#workforce care in construction

[constructionsafetynetwork]

Support and Rehabilitation Programs for Construction Workers

In the physically demanding world of construction, the well-being of workers is paramount. Support and rehabilitation programs for construction workers play a crucial role in maintaining a healthy and productive workforce. This article delves into the significance of these programs and the various components that make them effective. The Critical Need for Support and Rehabilitation The…

[v1nsmoke]

𝐌𝐀𝐓𝐂𝐇 𝐌𝐘 𝐅𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐊 // 𝐉𝐎𝐇𝐍 𝐇𝐀𝐍𝐂𝐎𝐂𝐊 𝐗 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐄𝐑

oneshot - fallout's john hancock x reader

tw: mentions of drugs (usual hancock activity)

summary: after days of exiting goodneighbor, you and hancock finally get to talk

fandom: fallout

a/n: there is not enough talk about this fella omg… now that liking the ghoul from the fallout show is accepted, i can come forward (i chose the “romance hancock” option every playthrough). no pronouns used, so gender neutral ig? also the inspiration for the title is that one song thats viral on tiktok rn, also galvanized square steel mentioned

tags: -

wc: 0.6k

“Day twenty-five since leaving Vault 111, today is Monday and my location is Diamond City, it’s currently 2:41 PM. Me and my companion are at the noodle shop,” you say, speaking into your Pip-boy. 

Recently, you’ve been documenting every day, usually just a brief summary on that day’s experiences. These experiences consisted of hourly radroach attacks, accidental overdose on jet, or encounters with hostile Mr. Handy’s. Or accidental near-death situations with a deathclaw. That only happened once. 

You weren’t sure anybody would ever hear these, even better, be interested in these daily logs. Your companion seemingly couldn’t care less about these logs, as he ate his portion of ramen next to you. 

“The Institute remains undefeated, and I doubt it will change today, I’m not in the mood for it,” you continue.

“If it depended on your mood, it would be there forever,” Hancock cuts in with his sarcastic remark.

A sigh escapes your lips at his words.

“Maybe I should switch back to Dogmeat and send you back to Goodneighbor,” you reply.

“Now, what good would that do for you?”

“It would spare me from more of these remarks.”

“But can Dogmeat give you this?” He asks as he slides you a jet.

Hesitantly, but you accept it with a smile. 

“John Hancock, the ghoul you are,” you sigh.

A smile creeps onto his features. 

“See? You like me enough.”

“Whatever helps you sleep…”

You’ve been traveling with Hancock for the past week or so, after you accepted the offer of Bobby, who just so happened to lie to you. One thing led from another, and after finishing off Hancock’s bodyguard, you managed to solve the bad blood between the two of you by killing Bobby herself. 

Hancock was useful and good company, helping out where he could and making small talk with you. Not to mention that he was supplying you with a different kind of drug every day. They don’t have that stuff in Vaults…

Last night, the both of you got high as hell in the home you bought with hard-earned caps here, in Diamond City. It was mostly a box, so you decided to illegally expand it with galvanized square steel and eco-friendly wood veneers. So, after the finished construction - that lasted four days with the cheap and friendly workforce including Little John (Hancock) and yourself -, the two of you decided to celebrate.

He plopped down onto the mattress - the construction fee was too much for you to spend even more caps on a normal bed -, resting his back against the wall. You popped open a bottle of Nuka-Cola, taking your place on the mattress next to him.

“So, how do ya like it?” He asks, taking a Jet out of his pocket.

“So far so good,” you reply with a sigh.

“That’s all? Not ‘I love this place more than the Vault’?”

“I do like it more than the Vault, cause you’re here.”

He stays quiet for a few seconds before speaking up.

“That’s good.”

“That’s all? Not ‘Wow I, too, am really glad that I’ve got you and get to share Jet with you and that you defended me from that Deathclaw’?”

He lets out a slight chuckle, hanging his head low. 

“Thank you, then. For these past few days I’ve spent with you. Never thought I would find anybody who would accept me as their companion.”

© v1nsmokes 2024. Do not modify, translate or rewrite.

[dukeofankh]

Almost everybody has at least a *little* bit of a point.

Yeah. Even them. And being wrong about everything else doesn't actually change that. They might not know how that point should actually be interpreted, they might come to foolish or even actively harmful conclusions from that point. They might radically overstate how prevalent or important the point is. But don't fall into the trap of refusing to acknowledge things that are true just because a bad person says them.

I cannot tell you how many times I've seen someone from a group I belong to dunking on someone from some outgroup, even a very harmful outgroup, and in doing so, denying basically true things that we would absolutely agree with if we were talking about them in private.

I dunno. Maybe it bugs me for neurodivergent reasons. Maybe I'm a pedantic ass.

The other day I got into a massive fight online with a guy in a feminist group because he was squabbling with a bit of a dipshit who pointed out that men are under a lot of pressure to become financially successful, and that's why they do stupid shit like get into crypto.

And like... rather than say "yeah, men are still expected under hegemonic masculinity to be breadwinners, despite the advances of women into the workforce, the economy being in shambles and the middle class having been whittled to a toothpick at this point. We need to work as feminists to challenge that gendered expectation, and as leftists to rebuild the power of labour to allow everyone, both men and women, to have a living wage that can allow for a family and a dignified life." This other feminist guy decided instead that, since the concept of men being pressured to be economic providers was being used in a way that sounded like it was suggesting that women only want to date rich men, it was redpill propaganda and, therefore, fascist misinformation. He went with, "what are you talking about, Gen X killed the concept of corporate success as marker of personal worth, everyone agrees that being a workaholic is bad and unattractive now. The idea that you think you'll be judged for being poor is a lie spread by the right to radicalize you into hating women." He did not react well when I pointed out that he was just as wrong as the other guy was. More wrong, actually.

And like...you can build multiple arguments from the same data point. Some are well reasoned, some aren't. Someone can feel pressure and assume it's much more widespread than it is, or that it takes a much more extreme form than it really does. But if you're going to coherently argue against an idea, you have to honestly appraise the situation and figure out what grains of truth it has in it. You have to acknowledge that core root of truth and show them how it means something else.

If, instead of doing that, you just deny the true thing because the other person's argument is built on it and you want to stamp it out? Because, hey, they interpreted it wrong, it's not like they really believe something true? You act as though a fact used to support a lie is also a lie. And if you do that, and argue against the facts because their conclusions are stupid, you construct a little world where, in refusing to accept both their flawed argument AND the fact it's based on, you become more wrong than they are. And you make the deeply foolish choice of picking a fight in that world. And if it's on the internet, that little world can become pretty big. Tactically, it's about the dumbest thing you could do. It ensures that they will keep fighting you because...you're fucking obviously wrong? It radicalizes people, because suddenly the only people who will acknowledge the truth on this thing they care about are other terrible people. It makes your side look dogmatic and ignorant. And apart from all of that...it gets things completely backwards.

Your principles are what you want to use to change the world for the better. You believe them because you honestly believe that following your principles improves things, because they are based on a solid grasp of how the world works. Your beliefs follow from what is true. If you flip it so that whether something is true is based on whether it supports your beliefs...that's a bad road to go down.

