#pay-walled article

[little--brittle]

To future archeologists, mega cruise ships might be some of the strangest artifacts of our civilization—these goliaths of mass-engineered delight, armed with dangling water slides and phalanxes of umbrellas. Looking up at one, you might gain the impression that cruise companies are trying to awe their customers into having a nice time. We have built battleships of pleasure, toiling the world’s oceans, hunting for fun.

It probably won’t come as a shock that the whole thing isn’t exactly sustainable. A medium-sized cruise ship spews greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those of 12,000 cars, while environmentalists accuse big industry players of investing little in decarbonization, and of covering up endless delay tactics in a heavy coat of greenwash. And for years, the industry has been dogged by bad PR from everything from routine dumping of toxic sludge to increasingly organized outrage from communities tired of hordes of tourists getting dumped at their docks.

The big question, though, is whether those customers buying cruise packages to the Bahamas or Alaska particularly care. It’s easy to make the case that they don’t. Despite the industry’s continued investment in new fossil fuel-powered ships, cruise ticket sales are projected to climb back to record 2019 sales levels this year after a hit during the pandemic, according to the latest industry association report.

At least one cruise company, though, is betting that at least some potential customers care about sustainable vacations. Hurtigruten, a specialty cruise line based in Norway, says it has built its last fossil fuel-powered ship. On June 7, the company unveiled new details about the technologies it’s testing in pursuit of the world’s first zero-emission cruise ship, and renderings of what the boat might look like. Instead of towering over the ocean, the ship seems to cling close to the water, the better to reduce air resistance. In place of smokestacks, the designers envision retractable sails that double as solar panels. It runs on batteries instead of the thick, sticky fuel oil that powers most ships. And it’ll be ready, the company hopes, by 2030.

With time running short to phase out fossil fuels and avert the worst effects of climate change, the moral argument is compelling. But big businesses often make their decisions on what they might consider more practical concerns than what is “right” and “wrong.” It’s possible that Hurtigruten and its zero-emissions vessels could turn the industry ship around. But it could just be a green fluke, a new offering for a small slice of climate-conscious vacationers, as the rest of the industry chugs on as before.

Designing a green cruise line

Just about every CEO wants to be counted as an environmentalist these days. But Daniel Skjeldam, the CEO of Hurtigruten is one of those few who doesn’t dance around one of the more uncomfortable dimensions of our climate problem: the apparent conflict between the endless pursuit of more, bigger, better, and the limits of the earth’s biosphere.

“I think it’s sheer wrong to build bigger and bigger and bigger cruise ships,” Skjeldam says. The average cruise ship has around 3,000 passengers, but cruise companies have been investing in ever-bigger liners. “7,000 [passengers], 8,000, 9,000,” Skjeldam says. “It’s just wrong.”

The idea of running a cruise line occurred to Skjeldam back in 2012. Hurtigruten (the name means “Express Route” in English) was losing money, and Skjeldam, then commercial director at European budget airline Norwegian Air Shuttle, thought he could turn things around. He wasn’t in consideration for the role, though, so over the course of several weeks, the ambitious then-37-year-old executive repeatedly called through to the switchboard at the office of the company’s chairman, until finally he was able to come in and give his pitch in person.

It wasn’t long after that Skjeldam, officially appointed as CEO in October of that year, was on a Hurtigruten ship sailing past the Svalbard archipelago, home to the world’s northernmost inhabited town. He was on the bridge, having a cup of coffee with the captain, a five-decade veteran at the company, who pointed out a glacier several miles away. When he started sailing for the company in 1980, the captain said, the glacier had reached all the way to where they were floating now.

The experience, for Skjeldam, was eye-opening, and under his leadership, the company began making investments in sustainability long before some of the bigger players in the industry started doing the same. In 2016, the company began outfitting its ships to use power from the grid while tied up in port instead of burning their own fuel—the technology can reduce air pollution when ships are docked by up to 70%. That year, Hurtigruten ordered the world’s first hybrid-power cruise ships, and started offering cruises on its first, the MS Roald Amundsen in 2019, which the company says has about 20% lower emissions than a similarly sized conventional ship. The company now operates four such vessels.

Skjeldam says the changes have to do with both customer desires for more sustainable travel, which he expects to grow in the years ahead, as well as employee demands. Hurtigruten is the largest employer in Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s main settlement. Temperatures there are warming six times faster than the global average, bringing unseasonably hot weather, glacial retreat, and more frequent avalanches triggered by unstable snow. “I speak to these people, and they reflect upon the massive changes that have happened just over the last decade, and it scares them,” says Skjeldam. “That’s driven this interest and desire from within the company on driving change and being part of the solution.”

Hurtigruten is aiming for carbon-neutral operations by 2040, and to cut all scope three emissions—those from the company’s supply chain—by 2050. But despite investing more than $70 million into emissions-reduction technology, progress has been slow, which the company blames partially on energy prices, which made it more expensive to buy low-carbon biofuels. Indeed, while Hurtigruten managed to cut about 2% of overall emissions between 2018 and 2022—emissions per customer trip remained essentially unchanged.

