#in fcc at least

[dulcewrites]

I think Myrah would be more mad than Aemond if Baelor got arrested🤔 like Aemond is privileged, and grew up w aegon he knows about ppl having bad times or how easy someone can lose themselves if not careful. But Myrah, she comes from a brown family (in my mind I hc her as Latina) she was raised a certain way, so her son getting arrested is disappointing but also devastating bcus she knows she raised him better than that

Oh for sure. I think it would be a sobering moment for her as a parents. It calls into question something she sort of feared before they had kids. On one hand, she enjoys and appreciates the fact that the world is her children’s oyster. They will be able to do and see things she never could at their age. But with that comes the stipulations of losing touch and expecting money to get you out of problems.

Her upbringing (as a woc) would color not only the way she moves through the world, but also how she navigates her relationship with Aemond and motherhood. The Aegon piece is interesting as well. Because though Aemond was never been one to get into serious trouble himself, he probably learned how to make things go away through his parents (mainly Alicent) dealing with Aegon :/. It would change the way he looks at things versus myrah.

As well as Aemond just being around people that are used to throwing money at problems. He probably went to a boarding school or belonged to a country club his family did. He’s a lawyer (in this universe). viserys owns a big company or is even a Wall Street guy; Alicent came from a wealthy family. Opposed to myrah/her Myrah’s parents. Myrah is an artist/art curator for a gallery. I see Amal being a hairdresser and Gerald maybe works in accoutanting or teaching.

Myrah would blame herself, and wonder if she let them get away with too much. Or let the money and privileges seep in too much. Especially with Baelor who she tends to side with because of his relationship with his dad.

[izzy-b-hands]

I may have gotten basically nothing done today aside from a couple Cloud surveys and some job apps but

It's okay

I will do the dishes after work (aka the one thing i wanted done before work today that my brain did not cooperate with me on at all)

This shift will go...i want to say good. but they're already emailing us abt doing the thing that we found out at the work training got them fined by a major regulatory body and im like. The shift hasn't even started yet. pls. not already im not even clocked in (and can't be until ten mins before anyway). Can u save ur fucking bs for when I'm at least on the clock being underpaid to deal with it lmao

I will get thru my shift tonight. maybe that's the best i can hope for here. I'll take it, and after...dishes and maybe more fic writing if my brain is up to it

[awkward-teabag]

It's old but here's a video from 8 years ago about one factor of it.

Some numbers from it:

The internet used 2% of the world's electricity in 2011

The internet used 91 billion kilowatt-hours in 2013 just in the US.

The internet data transfer rate was 28,000 gigabytes a second in 2013.

And those are numbers from over 10 years ago. I couldn't find any exact number but I see online advertising specifically uses the same amount of electricity as a small country these days.

And here's a study from 2018 about it if you want something long and crunchy.

From the highlight:

Online advertising consumed between 20.38 to 282.75 TWh of energy and 11.53 – 159.93 million tons of CO2e was emitted to produce the electricity consumed.

Of course there's no exact number as it's not recorded and, if it is, it's guarded (hence the wide range) but it's safe to say it uses a lot of electricity.

At least with TV commercials, they gave actors, directors, and screen writers a way into the film and TV industry and also employed a crew. There were even dedicated crews/houses for specific types of ads. They also had to be interesting or entertaining enough to draw attention given how many people used commercial breaks as bathroom/snack breaks and stopped paying attention to ads.

Sure they were trying to sell you something but at least there were others who were getting a paycheque and building up a resume from them. The more successful or viral an ad went (and going viral before the internet was a big thing), the better it was for the cast and crew and more than a few celebs got their start from a commercial or three.

Not so much now, especially when the whole ad is just CGI. They aren't interesting or entertaining and the production value is low to keep the costs down on that end. If an ad is more than lukewarm, odds are it was designed for TV first because internet advertising is all about quantity over quality.

honestly advertising is so fukcing wasteful not even just in the convincing you to buy shit you never actually wanted but like

how much electricity is wasted displaying ads that could've gone to keeping houses warm. How much paper is produced just to be turned into pamphlets and ads that will just be thrown away. how much internet bandwith is wasted just on the amount of ads that are on the internet nowadays. How many hours worth of labor went into producing ads that are going directly into my adblocker or my waste bin that could've been time spent doing literally ANYTHING useful?

[facts-i-just-made-up]

Not A Joke, Not Unreality:

A company called Quantum Fiber (under Century Link) recently set up my home town for fiber optic internet. I got them a month ago and aside from a few outages it was decent.

Last week, it went out. They sent me a super specific time it would be back-

They failed to make it and sent another, minutes later.

And another when that failed.

And over the week, more and more.

I called and they just read me the same email out loud. They offered no escalation or resources. Every time, they fail. I have not had internet for my house in a week, and this morning I got this one-

I looked into other people having the same problem and found this-

Edit forgot link

That's not something called a "766" line, that's them fucking up my city 766 times. This company is fucking shit, and I'm sick of this. I've filed an FCC complaint but those take a month to even get a reply.

So I'm hoping my 173,365 followers can help make this show of their ineptitude and callousness go viral. Please.

They are in a time of massive expansion into many new states and cities. I am asking anyone so inclined with a few minutes to spare to find your town or state's government information technology office or liaison, or just a local government representative of any kind, and write them a quick note stating that this company destroys town utilities and offers absolute frustrating failures of service in return.

If you have Quantum Fiber and have been similarly failed by them, please file an FCC complaint. You might at least get a free month out of it.

If you work with a news source or popular blog, please boost this however you can.

If you are on any app on which they are present, please feel free to write or tag them and let them know they have failed their customers and cities they work with.

Please do not engage in threats or harassment of any form. Keep this legal, civil, and proper so that it can create a legal basis and record of good citizen interaction on the part of this company's victims. I am asking for help in a grassroots campaign, not a violent or prank-filled heap that just gets people in trouble. AND DO NOT FOR ANY REASON EVER PESTER THE WORKERS, PHONE REPS AND TECHNICIANS THEY HAVE OUT THERE. This is the corporation's fault, not the poor folks they employ who they likely try to make take the backlash.

If you have any other ideas on how to hold a mega-corp responsible for the shit they put their customers through, please comment and recommend. I am sick of this shit. I know there are worse things happening and even worse companies doing horrid things right now. But maybe this one is new/small enough that a viral campaign can kick them where it hurts and get them to act more responsibly to their customers and safely to the places they work.

Please help if you have time. Please spread this in the hopes they see it and get off their butts and fix their horrible shit. Any random reblog or post on any platform might be the one their investors hear of.

Thank you anyone for anything you can do.

-Ari

[mostlysignssomeportents]

FCC strikes a blow against prison profiteering

TOMORROW NIGHT (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

Here's a tip for policymakers hoping to improve the lives of the most Americans with the least effort: help prisoners.

After all, America is the most prolific imprisoner of its own people of any country in world history. We lock up more people than Stalin, than Mao, more than Botha, de Klerk or any other Apartheid-era South African president. And it's not just America's vast army of the incarcerated who are afflicted by our passion for imprisonment: their families and friends suffer, too.