[pathetic-gamer]

random, deeply unscientific poll time because I'm curious how well this website reflects the overall labor force lol

before you mark "unemployed," READ THE EXPLANATION AND INSTRUCTIONS

DETAILS AND INSTRUCTIONS:

*The number listed beside each category is the number of job positions available to the total workforce, not necessarily the number of people who are actually employed.

*Not having a job does not automatically make you "unemployed." Unemployed means you are a participating member of the workforce but don't have a job currently. To be consider part of the active workforce as defined by the BLS, you MUST be ALL of the following:

16 years of age or older

residing in the 50 states or DC

available for work

actively seeking employment in the last 4 weeks

not on active duty in the military

DO NOT select unemployed unless you meet ALL of the criteria above.

Examples of not having a job but not counting as unemployed: stay-at-home parent (I know this one is a bad reflection of reality, i know i know pls dont yell at me), a full-time student not currently working, a 25 year old who hasn't applied for any jobs in over a few months, someone with a permanent or temporary disability who is either not working/seeking employment or on FMLA.

Other notes and explanation:

This is a list of all non-agriculture industries that employ 10 million or more people, based on the most recent data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The math might be way off bc I wasn't very careful lmao. If you have more than one job across more than one industry, pick the one that makes up the majority of your income.

A handful of familiar sub-industries that make up a portion of a larger industry but are less than 8 million people are listed in the "Other" category so that the much larger sub-industry can have its own line.

For example, healthcare belongs to "healthcare and public services," which is around 22M and includes childcare and social support services. Because direct healthcare delivery makes up such an enormous portion, I separated it out. The rest is fewer than 5M and thus does not get its own line, so they're included in "Other." (Insurance specifically is included in finance.)

More things included in "other":

Construction

Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction

Utilities

Real-estate

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Lincoln Project

* * * *

VP Harris challenges Trump on immigration

September 19, 2024

Robert B. Hubbell

On Wednesday, VP Kamala Harris spoke at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s 47th Annual Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C. Harris took on Trump's nightmarish threat to deport millions of immigrants if he is elected.

Harris said,

While we fight to move our nation forward to a brighter future, Donald Trump and his extremist allies will keep trying to pull us backward. We all remember what they did to tear families apart, and now they have pledged to carry out the largest deportation, a mass deportation, in American history. Imagine what that would look like and what that would be? How’s that going to happen? Massive raids? Massive detention camps? What are they talking about?

Harris’s speech is here: Harris delivers remarks at Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute leadership event.

As VP Harris said, it is a dangerous fantasy to believe that Trump could deport ten million immigrants. An operation of that scale is beyond the resources of the federal and state governments combined. Although the effort would not succeed, it would lead to economic chaos as the labor pool is jolted by the sudden disappearance of workers who fill entry level service jobs, harvest America’s crops, provide home care for the elderly, and provide significant portions of the workforce in construction, hospitality, and manufacturing industries.

If you don’t have time to watch Harris’s entire speech, I recommend viewing the segment in which she frames reproductive rights as one of the freedoms guaranteed to Americans. She also notes that 40% of Latina women live in states with Trump abortion bans: Harris addresses impact of Trump abortion bans on Latina women.

VP Harris’s comments on abortion and reproductive freedom are powerful and moving. She continues to be an effective, focused campaigner who is sticking to the Democratic messaging of “freedom” and “an opportunity economy.”

As a reminder, Kamala Harris’s Opportunity Economy focuses on making the lives of middle-class Americans better. Her proposals include a $6,000 tax credit for families with newborns, expansion of the child tax credit, expansion of the earned income credit, a $50,000 deduction for new business owners, making rent affordable, incentivizing the construction of 3 million starter homes (as opposed to McMansions), subsidizing $25,000 of the down payment for first time homeowners, and reducing the cost of prescription drugs. See Issues - Kamala Harris for President: Official Campaign Website.

The Federal Reserve cuts interest rates by 0.5%

The Biden-Harris administration significantly reduced inflation levels while sustaining robust growth in the US GDP. As a result, the Federal Reserve announced today that it was cutting the prime interest rate by 0.5% and suggested that additional cuts would be forth coming. See Federal Reserve Board - Federal Reserve issues FOMC statement.

Even Trump admitted that “it was a big cut,” although he suggested the timing was political. In truth, the cut was overdue. The Fed waited too long to reduce rates. See Common Dreams, Fed 'Waited Too Long' But Finally Cut Interest Rates. As noted in the Common Dreams article,

Center for Economic and Policy Research senior economist Dean Baker also welcomed that the Fed is changing course, saying: "This is a belated recognition that the battle against inflation has been won. Contrary to the predictions of almost all economists, including those at the Fed, this victory was won without a major uptick in unemployment."

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden achieved the nearly impossible—avoiding a recession while taming inflation. They deserve great credit for doing so—and voters are starting to realize that fact. See Harris closes gap with Trump on the economy, new Pennsylvania poll shows | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Per the Post-Gazette,

Pennsylvania voters no longer prefer former President Donald Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris on the economy in a poll that shows the Democratic presidential nominee all but erasing the deficit on which candidate can best handle the top issue for voters this fall. In a Quinnipiac University poll of likely Pennsylvania voters released Wednesday, Trump’s advantage over Ms. Harris was just 50% to 48%, a two-point advantage well within the survey’s margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.

Harris continues to do everything just right. While there is no guarantee of success, we should be gratified that we have a candidate who is running such a terrific campaign!

Trump's effort to cram voter suppression bill through Congress fails

Trump ordered Speaker Mike Johnson to make a futile attempt to pass a continuing resolution for the budget that included the GOP voter-suppression bill that would require proof of citizenship to register as a voter. (Note that our nation has survived for 235 years without requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote.) The bill was doomed to fail���and Mike Johnson knew it. But Trump ordered him to jump and Johnson’s only question was, “How high, sir?”

See Roll Call, Johnson's stopgap funding package goes down to defeat.

To be clear, Trump wants to force the US into a financial crisis for political advantage. He said on Truth Social,

If Republicans don’t get the SAVE Act, and every ounce of it, they should not agree to a Continuing Resolution in any way, shape, or form.

But extremists in the GOP caucus know that Mike Johnson will cave. Per Marjorie Taylor Greene, “Johnson is leading a fake fight that he has no intention of actually fighting.”

Americans deserve better than a House GOP caucus willing to hold the budget hostage for Donald Trump.

Trump's desperation is showing

Trump is promising tax cuts like a man who can smell defeat. On Wednesday, he promised New Yorkers that he would remove caps on federal deductions for state and local taxes (SALT). Trump's position is absurd because he proposed and obtained the SALT caps as a way of punishing taxpayers in New York, New Jersey, and California (among other states). Now that he senses that he might lose, he is telling voters in those states that he will remove the caps he instituted.

Members of Congress immediately trashed the idea. Although capping the SALT deduction was unfair to taxpayers in states that fund their operations and pay into the federal coffers, reversing the policy would add $1.2 trillion dollars to the deficit. See HuffPost, Donald Trump’s Latest Tax Pander Flops In Congress.

