. Good science fiction isn't merely about what the technology does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

Those social factors are far more important than the mere technical specifications of a gadget. They're the difference between a system that warns you when you're about to drift out of your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted out of your lane, so they can add $10 to your monthly premium.

They’re the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you've made a typo, and bossware that lets your manager use the number of typos you made this quarter so he can deny your bonus.

They’re the difference between an app that remembers where you parked your car, and an app that uses the location of your car as a criteria for including you in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.

I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment. These are changes to the rules of the game, undertaken in living memory, by named parties, who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, and face no consequences or accountability for their role in ushering in the enshittocene. They venture out into polite society without ever once wondering if someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.

In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.

And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet.

I'm not going to talk about AI today, because oh my god is AI a boring, overhyped subject. But I will use a metaphor about AI, about the limited liability company, which is a kind of immortal, artificial colony organism in which human beings serve as a kind of gut flora. My colleague Charlie Stross calls corporations "slow AI.”

So you've got these slow AIs whose guts are teeming with people, and the AI's imperative, the paperclip it wants to maximize, is profit. To maximize profits, you charge as much as you can, you pay your workers and suppliers as little as you can, you spend as little as possible on safety and quality.

Every dollar you don't spend on suppliers, workers, quality or safety is a dollar that can go to executives and shareholders. So there's a simple model of the corporation that could maximize its profits by charging infinity dollars, while paying nothing to its workers or suppliers, and ignoring quality and safety.

But that corporation wouldn't make any money, for the obvious reasons that none of us would buy what it was selling, and no one would work for it or supply it with goods. These constraints act as disciplining forces that tamp down the AI's impulse to charge infinity and pay nothing.

In tech, we have four of these constraints, anti-enshittificatory sources of discipline that make products and services better, pay workers more, and keep executives’ and shareholders' wealth from growing at the expense of customers, suppliers and labor.

The first of these constraints is markets. All other things being equal, a business that charges more and delivers less will lose customers to firms that are more generous about sharing value with workers, customers and suppliers.

This is the bedrock of capitalist theory, and it's the ideological basis for competition law, what our American cousins call "antitrust law."

The first antitrust law was 1890's Sherman Act, whose sponsor, Senator John Sherman, stumped for it from the senate floor, saying:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity. 

Senator Sherman was reflecting the outrage of the anitmonopolist movement of the day, when proprietors of monopolistic firms assumed the role of dictators, with the power to decide who would work, who would starve, what could be sold, and what it cost.

Lacking competitors, they were too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care. As Lily Tomlin used to put it in her spoof AT&T ads on SNL: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.”

So what happened to the disciplining force of competition? We killed it. Starting 40-some years ago, the Reagaonomic views of the Chicago School economists transformed antitrust. They threw out John Sherman's idea that we need to keep companies competitive to prevent the emergence of "autocrats of trade,"and installed the idea that monopolies are efficient.

In other words, if Google has a 90% search market share, which it does, then we must infer that Google is the best search engine ever, and the best search engine possible. The only reason a better search engine hasn't stepped in is that Google is so skilled, so efficient, that there is no conceivable way to improve upon it.

We can tell that Google is the best because it has a monopoly, and we can tell that the monopoly is good because Google is the best.

So 40 years ago, the US – and its major trading partners – adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly competition policy.

Now, you'll be glad to hear that this isn't what happened to Canada. The US Trade Rep didn't come here and force us to neuter our competition laws. But don't get smug! The reason that didn't happen is that it didn't have to. Because Canada had no competition law to speak of, and never has.

In its entire history, the Competition Bureau has challenged three mergers, and it has halted precisely zero mergers, which is how we've ended up with a country that is beholden to the most mediocre plutocrats imaginable like the Irvings, the Westons, the Stronachs, the McCains and the Rogerses.

The only reason these chinless wonders were able to conquer this country Is that the Americans had been crushing their monopolists before they could conquer the US and move on to us. But 40 years ago, the rest of the world adopted the Chicago School's pro-monopoly "consumer welfare standard,” and we got…monopolies.

Monopolies in pharma, beer, glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course, professional wrestling.

Remember: these are specific policies adopted in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned, and got rich, and never faced consequences. The economists who conceived of these policies are still around today, polishing their fake Nobel prizes, teaching at elite schools, making millions consulting for blue-chip firms.

When we confront them with the wreckage their policies created, they protest their innocence, maintaining – with a straight face – that there's no way to affirmatively connect pro-monopoly policies with the rise of monopolies.

It's like we used to put down rat poison and we didn't have a rat problem. Then these guys made us stop, and now rats are chewing our faces off, and they're making wide innocent eyes, saying, "How can you be sure that our anti-rat-poison policies are connected to global rat conquest? Maybe this is simply the Time of the Rat! Maybe sunspots caused rats to become more fecund than at any time in history! And if they bought the rat poison factories and shut them all down, well, so what of it? Shutting down rat poison factories after you've decided to stop putting down rat poison is an economically rational, Pareto-optimal decision."

Markets don't discipline tech companies because they don't compete with rivals, they buy them. That's a quote, from Mark Zuckerberg: “It is better to buy than to compete.”

Which is why Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for a billion dollars, even though it only had 12 employees and 25m users. As he wrote in a spectacularly ill-advised middle-of-the-night email to his CFO, he had to buy Instagram, because Facebook users were leaving Facebook for Instagram. By buying Instagram, Zuck ensured that anyone who left Facebook – the platform – would still be a prisoner of Facebook – the company.

Despite the fact that Zuckerberg put this confession in writing, the Obama administration let him go ahead with the merger, because every government, of every political stripe, for 40 years, adopted the posture that monopolies were efficient.

Now, think about our twiddled, immiserated nurses. Hospitals are among the most consolidated sectors in the US. First, we deregulated pharma mergers, and the pharma companies gobbled each other up at the rate of naughts, and they jacked up the price of drugs. So hospitals also merged to monopoly, a defensive maneuver that let a single hospital chain corner the majority of a region or city and say to the pharma companies, "either you make your products cheaper, or you can't sell them to any of our hospitals."

Of course, once this mission was accomplished, the hospitals started screwing the insurers, who staged their own incestuous orgy, buying and merging until most Americans have just three or two insurance options. This let the insurers fight back against the hospitals, but left patients and health care workers defenseless against the consolidated power of hospitals, pharma companies, pharmacy benefit managers, group purchasing organizations, and other health industry cartels, duopolies and monopolies.

Which is why nurses end up signing on to work for hospitals that use these ghastly apps. Remember, there's just three of these apps, replacing dozens of staffing agencies that once competed for nurses' labor.

Meanwhile, on the patient side, competition has never exercised discipline. No one ever shopped around for a cheaper ambulance or a better ER while they were having a heart attack. The price that people are willing to pay to not die is “everything they have.”

So you have this sector that has no business being a commercial enterprise in the first place, losing what little discipline they faced from competition, paving the way for enshittification.

But I said there are four forces that discipline companies. The second one of these forces is regulation, discipline imposed by states.

It’s a mistake to see market discipline and state discipline as two isolated realms. They are intimately connected. Because competition is a necessary condition for effective regulation.

Let me put this in terms that even the most ideological libertarians can understand. Say you think there should be precisely one regulation that governments should enforce: honoring contracts. For the government to serve as referee in that game, it must have the power to compel the players to honor their contracts. Which means that the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to permit.

So even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can no longer open your copy of Atlas Shrugged because the pages are all stuck together, who pines for markets for human kidneys, and demands the right to sell yourself into slavery, you should still want a robust antitrust regime, so that these contracts can be enforced.

When a sector cartelizes, when it collapses into oligarchy, when the internet turns into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four," then it captures its regulators.

After all, a sector with 100 competing companies is a rabble, at each others' throats. They can't agree on anything, especially how they're going to lobby.

While a sector of five companies – or four – or three – or two – or one – is a cartel, a racket, a conspiracy in waiting. A sector that has been boiled down to a mere handful of firms can agree on a common lobbying position.

What's more, they are so insulated from "wasteful competition" that they are aslosh in cash that they can mobilize to make their regulatory preferences into regulations. In other words, they can capture their regulators.

“Regulatory capture" may sound abstract and complicated, so let me put it in concrete terms. In the UK, the antitrust regulator is called the Competition and Markets Authority, run – until recently – by Marcus Bokkerink. The CMA has been one of the world's most effective investigators and regulators of Big Tech fuckery.

Last month, UK PM Keir Starmer fired Bokkerink and replaced him with Doug Gurr, the former head of Amazon UK. Hey, Starmer, the henhouse is on the line, they want their fox back.

But back to our nurses: there are plenty of examples of regulatory capture lurking in that example, but I'm going to pick the most egregious one, the fact that there are data brokers who will sell you information about the credit card debts of random Americans.

This is because the US Congress hasn't passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed a law called the Video Privacy Protection Act that bans video store clerks from telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. The fact that Congress hasn't updated Americans' privacy protections since Die Hard was in theaters isn't a coincidence or an oversight. It is the expensively purchased inaction of a heavily concentrated – and thus wildly profitable – privacy-invasion industry that has monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale.

The coalition in favor of keeping privacy law frozen since the season finale of St Elsewhere keeps growing, because there is an unbounded set of way to transform the systematic invasion of our human rights into cash. There's a direct line from this phenomenon to nurses whose paychecks go down when they can't pay their credit-card bills.

So competition is dead, regulation is dead, and companies aren't disciplined by markets or by states.

But there are four forces that discipline firms, contributing to an inhospitable environment for the reproduction of sociopathic. enshittifying monsters.

So let's talk about those other two forces. The first is interoperability, the principle of two or more things working together. Like, you can put anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, anyone's gas in your gas tank, and anyone's lightbulbs in your light-socket. In the non-digital world, interop takes a lot of work, you have to agree on the direction, pitch, diameter, voltage, amperage and wattage for that light socket, or someone's gonna get their hand blown off.

But in the digital world, interop is built in, because there's only one kind of computer we know how to make, the Turing-complete, universal, von Neumann machine, a computing machine capable of executing every valid program.

Which means that for any enshittifying program, there's a counterenshittificatory program waiting to be run. When HP writes a program to ensure that its printers reject third-party ink, someone else can write a program to disable that checking.

For gig workers, antienshittificatory apps can do yeoman duty. For example, Indonesian gig drivers formed co-ops, that commission hackers to write modifications for their dispatch apps. For example, the taxi app won't book a driver to pick someone up at a train station, unless they're right outside, but when the big trains pull in that's a nightmare scene of total, lethal chaos.

So drivers have an app that lets them spoof their GPS, which lets them park up around the corner, but have the app tell their bosses that they're right out front of the station. When a fare arrives, they can zip around and pick them up, without contributing to the stationside mishegas.