Still, Skjeldam is pushing ahead with the company’s next major project: building the industry’s first entirely zero-emission vessel. In 2021, the team began reaching out to technology firms and shipbuilders, and doing feasibility studies, figuring out what technologies—a small nuclear reactor, perhaps, or maybe using more biofuels—might work. Eventually, they settled on batteries.

There was no way to make a battery that would last long enough to use on what the company calls its “expedition” cruises—where trips vary from week-long pleasure rides the Galapagos to multi-month odysseys between the Arctic and Antarctica, and fares can range from a few thousand dollars to the price of a luxury sports car. But it might work for their flagship service: a multi-stop cruise up the Norwegian coast (which also serves as a mail and transit service between isolated fjord communities) that would offer frequent opportunities to recharge.

Even with many stops, the battery would have to be huge. Currently, the engineers are eyeing a capacity of 60 megawatt-hours, equivalent to 1,200 Tesla Model 3 batteries. This would allow it to run for well over 300 miles before recharging. Maximizing that range means finding ways to drastically cut the ship’s energy usage. To do this, the company is exploring using underwater maneuvering jets that can retract into the hull to cut drag, and a streamlined profile with a tiny cockpit-style bridge to reduce air resistance, as well as adding sails and solar panels to harness extra power. The company plans to have a final design by 2025.

Batteries vs. Biofuels

Hurtigruten’s work may prove out some worthy technologies that the rest of the cruise industry could adopt. But the central idea of using a big battery may ultimately be impossible for bigger cruise ships, because batteries can’t store enough power in a small enough space—to get across an ocean, you’d need a battery that might take up much of an entire ship. Sails can help, but they wouldn’t be able to do more than provide an energy boost for many kinds of shipping. That leaves either biofuels or synthetic fuels produced using renewable energy—each with its own drawbacks.

Methanol, made from renewable energy and CO2, is a good choice, but making it requires obtaining CO2 from a limited supply of global biomass (demand for agricultural waste and other forms of plant-based carbon are set to explode with global demand for alternative fuels) or else using huge amounts of renewable energy to pull CO2 from the atmosphere. Ammonia is another option for the shipping industry, and it gets around the CO2 supply problem, but it wouldn’t work for passenger ships, since a leak would expose thousands of people to poisonous ammonia fumes. Then there’s hydrogen, though the lightest element can be tricky to work with, since it leaks easily and needs to be supercooled to get to high enough densities to transport, which uses a lot of energy.

Four companies—Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian Cruise Lines, and MSC—control the lion’s share of the cruise market. They’ve made some positive moves, such as investing in ships capable of running on methanol, though such vessels might continue to mostly use diesel for the time being due to lack of refueling infrastructure. But, with the notable exception of Norwegian, the big players’ current environmental plans primarily hinge on using liquified natural gas (LNG) in the newest generation of ships. Using LNG does cut down on particulate emissions and certain dangerous pollutants like sulfur and nitrogen oxides. The industry also cites the fact that LNG has about 30% lower carbon dioxide emissions than using heavy fuel oil. But CO2 isn’t the only thing that escapes from the smokestacks—the engines popular in the cruise industry leave a lot of the natural gas unburned, which gets emitted as well.

Natural gas, also known as methane, is itself a powerful greenhouse gas. With a warming potential more than 80 times greater than CO2 over a 20-year timescale, the overall emissions picture of using LNG is likely worse for global climate change than if the cruise lines had stuck with petroleum.

When asked about the use of LNG on its vessels, a representative for Carnival pointed to the company’s “long term aspirations to achieve net carbon-neutral ship operations by 2050.” MSC Cruises and Royal Caribbean did not respond to requests for comment. “There is [an] abundance of scientific data and well-respected studies that showcase the environmental benefits and value of using LNG, one of the cleanest fuels available today,” the Carnival spokesperson wrote over email. “We also are piloting other next-generation green technologies such as biofuels, fuel cells and large battery storage systems, among others.”

Currently there’s little in the way of regulations to limit greenhouse gasses like CO2 and methane from shipping. Cruise industry emissions fall under the jurisdiction of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) of the United Nations, which technically has the authority to force deep sustained emissions cuts across worldwide shipping. In practice, though, the IMO has historically been heavily influenced by those very interests, with many countries appointing industry representatives to their IMO delegations. And the powerful Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA), the industry’s international lobbying arm, has not exactly fallen over itself to help strengthen emissions standards in ongoing IMO talks on greenhouse gas reductions, according to Bryan Comer, marine shipping program lead at the International Council on Clean Transportation.

“Anything that they can do to try and make the math work in their favor and to not have to do anything is what they’re trying to do at the International Maritime Organization,” says Comer. “They set targets that already include loopholes for them, and then they fight against climate regulations in foreign policy forums, and then once the regulations are agreed, they start fighting for exemptions and adjustment factors and special treatment. And oftentimes they get it.” CLIA representatives did not respond to requests for comment. Hurtigruten is not a member of the organization.

What matters to vacationers?