Trump's flip-flop is a sign of his willingness to promise anything to anyone to be re-elected. Trump's desperation is a more reliable sign of the state of the race than the polls!

Wall Street Journal debunks JD Vance immigrant / cat story

The Wall Street Journal published an article on Wednesday that reported (a) the city manager of Springfield told JD Vance that there was no evidence to support the cat-eating immigrant story before JD Vance doubled-down on the false claim on social media, and (b) the woman who filed a police report claiming her cat had been taken by Haitians later found her cat hiding in the basement of her house.

See Wall Street Journal, How the Trump Campaign Ran With Rumors About Pet-Eating Migrants—After Being Told They Weren’t True (This article is accessible to all.)

Per the WSJ,

[Vance] asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” recalled [Springfield City Manager] Heck. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.” By then, Vance had already posted about the rumors to his 1.9 million followers on X. Yet he kept the post up, and repeated an even more insistent version of the claim the next morning.

The WSJ article takes a deep dive into the situation in Springfield and is well worth your time to read the entire article. The WSJ reporters lay out in detail how Vance and Trump are exploiting an immigrant population that is helping Springfield to grow and prosper after decades of decline:

The local economy boomed. Business owners said they were grateful to have workers eager to work long shifts and do what it took to meet production goals. New subdivisions sprung up in the cornfields outside town. New restaurants opened. The Haitian flag flew at City Hall.

Growth came with growing pains. The number of non-native English speakers in the public schools quadrupled to more than 1,000 children. The local clinic and hospital were overwhelmed with people fleeing a country where healthcare had been scant. Traffic increased, as did frustration with drivers more accustomed with the chaotic streets of Port-au-Prince than the orderly grid of Springfield.

One thing is clear: Vance and Trump know the rumors have no basis in fact but continue to promote them—thereby hurting the people of Springfield. Trump claims he will visit Springfield—over the objections of the mayor and the Governor of Ohio (both Trump-supporting Republicans!). The fact that Republicans in Ohio understand the cynical dishonesty of Trump's propaganda is a good sign

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[zedtiae]

happiness takes time, time is my life, if I have no time, am I still alive?

gooooooooood morning toontown!!!

meet the Lampshade, your plucky Lawbot Secretary Intern who's raring to assist those Managers in need! While some may find her methods to be suspicious, she's got a burning passion for helping others and a radical degree of patience that helps her do just that. Just... try not to peek underneath the shade without her permission...

hi hello welcome to my ref post for Pylar lmao

I def plan on posting lots about her, so here's a small bio to get folks started :-)

Honorifics: Ms. (she/her)

Full Name: Pylar Cassandra Flow

Employee ID: #25052

Suit Name: Lampshade

Position: Secretary Intern

Date of Hire: 18 months ago

Current District of Employment: Offshoring & Drilling

Likes: Conspiracies, groovy artwork, moving with the flow

Dislikes: The cold, "squares," being face-to-face

Backstory: A bright individual built by two light-casting Suits out of spare parts and a whimsical dream, Pylar was never intended to have a specific intention — she was simply made. While this was fine in her initial few years of operation, Suit society inevitably collapsed in on the young construct and the pressure to conform grew from deep within, leading to her first lampshade during her third year of school. Now a Suit of the workforce, Pylar carries on at C.O.G.S Inc. with a hidden face and personality, positively hellbent on maintaining her facade atop the workflow as to prevent others from ostracizing her like she had experienced so long ago before.

Personality: To know this Suit would be to know two different sides of the same construct: the Lampshade and Pylar herself. The former is a clever, conniving little shadow who pulls strings until the best outcome is inevitably produced. For some Managers, her interference is nothing short of a Cog-send; to others, she's a fiend against all that is laid-back and relaxed. Meanwhile, the latter personality — Pili's true identity — is far more complex. While generally playful and boisterous, she continues to hide a softer, more glass-like core that frets first and foremost after the comfort of her loved ones. Hardworking and loyal all around, there's very little Pylar wouldn't do on both sides of her veneer for the constructs that she cares for.

[predvestnik]

ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤSTUDY    :    Аякс Кир́иллович Во́лков

tagged by :    @viaetor !! <3 tagging :  @ccaptain @visionheld (Kaveh or Diluc) @snowtombedstar @csial @melodicbreeze @verdantluxury (Lumine) and it's also up for stealing

—    basics.

▸  is your muse tall    /    short    /    average ? Tall, around 6'2

▸       are they okay with their height ? He doesn't care much for it outside of making his siblings happy by letting them dangle off his arms or climb his back now and then.

▸      what’s their hair like ? Silky, almost thick strands with subtle waves. He has random paler strands that are growing in quantity by the minute but so far are well hidden among the naturally sunset-colored ones. He is the one trimming it now and then.

▸     do they spend a  lot of time on their hair     /    grooming ? Not at all, washing and combing are essentially the extent of his routine with it. It isn't unkempt by any means, but it also doesn't demand much attention.

▸      does your muse care about their appearance   /   what others think ? No, if it's about how he looks but a hard yes for anything else. He may not go after it, but he's a big fan of praises, of having his feats acknowledged and respected. It sends him over the moon. Inversely, criticism will seldom earn a serious response from him, even if he does reflect back on them to fish for anything constructive he can use to hone himself.

—    preferences.

▸      indoors    or    outdoors ?     outdoors. ▸      rain    or    sunshine ?  sunshine. ▸      forest    or    beach ?      beach. ▸      precious    metals    or    gems ?      metals. ▸      flowers    or    perfumes ?     flowers. ▸      personality    or    appearance ?      personality. ▸      being    alone    or    being    in    a    crowd ?     being alone. ▸      order    or    anarchy ?   order. ▸      painful    truths    or    white    lies ?     painful truths. ▸      science    or    magic ?     magic. ▸      peace    or    conflict ?    peace. ▸      night    or    day ?     night. ▸      dusk    or    dawn ?   dusk. ▸      warmth    or    cold ?     cold. ▸      many   acquaintances    or    a    few    close    friends ?   few close friends. ▸      reading    or    playing    a    game ?      playing a game.

—    questionnaire.

▸      what are some of your muse’s bad habits ? As a hyper vigilant individual, he doesn't sleep. He no longer needs it in the same way a regular human does ever since inheriting the Foul Legacy (+everything that came from his connection to Skirk and the Foul) and acquiring his status as a neohuman. That, paired with him always anticipating conflict, makes sleeping an undesirable routine. Still, his stress levels could take a dive if he napped more often. He also prefers to do everything on his own, seldom taking any of the companies under his hierarchy with him, which has, in turn, caused some of them to be shared among other leaders for logistics reasons and shrunk his squad to the point that he mostly borrows workforce (so far, only from Pantalone) when he needs it in other nations.

▸      has your muse lost anyone close to them ? how has it affected them ? Close, not yet and hopefully he won't, but he's lost many comrades throughout his history with the Fatui and, although it's set with him that those who join it are certain of their fate, it still aches very deep inside how it was not a destiny some of them really wished.