In the USA, a company called Para shipped an app to help Doordash drivers get paid more. You see, Doordash drivers make most of their money on tips, and the Doordash driver app hides the tip amount until you accept a job, meaning you don't know whether you're accepting a job that pays $1.50 or $11.50 with tip, until you agree to take it. So Para made an app that extracted the tip amount and showed it to drivers before they clocked on.

But Doordash shut it down, because in America, apps like Para are illegal. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and section 1201 of the DMCA makes is a felony to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work," with penalties of $500k and a 5-year prison sentence for a first offense. So just the act of reverse-engineering an app like the Doordash app is a potential felony, which is why companies are so desperately horny to get you to use their apps rather than their websites.

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it's a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

Around the world, we have enacted a thicket of laws, we call “IP laws,” that make it illegal to modify services, products, and devices, so that they serve your interests, rather than the interests of the shareholders.

Like I said, these laws were enacted in living memory, by people who are among us, who were warned about the obvious, eminently foreseeable consequences of their reckless plans, who did it anyway.

Back in 2010, two ministers from Stephen Harper's government decided to copy-paste America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law. They consulted on the proposal to make it illegal to reverse engineer and modify services, products and devices, and they got an earful! 6,138 Canadians sent in negative comments on the consultation. They warned that making it illegal to bypass digital locks would interfere with repair of devices as diverse as tractors, cars, and medical equipment, from ventilators to insulin pumps.

These Canadians warned that laws banning tampering with digital locks would let American tech giants corner digital markets, forcing us to buy our apps and games from American app stores, that could cream off any commission they chose to levy. They warned that these laws were a gift to monopolists who wanted to jack up the price of ink; that these copyright laws, far from serving Canadian artists would lock us to American platforms. Because every time someone in our audience bought a book, a song, a game, a video, that was locked to an American app, it could never be unlocked.

So if we, the creative workers of Canada, tried to migrate to a Canadian store, our audience couldn't come with us. They couldn't move their purchases from the US app to a Canadian one.

6,138 Canadians told them this, while just 54 respondents sided with Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement. Then, James Moore gave a speech, at the International Chamber of Commerce meeting here in Toronto, where he said he would only be listening to the 54 cranks who supported his terrible ideas, on the grounds that the 6,138 people who disagreed with him were "babyish…radical extremists."

So in 2012, we copied America's terrible digital locks law into the Canadian statute book, and now we live in James Moore and Tony Clement's world, where it is illegal to tamper with a digital lock. So if a company puts a digital lock on its product they can do anything behind that lock, and it's a crime to undo it.

For example, if HP puts a digital lock on its printers that verifies that you're not using third party ink cartridges, or refilling an HP cartridge, it's a crime to bypass that lock and use third party ink. Which is how HP has gotten away with ratcheting the price of ink up, and up, and up.

Printer ink is now the most expensive fluid that a civilian can purchase without a special permit. It's colored water that costs $10k/gallon, which means that you print out your grocery lists with liquid that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

That's the world we got from Clement and Moore, in living memory, after they were warned, and did it anyway. The world where farmers can't fix their tractors, where independent mechanics can't fix your car, where hospitals during the pandemic lockdowns couldn't service their failing ventilators, where every time a Canadian iPhone user buys an app from a Canadian software author, every dollar they spend takes a round trip through Apple HQ in Cupertino, California and comes back 30 cents lighter.

Let me remind you this is the world where a nurse can't get a counter-app, a plug-in, for the “Uber for nurses” app they have to use to get work, that lets them coordinate with other nurses to refuse shifts until the wages on offer rise to a common level or to block surveillance of their movements and activity.

Interoperability was a major disciplining force on tech firms. After all, if you make the ads on your website sufficiently obnoxious, some fraction of your users will install an ad-blocker, and you will never earn another penny from them. Because no one in the history of ad-blockers has ever uninstalled an ad-blocker. But once it's illegal to make an ad-blocker, there's no reason not to make the ads as disgusting, invasive, obnoxious as you can, to shift all the value from the end user to shareholders and executives.

So we get monopolies and monopolies capture their regulators, and they can ignore the laws they don't like, and prevent laws that might interfere with their predatory conduct – like privacy laws – from being passed. They get new laws passed, laws that let them wield governmental power to prevent other companies from entering the market.

So three of the four forces are neutralized: competition, regulation, and interoperability. That left just one disciplining force holding enshittification at bay: labor.

Tech workers are a strange sort of workforce, because they have historically been very powerful, able to command high wages and respect, but they did it without joining unions. Union density in tech is abysmal, almost undetectable. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. There weren't enough workers to fill the jobs going begging, and tech workers are unfathomnably productive. Even with the sky-high salaries tech workers commanded, every hour of labor they put in generated far more value for their employers.

Faced with a tight labor market, and the ability to turn every hour of tech worker overtime into gold, tech bosses pulled out all the stops to motivate that workforce. They appealed to workers' sense of mission, convinced them they were holy warriors, ushering in a new digital age. Google promised them they would "organize the world's information and make it useful.” Facebook promised them they would “make the world more open and connected."

There's a name for this tactic: the librarian Fobazi Ettarh calls it "vocational awe." That’s where an appeal to a sense of mission and pride is used to motivate workers to work for longer hours and worse pay.

There are all kinds of professions that run on vocational awe: teaching, daycares and eldercare, and, of course, nursing.

Techies are different from those other workers though, because they've historically been incredibly scarce, which meant that while bosses could motivate them to work on projects they believed in, for endless hours, the minute bosses ordered them to enshittify the projects they'd missed their mothers' funerals to ship on deadline these workers would tell their bosses to fuck off.

If their bosses persisted in these demands, the techies would walk off the job, cross the street, and get a better job the same day.

So for many years, tech workers were the fourth and final constraint, holding the line after the constraints of competition, regulation and interop slipped away. But then came the mass tech layoffs. 260,000 in 2023; 150,000 in 2024; tens of thousands this year, with Facebook planning a 5% headcount massacre while doubling its executive bonuses.

Tech workers can't tell their bosses to go fuck themselves anymore, because there's ten other workers waiting to take their jobs.

Now, I promised I wouldn't talk about AI, but I have to break that promise a little, just to point out that the reason tech bosses are so horny for AI Is because they think it'll let them fire tech workers and replace them with pliant chatbots who'll never tell them to fuck off.

So that's where enshittification comes from: multiple changes to the environment. The fourfold collapse of competition, regulation, interoperability and worker power creates an enshittogenic environment, where the greediest, most sociopathic elements in the body corporate thrive at the expense of those elements that act as moderators of their enshittificatory impulses.

We can try to cure these corporations. We can use antitrust law to break them up, fine them, force strictures upon them. But until we fix the environment, other the contagion will spread to other firms.

So let's talk about how we create a hostile environment for enshittifiers, so the population and importance of enshittifying agents in companies dwindles to 1990s levels. We won't get rid of these elements. So long as the profit motive is intact, there will be people whose pursuit of profit is pathological, unmoderated by shame or decency. But we can change the environment so that these don't dominate our lives.

Let's talk about antitrust. After 40 years of antitrust decline, this decade has seen a massive, global resurgence of antitrust vigor, one that comes in both left- and right-wing flavors.

Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s trustbusters at the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Consumer Finance Protection Bureau did more antitrust enforcement than all their predecessors for the past 40 years combined.

There's certainly factions of the Trump administration that are hostile to this agenda but Trump's antitrust enforcers at the DoJ and FTC now say that they'll preserve and enforce Biden's new merger guidelines, which stop companies from buying each other up, and they've already filed suit to block a giant tech merger.

Of course, last summer a judge found Google guilty of monopolization, and now they're facing a breakup, which explains why they've been so generous and friendly to the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, in Canada, our toothless Competition Bureau's got fitted for a set of titanium dentures last June, when Bill C59 passed Parliament, granting sweeping new powers to our antitrust regulator.

It's true that UK PM Keir Starmer just fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-boss of Amazon UK boss.But the thing that makes that so tragic is that the UK CMA had been doing astonishingly great work under various conservative governments.

In the EU, they've passed the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and they're going after Big Tech with both barrels. Other countries around the world – Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and China (yes, China!) – have passed new antitrust laws, and launched major antitrust enforcement actions, often collaborating with each other.

So you have the UK Competition and Markets Authority using its investigatory powers to research and publish a deep market study on Apple's abusive 30% app tax, and then the EU uses that report as a roadmap for fining Apple, and then banning Apple's payments monopoly under new regulations.Then South Korea and Japan trustbusters translate the EU's case and win nearly identical cases in their courts

What about regulatory capture? Well, we're starting to see regulators get smarter about reining in Big Tech. For example, the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act were designed to bypass the national courts of EU member states, especially Ireland, the tax-haven where US tech companies pretend to have their EU headquarters.

The thing about tax havens is that they always turn into crime havens, because if Apple can pretend to be Irish this week, it can pretend to be Maltese or Cypriot or Luxembourgeois next week. So Ireland has to let US Big Tech companies ignore EU privacy laws and other regulations, or it'll lose them to sleazier, more biddable competitor nations.

So from now on, EU tech regulation is getting enforced in the EU's federal courts, not in national courts, treating the captured Irish courts as damage and routing around them.

Canada needs to strengthen its own tech regulation enforcement, unwinding monopolistic mergers from the likes of Bell and Rogers, but most of all, Canada needs to pursue an interoperability agenda.

Last year, Canada passed two very exciting bills: Bill C244, a national Right to Repair law; and Bill C294, an interoperability law. Nominally, both of these laws allow Canadians to fix everything from tractors to insulin pumps, and to modify the software in their devices from games consoles to printers, so they will work with third party app stores, consumables and add-ons.

However, these bills are essentially useless, because these bills don’t permit Canadians to acquire tools to break digital locks. So you can modify your printer to accept third party ink, or interpret a car's diagnostic codes so any mechanic can fix it, but only if there isn't a digital lock stopping you from doing so, because giving someone a tool to break a digital lock remains illegal thanks to the law that James Moore and Tony Clement shoved down the nation's throat in 2012.

And every single printer, smart speaker, car, tractor, appliance, medical implant and hospital medical device has a digital lock that stops you from fixing it, modifying it, or using third party parts, software, or consumables in it.

Which means that these two landmark laws on repair and interop are useless. So why not get rid of the 2012 law that bans breaking digital locks? Because these laws are part of our trade agreement with the USA. This is a law needed to maintain tariff-free access to US markets.

I don’t know if you've heard, but Donald Trump is going to impose a 25%, across-the-board tariff against Canadian exports. Trudeau's response is to impose retaliatory tariffs, which will make every American product that Canadians buy 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish America!

You know what would be better? Abolish the Canadian laws that protect US Big Tech companies from Canadian competition. Make it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak and modify American technology products and services. Don't ask Facebook to pay a link tax to Canadian newspapers, make it legal to jailbreak all of Meta's apps and block all the ads in them, so Mark Zuckerberg doesn't make a dime off of us.