Some climate activists say there’s a good argument that the cruise industry shouldn’t exist at all. Cruise ships are, on the whole, basically inherently wasteful—if you want to see the world, dragging an entire resort around with you is probably not going to be the most efficient way to do it. Compared to flying to a destination and staying in a hotel, cruising almost always has a far higher emissions profile, according to research by Comer and others. A five-night, 1,200 mile cruise results in about 1,100 lbs of CO2 emissions, according to Comer. Flying the same distance and staying in a hotel would emit less than half of that. And that’s not counting for the fact that cruise guests often also have to fly to the port where they will embark.

Bringing that argument to cruise customers, though, can be an uphill battle. The cruise industry puts a lot of money into defending its environmental image. Activists in cities like Seattle, Wash., and Juneau, Ala., often greet disembarking passengers with leaflets on cruising’s environmental effects. But some campaigners say that passengers are often impervious to volunteers’ arguments. Some passengers, says Karla Hart, an activist with Juneau Cruise Control and co-founder of the Global Cruise Activist Network, will even stop to defend the industry, saying how switching to LNG or phasing out plastic straws has solved cruising’s environmental problem. It’s a symptom, in her view, of a broader dynamic between the cruise industry and its passengers: that customers want to believe they can have the perfect vacations advertised on television and online, even though they know the reality of what they will get is far different.

“It’s a suspension of reality, to go with one’s desire for an experience that you must know you can’t have,” Hart says. “The same as suspending your rational thinking that because they’re not using plastic straws, and they switch to LED lights, that they’re not completely polluting the environment.”

A new TIME survey conducted by The Harris Poll backs up some of those points. To environmental campaigners, cruising stands out as perhaps the most polluting sort of vacation. But fully half of Americans surveyed consider taking a cruise to be “eco-friendly,” with only one in three regarding such vacations as being bad for the environment.

More Americans regard flying as being bad for the environment, despite cruising’s bigger carbon footprint per passenger.

Trying to convince vacationers to make greener choices probably has limited effectiveness anyway. Many Americans consider cruising to be an affordable vacation option—mega cruises especially tend to benefit from economies of scale. Three out of five Americans surveyed by Harris Poll consider cost to be a very important factor in their vacation planning. Meanwhile, only one in five Americans think of the environmental impacts of their vacation in the same way.

Ujwal Arkalgud, who studies consumer decision-making at Lux Research, says that a specialty cruise provider like Hurtigruten might be able to attract customers genuinely interested in sustainability, but that the mass market customers will likely only ever be interested in having a kind of green alibi. “People are not buying to save the planet,” says Arkalgud. “Because you know, one simple way to save the planet would be to not go on the cruise.”

Absent a real push from customers, activists and environmental experts say that only regulation on the level of the IMO, or across enough big ports or markets like the U.S. or the E.U., can make the industry invest in decarbonization in a serious way. “The reason why you’re not seeing a lot of investment and innovation in zero-emission vessels is because it’s a competitive global industry,” says Comer. “If you do something that costs you more, and you’re still competing on price, and you can’t demonstrate to the passenger why they ought to pay more for this, there’s not really any incentive for you to do it.”

Skjeldam supports more regulation—to a certain extent, he says, such measures to limit cruise industry pollution are inevitable. But he also has more faith that cruise-goers actually care about the environment than either activists or other cruise executives. And as the effects of climate change become more pronounced, he says, more of the world’s cruise-buying masses will begin to see the light.

“Unfortunately, there is a misconception in part of the industry, where they don’t think that their guests really are focusing on this. I think that is wrong—I think the guests will focus heavily on it in the future,” Skjeldam says. “The public demands are coming.”

[aniseandspearmint]

https://norcalpublicmedia.org/2024100296403/news-feed/is-the-food-in-the-fridge-still-good-california-wants-to-end-the-guessing-game

Can't get the link to come out right but GOOD ARTICLE.

California is implementing a new law to take effect by 2026 where disingenuous 'best by' and 'sell by' dates must be replaced by actually accurate information.

As things stand now, there's no actual regulation on the dates you see on food, so they're not always accurate, leading to a great deal of food waste (estimated at around 20% of food waste).

[definegodliness]

Research article from Physic of Fluids about Van Gogh's Starry Night, researching the accuracy of the invisible airflow depicted as the famous swirls in his painting:

"This result suggests that van Gogh had a very careful observation of real flows, so that not only the sizes of whirls/eddies in The Starry Night but also their relative distances and intensity follow the physical law that governs turbulent flows."

Well, that certainly sparks the imagination. Can't stop thinking about it. Of course I'm wondering how on earth Van Gogh actually did literally see the world. In the news article I read one of the scientist said it was painted too perfectly accurate to be explained as a simply coincidence. Fascinating. Simply fascinating.

[gedwimora]

reading medievalists and historians tearing grrm apart

[oifaaa]

Girl you’re dumb as shit and that person was too. In case you didn’t know Apollo is an Anatolian god who is already poc. Your little white American author removing everything but Greek from him (which still doesn’t make him white 💀💀💀) only means you need to take more history classes and riordan needs his degree taken away. Please go fucking lords sake learn the difference between representation and black washing.