That familial suffering isn't merely the constant pain of life without a loved one, either. America's prison profiteers treat prisoners' families as ATMs who can be made to pay and pay and pay.

This may seem like a losing strategy. After all, prison sentences are strongly correlated with poverty, and even if your family wasn't desperate before the state kidnapped one of its number and locked them behind bars, that loved one's legal defense and the loss of their income is a reliable predictor of downward social mobility.

Decent people don't view poor people as a source of riches. But for a certain kind of depraved sadist, the poor are an irresistible target. Sure, poor people don't have much money, but what they lack even more is protection under the law ("conservativism consists of the principle that there is an in-group whom the law protects but does not bind, and an out-group whom the law binds but does not protect" -Wilhoit). You can enjoy total impunity as you torment poor people, make them so miserable and afraid for their lives and safety that they will find some money, somewhere, and give it to you.

Mexican cartels understand this. They do a brisk trade in kidnapping asylum seekers whom the US has illegally forced to wait in Mexico to have their claims processed. The families of refugees – either in their home countries or in the USA – are typically badly off but they understand that Mexico will not lift a finger to protect a kidnapped refugee, and so when the kidnappers threaten the most grisly tortures as a means of extracting ransom, those desperate family members do whatever it takes to scrape up the blood-money.

What's more, the families of asylum seekers are not much better off than their kidnapped loved ones when it comes to seeking official protection. Family members who stayed behind in human rights hellholes like Bukele's El Salvador can't get their government to lodge official complaints with the Mexican ambassador, and family members who made it to the USA are in no position to get their Congressjerk to intercede with ICE or the Mexican consulate. This gives Mexico's crime syndicates total latitude to kidnap, torture, and grow rich by targeting the poorest, most desperate people in the world.

The private contractors that supply services to America's prisons are basically Mexican refugee-kidnappers with pretensions and shares listed on the NYSE. After decades of consolidation, the prison contracting sector has shrunk to two gigantic companies: Securus and Viapath (formerly Global Tellink). These private-equity backed behemoths dominate their sector, and have diversified, providing all kinds of services, from prison cafeteria meals to commissary, the prison stores where prisoners can buy food and other items.

If you're following closely, this is one of those places where the hair on the back of your neck starts to rise. These companies make money when prisoners buy food from the commissary, and they're also in charge of the quality of the food in the mess hall. If the food in the mess hall is adequate and nutritious, there's no reason to buy food from the commissary.

This is what economists call a "moral hazard." You can think of it as the reason that prison ramen costs 300% more than ramen in the free world:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/20/captive-market/#locked-in

(Not just ramen: in America's sweltering prisons, an 8" fan costs $40, and the price of water went up in Texas prisons by 50% during last summer's heatwave.)

It's actually worse than that: if you get sick from eating bad prison food, the same company that poisoned you gets paid to operate the infirmary where you're treated:

https://theappeal.org/massachusetts-prisons-wellpath-dentures-teeth/

Now, the scam of abusing prisoners to extract desperate pennies from their families is hardly new. There's written records of this stretching back to the middle ages. Nor is this pattern a unique one: making an unavoidable situation as miserable as possible and then upcharging people who have the ability to pay to get free of the torture is basically how the airlines work. Making coach as miserable as possible isn't merely about shaving pennies by shaving inches off your legroom: it's a way to "incentivize" anyone who can afford it to pay for an upgrade to business-class. The worse coach is, the more people you can convince to dip into their savings or fight with their boss to move classes. The torments visited upon everyone else in coach are economically valuable to the airlines: their groans and miseries translate directly into windfall profits, by convincing better-off passengers to pay not to have the same thing done to them.

Of course, with rare exceptions (flying to get an organ transplant, say) plane tickets are typically discretionary. Housing, on the other hand, is a human right and a prerequisite for human thriving. The worse things are for tenants, the more debt and privation people will endure to become home-owners, so it follows that making renters worse off makes homeowners richer:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

For Securus and Viapath, the path to profitability is to lobby for mandatory, long prison sentences and then make things inside the prison as miserable as possible. Any prisoner whose family can find the funds can escape the worst of it, and all the prisoners who can't afford it serve the economically important function of showing the prisoners whose families can afford it how bad things will be if they don't pay.

If you're thinking that prisoners might pay Securus, Viapath and their competitors out of their own prison earnings, forget it. These companies have decided that the can make more by pocketing the difference between the vast sums paid by third parties for prisoners' labor and the pennies the prisoners get from their work. Remember, the 13th Amendment specifically allows for the enslavement of incarcerated people! Six states ban paying prisoners at all. North Carolina caps prisoners' wages at one dollar per day. The national average prison wage is $0.52/hour. Prisoners' labor produces $11b/year in goods and services:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

Forced labor and extortion are a long and dishonorable tradition in incarceration, but this century saw the introduction of a novel, exciting way of extracting wealth from prisoners and their families. It started when private telcos took over prison telephones and raised the price of a prison phone call. These phone companies found willing collaborators in local jail and prison systems: all they had to do was offer to split the take with the jailers.

With the advent of the internet, things got far worse. Digitalization meant that prisons could replace the library, adult educations, commissary accounts, letter-mail, parcels, in-person visits and phone calls with a single tablet. These cheaply made tablets were offered for free to prisoners, who lost access to everything from their kids' handmade birthday cards to in-person visits with those kids.

In their place, prisoners' families had to pay huge premiums to have their letters scanned so that prisoners could pay (again) to view those scans on their tablets. Instead of in-person visits, prisoners families had to pay $3-10/minute for a janky, postage-stamp sized video. Perversely, jails and prisons replaced their in-person visitation rooms with rooms filled with shitty tablets where family members could sit and videoconference with their incarcerated loved ones who were just a few feet away:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Capitalists hate capitalism. The capital classes are on a relentless search for markets with captive customers and no competitors. The prison-tech industry was catnip for private equity funds, who bought and "rolled" up prison contractors, concentrating the sector into a duopoly of debt-laden companies whose ability to pay off their leveraged buyouts was contingent on their ability to terrorize prisoners' families into paying for their overpriced, low-quality products and services.

One particularly awful consequence of these rollups was the way that prisoners could lose access to their data when their prison's service-provider was merged with a rival. When that happened, the IT systems would be consolidated, with the frequent outcome that all prisoners' data was lost. Imagine working for two weeks to pay for a song or a book, or a scan of your child's handmade Father's Day card, only to have the file deleted in an IT merger. Now imagine that you're stuck inside for another 20 years.