Make it legal for Canadian mechanics to jailbreak your Tesla and unlock every subscription feature, like autopilot and full access to your battery, for one price, forever. So you get more out of your car, and when you sell it, then next owner continues to enjoy those features, meaning they'll pay more for your used car.

That's how you hurt Elon Musk: not by being performatively appalled at his Nazi salutes. That doesn't cost him a dime. He loves the attention. No! Strike at the rent-extracting, insanely high-margin aftermarket subscriptions he relies on for his Swastikar business. Kick that guy right in the dongle!

Let Canadians stand up a Canadian app store for Apple devices, one that charges 3% to process transactions, not 30%. Then, every Canadian news outlet that sells subscriptions through an app, and every Canadian software author, musician and writer who sells through a mobile platform gets a 25% increase in revenues overnight, without signing up a single new customer.

But we can sign up new customers, by selling jailbreaking software and access to Canadian app stores, for every mobile device and games console to everyone in the world, and by pitching every games publisher and app maker on selling in the Canadian app store to customers anywhere without paying a 30% vig to American big tech companies.

We could sell every mechanic in the world a $100/month subscription to a universal diagnostic tool. Every farmer in the world could buy a kit that would let them fix their own John Deere tractors without paying a $200 callout charge for a Deere technician who inspects the repair the farmer is expected to perform.

They'd beat a path to our door. Canada could become a tech export powerhouse, while making everything cheaper for Canadian tech users, while making everything more profitable for anyone who sells media or software in an online store. And – this is the best part – it’s a frontal assault on the largest, most profitable US companies, the companies that are single-handedly keeping the S&P 500 in the black, striking directly at their most profitable lines of business, taking the revenues from those ripoff scams from hundreds of billions to zero, overnight, globally.

We don't have to stop at exporting reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to Americans! We could export the extremely lucrative tools of technological liberation to our American friends, too.

That's how you win a trade-war.

What about workers? Here we have good news and bad news.

The good news is that public approval for unions is at a high mark last seen in the early 1970s, and more workers want to join a union than at any time in generations, and unions themselves are sitting on record-breaking cash reserves they could be using to organize those workers.

But here's the bad news. The unions spent the Biden years, when they had the most favorable regulatory environment since the Carter administration, when public support for unions was at an all-time high, when more workers than ever wanted to join a union, when they had more money than ever to spend on unionizing those workers, doing fuck all. They allocatid mere pittances to union organizing efforts with the result that we finished the Biden years with fewer unionized workers than we started them with.

Then we got Trump, who illegally fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the NLRB without a quorum and thus unable to act on unfair labor practices or to certify union elections.

This is terrible. But it’s not game over. Trump fired the referees, and he thinks that this means the game has ended. But here's the thing: firing the referee doesn't end the game, it just means we're throwing out the rules. Trump thinks that labor law creates unions, but he's wrong. Unions are why we have labor law. Long before unions were legal, we had unions, who fought goons and ginks and company finks in` pitched battles in the streets.

That illegal solidarity resulted in the passage of labor law, which legalized unions. Labor law is passed because workers build power through solidarity. Law doesn't create that solidarity, it merely gives it a formal basis in law. Strip away that formal basis, and the worker power remains.

Worker power is the answer to vocational awe. After all, it's good for you and your fellow workers to feel a sense of mission about your jobs. If you feel that sense of mission, if you feel the duty to protect your users, your patients, your patrons, your students, a union lets you fulfill that duty.

We saw that in 2023 when Doug Ford promised to destroy the power of Ontario's public workers. Workers across the province rose up, promising a general strike, and Doug Ford folded like one of his cheap suits. Workers kicked the shit out of him, and we'll do it again. Promises made, promises kept.

The unscheduled midair disassembly of American labor law means that workers can have each others' backs again. Tech workers need other workers' help, because tech workers aren't scarce anymore, not after a half-million layoffs. Which means tech bosses aren't afraid of them anymore.

We know how tech bosses treat workers they aren't afraid of. Look at Jeff Bezos: the workers in his warehouses are injured on the job at 3 times the national rate, his delivery drivers have to pee in bottles, and they are monitored by AI cameras that snitch on them if their eyeballs aren't in the proscribed orientation or if their mouth is open too often while they drive, because policy forbids singing along to the radio.

By contrast, Amazon coders get to show up for work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want. Jeff Bezos isn't sentimental about tech workers, nor does he harbor a particularized hatred of warehouse workers and delivery drivers. He treats his workers as terribly as he can get away with. That means that the pee bottles are coming for the coders, too.

It's not just Amazon, of course. Take Apple. Tim Cook was elevated to CEO in 2011. Apple's board chose him to succeed founder Steve Jobs because he is the guy who figured out how to shift Apple's production to contract manufacturers in China, without skimping on quality assurance, or suffering leaks of product specifications ahead of the company's legendary showy launches.

Today, Apple's products are made in a gigantic Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou nicknamed "iPhone City.” Indeed, these devices arrive in shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles in a state of pristine perfection, manufactured to the finest tolerances, and free of any PR leaks.

To achieve this miraculous supply chain, all Tim Cook had to do was to make iPhone City a living hell, a place that is so horrific to work that they had to install suicide nets around the worker dorms to catch the plummeting bodies of workers who were so brutalized by Tim Cook's sweatshop that they attempted to take their own lives.

Tim Cook is also not sentimentally attached to tech workers, nor is he hostile to Chinese assembly line workers. He just treats his workers as badly as he can get away with, and with mass layoffs in the tech sector he can treat his coders much, much worse

How do tech workers get unions? Well, there are tech-specific organizations like Tech Solidarity and the Tech Workers Coalition. But tech workers will only get unions by having solidarity with other workers and receiving solidarity back from them. We all need to support every union. All workers need to have each other's backs.

We are entering a period of omnishambolic polycrisis.The ominous rumble of climate change, authoritarianism, genocide, xenophobia and transphobia has turned into an avalanche. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity have weaponized the internet, colonizing the 21st century's digital nervous system, using it to attack its host, threatening civilization itself.

The enshitternet was purpose-built for this kind of apocalyptic co-option, organized around giant corporations who will trade a habitable planet and human rights for a three percent tax cut, who default us all into twiddle-friendly algorithmic feed, and block the interoperability that would let us escape their clutches with the backing of powerful governments whom they can call upon to "protect their IP rights."

It didn't have to be this way. The enshitternet was not inevitable. It was the product of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals.

No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning Tony Clement, James Moore: Thou shalt make it a crime for Canadians to jailbreak their phones. Those guys chose enshittification, throwing away thousands of comments from Canadians who warned them what would come of it.

We don't have to be eternal prisoners of the catastrophic policy blunders of mediocre Tory ministers. As the omnicrisis polyshambles unfolds around us, we have the means, motive and opportunity to craft Canadian policies that bolster our sovereignty, protect our rights, and help us to set every technology user, in every country (including the USA) free.

The Trump presidency is an existential crisis but it also presents opportunities. When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. We once had an old, good internet, whose major defect was that it required too much technical expertise to use, so all our normie friends were excluded from that wondrous playground.

Web 2.0's online services had greased slides that made it easy for anyone to get online, but escaping from those Web 2.0 walled gardens meant was like climbing out of a greased pit. A new, good internet is possible, and necessary. We can build it, with all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0.

A place where we can find each other, coordinate and mobilize to resist and survive climate collapse, fascism, genocide and authoritarianism. We can build that new, good internet, and we must.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#enshittification-eh

[tanadrin]

@misanthropymademe Breaking this out so as not to get sidetracked, but the statistic on "78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck" is wildly wrong, and is based on really bad surveys by for-profit companies using them to advertise their services. They also never define exactly what "paycheck to paycheck" means, which leaves room for that to include anyone who would be ruined by an unexpected $200 expense or the people who complain about how after private school tuition, music lessons, annual European vacations, and topping up their savings they have barely any money left over.

As of 2021, about 40% of Americans "would struggle to come up with $400 for an unexpected expense." According to this report from 2019, "75% of Americans [are] doping okay or are comfortable financially." About 10% of adults struggled to pay bills because changes to monthly income; 16% were not able to pay all their expenses in the time covered by the survey period; 63% of adults said if they had an unexpected $400 expense they could cover it completely in cash, or could put it on a credit card and pay that credit card off by the end of the month.

If you have seen the "78%" statistic, you're not stupid, or gullible; it's a deliberate lie that plays to people's priors that are pessimistic about the world, which social media is naturally inclined to engage because of how it tickles our limbic system. But it is false, and I think it is evidence that people get a large chunk of their impression about the state of the world from social media.

[probablyasocialecologist]

First, let’s address the fact that hackers recently accessed the personal data of about 14,000 23andMe customers. Because of how 23andMe works—it has a “DNA Relatives” feature that lets users find people they are probably related to—this breach created 6.9 million “other users” who had data stolen in the breach, according to reporting by TechCrunch. This data included people’s names, birth year, relationships, percentage of DNA shared with other 23andMe users, and ancestry reports.

[...]

Getting your DNA or your loved ones’ DNA sequenced means you are potentially putting people who are related to those people at risk in ways that are easily predictable, but also in ways we cannot yet predict because these databases are still relatively new. I am writing this article right now because of the hack, but my stance on this issue has been the same for years, for reasons outside of the hack. In 2016, I moderated a panel at SXSW called “Is Your Biological Data Safe?,” which was broadly about the privacy implications of companies and other entities creating gigantic databases of people’s genetic code. This panel’s experts included a 23andMe executive as well as an FBI field agent. Everyone on the panel and everyone in the industry agrees that genetic information is potentially very sensitive, and the use of DNA to solve crimes is obviously well established.  At the time, many of the possible dangers of providing your genome to a DNA sequencing company were hypothetical. Since then, many of the hypothetical issues we discussed have become a reality in one way or another. For example, on that panel, we discussed the work of an artist who was turning lost strands of hair, wads of chewing gum, and other found DNA into visual genetic “portraits” of people. Last year, the Edmonton Police Service, using a company called Parabon, used a similar process to create 3D images of crime suspects using DNA from the case. The police had no idea if the portrait they generated actually looked like the suspect they wanted, and the practice is incredibly concerning. To its credit, 23andMe itself has steadfastly resisted law enforcement requests for information, but other large databases of genetic information have been used to solve crimes. Both 23andMe and Ancestry are regularly the recipients of law enforcement requests for data, meaning police do see these companies as potentially valuable data mines. 

[beefrobeefcal]

Beefro's Annual Report 2024

I have been tagged countless times regarding a recap and/or what I was thankful for by so many wonderful friendos - but I'll give credit to @jolapeno for kicking us off.