▸      what are some fond memories your muse has ? Most of them involve his family. The evenings spent with his father and older siblings by a campfire, listening to tales of great adventurers under the aurora; getting his first fishing rod and the one experience with it that landed him face first into the freezing waters while trying to catch a particularly stubborn and rowdy fish; Teucer's birth and how he nagged his mother constantly to watch him sleep in his crib; Tonia's tight hug when he came back home after his conscription into the Fatui.

▸     is it easy for your muse to kill ? Yes, he will kill if he must. He will try anything else if he can spare innocent lives, but if all else fails, he will still go for it.

▸      what’s it like when your muse breaks down ? Sadness makes him nearly catatonic, unable to speak, unwilling to move. He will withdraw where he can't be reached and let it run its course. The worst of it is how it makes him feel powerless and naked of everything he's worked hard for, his shoulders may shake but he can't seem to bring himself to cry, and then comes the numbness. If someone he's, like, really close to wants to go after him anyway and tries to offer comfort, he will likely decline it at first but become a crumpled creature if they somehow manage to get him in their arms.

▸      is your muse capable of trusting someone with their life ? Yes but the roster of people he trusts with that is so small that it's almost a no, also because he's unhealthily confident that he won't ever need to and if he does, it's because he's willing to make the sacrifice anyway.

▸      what’s your muse like when they’re in love ? Doting, attentive and attuned to his partner's likes and dislikes. Childe is giving in many senses: material, emotional and physical. He will do nearly everything in his power to make them feel seen and wanted despite his non negotiable periods of absence — expect letters, shipments, and couriers knocking on their door to check up on them and deliver special gifts. He is not one to easily fall in love, but becomes a whole entire fool once he does. He's naturally protective, too, but not blindly.

He isn't exactly insecure, but he's resigned to the fact that, maybe, the arrangements of a relationship with him aren't ideal for a partner that looks for or expects him to be around for long or all the time, so he may lack tact, sound detached from it, when addressing this one aspect of being in a relationship with him, which might make others think he doesn't miss them or care to be together. This goes to how he is very open about the possibility of dying out there as well, oops.

[riverjester]

In the aftermath of battle, of the village’s uprising against Gato, of Haku’s sacrifice and Zabuza’s mad last stand, of the first snowfall he had ever seen, Naruto’s mind was buzzing incessantly.

They spent another week in the Land of the Waves. While the bridge was built. While Kakashi and Sasuke recovered from their injuries enough to be able to travel. Sasuke had remained completely bedridden for two days following the battle. During the next six his ability to talk and walk increased in steady increments, but the rural doctor that had patched him up ordered him not to move too much, or else risk straining himself and setting back his healing. Naruto knew this mostly because Sakura told him.

Despite his efforts to bury them, they kept resurfacing: the sensation of Sasuke’s breath petering out on his lap, the sight of him standing up to wave at them and show that he was still alive, only to crumble like a badly constructed toothpick tower right afterward. He avoided searing into his retinas the image of this Sasuke too — weak, nearly voiceless, careful with his movements so as not to set his puncture wounds bleeding through the bandages — by barely seeing him. He spent all day running around, his small army of clones doubling the village’s workforce: carrying materials, running errands, doing small menial tasks. He left Tazuna’s house in the morning before Sasuke got up and returned after he had gone to sleep for the night, slipping in and out of his futon, next to Sasuke’s, with as little of a fuss as he was able, ignoring how he noticed that Sasuke wasn’t actually asleep every time. The construction of the bridge carried on far more swiftly than it could ever have before.

Sakura would come out at noon to whack him upside-down on the head and remind him to eat his lunch before he wore himself out. It would be a hassle if they ended up having to drag his sorry chakra-exhausted body back to Konoha, she said. She would stay for a few hours to help out if it was needed, or to seat by Naruto’s side as he took a break, breathing in the salty ocean air that was so different from Konoha’s. Afterwards, she would return to Sasuke’s bedside, an anxiousness to her eye, like she had to make sure that nobody had died while she wasn’t looking.

Naruto had wondered, after their first fight with Zabuza, when Kakashi needed crutches to get by day after day, but it didn’t fully sink how long it took — normal — people to heal until he felt Sasuke’s striking absence while Naruto saw this cursed C-rank to its conclusion. The thought flitted back and forth like an annoying fly: his unmarred skin, the heat that he had started feeling eating him from the inside at times, the itch of a wound closing itself up in minutes. He felt nauseous if his mind lingered too long on the reason behind it. Like he had been carved out of the embrace of normalcy and was being dangled helplessly in the air while he kept trying to walk among, alongside people.

So he strained his muscles and his chakra to the degree that Kakashi would allow instead of following that train of thought.

He didn’t think about how he had broken out of Haku’s ice-mirror prison. He didn’t think about what had happened before that. He didn’t talk to Sasuke because he didn’t know what to say, how to look at him. It worked well, it wasn’t difficult to keep the distance, since Sasuke always turned to look at the window or the wall if Naruto happened to enter any room that he was in.

Once, towards the end of the week, when Sasuke was well enough to move about, to walk without his knees trembling after a few minutes, he came out with Sakura and Kakashi for lunch. The four of them had eaten it sitting by the docks, away from the dust of the construction site. If it had been any other day, Naruto would have been talking everyone’s ears off, Sakura would either laugh or groan in annoyance and shove him whenever he said something particularly stupid, Sasuke’s eyebrow would twitch, and he would act uninterested, but he would occasionally make a comment with his dry-pan humour, or he would genuinely engage in the conversation if the topic interested him enough.

It wasn’t any other day, however. Sakura talked, a nervous undercurrent to her voice that betrayed how rattled she felt within the weird atmosphere, and Naruto answered in between shoveling rice into his mouth as fast as possible. Sasuke, surprisingly, hadn’t sat too far away from them, but he averted his gaze, uncharacteristically picking at his food. Kakashi observed them over his book.

Before Naruto could finish his bento box in record time, a clone skidded to a halt before them. “Boss, a couple of us fell and popped and we need more hands, everybody else is busy.”

“Ah, alright, hold on.”

As he put down his chopsticks and made the handsign to create two more clones, Sakura interceded, “You didn’t notice your clones disappearing?”

The three clones ran off. Naruto scratched his cheek. “There’s, like, twenty of them, I don’t really keep track.”

“Twenty?” Sakura squawked, like she hadn’t seen them running around every day. Maybe she hadn’t counted them, it wasn’t like anyone but Naruto could tell them apart. “All morning?”

He would have answered with a confident fox-grin that twenty clones were nothing, he could do a much more awesome number, but suddenly, Naruto noticed that Sasuke was staring at him for the first time in six days — frowning, baffled. Their eyes met for a second, and then they looked elsewhere.

“Yeah, just about,” he answered Sakura, weirdly subdued for himself — he knew, he noticed himself out of balance.

Snapping his book closed, Kakashi was suddenly by his side. “Are you pacing yourself?”

“I’m fine, I don’t feel tired at all.”

Kakashi hummed. “Even so. Cut it back to ten.”

Naruto groaned a protest. “Sensei. But this way it goes so much faster and we can go back to Konoha sooner! Doesn’t this count as training, also?”