This is a subject I've followed off and on for years. It's such a perfect bit of end-stage capitalist cruelty, combining mass incarceration with monopolies. Even if you're not imprisoned, this story is haunting, because on the one hand, America keeps thinking of new reasons to put more people behind bars, and on the other hand, every technological nightmare we dream up for prisoners eventually works its way out to the rest of us in a process I call the "shitty technology adoption curve." As William Gibson says, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" – but the future sure pools up thick and dystopian around America's prisoners:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

My background interest in the subject got sharper a few years ago when I started working on The Bezzle, my 2023 high-tech crime thriller about prison-tech grifters:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

One of the things that was on my mind when I got to work on that book was the 2017 court-case that killed the FCC's rules limit interstate prison-call gouging. The FCC could have won that case, but Trump's FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, dropped it:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/prisoners-lose-again-as-court-wipes-out-inmate-calling-price-caps/

With that bad precedent on the books, the only hope prisoners had for relief from the FCC was for Congress to enact legislation specifically granting the agency the power to regulate prison telephony. Incredibly, Congress did just that, with Biden signing the "Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act" in early 2023:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/1541/text

With the new law in place, it fell to the FCC use those newfound powers. Compared to agencies like the FTC and the NLRB, Biden's FCC has been relatively weak, thanks in large part to the Biden administration's refusal to defend its FCC nomination for Gigi Sohn, a brilliant and accomplished telecoms expert. You can tell that Sohn would have been a brilliant FCC commissioner because of the way that America's telco monopolists and their allies in the senate (mostly Republicans, but some Democrats, too) went on an all-out offensive against her, using the fact that she is gay to smear her and ultimately defeat her nomination:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband/

But even without Sohn, the FCC has managed to do something genuinely great for America's army of the imprisoned. This week, the FCC voted in price-caps on prison calls, so that call rates will drop from $11.35 for 15 minutes to just $0.90. Both interstate and intrastate calls will be capped at $0.06-0.12/minute, with a phased rollout starting in January:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/fcc-closes-final-loopholes-that-keep-prison-phone-prices-exorbitantly-high/

It's hard to imagine a policy that will get more bang for a regulator's buck than this one. Not only does this represent a huge savings for prisoners and their families, those savings are even larger in proportion to their desperate, meager finances.

It shows you how important a competent, qualified regulator is. When it comes to political differences between Republicans and Democrats, regulatory competence is a grossly underrated trait. Trump's FCC Chair Ajit Pai handed out tens of billions of dollars in public money to monopoly carriers to improve telephone networks in underserved areas, but did so without first making accurate maps to tell him where the carriers should invest. As a result, that money was devoured by executive bonuses and publicly financed dividends and millions of Americans entered the pandemic lockdowns with broadband that couldn't support work-from-home or Zoom school. When Biden's FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel took over, one of her first official acts was to commission a national study and survey of broadband quality. Republicans howled in outrage:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/10/digital-redlining/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts

The telecoms sector has been a rent-seeking, monopolizing monster since the days of Samuel Morse:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/18/the-bell-system/#were-the-phone-company-we-dont-have-to-care

Combine telecoms and prisons, and you get a kind of supermonster, the meth-gator of American neofeudalism:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291

The sector is dirty beyond words, and it corrupts everything it touches – bribing prison officials to throw out all the books in the prison library and replace them with DRM-locked, high-priced ebooks that prisoners must toil for weeks to afford, and that vanish from their devices whenever a prison-tech company merges with a rival:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

The Biden presidency has been fatally marred by the president's avid support of genocide, and nothing will change that. But for millions of Americans, the Biden administration's policies on telecoms, monopoly, and corporate crime have been a source of profound, lasting improvements.

It's not just presidents who can make this difference. Millions of America's prisoners are rotting in state and county jails, and as California has shown, state governments have broad latitude to kick out prison profiteers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/08/captive-audience/#good-at-their-jobs

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

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/2024/07/19/martha-wright-reed/#capitalists-hate-capitalism

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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[uke-zone]

I really hate to post something like this on an account called uke-zone, but there's not much choice. I'm going to be homeless in a month.

For the past 2 years, I’ve been stuck in a toxic job because I took the first one I could get without reliable transport. I’ve been working as a web admin, making $14,400 a year. My rent is $12,360 a year, not including bills. I scraped by, constantly stressed, and exhausted. I lived alone after leaving an abusive family environment, so I just kept going.

Four days ago I was given a termination notice—the day after I refused to violate FCC guidelines. They wanted me to add a static list of customers to an email list, without allowing them to unsubscribe, and I couldn’t let myself be complicit or get hit with a $5,000 fine.

No savings, no support system, and no cushion. I won't survive the next month if I'm evicted. There is just straight up nowhere to go.

If you’re able to help me keep a roof over my head while I continue the job search, please drop a $20 or the most that won't hurt here: paypal.me/Ymukhopadhyay

In Texas, unemployment takes at least 4 weeks, assuming no disputes, and with my employer that's not happening. Rent is due. I’d be eligible for $143 a week, which... isn’t even close to enough to keep a roof over my head or eat. I couldn’t pay one month of rent if I tried. I'm looking down the barrel of being homeless again, and would frankly rather be dead.

If you have any need for a web developer, designer, or multimedia content specialist, I'd appreciate any support there as well, whether through projects or referrals.

I need to survive the next 30 days to not be constantly on the verge of losing everything. Going back to living paycheck-to-paycheck with no security and no safety net isn't an option. I was terrified one mistake or one bad turn could leave me with nothing until it did.

If you can’t offer help, I understand. But if you can, I'm begging in random tags on the Internet because I don’t want to be homeless again.

GoFundMe, if PayPal isn't an option

Thanks for reading this. ❤️

[itsmonobun]

i was having a moment(tm) about this pretty recently coz it doesn't even seem to be an inflation issue but straight up price gouging from grocers (especially + unsurprisingly from the major grocery retailers)

like prices shifting every now and then was pretty normal whenever stuff was happening with production or recalls or whatever (tho it could also just have been corporate greed) but the scale it's been happening recently is insane

[avaantares]

Verify.

Getting really, REALLY sick of all the botspam pretending to be refugees in Gaza. Just in the last couple of days I've had more than 20 new money requests land in my inbox, many of them exact duplicates sent from various randomly-generated URLs. Some of them seem to be AI-generated, or at least following a set Mad Libs format ("our beautiful ___-story house" is a perennial favorite; who knew Gaza had so many homes with 6 to 11 floors?).

Nearly all of these claim to be verified by some third party, but almost none have proof of it (links to a database, exact spreadsheet line numbers, etc.). Some that do give such information don't exist when you actually look them up; they're just assuming that nobody will bother checking.

This is why I never send money to unsolicited cash requests. Too many vultures are posing as victims to steal funds, and it's risky to trust a random DM without reliable third-party verification. By all means, support refugees and fund evacuation and relief efforts! But do it through safe/verified channels, and (for your own safety) never send random cash to a stranger on the internet without doing at least the bare minimum of fact-checking.

If you're considering donating to an individual campaign, ask for proof of third-party verification, such as whether it's listed on the fundraiser spreadsheet compiled by @/el-shab-hussein and @/nabulsi. While this is not 100% foolproof, it would require a dedicated scammer to jump through enough hoops to get listed, while most bots/scattershot scams are just pointing you directly to a GoFundMe link without taking the effort.