Friend you need to calm down a bit before you break a blood vessel over something that doesn't matter - I'm no expert your right they didn't teach old religions or mythology in my history class - that being said I do know that a lot of different religions (and even people in those religions) can have different versions of the same god it's how apollo is both a Greek and roman god but that being said the apollo that shows up in rick Riordans book is his version of the god its his character not the god himself it allows Rick to take some libraries with the character and that includes their designs - he's not the only one to do this either a lot of people who use the Greek gods in their books, games, shows will usually give them their own unique design on the characters- rick picturing apollo as white or me picturing him as black isn't a big deal

[angelnumber27]

From an article in New York Times called “The Delicious Misery of the ‘Sad Banger’

[mey-rin-is-fabulous]

No wonder the world looks so bleak. The only jobs people care about helping people get into are "high demand jobs" in short the trades or factory work. One is specialised( a lot of which require being good at math) and one will destroy your body.

In short its always about money and never about helping people do what they actually want to do.

[chicagocubsreactions]

MLB players dressing down Nike, Fanatics over new uniforms that look ‘like a replica’

[Original article]

The top story of spring training so far has nothing to do with the seams and stitches on a baseball. Instead, the talk of spring is all about the seams and stitches of the new jersey that Major League Baseball’s on-field uniform provider has rolled out for this season: the Nike Vapor Premier.

Nike claims the new jersey is softer, lighter and stretchier than the previous model. Many players say it’s worse. In clubhouses around the league on Wednesday, they criticized the jerseys’ poor fit, cheap look, inconsistent quality and small lettering.

“It looks like a replica,” Angels outfielder Taylor Ward said. “It feels kind of like papery. It could be great when you’re out there sweating, it may be breathable. But I haven’t had that opportunity yet to try that out. But from the looks of it, it doesn’t look like a $450 jersey.

“So far, thumbs down.”

At his locker, Angels reliever Carlos Estévez was in a tizzy over the new threads. He pulled out a couple tops and pairs of pants to show that the shades didn’t match. He laughed at the spacing and shrunken nature of the lettering on the back of the jersey. And he bemoaned the fact he can’t customize his pants to his preference, the way pitchers once could, tailoring the fit to their big dumpers and tree-trunk thighs.

“When I wear my pants, I feel like I’m wearing someone else’s pants,” Estévez said.

“I could see Estévez (flexing),” Ward said, “and it just ripping in the back.”

An airing of sartorial grievances that began earlier this week at the St. Louis Cardinals complex in Jupiter, Fla. has resulted in Nike, which engineered and designed the jerseys, and Fanatics, which manufactured them, facing blowback from big leaguers and baseball fans alike. The complaints prompted players to take their displeasure to their union, and the MLBPA is now involved in relaying the players’ concerns.

But anyone paying attention only to official channels would have little idea what the fuss was about. As that storm of criticism brewed in clubhouses, MLB and Nike ran a joint press release about the new jersey that included rave reviews from Cardinals third baseman Nolan Arenado (“It’s almost like wearing my favorite shirt out on the field”), Orioles catcher Adley Rutschman (“much more breathable, with vents on the numbers and better airflow all around”) and reigning NL MVP Ronald Acuña Jr. (“Feeling free in the jersey is the best feeling in the world”). All wear Nike gear in games. So do several other stars who have publicly praised the jerseys since Nike debuted them at the 2023 All-Star Game: Mike Trout, Kenley Jansen, Corbin Carroll and Jason Heyward.

Chicago Cubs shortstop Dansby Swanson, who has a Nike endorsement deal, said he reached out to Nike contacts Tuesday to discuss the new jerseys. He’s all for the new materials, he said, but some of the design decisions — like the specific shade of blue on the Cubs jerseys — are worth reconsidering.

“Cubbie blue is its own blue, right?” Swanson said. “This blue on the uniform is a little bit different than Cubbie blue. So how can we just recapture that?”

Swanson’s broader point was that in the design process, Nike may have removed some elements that make each team’s jersey their own. In Cardinals camp, for example, they lamented losing the chain-stitching of player names on the jersey.

“You wouldn’t change the font of, let’s say, the (Atlanta) Falcons,” Swanson said, referring to his favorite National Football League team. “They have a little bit of a futuristic block lettering. That’s unique to their jersey. You wouldn’t then go put that on the New York Giants jersey.” He added, “With some of those things, it’s like this makes a Cubs uniform a Cubs uniform. It doesn’t need to change. I think that they will probably have to end up figuring out a way to kind of go back to what it used to be.��

It is unclear whether these uniforms will differ from those worn in the regular season.

Nike did not respond to a request for comment.

While the jerseys themselves have changed, the main parties in the creation process have been the same since Nike became MLB’s official on-field uniform provider in December 2019, reportedly paying more than $1 billion for a 10-year deal. (Under Armour initially won that bid, back in 2016, but that deal fell apart and Nike swooshed in.) Nike partnered with Fanatics — which had purchased MLB’s 2005-19 uniform supplier, Majestic, in April 2017 — to manufacture the jerseys. So the Nike jerseys are now produced by Fanatics, out of the same Pennsylvania factory where Majestic jerseys were once made.

