#operant

[chetungwan]

I've been real busy lately because it's December and I work at the post office, so of course I am

But that doesn't mean I can't show up with an unprompted PSA

Hey! Have you ever mailed a letter to Santa Claus? Have you ever wondered what exactly happened to that letter? Well wonder no longer! If it had a stamp and a return address, then odds are that it ended up on the USPS's Operation Santa page!

Every year, the USPS collects letters to Santa Claus, and processes them to black out any identifying information. Last names, addresses, things like that. Then, the letters are posted on the Operation Santa webpage and people can adopt the letters.

Once you adopt a letter, you can buy gifts for them, wrap them up, and package them. Then you get a barcode from the website, and bring them to a post office. The clerk there will scan the barcode, which prints out a label with the address on it, and sends out the gift.

It's anonymous on both ends, and is generally just. A really nice thing to do.

I highly recommend it if you have some money to spare this year and want to give a kid a moment of magic this year

It's one of those things that the post office just happened to be positioned to do, and ended up knocking it out of the park. Unfortunately, I don't think they advertise this nearly well enough, and most letters end up going unanswered

Hopefully, a few more will be answered this year

[miametropolis]

last chance to evacuate

as you may know, israel has begun its ground operation in rafah. they dropped leaflets last night ordering people to evacuate, and bombing in east rafah has already begun.

The border is about to become unreachable.

Rafah is trapped.

We have literal hours until no-one, all the GoFundMe's you've scrolled past, all the people desperately begging on TikTok, will be able to escape.

Give now. Give whatever you can.

I am fundraising for the Odeh family, which is only 3k away from meeting its goal.

you will not get another chance.

GIVE HERE

[sailoreuterpe]

Using the bathroom in general is a human right and should be enshrined as such and I'm not joking. Too many groups of people are denied bathroom breaks or the use of bathrooms entirely--disabled people, blue-collar workers, children, homeless people, prisoners, students, the elderly. I'm surely missing other groups. Not using the bathroom when needed can cause serious, long-term damage, not to mention death. Free, clean, accessible bathrooms should be available everywhere. It's fucking cruel to deny someone the use of the bathroom, regardless of the reasoning. I'd rather every student in the world goof off and every homeless person make a mess and every worker "steal company time" than let one person suffer because they're denied the right to fucking pee in peace.

[abedallahmusallam]

Emergency: Help Abedallah and his family to Evacuate From GAZA WAR

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #276 )✅️

https://gofund.me/c358a1a5

Dear Humanity,

Please read this as if I'm a member of your family. maybe your brother, son or a friend and as if my family who's under death now is yours.

My name is Abedallah, a fresh graduate who wants to be a doctor like his role model, his father.

A student who was supposed to start his university and achieve the dreams he worked for but found himself losing the city he's living in, his house and losing any hope of a better future with it.

And after a alot of studying in Tawjihi ( The final level at high school before joining university), the war had another plan.

The story started since childhood, when every one I have knowen called me doctor.

This continued till I reach to the final grade at my school grade 12 (Tawjihi).

In this time, I felt that everything should be real, I can do it, I started to study

and work hard from begining to end, no sleep, no rest, all these things to achieve my goal and make my dream a real one.

The hard year has finished, then two week of fear waiting.

After this, the result came, it’s 99.4, I ranked the third in my country.

Since the war on Gaza strip started, we struggled alot, when we were at home at the beginning of the war the Israeli occupation bombed many houses around us, then we were displaced to Rafah because of fear and at the first day suddenly we heard the sound of many blasts,cracking glass and screaming women and children, they blew up a residential square near us.

After two months, I returned to khanyonis, but not to our home.

I live in tent becuse the israeli occupation burned my house completely, nothing left.

I feel that I lost and continue to lose every thing, this war made my dreams, hopes, my beloved things and my beautiful house burned and disappeared.

The single wish for me at this time is waking up from this nightmare and everything goes back to what it was.