Here are a few more bot-free ways to help:

Gaza Funds - a safer way to give directly to those raising money for evacuation, medical treatment, or rebuilding. This site randomly displays a vetted campaign every time you load the page, so it helps all campaigns get equal exposure. All campaigns in the database have been screened to weed out likely scams.

Charity Watch Gaza Aid list - Choose your own charity to support from this verified list of humanitarian and relief services. From this site, you can learn what your money goes toward and what percentage of it will be used for direct relief, rather than administrative costs.

Connecting Humanity/eSIMs for Gaza - This organization uses donated eSIM cards to provide internet and communications access to refugees and displaced people.

Operation Olive Branch - A grassroots organization, OOB helps verify individual fundraising campaigns and supports relief organizations.

UNRWA - The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine and the Near East provides food, medical supplies, educational materials, and more to affected areas.

Arab.org daily clicks to help - It's free and only takes a few seconds! You can click all six categories, once per browser per device per day (so different browsers, mobiles, desktops, tablets, etc. can all be used on the same day).

For more reading, here's the FCC guide to donating safely.

[mariacallous]

The US Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to lower price caps on prison phone calls and closed a loophole that allowed prison telecoms to charge high rates for intrastate calls. The vote will cut the price of interstate calls in half and set price caps on intrastate calls for the first time.

The FCC said it “voted to end exorbitant phone and video call rates that have burdened incarcerated people and their families for decades. Under the new rules, the cost of a 15-minute phone call will drop to 90 cents from as much as $11.35 in large jails and, in small jails, to $1.35 from $12.10.”

The new rules are expected to take effect in January 2025 for all prisons and for jails with at least 1,000 incarcerated people. The rate caps would take effect in smaller jails in April 2025.

Worth Rises, a nonprofit group advocating for prison reform, estimates that the new rules “will impact 83 percent of incarcerated people (about 1.4 million) and save impacted families at least $500 million annually."

New Power Over Intrastate Calls

The FCC has taken numerous votes to lower prison phone rates over the years, but Thursday's is particularly significant. While the FCC was previously able to cap prices of interstate calls, an attempt to set prices for intrastate calls was struck down in court in 2017.

Prison phone companies could sue again. But the FCC said it now has authority over intrastate prison phone prices because of the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, which was approved by Congress and signed by President Biden in January 2023. The new law "empowered the FCC to close the final loopholes in the communications system," the commission said.

The 2023 law—named for a grandmother who campaigned for lower prison phone rates—“removes the principal statutory limitations that had prevented the commission from setting comprehensive just and reasonable rates," the FCC said. Specifically, the law removed "limits to the commission's ability to regulate rates for intrastate calls and video communications."

More than half of prison audio call traffic is intrastate, with the calling and called parties both in the same state, according to data in a draft of the FCC order released before the meeting.

The FCC's work to reduce prison phone rates "was not always embraced by the courts," FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel said. "We were told—over and over again—that the commission did not have the authority to address every aspect of these rates, because while interstate calls fell within our jurisdiction, intrastate calls did not."

Previously, the FCC imposed price caps on interstate calls ranging from 14 to 21 cents per minute for audio calls, depending on the size of the facility. Going forward, a uniform set of price caps ranging from 6 to 12 cents per minute will apply to both interstate and intrastate calls.

Ban on Other Fees

The FCC also adopted video call rate caps for the first time. The video call caps range from 11 to 25 cents per minute. These caps are classified as "interim" and could be lowered in the future.

Other fees will be prohibited, too. “Using this new law, we fix what has been wrong for too long," Rosenworcel said. “We reduce calling rates by more than half. We stop tacked-on costs like ancillary fees and prohibit special fees for site commissions. We make clear these policies apply to both interstate and intrastate rates. We also set rates for video calls for the first time. On top of that, we strengthen accessibility requirements for incarcerated people with disabilities and improve consumer disclosures.”

Site commissions are payments that phone companies make to prisons and jails in exchange for the exclusive right to offer service to inmates. FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said that banning the commissions will "end the practice of provider kickbacks to correctional facilities and payments for costs irrelevant to providing services so callers will no longer be forced to bear the financial burden of these costs."

The nonprofit Prison Policy Institute said that prison phone companies charge ancillary fees for things "like making a deposit to fund an account." The ban on those fees "also effectively blocks a practice that we have been campaigning against for years: companies charging fees to consumers who choose to make single calls rather than fund a calling account, and deliberately steering new consumers to this higher-cost option in order to increase fee revenue," the group said.

The ancillary fee ban is a “technical-sounding change” but will help “eliminate some of the industry's dirtiest tricks that shortchange both the families and the facilities,” the group said.

FCC: Revenue Will Still Exceed Costs

The FCC's draft order said that even with the new caps, potential "revenues for eight out of 12 [Incarcerated People's Communications Services] providers exceed their total reported costs when excluding site commissions and safety and security categories that generally are not used and useful in the provision of IPCS. These eight firms represent over 90 percent of revenue, 96 percent of [average jail and prison population], and 96 percent of billed and unbilled minutes in the data set."

Worth Rises said that the "primary factors driving the FCC's lower rate caps is the exclusion of security and surveillance costs as well as the exclusion of commissions. For decades, the cost of an ever-expanding suite of invasive surveillance services has been passed on to incarcerated people and their loved ones. With [the] new rules, prison telecoms will be barred from recovering the cost of the majority of such services from ratepayers."

The price-cap order was fully supported by the FCC's three Democrats and Republican Nathan Simington. Republican Brendan Carr approved in part and concurred in part, saying he had concerns about the rate structure.

[rahleeyah]

It does come up, from time to time, the fact that I'm not shy about using profanity in my work, and while I do swear like a sailor myself this is unique to my writing for svu, bc I do actually think about it, and I do actually think these characters would swear. A lot. When I wrote for Blake I didn't have Jean Beazley saying fuck and shit and son of a bitch and Jesus, bc she wouldn't. Olivia Benson? Who we have heard countless times say the words she's allowed to say on NBC - damn and ass and bastard and son of a bitch many times, and even Jesus, a time or two? Elliot Stabler, who has said all those words and at least one goddamn? Who have been cops with the NYPD since the 90s? Oh these two swear. In the right context, of course. In their own minds, and in private with one another, especially when tensions are high. I'm not sure that there's a limit to how much they would swear at each other, in the middle of a fight without the FCC to worry about, but I am sure I haven't found that limit yet. And when someone comes to me and says they think there's too much swearing in one of my stories I find myself thinking - too much for who? For the characters? Bc I don't think canon backs that up. I think canon supports sweary Olivia Benson. Too much for that particular reader, perhaps. But I'm not writing to suit that particular reader's taste. I'm not trying to produce something they personally are comfortable with. That's not my goal here.

[dulcewrites]

Aemond @ Myrah is literally: am I attracted to her or is she just annoying?