“Don’t overexert yourself, idiot,” came Sasuke’s raspy voice from across their group.

He startled and his eyes fixed upon Sasuke’s face, who had gone back to eating his food, although his shoulders were tense, his movements mechanical. It was the first time Naruto had heard him talk since he had passed out from Haku’s senbon. His throat was mostly healed, but his voice still had a croaky, breathy quality to it very unlike his smooth baritone. Naruto disliked it. He disliked even more not knowing how to respond, when interacting with Sasuke usually wasn’t a thing he ever gave a second thought to before doing. His eyes skittered away and he rubbed the back of his neck, to assuage the need to do something with his hands.

The discomfort was palpable. Kakashi tried to cut through it, “Sasuke’s right, Naruto. If you want to practice while doing this, concentrate on a more precise use of chakra with your clones, not on creating more.”

Naruto finished his food, and with a hurried, “Alright, sensei,” he was off towards the bridge.

Sakura was weirded-out by their walking on eggshells around each other like this, Kakashi’s eye crinkled with something that Naruto could only describe as faraway constipation. Naruto simply couldn’t help the awkwardness. Sasuke would have preferred breaking his knee than be the one to break the tension.

So Naruto kept busy for the entire week, until the bridge was finished and everyone was healthy enough to walk all the way to Konoha. He spent his entire time running, and the night before they were to set out on the trek back home, perhaps because the end to the hecticness lulled him into his first deep sleep in eight days, the events of the battle against Haku and Zabuza finally caught up to him in his dreams.

When he woke up, he didn’t remember much of it. A maelstrom of movement, blood, ice, flesh, needles. A pain so sudden yet so profound that it could only burst forth as undiluted rage, chakra that felt like acid dissolving him from the inside out, a cocoon of unfathomable power spurring him to kill kill kill. He clawed his way through the violence, after-images of Haku’s angelic face after ripping his throat out with his teeth blurring into an undefined landscape of flames, debris, and corpses strewn about — vague memories that weren’t his own. And in the middle of it, a fallen teammate that would never rise again despite the monster that lived in Naruto’s veins going on a rampage for him.

He sprung up from his futon with a scream trapped in his throat and his eyes wet. He looked down at his hands, uncomprehending when he didn’t see his nails elongated into bloodied claws. And then his heart lurched with urgency and he turned to look at Sasuke, to check that his chest still rose and fell and the bandages around his neck remained white.

He found Sasuke already looking at him, propped up on his elbow, a hand reaching out, and his eye-brows furrowed. Naruto blinked his tears away and Sasuke’s hand went back to his futon, his expression neutral again, like a mirage dissipating.

They stared at each other in the darkness, and as Naruto’s heart calmed down and his brain processed that Sasuke was alive in the waking world, embarrassment overcame him. He was not completely certain of what his face was doing, but he guessed that he must have looked really stupid: cheeks wet, panting slack-jawed while he looked at Sasuke like he was drinking in the face of god.

He turned away and rubbed his tear-tracks away with his sleeves, muttering, “Sorry.” Saliva lingered in his throat as he struggled to swallow. “I, uhm…” he trailed off.

The quiet between them that he had previously been thankful for felt suffocating then. He considered murmuring a good-night and laying down again, but it didn’t feel right.

Finally, Sasuke spoke, whisper-soft like neither of them ever were, “Nightmare, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Hm.”

Naruto threw a look at the other two futons on the other side of the room. Sakura seemed to be soundly asleep. Kakashi might not have been, the bastard, but he hadn’t risen either. “Did I wake you?”

“You were gasping and moving,” Sasuke answered. His voice was mostly back to normal, although it was hard to tell when he whispered. “But you do that every night. Would it kill you to be quiet for once?”

Naruto acknowledged the jab for what it was — a lame, clumsy attempt at returning to normalcy — but he was feeling too raw to fall into their old routines. He just cringed.

At the lack of a whiny rebuttal from him, he sensed a growing air of discomfort from Sasuke, even without looking at him. There was a quiet rustle as Sasuke lied on his back fully again.

In the manga that he had read and the movies that he had watched, this would be the part where he was asked if he wanted to talk about his bad dream. He couldn’t picture Sasuke doing it, and Sasuke didn’t do it, so he guessed that his impression of his character was fairly accurate.

Well.

Except for the part when Sasuke almost died for Naruto the previous week. That was not something that he would have ever seen coming. Teammates were supposed to watch each other’s backs, but Naruto struggled to understand that Sasuke would go to such an extreme for him. He had asked then, why me? why someone like me? someone who hadn’t been worth anything to anyone before a month ago?, and Sasuke had answered then too, but it hadn’t been a very good answer.

The blankets were rough in his tight fists. Naruto shrunk into his shoulders as he asked, “Why did you do it?”

Sasuke replied after a beat, “I told you already.” He didn’t pretend not to know what Naruto was talking about. He probably suspected what the nightmare had been about, too. “I…” he began. Paused. Naruto looked at him; Sasuke was frowning up at the ceiling. “I just saw the senbon coming for you, and I… had to move.”

He spoke slowly, even haltingly. An echo of Sasuke’s last words before he lost consciousness came to him. That he had sworn not to die before he killed his brother — and yet he had forsaken that oath with a last plea for Naruto not to die too. Even if he had done it on impulse, it had to mean something. Maybe Sasuke was realizing that too.

Naruto thought of Iruka taking a giant shuriken to the back to protect him. He wondered if that was what having people truly meant. A choice that one makes before one realises its truth burrowing deep into one's reflexes. Blood and pain and sacrifice for those that he would call his own. Haku had said something like that.

Perhaps it was the night, the undefined lines of Sasuke’s figure in the blue-dark of this borrowed room kilometres away from Konoha, their third teammate and their sensei oblivious to them, that made it feel like he could voice the next question.

“Would you take it back?”

His fists trembled slightly in his lap, but his gaze didn’t stray from Sasuke’s face. He hadn’t realized how much he anticipated the answer until he had sought it. Sasuke looked at him, his eyes so black when they had been so red while he laid his head on Naruto’s hands and knees, and then he turned his face away.

Perhaps it was the night for him too, the unreality of this dream of a moment away from the daylight, that allowed him to say, “No.”

Something heavy grew in Naruto’s chest. He didn’t know how to name that emotion. He only knew that — if there was a world in which Sasuke died from an attack that he could have taken in his stead, that wasn’t a world where Naruto would want to keep living. Even if that was the only world where he became Hokage.

He moved to kneel facing Sasuke.

“Then,” he started, a forceful whisper that was too loud for the hour, but Naruto was too loud always, “I won’t die if you don’t.”

Sasuke turned his head back towards him with a jerk, eyes widened ever so slightly. “You…”

“And you won’t die if I don’t,” Naruto finished.

Sasuke blinked at him, at his posture in an uncommonly good seiza, shoulders straight, hands on his knees. Gazed into his eyes, that Naruto made sure didn’t waver.

“And if one of us does die?”

“We won’t.”

“You can’t know that.”

“We won’t, I won’t allow it.”