Chris Creamer, who runs SportsLogos.net, explained in an email Wednesday that it’s surprisingly common for one company to create jerseys for another brand like Fanatics is now doing for Nike. When Fanatics takes over as the National Hockey League’s uniform outfitter this fall, the Fanatics-branded jerseys will be manufactured at the same Quebec factory as the Adidas ones NHL players are wearing this season.

“The money exchanged in these deals is really just for that brand’s corporate logo on the jersey,” Creamer wrote. “The leagues or the companies involved don’t seem too bothered by who is actually producing it.”

A Fanatics spokesperson declined to comment.

Nike claims that in designing the Nike Vapor Premier it “body-scanned more than 300 baseball players to dial in the ideal fit — more athletic and form-fitting than the previous chassis,” which is clothes-speak for template. But a common complaint among players is that Nike has limited the customization of jerseys.

Pitchers, in particular, are huffing about their pants. Before last year, according to multiple pitchers, they had several measurements taken for their pants, which then were tailored. Nike has since simplified the fitting process, and tailoring is not on the table. (“You’re telling me that Fernando Tatis is going to be on the field without painted-on pants?” a pitcher joked. “Robbie Ray with some baggy pants?”)

Some clubhouse managers have taken on the task of tailoring.

Yankees reliever Tommy Kahnle, who fans have given the nickname “Tommy Tightpants,” has leaned into the look. He reached into his locker for his new trousers Wednesday and gave them a “stretch test” with his hands. Not tight enough. Kahnle hadn’t actually put them on yet, but he knew.

“I like the old ones,” Kahnle declared.

A Dodger said he was swimming in his pants.

A Tiger loudly complained, “These pants they made are terrible.”

Among the design tweaks Nike made to this year’s jersey, according to Uni Watch’s Paul Lukas, are stretchier fabric, changing home jerseys from white to a subtle off-white, narrowing the placket (the vertical strip on the front of the shirt upon which the buttons sit), altering the belt loops, moving the MLB logo down on the back of the jersey and reducing the size of the last-name lettering. The latter change has fans fuming and players scratching their heads.

(Link to tweet showing the difference in the jerseys)

Tigers catcher Jake Rogers, who had no other complaints about the jerseys (“It feels good”), noticed that the lettering was visibly smaller this year. “You see an old jersey, my name was like this,” he said, gesturing with his hands, “using up a lot of room.”

“Look at the last names, bro,” Estévez said. “I’m 6-foot-6. This is going to look tiny on me.”

“I think the last names look really bad honestly,” a Cardinals player said. “I saw someone on Twitter said this looks like a Walmart jersey.”

Nike will sell three versions of the Nike Vapor Premier jerseys to fans: Limited Jersey (“inspired by the on-field jersey”), Game Jersey (“replica player jersey”) and Elite Jersey (“authentic jersey, as worn by player on-field”). Only the Limited jersey is currently available; an Acuña can be had for $174.99.

Now situated at Cubs spring training in Mesa, Ariz., Swanson has been sort of stuck in the middle, privy to both complaints from players about the jerseys and chats with Nike employees about them.

“It’s one of those things where there’s good and bad,” Swanson said. “It’s hard to sit here and just blast them about it or praise them for it. There’s stuff on both sides, and I think the beauty is they’re willing to have those conversations. Obviously, if it’s a change of anything, initial reactions are always going to be (strong). But I do think there are some things that could be altered to make it better.”

Whether or not Nike makes changes, this jersey looks different. It feels different. It’ll take time, however, to know whether the Nike Vapor Premier is actually better or worse than the version before it. When Majestic in 2016 introduced its “Cool Base” jersey — lighter, moisture-wicking, more flexible — they felt thinner and cheaper, Creamer said. There were design complications. There was criticism. But eventually, everyone moved on.

Reds catcher Luke Maile said changing jerseys is like changing toilet paper.

“You notice it at first,” he said, “but after a while, it’s just your toilet paper.”

[papirouge]

There's this post floating aroud pulling out sources arguing that the TERF movement is showing signs of being a cult (which might be at some level lol) but look what I found in their source

[ifitsbritishimprobablyafan]

Hey I need some cat advice!

I’ve been doing my best to research things online through articles and videos, I’ve also been talking to my friends/family that own cats, and I talked to a vet back when I first got him, but this is my first time ever having a cat so everything is super new to me (I’ve only had him for about 3 months now).

We’re having some behavior issues and I wanted to see if anyone had any advice for training or what I can do to help him so he’s not acting out. I worry that many things are my fault just because I’m not used to handling a cat.

I want to start off saying he really is so SWEET. He sleeps with me every night, loves to cuddle on my lap while I work or watch movies, loves play time, will come up and give me kisses and rub all over me when I come home from the store or school, and he never hisses or anything like that.

BUT when he wants my attention he is INSISTENT and it doesn’t matter that I’m sleeping, working, eating etc.

At first he meows but I can’t always get up and give him what he wants (usually either food or playtime).

If he doesn’t get what he’s after, he starts biting me (he literally just walks up to my leg and bites it - 0/10 don’t enjoy).