This time last year, there were only 400 of you following me while I wrote my silly little stories. I had no idea how the year would go, from coming close to deleting everything to finding a community of people and friends who I now count as irl besties. I changed up the content I write and have explored all sorts of new things with the love and support of all you.

I love you all so very much. Here's to keeping one another afloat and warm in 2025,

Beefro👌🥩💜

Below are the fics, posters and things that I am very proud of from 2024 (masterlist can be found here).

One Shots:

Purpose: I know, I know... I have hooted and tooted about this fic before, but I really loved this so much. The fact that @perotovar loved it also makes this extra sweet. I know I am not known for seriousness and such, but I loved the experience.

like a cigar: I love this one for many reasons but chief among them is the brainstorming with @noxturnalnymph and @strang3lov3 that brought it to life. That evening will stay with me from now until the day I yeet from this mortal coil and I love you both so very much.

what the hell is wrong with tim: A vanity project that sat in my wips for 5 months. I started it because I wanted @pedroscouts badges for 'Sex Pollen' and 'Tim Rockford'. Then all hell broke loose and in to the wip bin Tim went. I finally dug him out and plugged away at it and the end result is one I am proud of. I worked hard for Tim... and all he got was pussy-fluid induced conjunctivitis and an eyepatch.

Shorties:

For the Stars: This one was brought about for my beloved Deedle @bitchesuntitled - she has worked hard on her sobriety, then wisely and bravely chose to celebrate it with her community. I was honored to get to take part in this celebration.

Ezra Goes to Church: @toxicanonymity knew what we needed during the summer and brought about the Manspread Olympics. This shortie, sitting at 350 words, has brought me so much joy. A titan's girth in so few words.

Series:

There are Other Fish in the Sea: This one came from a deep place of ouch. I had found a community on here who enjoyed the same things I did and it blew up in my face bc some people cannot play nice in the sand box. I still remember sending this idea to a beloved moot and their response was "I'm sorry, what are you going to do to Frankie & Mouse???" It was cathartic and a blow out way to change direction and I love Ezra.

the BEEF: I know there is only one fic in this anthology series so far, but I love the concept for it so much (thanks to @covetyou). The grumpy old neighbour Joel that kicked it off really allowed me to be as unhinged and horny as I wanted and my love for him is eternal.

Posters:

This year, I took up making posters for my wips and fics to boost my moral in writing. It helped! Below are the ones that have really made me fluff my feather in my cap (some are still wips).

Things:

Monthly Prompt Challenge: In a bid to share my ideas and thots, I started this in September. So far, no one has told me to stop and I very much enjoy do this!

beef Art: This year, I had Canva introduced to me and I have never looked back. You can see some of the horrible things I have created here.

Community: I have been most fortunate to have been welcomed and held by some extremely fabulous folks on here. There are so many of you, from the casual reblogger to the routine ask dropper (@deathsholywaterr, looking at you 💋) to the beta fish (@weregirlbyknight) to the shy nonnies... and to my beloveds who's usernames/pics made my heart warm, all of you keep this beef smiling. Thank you.

tagging bc you're a repeat offender in my heart:

@strang3lov3 @noxturnalnymph @weregirlbyknight @whocaresstillthelouvre @bitchesuntitled

@goodwithcheese @jolapeno @secretelephanttattoo @perotovar @sp00kymulderr

@rebel-held @romanarose @endlessthxxghts @wintrwinchestr @xdaddysprincessxx

@toxicanonymity @pedrit0-pascalit0 @yopossum @hellfire-state-of-mind

@tinytinymenace @jennaispunk @crowandmousewritingco @yallhearsm @missredherring

@kedsandtubesocks @slutsoutgutsout @magpiepills @sr-lrn @maggiemayhemnj

@mothandpidgeon @schnarfer @mando-abs @timelordfreya @artsy-girl-76

@wordywarriorwrites @ace-turned-confused @studioghibelli @bluecookies-and-ink @evolnoomym

@covetyou

[mariacallous]

Last month, the Trump administration placed a $1 spending limit on most government-issued credit cards that federal employees use to cover travel and work expenses. The impacts are already widely felt.

At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists aren’t able to order equipment used to repair ships and radars. At the Food and Drug Administration, laboratories are experiencing delays in ordering basic supplies. At the National Park Service, employees are canceling trips to oversee crucial maintenance work. And at the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Aviation Administration, employees worry that mission-critical projects could be stalled. In many cases, employees are already unable to carry out the basic functions of their job.

“The longer this disruption lasts, the more the system will break,” says a USDA official who was granted anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak to the media about the looming crisis.

A researcher at the National Institutes of Health who tests new vaccines and treatments in rodents says he has had to put experiments on hold; his lab is not able to get certain necessary materials, such as antibodies, which are needed to assess immune response. “We have animals here that are aging that will pretty soon be too old to work with,” says the researcher, who requested anonymity as they aren’t authorized to speak publicly about the agency. Young mice and rats that are 6 to 8 weeks old are typically used for drug and vaccine studies, but some of the animals in their lab have now aged out of that window and may have to be euthanized.

They say NIH workers have been using internal listservs to ask for reagents and lab equipment from other buildings or institutions to try to compensate for shortages, but they’re not always able to track down what they need. The NIH is made up of 27 institutes and centers, and its Bethesda, Maryland, campus is spread across more than 75 buildings. “Sometimes you need something that's really niche, and you're just not going to find it from someone else on campus,” they say.

The change comes as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency continues to hunt for alleged examples of waste across the federal government. Late last month, DOGE announced that it was working to “simplify” the government’s largest credit card program, which issues GSA SmartPay travel and purchase cards for federal employees. Last Wednesday, the agency claimed 24,000 cards had been deactivated.

The credit card program allows federal workers to bypass the typical procurement process required to buy goods and services. A 2002 report from the Department of Commerce said that, “by avoiding the formal procurement process, GSA estimates the annual savings to be $1.2 billion.” It also enables federal employees to avoid paying sales tax on expenses that the government is exempt from.

At the FDA, labs that analyze samples to ensure that food, drugs, medical devices, and cosmetics are safe and meet regulatory standards are already facing shortages. "While we are always acutely aware of when Congress’ funding is going to run out, we are able to order supplies to keep things going in the lab. This abrupt ending felt like the rug was being pulled out from under us," says an employee at the FDA who requested anonymity because they aren't authorized to speak with the media.

The employee recently placed an order for pipette tips, an essential laboratory supply, but found that order was put on hold. "Now we are running out, asking colleagues at other offices to share what they might not be using,” they told WIRED.

In addition, workers say FDA labs now have to go through a lengthy process to order liquid nitrogen, which is used to keep ultra-cold freezers running. These freezers preserve samples of cells and other biological material that reflect years, and sometimes decades, of research. Delays in getting liquid nitrogen tanks could destroy that material. Previously, new tanks could usually be acquired the same day as putting in a request. Now, it takes a week or so to receive a tank after initiating a request.

An employee at the Environmental Protection Agency says her facility is not able to place regular orders of liquid nitrogen at the moment. “We have dozens of these freezers full of important environmental samples that are imminently at risk of being lost because we can no longer get our regular shipments of liquid nitrogen,” says the employee, who requested anonymity. These samples are used as part of research on detection and remediation methods for chemicals such as PFAS, which are found in many products and break down very slowly over time.

“Scientists are being forced to jerry-rig the connection points on these freezers to accept pressures of liquid nitrogen they were not designed to handle,” the employee says. “Divisions are resorting to bartering with each other to obtain needed items.”

The FDA and EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED.

The credit card freeze also means that federal researchers who were working on scientific manuscripts can’t pay journal fees, meaning they can’t submit their work to certain journals for publication.

An employee at a federal forensics lab told WIRED that spending limits mean the lab is no longer able to pay to ship evidence back to agents, effectively halting its ability to do casework. Before a case goes to trial, defendants have the right to access and review evidence that the prosecution intends to use against them, which includes access to the evidence in their case. Defendants are able to send that evidence to an outside lab for analysis if they choose. “Cases can’t progress until we return the evidence,” says the forensics lab worker, who asked to remain anonymous. “I basically can’t do my job right now.”

NIH employees were told that travel cards could not be used at all for 30 days, forcing scientists to cancel plans to attend a major infectious disease conference next week. USDA employees at the Pest Identification Technology Laboratory have stockpiled reagents used for molecular tests in advance of the spending limits, according to the USDA official.

FAA employees who travel to work on and test aviation systems worry the credit card freeze will prevent them from completing their projects. “We are allowed to use our personal cards in emergencies but none of us trust them to pay us back now,” says one employee.

The impacts have hit the National Park Service as well. One employee was poised to go on a trip to oversee road maintenance at a national monument when the change went into effect on February 20. “Unless I want to pay for it myself, I can’t go. I can’t pay for my hotel, my rental car, fuel for the car. Now I can’t carry out the mission,” the employee says. “Today, instead of focusing on other work, I’m focused on three different contingencies on how to handle this. Do I go? Do I call my engineering team and tell them to reschedule? And if so, when? The project is on an indefinite hold.”

A memo written to staff at the National Park Service specified that “all travel that is NOT related to national security, public safety, or immigration enforcement should be canceled if it begins on Wednesday, February 26, through the end of March 2025.” A long-term decision on the travel policy, it said, will come “at a later date.” Some NPS staffers were able to travel in February despite not getting official clearance. They have now been told no travel will be allowed in March. To date, roughly 75 trips have been canceled or rescheduled, according to a source familiar with the situation.

The National Park Service did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED.

Some government employees say they were given a warning prior to the change being announced on February 20. “We went out and bought cases and cases of toilet paper the night before,” another current employee at the National Park Service says. “There’s a general acknowledgement that things are going to break.”

That employee works in the Pacific West Region, which manages federal land in California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Nevada, as well as parks in Arizona, Montana, Guam, and American Samoa. While the GSA did allow for the possibility of exceptions to the clamp-down, the employee claims there are only four purchase cards with spending limits above $1 available for the entire region.

Some of these parks pay for services like internet and wireless on purchase cards—leaving staffers wondering if their work devices could soon be cut off. “Before someone can fix a bathroom a work order has to be issued,” the current employee explains. “That happens electronically. Like any business, we rely on email, Teams, and chat to get things done.”

The spending limits reflect Musk’s belief in zero-based budgeting. After he purchased Twitter, he slashed the budget to zero and forced employees to justify every expense. He also froze people’s corporate credit cards.

“With the Twitter pausing of payments, at some point we were in a meeting at 1 am on a Saturday, and it was like, ‘Hey, let's turn the credit cards off to see what bounces, and what happens,’" explained angel investor Jason Calacanis on the All In podcast in February. (Calacanis was part of Musk’s transition team at Twitter.) “And of course, we started getting calls ... The people who come first, they're probably the ones who are in on the biggest grift.”