Sasuke huffed and looked away. One corner of his mouth twitched up nevertheless. “Usuratonkachi. That’s not the way of the shinobi.”

“I’m Uzumaki Naruto,” he announced, and Sasuke rolled his eyes and shushed him. “And I’ll forge my own way.”

The way Sasuke looked at him then was annoyed, but he was also smiling slightly. Almost — and Naruto couldn’t believe that the thought crossed his mind — fond. “You’re such a moron,” he muttered, even though Naruto was being completely serious.

For the first time in a week, Naruto began to feel the hot prickle of frustration that Sasuke always arose in him. But before he could complain, his teammate continued, “There may be forces that neither of us can beat, though.”

No traces of humour left. Sasuke’s eyes somehow gleamed in the dark. His mouth was a soft blurry line, set firmly. Naruto suddenly felt very unequal looking down at him. Sasuke must have felt the same, because he sat up, the blankets pooling on his lap, the white of the bandages on his arms stark with the moonlight coming in from the window.

“You really can’t control who lives or dies,” he said, somber, a knowing weight. “But,” he added, “if I die, you live.”

Part of Naruto wanted to argue back that he would beat any impossible odds. A larger, wiser part knew that it wasn’t an argument that he wanted to start with a Sasuke who looked at him like he did then.

“Then if I die, you live,” he promised as well.

That night, they made a pledge to each other. The next morning, Sasuke ditched the dressings on his wounds, no longer necessary. He and Sakura made fun of the name that Tazuna had given the bridge, much to Naruto’s chagrin, who had barely even been able to gloat about it. Team 7 made offerings to Haku and Zabuza’s nameless burial and then started the journey back to Konoha. Naruto and Sakura bickering, Sasuke ignoring them, Kakashi reading his cheap erotica. The sun shined. Naruto looked at Sasuke, and sometimes Sasuke would look at him back. They didn’t talk about it ever again, but the memory of that night stayed.

[specialagentartemis]

@needlesandnilbogs Alternate answer I was considering giving:

This is the title that could go with the Murderbot Diaries concept I probably won't actually write but rotate in my mind occasionally. I call it "Trojan War AU" in my head but really it is like Ultimate Bad End. The Corporation Rim has had it with this little freehold continuing to pop up in various places making a mess of things with their media, academic, and legal advocacy for things like "construct rights" and "planetary colony independence" and "welcoming escaping contract-slaves" and "corporations having to abide by laws," and are considering Preservation's rising prominence in these things to be a threat to their business models and general capacity to control their people, so they band together and muster a thousand spaceships and bomb Preservation to shit to Send A Message. Possibly including a false surrender which is Illegal but what do they care, who's going to hold them to account. It's sad it's tragic Indah is Hector and dies just as heroically and some of the Preservationers can escape and regroup on the continent that's mostly uninhabited and still in the process of terraforming and harder to track down people there. The CR has blown the station out of the sky, reduced the primary city to rubble, and Made Their Point. Mensah, her family, Pin-Lee, and Bharadwaj manage to escape to the continent; lots of other Preservationers including MB's other humans were caught in the post-war roundup of the main city which the CR went. Hey. Free workforce. Dividing them up and shipping them off to mines and factories and such because what do you do with a conquered population just sitting there for you to not have to even pretend to pay. (And then ofc Murderbot has to go track them down and rescue them because it couldn't do much on its own against a whole invading force besides try to get its humans to safety, and even though the war is over like hell is it gonna let the CR forces prevent it from doing that job.)

I sometimes think about this when I'm in a Tragedy Mood but it's probably not something I'm gonna write. 

[pinksssideblog]

i had super misogynistic parents. they expected me to cook, clean, and care while my brothers weren't expected to do anything. i was always treated lesser than and was always fighting with my mom because she would get upset over her husband not contributing, but instead of taking it up with him, she questioned why i didn't do it like it was my responsibility. i remember arguing with her and asking her why she treated me like that and she would just respond "you're a girl, you need to get real" and my dad would always justify his abusive and misogynistic treatment of me as him "raising a proper woman"

the reason i bring this up is because today i was waiting in the grocery line and the mom in front of me saw her friend and she told her friend that her sons were in soccer practice and her daughter was helping her shop and then they were going to go home to cook and clean because it was good practice for her future.

this genuienly shocked me so much.

ever since ive entered the void, misogny has not existed. none of my friends are misogynistic, no one in my workplace is misogynistic, and none of the other people are misogynistic either. yk how people talk about women being undermined in the workforce. literally does not exist in my office. ofcourse i hear about all the misogynistic social media influencers but ive always just disregarded that as nonsense and misogyny has just not existed in my life for a while now that it literally shocked me to face it again. it felt like hearing someone say the Earth was flat, it was like "who even thinks that and what is wrong with this person?"

the reason i share this is because, unfortunately, many of you do face misogyny to this day. i promise you, this isn't a "set" social construct. my mom always used to say "no man will want a woman who can't cook and clean, it is literally the job of the wife to do these things" i promise to you, this is a lie. in fact my neighbors a few apartments down are an older couple and the husband does all the cooking. every relationship ive interacted with is equal.

i really want to assure you that a world without misogyny does exist and it is attainable. do not fall for its stupid brainwashing. juat make sure to check yourself of any internalized misogyny and know that you are God.

[fatehbaz]

Vidal [...] emphasizes the close relationship that existed between the Louisiana settlement [at New Orleans] and the Caribbean island [Haiti, the colony of Saint-Domingue] during the former’s French colonial period (1718-69). It has become a bit of a popular adage to describe New Orleans as the northernmost port of the Caribbean, but Vidal’s Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society demonstrates the substance behind these claims. [...] New Orleans is the missing link, a late-forming city that largely inherited its founding ideas, practices, peoples, plants, and laws from its longer-established imperial neighbors [Spain, France, Britain, the United States]. It thus offers the ideal case study in which to consider how colonies around the Americas developed in conversation with one another [...].

Vidal convincingly argues that New Orleans was a “slave society,” or a settlement in which racialized slavery informed every part of everyday life from its inception, whose physical construction was done alongside the “construction of racial categories” (p. 1).

This is an important shift within Louisiana historiography, which has long stood by [...] [the] argument that early New Orleans offered the semi-unique example of a “slave society” devolving into a “society with slaves.” Abandoned by the French following the spectacular failure of the Compagnie des Indes, the standard story goes, New Orleans became an isolated backwater until the 1770s, struggling to survive and permitting, out of sheer need, less disciplined contact between residents of European, Indigenous, and African birth and descent. [But] Vidal, in contrast, shows that, while Louisiana struggled to create a full-fledged plantation economy during the French era, this did not prevent its capital from organizing itself along the highly stratified lines of the Caribbean islands.

---

Furthermore, she argues, because New Orleans did not see many new residents after 1731, free or enslaved, and because it was a smaller settlement, white inhabitants were able to build upon these ideas in a relatively stable environment - focusing much of their energies on surveilling, containing, and disciplining the enslaved and free persons of color (p. 26). [...]