Then if I continue to not give him what he wants he starts destroying things because that always gets me to actually get up and pay attention to him. He still doesn’t get the thing he wants but it does get me to move.

This has led to a couple broken items and (this is the one that really baffles me here) the eating of anything and everything paper.

He has eaten like 6 or 7 art prints right on the wall and I’ve had to slowly start taking down any that he can reach... my walls are going to wind up barren because he keeps eating them. He’s also eaten the cover of the book I was reading, my planner, the printer paper right out of the printer, and more.

I try and keep him on a routine so that he knows when it’s feeding time/play time/cuddle time etc. but this does not seem to matter to him.

For example, he gets fed at 6am and 6pm everyday but starting at about 4am and 4pm he turns into a menace every five seconds to tell me he’s hungry.

I’m feeding him the right portions listed on the food I give him for his weight/age so I’m not starving him and I don’t want to over feed him since he’s indoor only and therefore gets less exercise.

My final ditch effort has been shutting him out of the room I’m in after he starts the destruction phase (the bedroom when I’m sleeping or the office when I’m working). But now he’s taken to clawing up the carpet under the door (I’m in an apartment so I’ll have to pay those damages) and just slamming himself into the door.

Any advice? What should I do to try and train him to be patient or how to behave when he wants something?

My attempts at research were mostly about sticking to a routine and not acknowledging them (for example, ignore the cats meows when they try to wake you up so that they learn this doesn’t work and let you sleep)... but I’m already sticking to a routine and me ignoring his behaviors has just led him to escalating further and further into behavior I don’t like/want.

I don’t know what to do and I don’t ever want to hurt him or make him feel unloved but it’s already painful for me (physically with the biting and emotionally with him wrecking my stuff) and is going to start to get expensive too as I start having to replace items or pay my apartment for damages.

He is more important and valuable than anything and everything in my apartment but that still doesn’t mean I wanna deal with him eating all the paper in my apartment or biting me to get attention

[c-u-c-koo-4-40k]

I find this interesting. I will reblog.

DO NOT DO THIS!!!

If a website has a paywall, like New York Times, DO NOT use the ctrl+A shortcut then the ctrl+c shortcut as fast as you can because then you may accidentally copy the entire article before the paywall comes up. And definitely don't do ctrl+v into the next google doc or whatever you open because then you will accidentally paste the entire article into a google doc or something!!!! I repeat DO NOT do this because it is piracy which is absolutely totally wrong!!!

[hexblooddruid]

Really interesting article that I read recently about an arson attack from a tourist in Puerto Rico

[nice-and-accurate-ramblings]

FUCK NEIL GAIMAN.

[little--brittle]

Mireille guiliano is a slim and successful woman. She was born in France and studied in Paris before working as an interpreter for the United Nations. She then worked in the champagne business and in 1984 joined Veuve Clicquot whose performance was, at the time, rather flat. She fizzed up the ranks and launched their American subsidiary. In 1991 she became its chief executive and ran it with great success. In her apartment overlooking downtown Manhattan, she offers a glass of water before quipping “You know how much I love water.” She is correct; drinking plenty of water is a key rule in “French Women Don’t Get Fat”, her bestselling book on how to lose weight and stay slim “the French way���.

In the book she describes her discomfort when as a teenager she gained weight while spending a summer in America. Her uneasiness comes to a head when she returns home to France and her father, instead of rushing to hug her, tells her she looks “like a sack of potatoes”. She goes on a new diet plan, remembers her old French habits (lots of water, controlled portions, moving regularly) and tips the scales back in her favour.

As a successful woman who is willing to talk publicly about her appearance and her weight, Ms Guiliano is rare. “Of course no one wants to talk about it,” she says. “It is much easier to pretend it comes naturally.” Successive waves of feminism have told smart women they should have emancipated themselves from vanity—as they have from domestic servitude and an existence defined by procreation.

But as a woman greatly affected by a comment about her weight she is not rare. Aubrey Gordon, the co-host of the Maintenance Phase, a podcast which unpicks the problems with modern weight loss and wellness, was told by a doctor that she was overweight aged just ten. Roxane Gay, an American writer, describes the shock on her parents’ faces when she returned home from her first term at boarding school, aged 13, weighing 30 pounds (around 14 kgs) more than she did when she went away.

These experiences are deeply personal but also universal, at least in the rich world. They reflect the pressure on women to look like an “ideal”. That ideal has changed over time. Renaissance nudes boast ample curves. But in more recent decades it has been defined by thinness. In the 1980s in New York it was the “social x-ray”, a term coined by Tom Wolfe in his novel “Bonfire of the Vanities” to describe women so slight they existed only in two dimensions. This morphed into the “heroin chic” ideal of London in the 1990s.

Today the perfect body is the “weasel bod”, says one Los Angelena, who is surrounded by women seeking physical perfection. These women strive to look streamlined and sleek, like a weasel, as though they could slip through water without disturbing it. Pursuit of such a body might permit a little more food than the regimes of the past but it is just as difficult to attain.