The way her annoying behavior ends up being his fav thing about her 🫶🏽☹️

I hope to delve into this in the story but I was thinking about how Myrah is probably the way she is bc her parents cultivated an environment for her to thrive. It’s so different from the behavior/environment Aemond grew up in. It will make for an interesting dynamic or only being married but as parents themselves

[alivehouse]

i do think its funny how every now and then someone with a few actual brain cells will go ‘hey maybe we should make extra effort to make Literally anyone other than middle to upper class white cishet men in their 50s feel welcome or at least safe here’ like literally the most basic easy to swallow liberal Take on the subject possible and everyoneee will be vying for blood having a full tantrum over it in the comments. but yeah im sure ham radio in its present state will live forever lmao. fcc will totally not keep chopping up the bands as current hobbyists keel over guys!!!

[uplift-daily]

On July 18th, the FCC voted to "end exorbitant phone and video call rates that have burdened incarcerated people and their families for decades. Under the new rules, the cost of a 15-minute phone call will drop to $0.90 from as much as $11.35 in large jails and, in small jails, to $1.35 from $12.10."

The new rules are estimated to impact 1.4 million incarcerated people and save affected families at least $500 million annually.

[crybaby-bkg]

sᴄᴏʀɴᴇᴅ | ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ sɪх

Bakugou x f!reader Warnings/Tags: some brief flashbacks, the tiniest bit of tension, brief mention of manga spoilers from chapter 362, negotiations of hero talk Word Count: 4.6k Minors/blank/ageless blogs DNI!

Main Masterlist

AO3

It’s been a couple of days since your temporary stay at Bakugou’s house, and its more peaceful than you had expected it to be. You don’t see him much for the first few days, with your schedules conflicting with hero work and regular work. You haven’t gotten any major calls as The Red Medusa, and the smaller issues you leave to the other vigilantes like you. You haven’t heard anything from Vanity, and it scares you more than anything to hear what she has to say about your living situation, but you don’t reach out first. 

Instead, you pretend to live in bliss with your warm blanket and even warmer cup of tea in your hands. You cradle it in your palms as you sit on the couch, watching the news with an unfocused gaze. Your eyes clear though, the moment you hear the doorknob rattling, and find Bakugou entering with a frown on his face. 

“Didn’t catch the villain, sunshine?” You ask, tone droning on as you survey him—woah. Your eyes immediately snap back to the television, face as warm as your cup as Bakugou kicks off his boots and angrily sets down his heavy gauntlets. 

“‘Caught the bastard, but he ripped my fuckin’ pants with his stupid fuckin’ quirk!” He bellows, eyebrows downturned as he barely casts you a glance before he goes stomping off to his room. You keep your eyes zeroed on the screen, but its all for naught when the news anchors now focus on the fight Dynamight just wrapped up, camera zooming in entirely too close to his crotch for it to be FCC approved. 

The rip in his pants is high up on his thigh, exposes more than it should, his pale flesh splattered in blood and whatever blue goo the villain spits out. You can see Dynamight cursing up a storm, his mouth blurred out, as the news anchors try to withhold their laughs, one even making a dirty joke. 

It makes your stomach twists—how could they sexualize him like that, in a moment of battle? Of fighting to protect the citizens of this city? How could they focus on how strong the muscle in his thigh flexes when he jumps up and blasts himself into the sky? Focus on how more and more of his skin peels out with every turn he does in the air? How can they focus on how…how nice…

You stand up abruptly, beelining to the sink as you turn your cup upside down, emptying its contents down the drain. It must’ve been that stupid sleepy time tea Bakugou keeps stacked up in his cabinets fucking with your head, because you could never, ever look at him like that. 

Like the way you look at him now when he stomps out into the kitchen, roughly running his fingers through his hair as he stands there in only a tank top and shorts that stop right above his knee. The scar in his shoulder has healed nicely, you think to yourself, fading from pink to his skin tone. 

“Why’re you wasting my good tea?” He grunts, brushing past you to open up the cabinet. You avert your gaze, mouth twisting—in shame, so much shame—as you try to remember what he’s just asked you. 

“Because its shit.” You answer plainly, finding it in you to start washing the dishes you had left from earlier. Bakugou flitters around the kitchen comfortably, eyeing you when you go quiet. 

“Bullshit. You’ve used at least two bags everyday since you started staying here, and that’s on a good day.” He throws at you, leaning against the counter to square you off with a look to the back of your head. You bristle at that. 

“Why are you watching me, pervert?” You snarl at him, but your voice is shakier than it usually is. He picks up on that, but doesn’t comment on it. 

“Because you’re using up my good shit.”

“It looks like that’s your only shit.” You counter back. “Do you even have any other tea flavors? And why do you have so much of that sleepy time shit anyway?” 

Bakugou doesn’t answer for a long while, and you wonder if somehow, you’ve struck a nerve. You look over your shoulder to see if he’s still there, if he’s somehow stalked off with his freaky hero abilities without you hearing him, but he still stands there. Arms folded, gaze drifted away somewhere far. He looks up when he realizes you’ve been staring at him, frowning, and he opens his mouth to speak but is cut off by the beeping of the microwave. He turns, and takes the water out, steam curling around his hand. 

“Just like it, ’s all.” He answers with a shrug, turning his back to you this time, as he starts fixing his tea. You don’t say anything else about it, but your eyes lilt down to where his pale leg sticks out of his shorts. 

“Your thigh okay?” You find yourself asking, turning quickly to the spoon you’ve been washing for two minutes now, when Bakugou turns in your direction again. 

“Yeah? ’S alright. Just a few scratches.” He hums, walking up beside you to dump the spoon he used to stir his tea up into the soapy load you’ve finally dwindled down. You sneer at him, and he only quirks an eyebrow at you over the rim of his cup before walking down the hall. 

“Get some sleep, dumbass.” He tells you, almost fondly, and it makes your heart squeeze a little tighter than you’d like it to. You fumble over your words, looking for a comeback you’ve been struggling to come up with since you started staying with him. Instead of using words, you flip him the bird again, soapy and unseen to the back of his head. 

…

It’s been a couple of hours since you laid down for bed, even longer since you drank the tea, and you think that the shit is a scam. The whole point of sleepy time is to put you down to sleep, right? So why the fuck is it 3:41am, and you can’t sleep through your usual nightmares? 

Maybe, you just need another cup. 

You swing your legs over the bed, throwing the purple blanket away from your form as you slide into the slippers Bakugou lended you (you yelled at him for buying you something, and he yelled back that he didn’t need you slipping and breaking your damn neck on his hardwood floors). You go to exit your room, but you hesitate for a second. You don’t typically leave your room until the sun rises, even in times when you have to pee really fuckin’ bad. 

It brings back memories of creeping around in places that weren’t inherently yours, and being hunted, preyed upon, in long dark hallways with men who wanted to get a taste of your flesh. But you know that this place is safe, even if it pains you to admit it. So you scurry back to your bed, slide your pocket knife into the waistband of your sleep pants, and cover your shoulders with the purple throw blanket. 