Employees see it a different way. “There are so many controls in place to make sure fraud doesn’t happen,” alleges the current NPS staffer. “I honestly believe the only fraud occurring is being committed by Musk, [Russell] Vought, and [Donald] Trump.”

[femenaces]

I may or may not be one of the anonymous sources in this article

Edit, the text of the article for those who can’t view it (under the cut):

Last month, the Trump administration placed a $1 spending limit on most government-issued credit cards that federal employees use to cover travel and work expenses. The impacts are already widely felt.

At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists aren’t able to order equipment used to repair ships and radars. At the Food and Drug Administration, laboratories are experiencing delays in ordering basic supplies. At the National Park Service, employees are canceling trips to oversee crucial maintenance work. And at the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Aviation Administration, employees worry that mission-critical projects could be stalled. In many cases, employees are already unable to carry out the basic functions of their job.

“The longer this disruption lasts, the more the system will break,” says a USDA official who was granted anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak to the media about the looming crisis.

A researcher at the National Institutes of Health who tests new vaccines and treatments in rodents says he has had to put experiments on hold; his lab is not able to get certain necessary materials, such as antibodies, which are needed to assess immune response. “We have animals here that are aging that will pretty soon be too old to work with,” says the researcher, who requested anonymity as they aren’t authorized to speak publicly about the agency. Young mice and rats that are 6 to 8 weeks old are typically used for drug and vaccine studies, but some of the animals in their lab have now aged out of that window and may have to be euthanized.

They say NIH workers have been using internal listservs to ask for reagents and lab equipment from other buildings or institutions to try to compensate for shortages, but they’re not always able to track down what they need. The NIH is made up of 27 institutes and centers, and its Bethesda, Maryland, campus is spread across more than 75 buildings. “Sometimes you need something that's really niche, and you're just not going to find it from someone else on campus,” they say.

The change comes as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency continues to hunt for alleged examples of waste across the federal government. Late last month, DOGE announced that it was working to “simplify” the government’s largest credit card program, which issues GSA SmartPay travel and purchase cards for federal employees. Last Wednesday, the agency claimed 24,000 cards had been deactivated.

The credit card program allows federal workers to bypass the typical procurement process required to buy goods and services. A 2002 report from the Department of Commerce said that, “by avoiding the formal procurement process, GSA estimates the annual savings to be $1.2 billion.” It also enables federal employees to avoid paying sales tax on expenses that the government is exempt from.

At the FDA, labs that analyze samples to ensure that food, drugs, medical devices, and cosmetics are safe and meet regulatory standards are already facing shortages. "While we are always acutely aware of when Congress’ funding is going to run out, we are able to order supplies to keep things going in the lab. This abrupt ending felt like the rug was being pulled out from under us," says an employee at the FDA who requested anonymity because they aren't authorized to speak with the media.

The employee recently placed an order for pipette tips, an essential laboratory supply, but found that order was put on hold. "Now we are running out, asking colleagues at other offices to share what they might not be using,” they told WIRED.

In addition, workers say FDA labs now have to go through a lengthy process to order liquid nitrogen, which is used to keep ultra-cold freezers running. These freezers preserve samples of cells and other biological material that reflect years, and sometimes decades, of research. Delays in getting liquid nitrogen tanks could destroy that material. Previously, new tanks could usually be acquired the same day as putting in a request. Now, it takes a week or so to receive a tank after initiating a request.

An employee at the Environmental Protection Agency says her facility is not able to place regular orders of liquid nitrogen at the moment. “We have dozens of these freezers full of important environmental samples that are imminently at risk of being lost because we can no longer get our regular shipments of liquid nitrogen,” says the employee, who requested anonymity. These samples are used as part of research on detection and remediation methods for chemicals such as PFAS, which are found in many products and break down very slowly over time.

“Scientists are being forced to jerry-rig the connection points on these freezers to accept pressures of liquid nitrogen they were not designed to handle,” the employee says. “Divisions are resorting to bartering with each other to obtain needed items.”

The FDA and EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED.

The credit card freeze also means that federal researchers who were working on scientific manuscripts can’t pay journal fees, meaning they can’t submit their work to certain journals for publication.

An employee at a federal forensics lab told WIRED that spending limits mean the lab is no longer able to pay to ship evidence back to agents, effectively halting its ability to do casework. Before a case goes to trial, defendants have the right to access and review evidence that the prosecution intends to use against them, which includes access to the evidence in their case. Defendants are able to send that evidence to an outside lab for analysis if they choose. “Cases can’t progress until we return the evidence,” says the forensics lab worker, who asked to remain anonymous. “I basically can’t do my job right now.”

NIH employees were told that travel cards could not be used at all for 30 days, forcing scientists to cancel plans to attend a major infectious disease conference next week. USDA employees at the Pest Identification Technology Laboratory have stockpiled reagents used for molecular tests in advance of the spending limits, according to the USDA official.

FAA employees who travel to work on and test aviation systems worry the credit card freeze will prevent them from completing their projects. “We are allowed to use our personal cards in emergencies but none of us trust them to pay us back now,” says one employee.

The impacts have hit the National Park Service as well. One employee was poised to go on a trip to oversee road maintenance at a national monument when the change went into effect on February 20. “Unless I want to pay for it myself, I can’t go. I can’t pay for my hotel, my rental car, fuel for the car. Now I can’t carry out the mission,” the employee says. “Today, instead of focusing on other work, I’m focused on three different contingencies on how to handle this. Do I go? Do I call my engineering team and tell them to reschedule? And if so, when? The project is on an indefinite hold.”

A memo written to staff at the National Park Service specified that “all travel that is NOT related to national security, public safety, or immigration enforcement should be canceled if it begins on Wednesday, February 26, through the end of March 2025.” A long-term decision on the travel policy, it said, will come “at a later date.” Some NPS staffers were able to travel in February despite not getting official clearance. They have now been told no travel will be allowed in March. To date, roughly 75 trips have been canceled or rescheduled, according to a source familiar with the situation.

The National Park Service did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED.

Some government employees say they were given a warning prior to the change being announced on February 20. “We went out and bought cases and cases of toilet paper the night before,” another current employee at the National Park Service says. “There’s a general acknowledgement that things are going to break.”

That employee works in the Pacific West Region, which manages federal land in California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Nevada, as well as parks in Arizona, Montana, Guam, and American Samoa. While the GSA did allow for the possibility of exceptions to the clamp-down, the employee claims there are only four purchase cards with spending limits above $1 available for the entire region.

Some of these parks pay for services like internet and wireless on purchase cards—leaving staffers wondering if their work devices could soon be cut off. “Before someone can fix a bathroom a work order has to be issued,” the current employee explains. “That happens electronically. Like any business, we rely on email, Teams, and chat to get things done.”

The spending limits reflect Musk’s belief in zero-based budgeting. After he purchased Twitter, he slashed the budget to zero and forced employees to justify every expense. He also froze people’s corporate credit cards.

“With the Twitter pausing of payments, at some point we were in a meeting at 1 am on a Saturday, and it was like, ‘Hey, let's turn the credit cards off to see what bounces, and what happens,’" explained angel investor Jason Calacanis on the All In podcast in February. (Calacanis was part of Musk’s transition team at Twitter.) “And of course, we started getting calls ... The people who come first, they're probably the ones who are in on the biggest grift.”

Employees see it a different way. “There are so many controls in place to make sure fraud doesn’t happen,” alleges the current NPS staffer. “I honestly believe the only fraud occurring is being committed by Musk, [Russell] Vought, and [Donald] Trump.”

[political-us]

The Trump administration is looking to overturn a Biden-era rule limiting major banks’ ability to penalize customers with overdraft fees, a reversal that has major banking associations salivating at the mouth. Last week, House Financial Service Committee Chair French Hill (R-Ark.) and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-S.C.) introduced legislation to repeal the rule, which eliminated junk fees associated with account overdrafting — capping the penalty at $5 — and gave banks several options to manage overdraft costs without placing an excess burden on consumers. The Trump administration endorsed the legislation on Monday, with Office of Management and Budget Director and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Interim Director Russ Vought writing on X that he was “grateful” that the representatives had introduced legislation overturning the rule. “Passing this important legislation will immediately further President Trump’s deregulatory agenda,” he wrote. At the time the rule was passed, former CFPB Director Rohit Chopra wrote that the directive was expected to “add up to $5 billion in annual overdraft fee savings to consumers, or $225 per household that pays overdraft fees.” “Over the past few decades, these highly profitable overdraft loans have increased consumer costs by billions of dollars,” Chopra argued. “The loans have also led to tens of millions of consumers losing access to banking services, as well as facing negative credit reporting that has prevented them from opening another account in the future.” The rule angered major banking organizations. In December, the The American Bankers Association sued the Biden administration alongside a coalition of banking groups, accusing the CFPB of exceeding its authority and claiming that the regulations would harm consumers. On Monday, several banking associations once again called on the CFPB to withdraw the rule. In their announcement, Reps. Scott and Hill wrote that they have the “support of key stakeholders, including the Consumer Bankers Association, Independent Community Bankers of America, American Bankers Association, and America’s Credit Unions.” Under the auspices of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the CFPB has become a target of the Trump administration’s gutting of the federal workforce, which has included regulatory agencies providing oversight to major corporations. In a statement released earlier this month, the White House accused the CFPB of functioning “as another woke, weaponized arm of the bureaucracy that leverages its power against certain industries and individuals disfavored by so-called ‘elites.’” Musk added “CFPB RIP “ on X, writing that while the organization did “above zero good things,” they “still need to go.” Last week, Vought ordered all work at the bureau to cease, pending layoffs at the organization amid efforts to shut it down entirely. Over the weekend, a federal judge blocked the mass firing of CFPB staffers following a union challenge. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) torched the administration’s actions in a recent interview with Rolling Stone. “ Donald Trump campaigned on lowering costs for working families ‘on day one,’ she said. “He is now sidelining the agency that over the last dozen years, has returned $21 billion directly to people who got cheated by giant financial institutions. In other words, his plan is to do nothing on reducing costs, but sure enough, put in place a plan to raise costs for people who are working hardest in our economy.”

[squidsinashirt]

**Shoving my way through the tabloids and paparazzi**

Mr Tracy, the work you have done for the world's environmental charities is phenomenal, it's amazing that you're so passionate about not only our world's oceans but it's rainforests, it's grasslands and it's human life too.

At times it must be challenging trying to balance your work with humans and your passion for wildlife what with how humans have destroyed the worlds ecosystem.

Tell me, do you see a future with nature and the hustle and bustle of the human world working together in peace? How do you think we could achieve that?

– Nature&Nurture news blog reporter.🌿

Hi there! 👋

Apologies for the delay in replying to this - love your stuff, long time subscriber! Wanted to give you a decent reply so I hope this is okay.