All women eventually recognise the importance placed upon their bodies. It is as though girls are walking through a forest unaware and are then shown the trees. They can wonder how the trees got there, how long they have been growing and how deep their roots really go. But there is little they can do about them and it is almost impossible to imagine the world any other way. And the fiction that clever and ambitious women, who can measure their worth in the labour market on the basis of their intelligence or education, need pay no attention to their figure, is difficult to maintain upon examination of the evidence on how their weight interacts with their wages or income. The relationship differs in poor countries where rich people are generally heavier than poor ones.

Wealthy people are thinner than poor ones in countries such as America, Britain, Germany and rich Asian countries, such as South Korea. There is typically a gently downward sloping relationship between most measures of weight, like body mass index (bmi), a measure of obesity, or the share of a population that is obese, and income, as measured by wages, the share of people below a poverty line or their income quartile.

That poor people are more likely to be overweight has often been explained by arguments that obesity, in the rich world, is a feature of poverty. Poor people may struggle to afford healthy foods. They may reach for processed or fast foods because they lack the time to prepare meals at home or have less time to exercise because low-wage jobs often involve working long shifts and can be less flexible than those performed by the “laptop class”. Or because low income is often a function of limited education, perhaps, so goes the thinking, that lack of education extends to a lack of knowledge about how to maintain a healthy weight.

The problem with all of these explanations is that the correlation between income and weight at the population level in advanced countries is driven almost entirely by women. In America and Italy the relationship between income and weight or obesity is flat for men and downward-sloping for women. In South Korea the correlation is positive for men but this is more than offset by the sharply negative correlation in women. In France the relationship slopes gently downwards for men, but the slope is much steeper for women. These kinds of patterns seem to hold across most rich countries and appear robust to various ways weight or obesity might be measured.

In other words, rich women are much thinner than poor women but rich men are about as fat as poor men. Wallis Simpson, whose marriage to King Edward VIII prompted his abdication, is supposed to have said that a woman “can never be too rich or too thin”. Apparently she must be both or neither.

That should give pause to anyone who thinks that poverty can explain why people are overweight or obese, or that being rich helps people to maintain a lower weight. You must then explain why those dynamics seem only to affect women. Perhaps the relationship would look the same for both sexes, but the occupations they do that require or might result in slimness differ. Men disproportionately do lower-paid physically active jobs, like construction (although nurses spend as much time walking or standing as builders, and are disproportionately women). Some rich women, such as actresses, might be explicitly required to be thin to play certain roles.

Still, it is hard to believe that either dynamic explains the entire difference. Data from the American Bureau of Labour Statistics (bls) suggest that just 3.5% of civilian workers do intensely physical jobs (and some of those categories, like exercise instruction and dancing, employ plenty of women). Only 0.1% of workers do jobs such as acting. That there is a gender gap in the relationship between income and weight, which cannot easily be explained by other differences between men and women, indicates another explanation: perhaps being thin helps women become rich.

Myriad studies which find that overweight or obese women are paid less than their thinner peers while there is little difference in wages between obese men and men in the medically defined “normal” range. There are exceptions: one Swedish study found that obese men were paid less, but obese women were not. But research in America, Britain, Canada and Denmark suggests that overweight women do have lower salaries. The penalty for an obese woman is significant, costing her about 10% of her income.

This might understate reality because it is hard to measure the wage gap for someone who was not offered employment because of their size. The upper estimates of the wage premium for a women being thin are so significant that she might find it almost as valuable to lose weight as she would to gain additional education. The wage premium for getting a master’s degree is around 18%, only 1.8 times the premium a fat women could, in theory, earn by losing around 65lbs—roughly the amount that a moderately obese women of average height would have to lose to be in the medically defined “normal” range. The penalty appears to be particularly significant for white women—evidence for black or Hispanic women is weaker (though could be explained in part the fact that studies often use bmi which can misclassify these women).

Discrimination against fat women has not diminished as their numbers have risen. “We might expect a declining penalty due to the increase in the percentage of overweight individuals,” wrote David Lempert, an economist, in a working paper for the bls, because it has become more normal to be overweight. Instead the stigma against overweight people has grown with their number; it almost doubled between 1980 and 2000. He suggests this may be because “the increasing rarity of thinness has led to its rising premium.”

The conclusion of the paper layers one infuriating sentence on top of another. As larger women age, he writes, they incur the effects of years of cumulative wage discrimination. Controlling for other factors, their starting wages are lower. Throughout their working careers, these women receive fewer raises and promotions. His paper shows “that an obese 43-year-old woman received a larger wage penalty in 2004 than she received at 20 in 1981,” and also that “an obese 20-year-old woman receives a larger wage penalty today than she would have in 1981 at age 20.”

This might reflect, in part, the higher costs that obese employees might impose on their employers, especially in America. Health-insurance premiums in America are often paid by employers, and very overweight or obese people tend to incur higher costs, partly because they suffer more health problems as they age. Still, it is unclear why these costs would be passed on only to women. And studies in Canada and Europe (where government-funded health care is the norm) find similar sized wage penalties for women.