You stand in front of the door for a few seconds, taking in some deep breaths before you unlock the door. You wait, chest shaking with the forced air you pump into your lungs, before swinging the door open. Your hand rests on the knife as you survey the silent house, looking down the hallway to Bakugou’s room, and find his door cracked. 

You turn and start heading to the kitchen, seeing that a single light above the stove has been left on. He must’ve done it, because you swore you turned off all the lights before heading to bed. You had made that mistake once and woke up to a snappy text of running up his light bill the next morning. So you walk a little faster, ready to turn it off, only to be stopped in your tracks at the sight of Bakugou in the kitchen himself. 

His head snaps up when he sees you turn the corner from where he rests against the counter by the microwave, looks almost as if time had done a rewind of the day. Only this time, he looks tireder, and you see the mug he used earlier is in the sink, and he nurses another one in his right hand. 

“What’re you doing up this late?” He slurs quietly, sipping at his drink before resting it on the counter beside him, folding his arms across his chest. You jut your chin out to him, as you mirror his position across the kitchen. 

“I could ask you the same thing. Don’t you have work in the morning?” You ask him, eyes fluttering to the cabinet that holds that scamming ass tea. Bakugou follows your line of sight and must connect the dots, because he huffs out a laugh before turning to reach into the cabinets behind him. He pulls out the mug you’ve been favoring, and waves a dismissive hand at you when you take a step forward to protest. 

“You don’t have to,”

“I know I don’t. Doing it because I wanna.” He yawns, starts taking out the materials he’s seen you use for the few days you’ve been here. Water from the tap, the black mug that reads “fresh out of fucks” in white lettering, the sleepy time tea bag, a scoop of sugar, and a squeeze of honey. 

“You really are a pervert.” You tack on quietly, jumping a little at the laugh that shoots out from his chest. 

“For knowing how you like your tea?” He asks, looking over his shoulder as he takes the warm water out (never actually hot—how did he know that though?). 

“Yeah, since I’ve only been here for a couple of days now.” 

“‘M a hero. My job is to observe.” Bakugou counters back, crossing the kitchen to hand you your tea. He looks down the bridge of his nose at you, corner of his mouth quirked up in such a way that it makes the pit of your stomach twist uncomfortably the longer you look at it. Stupid fuckin’ face. 

“Thanks,” you whisper, taking a hesitant sip, realizing quickly that its the way you’ve always liked it. Bakugou doesn’t say anything, just returns to his spot across the kitchen from you, sipping at his own drink as he takes you in. 

“You never answered my question,” he calls out, making you tilt your head in confusion. “Why’re you up this late?” He asks. You roll the answer around in your head for a few seconds, taking another drink, as you wonder where the harm comes in with sharing. It’s almost four in the morning anyway—anything you say right now doesn’t even really count. 

“Same old night terrors.” You hum into the rim of your cup, eyes drifting down to the squeaky clean floors of the kitchen tile. Bakugou doesn’t respond, and it makes you glance up to him, wondering why he’s fallen so silent. 

“You get reoccurring nightmares, too?” He asks gently, and in this light, you don’t think he’s ever looked softer. The light above the oven is dim, and casts an almost eerie glow on the pro hero, if not for the sunken bags under his eyes and the frown lines etched permanently into his skin. His hair looks fallen, a little puffy at the roots still, and his mouth is such a gentle line across his face, bottom lip puckered slightly. He looks…tired, exhausted with the seemingly never ending days of hero work. 

Will this be what you’ll look like if you agree to become a pro hero? Restless and overworked, all for the sake of “justice”? Do you not already look like that, though? 

“Yeah,” you answer softly. “About the shit that happened to me in the past.” You don’t know why the word vomit starts, but its hard to cut it off once it starts spilling. 

“I know Miruko killed them, but they still haunt me in my dreams, most night. Feels like I can’t escape them, even if I try, and gods know I’ve fuckin’ tried.” Your voice falls to a whisper, your throat tightening with every confession. You can’t open up to him—what if he uses what you say against you? What if he takes your pain and contorts into something even more grotesque? Into weapon, into battery, into destruction of your very being? 

But Bakugou only nods with you, as if he knows. As if he understands everything. 

“Same with me, it’s why I keep so much of that fuckin’ sleepy time tea ‘round.” He grunts out, eyes casted low as if in thought. “We killed the fucker that took me out years ago, and still,” his voice becomes strained, and he sets down his cup as if he’s afraid it’ll explode in his hands. It just might, with the way his teeth grit to hide the wobble of his chin, angrily. 

“And still I get these fuckin’ nightmares about—about,” 

“You don’t have to share in detail, if its too hard to say out loud.” You cut him off quickly when his voice starts to elevate, throwing off the serenity in the space you two have created for yourselves. Bakugou cuts his eyes up to you quickly, his gaze hardened and distant, but it clears the longer he looks at you before his upper body deflates. 

“Do you journal your nightmares?” You ask him, voice tiny. “Had a therapist tell me it helps. The only thing it helped was forgetting the dream after writing it down, but I remembered the next night when it happened again.” You laugh humorlessly, hiding your trembling chin behind your mug, blinking away the frustrated tears. 

“Not much of a writer.” Bakugou confesses. 

“You don’t have to be. Just write down what happened; its supposed to help you process shit.” You offer to him, narrowing your eyes at his slowly forming crooked grin. 

“Are you treating me like one of your patients?” He asks quietly, finishing the rest of his tea as you roll your eyes dramatically. 

“Only if you’re willing to pay for my services.” You throw back at him, your own mouth cracking into a small grin. You both share a look before growing quiet again, taking in the spacious kitchen, and the other occupying the opposite end of it. Bakugou stares at the blanket covering your shoulders, and speaks first. 

“You remember the first day we met, when—”

“When I kicked your ass?” You interject, eyebrows raising as you down the rest of your tea. He scoffs with a roll of his eyes. 

“When you were upset, and calling me sexist?” He asks instead. Instantly, your joking mood disappears, and you find yourself sinking into the counter behind you. You hop up on top of it, wrapping the blanket closer to your form as you think back on the day you first encountered Dynamight, days after seeing his viral video. Your mouth sours. 

“You never let me explain.” He says quietly into the silent room, commanding your attention, which you’ve settled onto the small crack in the corner of the floor. Your eyes snap up to his, and you think, I don’t wanna talk about it anymore. You think, I’ve finally started liking you as much as a damaged person like me can. You think, why does he have to bring up the Red Medusa and Dynamight right now? You think, why are you ruining this moment for us? You think—what moment? 

“We had a running joke, back at UA.” He starts, despite the way your mouth downturns and you start to curl into yourself. “That me and Ponytail—Creati, were in competition for the biggest boobs.”

At that, an unexpected laugh rips out of you. You cover your mouth in shock, eyes wide, mouth trembling as you try to keep your shocked giggles at bay. On instinct, your eyes travel down to his chest and—yeah, he really doesn’t help his case with how he folds his arms under his chest, giving himself a sort of cleavage. He narrows his eyes at you, and another giggle escapes from the palm of your hands. 