That’s very kind of you to say but I can’t take all the credit. Tracy Industries is committed to all of the green pledges we have made, and our successes with various third party organisations and projects is only thanks to the enthusiastic effort of all of our board, trustees, senior management and of course, our CEO (who is incredibly supportive of all of our projects).

(I just send comms and put up posters and annoy people at the annual galas once they’ve had a drink or two)

Moving to being a zero-waste society has been a huge achievement, but we shouldn’t be stopping there. We’ve spent a lot of time ripping every resources from the planet and doing what we like without much concern for everything else that shares this space with us. We should be actively investing in restoration programmes that prioritise renewal over our own priorities, and vehemently protecting what is already there.

So do I see a future with nature and our very busy society coexisting - it has to! Nothing works if nature doesn’t. We came very close to the brink not so long ago, and we can’t allow that to happen again. We’re the custodians of our little planet, and it’s up to us, and us alone, to do better. Everything around us is relying that, as a population, we pick up that responsibility, including for our own kids and so on.

I had a really great afternoon recently organised with Robby Shelby (co-creator of the Supreme Barrier Reef with his mom, Dr Helen Shelby) with their junior conservation team. They’re all elementary school aged kids, learning to dive and also learning about the work that is ongoing there, why it matters and how to continue it. It’s amazing to see the next generation keen to take the reins - and I had an awesome time getting schooled on turtles and jellyfish.

How to achieve that - that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it. There’s a reason various world bodies have spent so long fighting over it and I guess it’s because it’s complicated, on paper and in practice.

I would say my own philosophy is that we ought to be leaving the world a better place than it was when we stepped into it. Everyone has an equal individual responsibility to do what they can. Food choices you make (hi fellow vegan gang 🌱), where you spend your money if you can, and educating other people. Treating the planet and everything that lives here kindly (including each other so, y’know, be excellent to each other!)

I guess I’m just very lucky that I can access resources that mean we can do a lot more.

For the bigger stuff, there are obviously the three main goals of the World Ecological Summit (not going to have time to go into the other 47 sub points):

1. Move to entirely emission free fuels and technology for all transport, which we’re making really good strides in, which is super exciting. As a bit of a side note, International Rescue has ⅖ of our ‘birds totally clean (see, nobody is perfect except Thunderbird Four). My aim over the next 12 months is to try and get to a point where we have a 95% sustainable fuel option ready to trial for each of them - currently sitting at 75% average, which is good but… we don’t do ‘good’ at iR, we do better. We use three different fuels because of the differing technologies each of our ships carries and the environments they work in so it’s a little more complicated. But that’s one of my pet projects (along with our incredible engineering department) so check in with me in the fall!

2. Our largest industrial leaders taking responsibility in being proactive, investing in green technologies and processes, and using their corporate responsibility for good. I think my previous answer about Tracy Industries kind of covers this one, but it’s important that those with the biggest weight to throw around do it in a way that benefits the most vulnerable in our society. Which leads nicely into point three…

3. Protecting the most vulnerable ecosystems, territories and people. It’s really easy to point the finger at humans for the environmental concerns we all share, but that’s completely unfair toward the most vulnerable populations amongst us, who are usually the ones who have had the most impact from what we’ve caused. We should be improving our environment, whilst also addressing the inequalities in food hunger, poverty, ill health, education that still exist. They aren’t necessarily two separate issues and we are an incredibly advanced society, - there’s no reason people should still be living with such huge levels of difference.

So I guess the summary of all of this is - people need to lift their head and care a bit more, and not be afraid to take on the responsibility of being better to environment and to each other.

Thanks again for the query - always happy to ramble to you guys! If you’d like to come along to the next visit to our rainforest project on the Bolivian border, we’re due to be out there early May and you’d be more than welcome! You can get me on g.tracy@tracyindustries.org 🫶🏻

[whencyclopedia]

Sydney Harbour Bridge Construction

The Sydney Harbour Bridge – affectionately known as The Coathanger by Australians – was opened to great fanfare and a touch of scandal on 19 March 1932 and was the longest steel arch bridge in the world at the time, with a span of 503 metres (1,650 ft) and standing at 134 metres (440 ft) above Sydney harbour.

Sydney Harbour Bridge During Construction

State Library of New South Wales (Public Domain)

Before the bridge was constructed, there were two Sydneys – the north side, with a population of around 300,000, and the south side and central business district, with 600,000 people. A regular and reliable ferry service took passengers across the harbour, carrying 13 million annually by 1908. There was also a land route from the south to the north shore, which was a time-consuming journey known as the 'five bridges' – horses and cars crossed a series of bridges over the Parramatta River, a detour that added 20-30 kilometres (12-19 mi) to the trip.

As Sydney's population grew and up to 75 ferries crisscrossed the harbour, often in dangerous and foggy conditions, the need for a bridge to connect the northern and southern shores gained momentum. One extraordinary man, Dr John Job Crew Bradfield (1867-1943), envisioned a structure that would unite Sydney – a minimalist, sweeping steel structure embodying modernist design aesthetics, breaking free from the city's convict-era agrarian roots.

Early Designs

Charles Darwin's grandfather, Dr Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), was inspired by reports of the NSW colony and mentioned the vision of a 'proud arch' in his poem Visit of Hope to Sydney Cove, near Botany Bay, published in 1789. However, the first person to seriously propose a harbour bridge was the emancipated convict and New South Wales (NSW) government architect Francis Greenway (1777-1837). In an 1815 report to Governor Macquarie (1762-1824), Greenway raised the idea and also wrote to the editor of The Australian newspaper, which published Greenway's letter on 28 April 1825:

Thus in the event of the Bridge being thrown across from Dawes Battery to the North Shore, a town would be built on that shore, and would have formed with these buildings a grand whole, that would have indeed surprised anyone entering the harbour; and would have given an idea of strength and magnificence that would have reflected credit and glory on the colony and the Mother Country.

(The Australian, Letter to the Editor)

Greenway's vision was never adopted. The engineering skills and steel technology to span the harbour were not yet available, and the NSW colony was focused on agricultural production and settlement.

The next proposal was put forward in 1857 when English-trained engineer Peter Henderson designed a bridge from Dawes Battery (now Dawes Point on the south side) to Milsons Point. Henderson had worked with Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859), the renowned and groundbreaking 19th-century engineer who designed London's Paddington Station, the Great Western Railway linking London with the west of England and South Wales, and various steamships.

Sketch of Proposed Sydney Harbour Bridge

P. E. Henderson (Public Domain)

Henderson's sketch for a cast iron bridge supported by two pylons on either side of the harbour is the oldest existing practical plan. The population and economic activity on the northside in 1857 were not significant enough to convince the colonial government. It is also likely that engineering knowledge at the time would have resulted in a bridge that may have fallen into the harbour. Cast or wrought iron, which is not as strong as steel, might not have been capable of withstanding the stresses of a large span in a harbour with strong tides and a city frequently buffeted by high winds.

By the turn of the century, north shore residents had formed the Sydney and North Shore Junction League, championing a bridge inspired by the vision of Sir Henry Parkes (1815-1896), a local politician and five-time premier of NSW. Parkes had called for a bridge to improve transportation and promote urban development. This resulted in Minister for Works E. W. O'Sullivan (1846-1910), announcing a design competition in January 1900. Submissions were received from local and international engineers.

Continue reading...

[224bbaker]

🎂🥂Chapter Fifteen: The Case of the Birthday Boy🤵🏻‍♂️

You are cordially invited to:  Carlton House 7pm. August 20th, 1891

In which James faces the facts, Fitzy learns how to "yes-and," and the Toast of London attends Lucius’s Peppermint’s Annual Charity-a-thon…

Transcript here and at 224bbaker.com, where you can also find bios, more info, and links to our social media.

Full credits and content notes below the cut

CREDITS

Written and Directed by Ian Geers and Lauren Grace Thompson. Sound designed by Sarah Buchynski. Produced and edited by Lauren Grace Thompson. Original music by Baldemar and Ian Geers. 

CAST

Hampton Fawx: Jeremy Thompson

James Stallion: Chris Vizurraga

Madge Stallion: Katie McLean Hainsworth

Fitzy: Zack McKenna

Archie Cartwright: Shawn Pfautsch

Lucius Peppermint: Evin McQuistion

Thomas Rake: Sam Hubbard

Weatherby: Allie Babich

John Watson: Tom Crowley

Lottie: Beth Eyre

Party Guest: Rachel Jones

Times Reporter: Sarah Coakley Price

Standard Reporter: Chris Hainsworth

CONTENT NOTES

This episode contains adult language and sexual innuendo. Choking sounds. Murder.

[luoyunxifan]

Spotlight on Acting:

Luo Yunxi as Tantai Jin / Ming Ye / Cang Jiumin in Till the End of the Moon

In 2023, Luo Yunxi (罗云熙) starred in the Chinese fantasy (xianxia) drama Till the End of the Moon (长月烬明), where he played the following roles:

- Tantai Jin (澹台烬) / Cang Jiumin (沧九旻), hostage prince, King of Jing, and eventually an immortal disciple

- Ming Ye (冥夜), the War God of Shangqing Divine Realm

- Chu Mo (初魔), the Ancient Devil God 

Luo Yunxi also sang covers of "Black Moonlight" (黑月光) and “Let’s Be Like This for 10,000 years” (要不然我们就这样一万年) on the soundtrack. 

This drama has had huge international reach and has put Luo Yunxi on the world stage. (More about this below)

Drama Summary:

The drama is based on the novel Black Moonlight Holds the BE Script by Teng Luo Weizhi. It tells the story of the demon fetus Tantai Jin, who was born to become the new Devil God, and the immortal Li Susu, who travels back in time to stop him. Tantai Jin is caught between good and evil, his journey taking him from a hostage prince to a king, to the disciple of an immortal sect.

Success:

The drama has been released in more than 30 countries and regions, including North America, Europe, and Australia, and on 13 broadcast platforms. 

It has broken many records and won several awards including the Most Commercially Valuable Film & TV IP at the 7th Global Licensing Expo in Shanghai, and 2023 Drama of the Year Award at Weibo Night.

Till the End of the Moon has been praised for its innovative storyline that emphasises the hero's understanding of his existence and the strength of the hero's internal locus of control. Its exquisite costumes, depictions of Dunhuang culture and Chinese mythology have been credited with promoting classic Chinese culture.

It was included as the third most popular Chinese cultural intellectual property of the year, wholly representing the keyword gufeng xianxia in the 2023 CSIC Annual Report on the Chinese Cultural Symbols & International Communication Index released at the World Internet Conference.