Meanwhile, the idea that the penalty for being obese might be rising, not falling, is backed up by the data from the “implicit bias” test run by Harvard University. It asks test-takers to associate people of different races, sex, sexual orientation or weight with words like good or bad. And in general the findings are trending in a positive direction—discrimination on the basis of race and sex has fallen over the last decade. Negative associations of gay people have fallen by a third. Weight is the exception—attitudes towards heavy individuals have become substantially more negative.

In this context the arguments often made for why women and girls feel such pressure to be thin and suffer from low self-esteem when they are not appear woefully incomplete. Perhaps women do feel bad about themselves because they compare themselves to the gazelles that populate the covers of magazines and are duped into thinking those photos are unedited and attainable. Maybe their parents or a doctor commented on their weight when they were young. But in addition to those pressures is the powerful incentive of the market: women accurately perceive that failing to lose weight or be thin will literally cost them.

It is economically rational for everyone to devote time to education because it has clear returns in the labour market and for future wages. In the same way it appears to be economically rational for women to pursue being thin. Obsessing over what and how much to eat and paying for fancy exercise classes are investments that will bear returns. For men they are not.

To some extent women know this. A generation ago they seemed to take it for granted. “The most basic thing to get on with after your job—or during it—is how you look and feel. It is unthinkable that a woman bent on ‘having it all’ would want to be fat, or even plump,” wrote Helen Gurley-Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine in the 1980s and 1990s in her book “Having It All”, before rattling off advice about how to survive on 800 calories a day, encouraging women to weigh themselves daily and to accept that “dieting is hell and stop getting depressed about it!”

Such attitudes were more acceptable four decades ago. But the economic reality does not seem to have shifted much. All that has changed is the narrative, which has embraced body positivity and shunned dieting. Instead of the South-Beach diet or Atkins women eliminate foods—becoming gluten-free, vegan, low-sugar—under the guise of health or wellness, to improve their gut health or raise their energy levels. People spend large sums to attend Soul Cycle classes, a kind of boutique indoor cycling, to be strong and fit, not to burn calories. “Even glossy women’s magazines now model scepticism toward top-down narratives about how we should look…but the psychological parasite of the ideal woman has evolved to survive in an ecosystem that pretends to resist her,” writes Jia Tolentino in her book “Trick Mirror”. Feminism “has not eradicated the tyranny of the ideal woman but, rather, has entrenched it and made it trickier.”

Because being very obese comes with elevated health risks, some might argue it is not a problem that there are incentives for women to lose weight. But this relies on two wobbly pillars of logic. First, that people’s weight really is within their control. And second, that shame is an effective motivator.

Most people have experienced the effect that eating a little less and moving a little more has on their physical form and so it is common to think that weight and obesity is a mutable trait—one that slim people work to achieve and fat people fail to achieve. If this were the case, then it might seem possible for women to opt out of discrimination on the basis of weight, by conforming to the body type society demands of them.

Yet the perception of total control is misguided. People often report gaining weight when they start taking antidepressants; women tend to if they suffer from conditions such as polycystic ovarian syndrome. Ms Gay describes how her weight gain occurred in the aftermath of a brutal sexual assault. It also raises the question of why a great slice of humanity collectively lost control of their eating habits in the 1980s, when obesity rates began to soar in developed countries. Scientists are unsure of the answer (some point to the rise of processed foods) but they do agree that it is almost impossible to lose weight and stay smaller—and people who achieve this are far rarer than those who spend their lives trying, failing and blaming themselves.

Perhaps shame can work for some people, on the margin. It worked for Ms Guiliano. When asked why her reaction to her father’s comment was to decide to lose weight, rather than to tell him off, she pauses for a moment. “But, of course,” she says, “he was right.”

But think, too, of the huge cost that the stigma, shame or the fear of becoming overweight has on all of the women and girls who spend their lives worrying about what becoming that way might cost them. It is impossible to move around the world as a woman and not notice the time, energy and investment women make in logging the food they eat, reading diet books and attending exercise classes. Anyone who has tried a juice cleanse or a cabbage soup diet will know that the pursuit of thinness can come at the expense of other important things girls and women might want to do, like being able to focus on exams and work or enjoy food.

According to some surveys, girls as young as six recognise the expectation that they should be thin. Then adolescents “overwhelmed by sudden expectations of beauty, transmit anorexia and bulimia to one another like a virus,” writes Ms Tolentino. The tragedy is that there is no escape. Most women seem to try to conform. Some choose not to. Many simply fail. But whatever path is taken, it seems to come at a great cost.

[bandzboy]

i went to read the new yorker article and i can't believe you weren't joking when they called engenes saying "let enhypen rest" a punishing campaign??? this is insane they're so evil (both hybe/bpd and the article lmao)

it's genuinely baffling 😭 how is fans caring about their fav group's health a "punishing campaign"? it just truly shows that this is also exactly how hybe thinks and this was a way for them to make fans feel bad for even attempting something. i still can't believe that some fans don't see how evil this is and how much they don't care and how taking further action (boycotting) is absolutely necessary rn.

here's the excerpt from the article if someone hasn't read it

[starfleetsacademy]

if I was a sports reporter I'd drop everything and tell my boss that effective immediately I'd be covering the lakers '24-25 season.