Vidal especially points to the 1729 Natchez attack and ensuing Natchez Wars [against Indigenous peoples] as pivotal moments in the militarization of white New Orleanians [...]. Subsequently, a scrupulous supervision of racial boundaries became the norm for the rest of the French era and fostered “a sense of community among white urbanites” (p. 141).

Chapter 3 takes readers to the streets, levees, and other public spaces of New Orleans, where whites sought to sculpt the privileges of “whiteness” against both residents of African birth and descent as well as one another. Elite men and their wives scuffled over the best seating at church in an effort to recreate France’s ancien régime culture; socially lower soldiers and nonslaveholders, meanwhile, carefully guarded their weaker claims at mastery through street violence that frequently targeted the enslaved and free individuals of color. [...] Beginning with a careful reading of census categories, Vidal traces how distinctions between European settlers [...] were increasingly replaced with those centered exclusively on race by 1763. These efforts were paralleled by segregating practices in other domestic spaces. Close interactions, then, as Vidal forcefully shows, effectively strengthened, rather than weakened, urban racial hierarchies. [...] [Vidal then] follows the ways in which the demographically diverse workforce of the early colony made up of white indentured servants, convicts, and soldiers in addition to enslaved Africans - gave way to associations of difficult and degrading labor limitedly with the enslaved. [...]

---

French Louisiana inherited racial categories from the Caribbean but adjusted them to fit local needs, experiencing “not so much a loosening, but a more complex transformation” of its racial regime, largely through violence (p. 371).

Vidal documents how the Superior Council utilized targeted prosecutions and punishments to increasingly “imprint terror and instill obedience” on the enslaved (p. 390). [...] [The book] thus details a society in which racial hierarchies were asserted and supported through both top-down and bottom-up policies and practices, as “no social institution or relationship was left untouched by race” (p. 504).

To this end, Vidal speaks to important conversations by historians of enslaved women in the British Caribbean, including Jennifer Morgan and Marissa Fuentes. These authors have used a similarly wide range of sources [...] [and] archives to underscore the invasive nature of colonial racism. [...] [I]n part [...] Vidal’s [chapters work] to decouple lower Louisiana history from the fur traders of New France [Ontario/Quebec, and the watersheds of the Mississippi/Missouri rivers] and to reattach it to the planters of Saint-Domingue [in Haiti and the Caribbean]. [...] Combing through administrative papers, censuses, laws, parish registers, correspondence, and judicial records from both sides of the Atlantic, readers will get a sense that there is little Cécile Vidal has not seen or considered. [...] Her book will prove essential reading [...] and it hopefully will convince an even wider audience [...] [to engage with] comparative, cis-Atlantic, and transatlantic studies of imperialism, race, and slavery.

---

All text above by: Kristin C. Lee. "Review of Vidal, Cécile, Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society". H-Atlantic, H-Net Reviews. January 2022. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[owlbear33]

like I know Mech pilots and general mecha-nonsense is the hornyness du jour (it seems like a new mech ttrpg or wargame is released every five minutes)

but mechs have never really been my thing, more of a spaceship girl

where's the love for getting Karen S'jet'd, subsumed into the core of a gargantuan machine, your senses expanding, able to see for millions of miles, armed with titanic cannons, constructing within you fleets of warships, responsible for the thousands of lives crawling within you and crewing your fleet

cared for by a teeming workforce of engineers

[hezuart]

Well, that sure was a heated response, wasn't it? They seemed especially pissed about your comment regarding Otto's abusive behavior towards Noone, though that seems understandable. But they may have had a point about the series being implied to have been taking place on an alternate realm long before the podcast confirmed it to actually be the case as I do recall some of these interviews that they've mentioned. Also, people have been saying that Tarsier handed over a lore bible to Supermassive Games and that they were following those concepts not yet touched upon, so there's that to consider. Personally, I don't think that the podcast contradicts established canon, more so expands upon it, but you shouldn't have to feel forced into liking this direction of the series just because that may have been the idea from the start. Any thoughts?

Thoughts below Option A: You have loving parents and a kind doctor to take care of you. You are told you have a brain tumor that may or may not be benign, they'd have to run further tests, but its not something to worry about just yet. The doctor starts plugging you into annoying machines. You get a lot of headaches. He explains he needs help finding his sister but you get mad at him and refuse to help. He says if he could trade places with you to get your headaches and terrible dreams, he would, but he can't. He starts being mean and drugs you to sleep so he can find his sister. Option B: You teleport to a world where you have to fight for your life and always be hunted by grotesque, terrifying creatures that snatch, torture, and kill any and every child you've come in contact with. The worlds you teleport to are completely different each time. They are incomprehensible. You have no support system. But at least you won't have to worry about your tumor anymore. It's not about dismissing his abusive behavior, it's about Noone being dumb for picking the clearly wrong choice here.

Tarsier in its early days has always been confused as to the lore of their series. They tried to have a tv show made, they tried to make comics. Six allegedly has amnesia. But a lot of things were canceled or changed. Their first game actually, The City of Metronome, was taken and remade into Little Nightmares 2 essentially.

"The evil Company managed to uncover the secret of a wondrous machine capable of creating ideas and designs for world-building. Possessing this knowledge the Corporation set out to construct their own version of this machine. With the machine finished the requirement for maintenance arose, the machine and newly constructed areas needed a workforce to make sure everything was running smoothly. And what better way to employ some workers than to kidnap children, suck out their souls and put them to work?

So things were all well and good then, until a young man training to become a steam-train engineer one day met a girl aboard the train he was working on. She makes him question the purpose of life in the city, is the Corporation to be trusted? Could it be that it is evil? Together you both set off on a quest to unravel the Corporation's mysterious, probably evil plans."

This game insinuates the evil corporation can create worlds but doesn't say the children are FROM other worlds. It's a fantastical, creepy place with its own lore and literal world-building, why would the children NEED to come from IRL? Same goes for LN When it comes to Tarsier, they were heavily inspired by Spirited Away as you said, where Chihiro is transported to the spirit world and forced to work in a bathhouse, so that may be where they are coming from. But if you think about it, there is no legitimate reason to include the fact that children come from the real world. The children in the video games are never confused. They never cry. They never act like real children would, separated from their parents in a terrifying place. I would sit around and cry until something came along and killed me immediately. A child stands no chance of survival there. Some of the children of LN are cruel. A cruelty that shouldn't come with children from the real world so commonly. Six is sadistic, Mono uses a gun to kill the Hunter, he has an axe to violently break down doors and smash porcelain children. Seven electrocutes the Granny. They are also insanely smart, all good at puzzle-solving. They never act like real children from the real world. But when it comes down to it, they can't return home. So why include the fact that they are from the real world at all? What's the point of that? They don't act like they're from the real world. "Six was actually a sweet little girl with two loving parents and maybe even a younger brother!" Is such a weird direction for this series to go.