Genre:

Costume, romance, fantasy

Where to watch:

Rakuten Viki, Youku, and Apple TV (Will vary by region) Source: Baidu Baike, Wikipedia

Photo and information credits: Luo Yunxi News Baidu Baike Youku 长月烬明 Weibo

[lightdancingwords]

Crossroads of the Heart - Part Eighteen of ?

Pairings: CJ Braxton x Y/N Female reader

Series Summary: Y/N is a psychology major assigned to shadow CJ at The Stand, unaware he's the one who basically saved her life four years before. CJ is unaware that she's the one who left a notable impact on him over the phone four years ago. As they navigate the work at The Stand, they develop a spark that demands revelation and connection.

Word Count: 4,319

Tags/Warnings: Light fluff, mentions of s*icide, a touch of angst, 18+ implied smut

A/N: Comments, Likes, Reblogs, Kind feedback are always highly appreciated. Please let me know if you want to be added to the tag list!

Dividers: credit to @saradika-graphics

Chapter Eighteen: Speaking Up

The next day at The Stand was back to normal—or at least, as normal as things ever got.

The morning was steady, the phone lines constantly buzzing, volunteers moving efficiently through their shifts. The storm was over, but its aftermath was still playing out in the conversations happening on the helpline—people dealing with flood damage, with anxiety, with the weight of what they had just endured.

Y/N was in the thick of it, a headset over her ears, her voice calm and steady as she helped someone navigate their own storm.

CJ, meanwhile, was buried in emails.

He hated this part of the job.

The never-ending administrative work. The endless stream of requests, grant reports, donation updates, and networking opportunities—most of which made him want to bash his head against the desk.

Still, he managed it, scanning each email with the apathetic efficiency of a man who had done this way too many times before.

Until—

He paused, his eyes narrowing at one particular subject line.

Invitation: Annual Charity Gala & Fundraiser

CJ groaned before he even opened it.

Because he already knew what this was.

Sighing, he clicked into the email and skimmed the details, his frown deepening with every word.

By the time he reached the end, he was done.

"Priya," he called, already rubbing his temples.

Priya, who was already half-expecting something like this, strolled into his office, arms crossed. "Let me guess. More paperwork?"

"Worse," CJ muttered, gesturing at his screen. "A fundraiser."

Priya arched a brow, stepping closer to glance at his monitor. "Hobnobbing with the rich again?"

"Apparently." CJ sighed, leaning back in his chair. "An annual charity gala. A great opportunity to ‘strengthen our network of donors and ensure continued support for organizations like The Stand.’" He looked up at Priya. "Translation? I have to suit up and schmooze with a bunch of people who only care about tax write-offs."

Priya winced, her sympathy genuine. "Oof. Yeah. That’s the worst."

"Thank you," CJ muttered, rubbing his face. "I hate these events."

"I know," Priya said, nodding. "But you also know we need them."

CJ groaned, tilting his head back. "I know."

And that was the worst part.

Because as much as he despised these kinds of fundraisers—where people pretended to care, where they talked about impact but only gave just enough to make themselves look good—he couldn’t avoid it.

Because The Stand needed money.

Because without donors, without the support from these kinds of people, organizations like his didn’t survive.

"We’ve got to play the game," Priya reminded him, her voice gentle but firm. "You hate it, but it keeps the lights on. It keeps the helpline running. It pays our volunteers."

CJ sighed. "Yeah. I know."

Priya smirked slightly. "Besides, maybe you’ll meet a rich philanthropist who actually gives a damn this time."

CJ snorted. "Doubtful."

"Stranger things have happened," she teased. "Like you being in love and not a complete workaholic anymore."

CJ shot her a look. "Go away."

Priya laughed, patting his desk before turning toward the door. "I’ll start looking into the event details. You start mentally preparing yourself for social interaction."

"I hate everything," CJ muttered under his breath.

Priya smirked. "And yet, you’ll go because you love this place."

CJ exhaled, rubbing the back of his neck. "Unfortunately."

As Priya walked out, CJ leaned back in his chair, glaring at the email like it had personally offended him.

Because he knew she was right.

He’d go.

He’d play the game.

But he wouldn’t like it.

Lunchtime was a welcome break. CJ and Y/N had taken their food into his office, away from the usual chatter of the break room, seeking a moment of quiet. It was just the two of them, their takeout containers spread out over his desk, the soft hum of the heater filling the space. CJ poked at his food, still thinking about the damn fundraiser. Y/N, ever perceptive, picked up on it immediately. "Okay, Braxton. Spill." CJ smirked, glancing at her. "I already told you about my day. You were there." "Mmhmm," Y/N hummed, resting her chin in her hand. "But I know that face. You’ve got something on your mind. So spill." CJ sighed, leaning back in his chair. "I got invited to a fundraiser." Y/N blinked, tilting her head. "Like, a fancy one?" "The worst kind," CJ muttered, running a hand through his hair. "A charity gala, full of rich donors who I have to schmooze with so they’ll maybe throw some money our way." Y/N winced. "Oof. Yeah, that sounds terrible." "Thank you," CJ said, pointing his fork at her. "Finally, someone gets it." "Priya doesn’t?" "Priya absolutely gets it," CJ admitted. "She just reminded me that I have to do it anyway." Y/N smirked, taking a bite of her food. "Well, she’s not wrong." "Don’t encourage her," CJ groaned. Y/N chuckled before giving him a thoughtful look. "Do you… want me there?" CJ paused, looking over at her. "Only if you want to go," he said honestly. "I don’t want to force you into that." Y/N pursed her lips, tapping her fingers against the table. "I… don’t know." CJ nodded, not the least bit surprised. "I get it. These kinds of events suck." "I just… don’t know if I’d fit in at something like that," Y/N admitted, playing with the edge of her sleeve. "It’s not really my world." "It’s not mine either," CJ muttered. "I’m just faking it for a paycheck." Y/N smiled softly. "You’ll handle it just fine, though." CJ arched a brow. "Oh yeah? How do you figure?" Y/N leaned in slightly, resting her elbow on the desk. "Because you’ve got charm, intelligence, and good looks—basically the perfect combination for convincing rich people to give you money." CJ smirked. "You think I’m charming?" Y/N rolled her eyes but smirked back. "You know you are." "And intelligent?" CJ teased. "Mmhmm." "And good-looking?" Y/N laughed, shaking her head. "Oh my God, don’t let this go to your head." "Too late," CJ said smugly, popping a fry into his mouth. Y/N giggled, nudging his leg under the desk. "Seriously, though. You’ll handle it. You know how to talk to people, and you actually care about what you’re fundraising for. That makes a huge difference." CJ exhaled, nodding. "Yeah. I know. I still hate it, though." "And yet, you’ll do it," Y/N said, smiling warmly. "Because you love The Stand. Because you want to keep helping people. And because, like it or not, you’re really good at this stuff." CJ smirked slightly, reaching over to tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear. "You really know how to hype me up, huh?" "I do my best," Y/N teased, leaning into his touch. "But, seriously. You got this." CJ sighed but nodded. "Yeah. Guess I don’t have a choice." Y/N grinned. "Nope." CJ chuckled, shaking his head before returning to his food. The gala was still going to be a pain. But at least now? It felt a little more manageable.

CJ had never enjoyed these types of events, but he had gotten very good at faking it. The venue was lavish, all polished marble floors and sparkling chandeliers, the kind of place that screamed old money and excessive wealth. Guests milled about in tailored suits and designer gowns, glasses of champagne in hand, the murmur of conversation blending seamlessly with the elegant hum of a live jazz band playing in the corner. CJ adjusted his cufflinks, already itching to be anywhere else, but he had a job to do. Y/N had opted not to come, and he hadn’t been the least bit surprised when she told him. "I just… can’t," she had admitted earlier that afternoon, fidgeting with her sleeve. "These kinds of people—they make me anxious. I’ll just be worrying about everything, and I don’t want to be a distraction to you." CJ had immediately taken her into his arms, pressing a kiss to her forehead. "I don’t want you to do anything you’re not comfortable with, sweetheart. It’s okay." "You’re not mad?" "Mad? Y/N, I love you. That’s all that matters. I’ll be fine." And honestly? He was fine. He could handle these kinds of people. He knew how to maneuver through these rooms, how to play the game, how to smile and shake hands and make them feel like they were doing something profound by simply writing a check. So, that’s what he did. He charmed. He worked the room with an ease that he didn’t necessarily feel, but after years of running The Stand, he knew how to make people listen. He had in-depth discussions about why The Stand was necessary, about how many lives had been changed because of the helpline, about the impact it had—not just in their city, but in the entire network of crisis support. And, as much as he hated to admit it, the strategy worked. By the time he made his way toward the bar to grab a drink, he was already securing potential donations, business cards filling his pocket like tiny victories. Then— He turned. And froze. Because standing just a few feet away was a man he had only ever seen once before. A man he had ordered out of The Stand after he humiliated his own daughter in front of her colleagues. Henry Y/L/N. Y/N’s father. CJ’s stomach tightened instantly, but he didn’t let it show. Instead, he remained perfectly composed, rolling his shoulders back as he turned fully to face him. Henry had definitely seen him too, because his expression flickered with something—surprise, followed quickly by the kind of politeness that came from years of high society expectations.

"Mr. Braxton," Henry said smoothly, stepping forward. "Didn’t expect to see you here." CJ forced a polite, neutral expression. "Likewise." Henry extended a hand, his gaze steady. CJ hesitated for half a second before reaching out and shaking it—because if there was one thing CJ had learned over the years, it was that playing civil was sometimes the best strategy. Even if he wanted to tell this man exactly what he thought of him. "I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised," Henry continued, adjusting the cuff of his expensive-looking suit. "A fundraiser like this is important for people in your line of work. These events keep places like yours running, don’t they?" CJ gave a tight smile. "That they do." Henry hummed thoughtfully, swirling the whiskey in his glass. "I’ve heard quite a bit about The Stand. It’s a noble cause, I’ll admit. Important work. Though I imagine it can be… quite demanding." CJ’s jaw ticked slightly. "It is," he said, voice even. "But it’s worth it. Every day." Henry studied him for a long moment. "I also imagine it can be quite difficult to maintain something like that while balancing a personal life." CJ’s grip on his drink tightened slightly, but he didn’t let his expression change. He knew exactly what Henry was getting at. This wasn’t about The Stand. This was about Y/N. But CJ refused to take the bait. "It’s a challenge," CJ said smoothly. "But I manage." Henry nodded slowly, taking a sip of his drink before sighing. "I suppose I should thank you." CJ raised an eyebrow. "For what?" "For looking after my daughter," Henry said, his voice steady, unreadable. "I assume she’s doing well?" CJ’s chest tightened. Because now Henry wanted to ask? Now, after everything, he suddenly cared?