“Shut the hell up,” he tells you, no bite evident in his voice, and it only makes more laughs run from you into the quiet air of the kitchen. “And we had a little reunion a few months back, and we all started reminiscing ‘nd shit. And of course, dumbass Sparky records the worst part of our conversation, crops out what was said before and after, and uploads it.”

Your smile dies down a little as you think back on the video of Dynamight, obviously a little buzzed by his slur and reddened cheeks. You remember him sitting away from everyone else captured in the video, grunting that Ponytail’s tits have gotten so much bigger over the years, he’s surprised that she hasn’t tipped over and created a fuckin’ crater bigger than Musutafu by now. 

“Out of context, it was gross.” Bakugou admits, nodding his head once, his eyes casted to the back of the couch seen from over the kitchen island. “But beforehand, the fuckin’ idiots had brought up the whole boob contest thing, and we were all joking about it, you know?

“Shitty Hair said I still had her beat, and I made that comment that you heard. But then, she came back and said mine were so big that she was sure that I took a leave of absence a few months back to get them done just to beat her.” He shakes his head at that with a huff of a laugh, and you chuckle under your breath at the thought of that. Big bad Dynamight going under the knife to get bigger tits. The thought makes you laugh a little harder than you expected to, before it dissolves into a full blown cackle. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” You keep repeating, waving your hand at him as you wipe away a budding tear in your eye. Bakugou tries to sneer at you, but he can’t help the small smile creeping up on his face. You’re laughing, he thinks, he made you laugh. 

“It’s just that, the imagery of you doing that just surprised me, is all.” You catch your breath after a few seconds, a big smile still stretching your cheeks as you look down at his chest again. He covers it with his arms, and frowns at you. 

“Looks like you’re the perv here.” He counters. You chuckle, hiding your face behind your hands as you shake your head. Once you’ve finally calmed down, do you emerge again, smile not as big, but it still ghosts your face softly. 

“Thank you.” You state simply, bowing your head slightly to him. He cocks an eyebrow, goes to pick up his mug before realizing its empty, frowning at it. 

“For calling you a perv?” Bakugou asks, and you snort at that, shaking your head. 

“No, for taking the time out to clear that up for me. You didn’t have to.” Your voice drips with sincerity, makes Bakugou take you in more. The softness of your face, the gentleness in your eyes that he’s never seen before, how the low light shadows the highest peaks of your cheeks. 

“Yeah, but I knew it bothered you in that moment, and I didn’t think we could ever fully move past everything if I didn’t clear the air.” He tells you, voice softening the more he speaks. His eyes grow kind, and it becomes too much too fast for you, so you hurriedly look away to the mug in the sink. 

“Guess you’re not too much of a pig to be around.” You retort back, always falling back on insults when conversations get too serious. You hear Bakugou snort, and you snap your eyes to the fond look on his face. He stares at you for entirely too long, makes your face grow much warmer than you’d like it to, before he pushes off of the counter. He places his second mug in the sink, and when he gets closer to you, breathing suddenly gets a little more difficult. 

You eye the pinkish scar still on his shoulder, and now you understand why it doesn’t give you the same gratification that it usually does. You glance back at his eyes, and the soft look he reserves for you, flinching a little when his arm raises. But he only pats you on the top of the head once, his hand heavy, making you bow a little under the weight. 

“Get some sleep, nerd.” Bakugou tells you gently, and you don’t think you’ve ever heard his voice this quiet before. His lip quirks up in a tiny smile, and he starts off into the hallway. But you find yourself blurting out before you can even think about it,

“What would the conditions be if I agreed to become a Pro Hero?” Your voice is shaky, unsure ground you’re settling on as your eyes try to find his form in the swallowing darkness of the hallway. You hear his footsteps come to a halt, and you’re too afraid to look at him when he backs up in the entryway of the kitchen. 

“So, you agree? To become a hero?” Bakugou asks slowly, and you’re terrified to look him in the face, see the curiosity, the hope, meld into his features. You shake your head abruptly. 

“Not until I know the conditions.” You tell him firmly, looking up to find his face in the shadows, how the carmine of his eyes seemingly gleams in the darkness. It both unsettles and calms you when the tiniest hint of a smile graces his features. 

“We can talk about it in the morning.” He tells you, nodding his head once, looking to you for confirmation. But you only eye him as you hop down from the counter, and place your mug beside his own two in the sink. 

“Along with the rent?” You bite at him, aware that he still hasn’t given you a price yet. But Bakugou only grins at you, shrugging, as he starts his way back down the hallway again. 

“Possibly.” He shrugs before he disappears into the darkness, waving over his shoulder. “Goodnight.” 

You mumble a goodnight under your breath, face entirely too warm for your liking. Maybe you’re catching a cold, you think. Because there can’t be any other explanations to feeling like this when Bakugou is around. 

Right?

…

You guys don’t talk about rent in the morning, and instead only about the conditions of you becoming a hero. Bakugou sets up an online meeting with Deku and Yuu to discuss what would become of you if you do agree. 

Condition #1: No more being a vigilante. (You figured that, but hearing it out loud still made your face sour.)

Condition #2: You shadow Dynamight most days when he patrols, so you’re not alone out in the field for the first year. (That’s a long commitment, you had told Bakugou, and he only frowned at you before turning back to the screen.)

Condition #3: You start actual hero training with a private tutor that will be funded by the agency Dynamight works at. (Why is everything centered around him? You mumble to yourself, which makes the blond bristle and mumble that no one else would take your rude ass.) 

Condition #4: Your Red Medusa tattoo has to be covered at all times in public, and you must pick another name for yourself that does not include red nor Medusa. (That one isn’t as reasonable as you wish it could be—there’s an attachment to the name. How can they expect you to just drop it, dead and weightless, like it meant nothing? Leave it to die in the streets, the same way you almost did?)

Condition #5: Do not let anyone know who you used to be. (Are you gone? As you sit here in Bakugou’s kitchen, have you already ascended, have you already had your memorial? Have they already snuck you into soft earth and Frankenstein’d your remains?) 

You tell them that you’ll think it all over, but you agree for the most part. You can ask Yuu about bringing in Vanity once you’ve proven yourself to not be a lost cause, but that’s if she would even be willing to change who she is for the justice system. In all honesty, you doubt it. But you don’t think it’ll hurt to try. 

Bakugou closes his laptop once the call is over, turning in his seat at the kitchen table to face you. You’re in your head, gnawing at your bottom lip as you mull everything over. 

Is this really what you want? To put your days of being a vigilante behind you? Can you really stomach saving just anybody, even if they don’t deserve it? Can you even fathom the attention you’ll get, positive and negative, at an even bigger rate than before? Knowing everyone will have access to your name and your face and your body and—

“Hey.” A gruff voice calls out to you, and your eyes snap over to find vermillion ones already staring back at you. You hadn’t realized just how tight your chest had gotten, how your breaths had started picking up, your hands shaking against the granite table. You search Bakugou’s eyes for some kind of safety net, some kind of tether that will anchor you back onto this plane. 