Help your brother to get out of this disaster, rebuild his house and complete his education and realise his dream of becoming a doctor.

[auckie]

https://x.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1765391777580912958?s=20

PLEASE GD IF YOU LOVE AND WANT TRAINS

[389]

Speed Ratliff as the Boom Operator for SAW (2004)

[funkyboxofinterests]

Sometimes Raph misses being small

[selflovebystephen]

[essektheylyss]

"must a story have conflict?" yes. hope this helps <3

[chronicbitchsyndrome]

so: masking: good, unequivocally. please mask and please educate others on why they should mask to make the world safer for immune compromised people to participate in.

however: masking is not my policy focus and it shouldn't be yours, either. masking is a very good mitigation against droplet-born illnesses and a slightly less effective (but still very good) mitigation against airborne illnesses, but its place in the pyramid of mitigation demands is pretty low, for several reasons:

it's an individual mitigation, not a systemic one. the best mitigations to make public life more accessible affect everyone without distributing the majority of the effort among individuals (who may not be able to comply, may not have access to education on how to comply, or may be actively malicious).

it's a post-hoc mitigation, or to put it another way, it's a band-aid over the underlying problem. even if it was possible to enforce, universal masking still wouldn't address the underlying problem that it is dangerous for sick people and immune compromised people to be in the same public locations to begin with. this is a solvable problem! we have created the societal conditions for this problem!

here are my policy focuses:

upgraded air filtration and ventilation systems for all public buildings. appropriate ventilation should be just as bog-standard as appropriately clean running water. an indoor venue without a ventilation system capable of performing 5 complete air changes per hour should be like encountering a public restroom without any sinks or hand sanitizer stations whatsoever.

enforced paid sick leave for all employees until 3-5 days without symptoms. the vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through industry sectors where employees come into work while experiencing symptoms. a taco bell worker should never be making food while experiencing strep throat symptoms, even without a strep diagnosis.

enforced virtual schooling options for sick students. the other vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through schools. the proximity of so many kids and teenagers together indoors (with little to no proper ventilation and high levels of physical activity) means that if even one person comes to school sick, hundreds will be infected in the following few days. those students will most likely infect their parents as well. allowing students to complete all readings and coursework through sites like blackboard or compass while sick will cut down massively on disease transmission.

accessible testing for everyone. not just for COVID; if there's a test for any contagious illness capable of being performed outside of lab conditions, there should be a regulated option for performing that test at home (similar to COVID rapid tests). if a test can only be performed under lab conditions, there should be a government-subsidized program to provide free of charge testing to anyone who needs it, through urgent cares and pharmacies.

the last thing to note is that these things stack; upgraded ventilation systems in all public buildings mean that students and employees get sick less often to begin with, making it less burdensome for students and employees to be absent due to sickness, and making it more likely that sick individuals will choose to stay home themselves (since it's not so costly for them).

masking is great! keep masking! please use masking as a rhetorical "this is what we can do as individuals to make public life safer while we're pushing for drastic policy changes," and don't get complacent in either direction--don't assume that masking is all you need to do or an acceptable forever-solution, and equally, don't fall prey to thinking that pushing for policy change "makes up" for not masking in public. it's not a game with scores and sides; masking is a material thing you can do to help the individual people you interact with one by one, and policy changes are what's going to make the entirety of public life safer for all immune compromised people.

[miametropolis]

Palestinian father Fadi Al-Sharif is trying to help his family escape from Gaza.

They're raising $62,500 to evacuate 11 people. This includes Fadi's 9-month old baby, his parents, and his wife.

Today, they are almost halfway to their goal.

Let's get them all the way.

Will you help?

DONATE NOW

SHARE ✿ LIKE ✿ REBLOG ✿

[saveugoodmadam]

*leaves theatre* wow what a great show my favourite bit was how it fundamentally changed me as a person forever

[cardo-de-comer]

uh oh