CJ had handled a lot of uncomfortable conversations in his life. But this? Now, he had the audacity to ask about her. "I assume she’s doing well?" CJ’s fingers tightened around his glass, but outwardly, his face remained neutral. Controlled. Because CJ Braxton didn’t explode. He didn’t make scenes at high-profile events. No, he used words. And right now, Henry was about to get a lesson in what those could do. CJ set his drink down carefully on the bar, rolling his shoulders back before leveling Henry with a look so steady, so unshakable, that for the first time, the older man’s confident exterior wavered just slightly. "You want to know how Y/N is doing?" CJ asked quietly, his voice calm—too calm. Henry frowned slightly, tilting his head. "Yes, of course—" "The first time I met your daughter," CJ cut in smoothly, "she called The Stand nearly five years ago. She was alone. She was in pain. And she was contemplating whether her life was even worth living." Henry stiffened. CJ didn’t stop. "She didn’t think she mattered. She told me she felt so unwanted, so irrelevant in her own family, that maybe—just maybe—she was better off gone." The words hung in the air like a threat, pressing between them, sinking deep into Henry’s chest. CJ watched the moment the realization hit. The slight tension in Henry’s jaw. The way his grip on his whiskey tightened. The way he suddenly couldn’t quite hold CJ’s gaze. "That phone call? That night?" CJ continued, his voice unwavering. "It saved her life. I saved her life. Because she didn’t have you. Because you made her feel like she was never enough—and when she finally broke under the weight of that? She had to call a stranger just to feel like she mattered." Henry inhaled sharply, his chest rising and falling as if processing the weight of CJ’s words. But CJ wasn’t done. "So yeah," CJ murmured, tilting his head slightly. "She’s doing well. She’s stronger than you ever gave her credit for. And you know what? She got there without you." Silence. A long, heavy silence. CJ didn’t break eye contact, didn’t give Henry a single inch to recover. And for the first time since this bullshit conversation started, Henry Y/L/N actually looked shaken. He opened his mouth once, then closed it. He glanced at his drink, as if searching for something to say—but for once, he had nothing. CJ exhaled slowly, shaking his head. "I keep The Stand going for people like her," he said, softer now but no less firm. "For the ones who call when they don’t think they have anyone else. Because I know what it’s like to be on the other end of that line, to hear someone breaking and not knowing if they’ll make it through the night." He took a step back, his voice dropping lower—final, absolute. "And if you ever cared about her at all, Henry, you'd take a long, hard look at the man in the mirror and ask yourself if the damage you caused is something you can ever fix." Another beat of silence. Then, CJ picked up his drink, took one last, slow sip, and set it down. "Enjoy your night," he said smoothly before walking away, leaving Henry standing completely speechless among a sea of people who would never know what had just transpired. And for the first time that evening? CJ felt like he had actually done something worthwhile.

The gala had finally wound down, the last of the too-firm handshakes and fake smiles fading as CJ stepped outside into the cool night air. He loosened his tie as he walked toward his car, exhaling deeply, letting the weight of the evening roll off his shoulders. He had done what he needed to do. He had played the game, secured more than a few hefty donations, and ensured The Stand would continue running smoothly for a while longer. And, most importantly? He had said what needed to be said to Henry Y/L/N. Not that he was going to tell Y/N that. That conversation would stay between him and the man who needed to hear it most. Instead, as he drove home, his focus shifted to something far more important—her. When CJ stepped inside their apartment, he was immediately greeted by the comforting scent of something warm—tea, maybe, or the faint traces of whatever Y/N had cooked earlier. She was curled up on the couch in one of his hoodies, a book open in her lap, but the moment she heard the door, she perked up, a sleepy smile forming on her lips. "Hey," she murmured, stretching slightly. "You're home." CJ smirked, tossing his suit jacket over a chair before walking over to her. "That I am." Y/N set her book aside and reached for him, and he didn’t hesitate—he sank down onto the couch beside her, pulling her into his arms, breathing her in. God, he had missed her. "How was it?" she asked softly, resting her chin against his shoulder. CJ exhaled, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. "Surprisingly successful. Got a number of big donations lined up. Should keep us running comfortably for a while." Y/N smiled, tracing soft circles against his chest. "See? I told you you’d handle it just fine." CJ smirked, tilting her chin up slightly so he could press a slow, lingering kiss against her lips. "Yeah, yeah. You love being right, don’t you?" "Mmm," Y/N hummed against his mouth. "Maybe a little." CJ chuckled before pulling her closer, settling in, letting himself finally relax. "But I missed you," he admitted, his voice lower now, more honest. "A lot." Y/N smiled against his skin. "I missed you too." CJ sighed, holding her just a little tighter. He wasn’t going to tell her about Henry. He wasn’t going to let that man steal a single moment of this. Because this—coming home to her, holding her, loving her—this was what mattered. Everything else? It could wait.

The warmth of their apartment, the familiar scent of her, the quiet hum of the world outside—it all settled into CJ as he held Y/N close, her body tucked perfectly against his. He had made it through the gala. He had done what he needed to do. But his mind was still elsewhere. Still lingering on the conversation with Henry. On the words he had said. "The first time I met your daughter, she called The Stand nearly five years ago... She didn’t think she mattered. That phone call? That night? It saved her life." CJ had always known that night had been important. That call had stayed with him long after it ended, long after the voice on the other end had whispered a soft "Thank you," before hanging up. He had felt the weight of her pain, of her uncertainty, of her desperate need to be heard. And somehow, all these years later, fate had brought her back to him. Her practicum. Her choosing The Stand. Them meeting again, forming a connection neither of them had realized had started all those years ago. And then, falling in love. CJ exhaled slowly, his grip on her tightening just slightly. Because he almost lost her before he even knew her. And that hit him harder than he expected. Y/N shifted slightly, looking up at him with those soft, knowing eyes. "CJ?" she murmured, her fingers tracing lightly over his chest. CJ swallowed, his throat tight as he tilted her chin up, his thumb brushing gently along her jaw. "Come to bed with me," he murmured, voice low, weighted. Y/N’s lips parted slightly, a quiet, knowing expression settling over her face as she nodded. No teasing, no playful remarks—just an understanding. Because she felt it too. She let him guide her, their steps slow, deliberate, as they made their way to the bedroom. And once the door closed behind them, CJ didn’t rush. This wasn’t about urgency. This wasn’t about desperation. This was about her. About everything that led them here. His hands moved slowly, reverently, as he slid her hoodie from her shoulders, as he pressed kisses along the column of her throat, his breath warm against her skin. Y/N let out a soft, content sigh, her hands sliding up his chest, over his shoulders, like she needed to feel every part of him. "CJ..." she whispered, her fingers curling into his hair as he lingered at her collarbone, his lips lingering over every inch of her. "I love you," he murmured against her skin, his voice low, thick with emotion. "You know that, right?" Y/N swallowed, tilting her head slightly to meet his gaze. "I know," she whispered, her own eyes glimmering in the dim light. "I love you too." CJ let out a slow breath before kissing her—slow and deep, pouring every unspoken thought into it. Every memory. Every realization. Every ounce of tenderness that had settled in his chest since the moment he walked into her life again. His hands traced along her back, moving with care, worshipping her, memorizing the feeling of her beneath his fingertips. He took his time, letting her feel every bit of what he couldn’t put into words. And when they finally moved together, when she whispered his name like it was the only thing she knew, CJ realized— This was everything. This was what mattered. And he would never take it for granted.

Monday morning came too quickly. CJ was already at The Stand, nursing a fresh cup of coffee as he scanned through emails, trying to mentally prepare for the week ahead. He was still feeling the lingering exhaustion from the weekend—though that had nothing to do with the gala and everything to do with how he and Y/N had spent the rest of the night after he got home. Not that he was complaining. But now, it was back to work. And apparently, back to talking about the damn fundraiser. Because the second Priya stepped into his office, her expression expectant, he already knew what was coming. "So," she started, crossing her arms, "how’d it go?" CJ barely looked up from his screen. "Shut the door." Priya raised an eyebrow, but she complied, pushing it closed behind her before stepping further in. "That bad?" "Not exactly," CJ muttered, setting his coffee down before leaning back in his chair. "But I don’t want Y/N hearing about this." Priya studied him carefully, then took a seat across from him. "Alright. Hit me. What happened?" CJ let out a slow breath, rubbing the back of his neck. "First, the good news. We pulled in a lot of donations. More than I expected. Should keep us running very comfortably for a while." Priya smirked. "Told you your charm would work." "I hate that you were right," CJ muttered, but there was no real heat behind it. "So what’s the bad news?" Priya asked, her tone shifting slightly. CJ hesitated. Because this was the part he really didn’t want to say out loud. Finally, he sighed. "I ran into Henry Y/L/N." Priya immediately sat up straighter. "Y/N’s dad?" "Yeah." "Shit." "That about sums it up," CJ muttered, running a hand over his jaw. Priya tilted her head, watching him closely. "How bad was it?" "It was… controlled," CJ admitted. "He asked about Y/N. Acted all polite and formal, like he hadn’t humiliated her in front of her entire workplace the last time he saw her." "Classic," Priya muttered. "What did you say?" CJ’s jaw ticked slightly as he exhaled through his nose. "I told him the first time I ever spoke to Y/N was when she called The Stand nearly five years ago, thinking about ending her life because she felt like she wasn’t enough for him." Priya stilled. CJ leaned forward, his voice quieter now, but just as firm. "I told him that phone call saved her life. And that it wasn’t because of him. It was in of spite him." A long silence stretched between them. Priya’s expression was unreadable at first, but then she slowly leaned back, crossing her arms. "Damn." "Yeah." "And how did he take that?" CJ let out a dry laugh. "Like a man who just got hit with a reality check he wasn’t ready for." Priya smirked slightly, shaking her head. "Jesus. You really let him have it." "I didn’t yell," CJ muttered. "Didn’t cause a scene. Just… told him the truth." Priya tapped her fingers against her arm, thinking. "Are you going to tell Y/N?" CJ hesitated. Then, he shook his head. "No." Priya raised an eyebrow. "Because…?" "Because she doesn’t need this hanging over her right now," CJ said simply. "She’s been through enough. If Henry actually does something with the information I gave him—if he makes an effort—then maybe I’ll tell her. But for now? She doesn’t need to know." Priya studied him carefully, then gave a slow nod. "That’s fair." CJ exhaled, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I just… hate that he still has a place in her head. That even a text from him makes her hesitate." Priya’s expression softened slightly. "That’s what happens with people like him. They dig in deep. It’s not easy to shake." CJ knew that. But he still hated it. Priya stood, smoothing her hands down her blouse. "Well, at least now he knows the truth." "Yeah," CJ muttered. "We’ll see what he does with it." Priya gave him a long look. "You did right by her, CJ." CJ sighed, running a hand through his hair. "Yeah. I just hope she never has to hear another word from him again." Priya didn’t argue with that. Because, honestly? She hoped for the same.

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