“Don’t overthink it. Do what’s best for you, yeah?” He says so quietly, as if it weren’t just you two in his spacious loft. But it works, the softness, makes you whisper back a quiet okay, your voice tiny as you place your feet in your chair to rest your chin on your knees. Bakugou stares at you for a couple of beats, speaks before he sees you sink too deep into your head again. 

“Ready to get some early training in?” He asks you, corner of his lip lilting when you instantly furrow your brows in confusion. 

“But I thought you didn’t work today?” You mutter, frowning at him when he stands and rests his hands on his hips, almost as if in waiting. 

“I don’t,” he shrugs. “But I figured this could be good for you. Know you like beating someone’s ass from those viral videos of you.” 

You think back on the many videos of you while in the streets, doing your vigilante work. A couple of times when your gun had jammed, or it was knocked too far away from you, or you ran out of ammo and had to resort to hand to hand combat. Those moments were always thrilling, and it would take you back to your days of self defense training. How your instructor would yell at you, push you to go harder, to not show mercy because the other person would never grant you the same grace. 

Every time you had to use your fists, you would always picture the person as your attackers’ faces. Every single one of them. Their smug faces suddenly blue and black, swollen and bleeding, begging at your feet for some reprieve, the same way you used to do. Hand to hand combat made you nervous if you didn’t have the safety of your gun, but it also gave you so much power you never felt as if you had before. 

“Yeah, I’m ready to go whoop some hero ass.” You nod, eyes far away as you stand from your chair. Bakugou has to take a step back as you almost bump into him, and he shakes his head at you as you make a beeline for your room, suddenly determined. 

“Can’t say that, when you’re gonna be a hero soon, too!” He calls out to you, but you only flip him the bird. He can’t say he didn’t expect it. 

chapter seven

please do not repost or rec on tik tok!

tag list: @endlessfreaky@iamaconfusedpan

[probablyasocialecologist]

Reagan’s Republican Party of 1981 was very different from Herbert Hoover’s of 1933: it had become the refuge of millions of formerly Democratic white conservative voters in the Solid South who resisted the civil rights reforms of the 1960s. Accordingly, behind his cheerful veneer Reagan made sure that he tapped into the fierce resentments of federal authority, dating back to the Civil War and Reconstruction, that fueled that resistance. Before they were done, the Reagan Republicans had absorbed into their coalition an array of aggrieved Americans, including quasi-theocratic white Christian nationalists, the gun-manufacturing lobby, antiabortion militants, and antigay crusaders. The antigovernment fervor that grips the nation today is the long-term product of the right wing that Reagan called to arms (literally, in the case of the National Rifle Association) forty-odd years ago. It was his attorney general Edwin Meese, in tandem with the newly formed Federalist Society, who started packing the federal judiciary with the conservative judges who have gutted federal protections for voting rights, abortion rights, and more, while inventing, with fake history presented as “originalism,” an individual’s Second Amendment right to own and carry military-grade armaments. It was the Reagan administration that eliminated the FCC’s fairness doctrine, which mandated that broadcasters provide balanced coverage of controversial public issues, paving the way for right-wing talk radio inciters like Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy and, on cable TV, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News to amplify antigovernment paranoia. The Reagan White House also harbored the former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan as its communications director. Buchanan’s politics were rooted in the 1930s America First isolationism of Charles A. Lindbergh and the diatribes of the right-wing “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin, with their eccentric fixations on imaginary Jewish internationalist cabals. In the waning days of Reagan’s presidency, Buchanan remarked that “the greatest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan.” He tried to fill that vacuum himself, nearly defeating President George H.W. Bush in the 1992 New Hampshire primary with his “pitchfork brigades.” His convention speech later that year laid out the culture wars to come. Then he followed up with another bid for the Republican nomination in 1996 and an independent campaign in 2000. All those efforts failed, but their stark themes of isolationism, lost national greatness, immigrant invasion, and racial fear provided a template for Donald Trump’s MAGA campaign a quarter-century later. “American carnage” was the favored far-right image at least two decades before Trump.

[deathlygristly]

I really need to stop checking other platforms for news. Yes, they can be more local. Yes, they can be more diverse with groups I've never really interacted with so I learn more about others.

On the other hand I am starting to feel how social media can stress people out and make them more cynical and negative, the upper middle classness of the local reddit is downright depressing, and I am not always able to stop myself from replying when I shouldn't.

Anyway I just saw someone claiming that the military helicopters delivering supplies to the mountains and the official emergency workers and help from FEMA in our mountains must be recent since it's not what they've heard about, and I don't even know what to do with that.

I linked a small easy to understand local story talking about the Swannanoa fire chief begging people to stop spreading misinformation and I said you're getting Russian propaganda from whoever told you the government isn't here helping. Maybe that will help, I don't know.

It's just...man.

And they were talking about the concert and saying at least those musicians would help when the government wouldn't. The concert where the governor held a press conference beforehand!

Also how could they have not seen all the videos like this one?

But that's what I mean about other social media being more diverse and showing me groups I don't interact with so I can learn more about them. I have no connections to people whose media diet consists solely of propaganda, so I tend to assume that people know what they're talking about and that they have good information and they're just trolling because they're from a troll farm or they just like fascism.

So I guess this experience is good for learning about people who may not be fascist at heart but who only listen to media run by fascists.

It's just...if no one in the government was in the mountains helping, there'd be so many more dead people. People would have starved or died of dehydration. People would have died from diseases caused by whatever water or food they could find being extremely contaminated. The entire region would still be closed off, because the state department of transportation wouldn't have done any work on the roads.

The N.C. Department of Transportation crews and contractors have reopened more than 600 North Carolina roads, mostly in the western part of the state, since Hurricane Helene. Transportation crews were nearly done cutting and moving debris to the shoulders to reopen roads, NCDOT officials said Monday. They created over 4,100 debris sites on roadsides. "Damage estimates from what we have been able to assess to this point are up to several billion dollars and we’re not done,” said state Transportation Secretary Joey Hopkins in a news release. “The damage to our roads and bridges is like nothing we’ve ever seen after any storm, and this will be a long-term recovery operation. But we will be here until western North Carolina can get back on its feet.”

Also if the government wasn't helping no one would be able to communicate that they were all there dying of starvation and lack of clean safe water.

In the catastrophic aftermath of Helene, “disaster roaming” has been enabled in North Carolina to help connect residents who may be otherwise offline. Disaster roaming allows any phone on any cellular network to access any available network to connect to, regardless of provider. Service providers are required to activate disaster roaming during the following situations: When the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Emergency Support Function (ESF-2) is activated When the FCC’s Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS) is activated When the Chief of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau issues an activation Public Notice upon request of a state When a state has activated its Emergency Operations, activated mutual aid, or proclaimed a local state of emergency

The government had to act to get disaster roaming enabled.

I just....god. What do you even do about this level of propaganda?