[branded-perceptions]

Metaphorical "Führer" of mimetic motivational charges' relations to our minds' sense-makings commodfied referentially shared (advertised) bra(i)nd(e)ad symbols guided ("geführte", DIRECTED🧠👅🧠) interplay ("brand love") of workforce, voters & consumer motivations' habitualised creation effects

in its attention shadows by that

(immunity to change robert kegan)

defines more unseen collective unconsciously created causal effect aspects on our lives

like monotonously glorified shared focal lenses DIRECTED selective breeding of

🎵"LEMON TREE - FOOLS GARDEN"

(ever in comparison analysed Kumquat or tried banana types thatsmell like strawberry?)

has

created citrus types more & more optimised towards uniform "flawless" appearance fa(r)ces🤡 to match by commercial media manipulatively glorified symbolic imitation love expectations' 🎵"DES(S)ERT OF JOY"

while in attention shadows'🍑

https://youtu.be/z4YkMoysymY

actual reality containing less & less causal beneficial substances but more & more pesticides

similar like all the lemonade business that manically "hustles" to squeeze attention towards reductionistic bra(i)nde(a)d appearances' socially constructed status "heaven"🤥😷😇

(🎵YESTERDAY YOU TOLD ME ABOUT THE BLUE BLUE SKY)

whose by that symbolically🔠🎅🔢 shared motivational convergence fa(r)ces handling of objective reality

https://youtu.be/5Xpx0l6FXJU?si=vchSGCCrVyu4Pl7v&t=43

like a "starry" (psychotic) tasteless focal lense of self-destructive mental mass psychogenic illness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtNvfJHsHsc

of linguistically constructed "lemonade" actually causally

(🎵AND ALL THAT I CAN SEE IS JUST A YELLOW LEMON TREE)

does

besides HFCS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yHzXWCLCiI

not contain lemon even tho its linguistic SYMBOLS or advertising imagery do similar like medical communication of C-19 treatments reputation manage their by societies fantasies distorted social incentives' resulting focus of care

https://youtu.be/VvIdopW-rjw?si=3PQ3gmtHqm5ekVzq&t=214

(🎵BUT NOTHING EVER HAPPENS AND I WONDER)

blurred self-justifications, foreclosure, psychological biases & imitational motivations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mslPgRe1YI

🔍this is water david foster wallace

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Congress has passed a bipartisan $858 billion defense bill that would give service members a hefty pay raise, bolster support for Ukraine and Taiwan, and rescind the US military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

The Senate voted Thursday to pass the massive National Defense Authorization Act, known as the NDAA, with bipartisan support. It follows the House’s bipartisan approval of the legislation last week.

The legislation now goes to President Joe Biden for his signature. The White House views the removal of the mandate as “a mistake,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday. But she declined to say whether Biden would sign a bill that ends the requirement, noting that the president will “judge the bill in its entirety.”

The defense bill outlines the policy agenda for the Department of Defense and the US military and authorizes spending in line with the Pentagon’s priorities. But it does not appropriate the funding itself.

The must-pass legislation, which would authorize $817 billion specifically for the Department of Defense, would provide $45 billion more than Biden’s budget request earlier this year.

The increase for fiscal year 2023 is intended to address the effects of inflation and accelerate the implementation of the national defense strategy, according to the Senate Armed Services Committee. It would authorize $12.6 billion for the inflation impact on purchases, $3.8 billion for the impact on military construction projects and $2.5 billion for the impact on fuel purchases, according to a bill summary from the Committee.

The NDAA also includes provisions to strengthen air power and land warfare defense capabilities, as well as cybersecurity.

And the legislation shows Congress’ continued support for helping Ukraine repel Russia’s invasion, even though several Republican lawmakers have raised questions about the ongoing US aid.

“That’s the important thing – that you don’t see any diminution in the bipartisan consensus about providing support to Ukraine, despite having heard a lot about rising concerns,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank.

Here are some key provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act:

SUPPORT FOR SERVICE MEMBERS AND THEIR FAMILIES

The bill would provide a 4.6% increase in military basic pay for service members, the largest in 20 years. The Department of Defense’s civilian workforce would get the same raise.

It would also bump up service members’ housing allowance by 2% and require a report on a “more transparent, fair, and flexible way to calculate the basic allowance for housing,” according to a summary from the House Armed Services Committee.

The legislation would also increase the eligibility threshold for the Basic Needs Allowance, a new supplemental payment for low-income military families, to 150% of the federal poverty line, up from 130%.

The NDAA would also increase funding for commissaries to help offset higher prices. And it would create a pilot program to reimburse military families for certain child care costs related to a permanent change of station.

It would authorize the reimbursement of up to $4,000 for pet relocation expenses stemming from permanent changes of station to or from locations outside the continental US.

To address the issue of suicides among service members, the bill would require the Defense Secretary to compile a report on suicide rates by military occupational specialty, service and grade. It would mandate that the Defense Secretary brief the congressional Armed Services committees on the preliminary findings of the review no later than June 1.

Some 519 US service members died by suicide last year, according to the Pentagon. The overall suicide rate per 100,000 active-duty service members has slowly increased from 2011 to 2021.

AID FOR UKRAINE

The NDAA would extend and modify the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, as well as authorize $800 million in funding in fiscal year 2023, which is $500 million more than was contained in last year’s defense bill.

The program provides funding for the federal government to pay industry to produce weapons and security assistance to send to Ukraine, rather than drawing directly from current US stockpiles of weapons.

The funding authorization in the defense bill is intended to supplement additional money for the initiative expected in a future federal spending package, according to Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican who wrote the program into law in 2015.

Also, the defense bill would expedite the delivery of munitions to Ukraine and the replenishment of associated US stockpiles by streamlining acquisition requirements and authorizing multiyear procurement for certain munitions, according to the House Armed Services Committee. The authorization would also provide stocks of munitions to US allies and partners, as well as increase the number of munitions that would be needed if China takes action against Taiwan.

It would be the largest number of multiyear procurement contracts for munitions that the defense bill has authorized in recent history, if not ever.

One of the key concerns throughout the ongoing conflict in Ukraine has been whether the industrial bases of the US and other allied nations can meet the demand required to support Ukraine. This measure is focused on reducing bureaucratic red tape to help industry produce those weapons for Ukraine faster.

ENHANCED DEFENSE PARTNERSHIP WITH TAIWAN

The NDAA would establish a specific defense modernization program for Taiwan to deter aggression by China, according to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey.

It would authorize up to $10 billion in Foreign Military Financing grants over the next five years, enhance training and collaboration, and make available up to $2 billion in loans.

It would also give the President the authority to give Taiwan up to $1 billion in weapons and munitions.

And it would create a regional contingency stockpile, which would allow the Pentagon to put weapons in Taiwan for use if a military conflict with China arises, Cancian said.

Wary that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine might prompt China to take similar action against Taiwan, Biden has said several times that the US has an obligation to defend the self-governing island should China invade. Under Biden, as well as his predecessors, the US has sold weapons to Taiwan to strengthen its defensive capabilities.

END OF MILITARY COVID-19 VACCINE MANDATE

The bill would end the requirement that troops receive the COVID-19 vaccine. However, it would not reinstate members of the military who were discharged for refusing to get vaccinated – an amendment conservative senators unsuccessfully offered.

The controversial provision to rescind the mandate was pushed by congressional Republicans. House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy said last week that the mandate’s end is “a victory for our military and for common sense.”

But military officials and experts have warned that it could have adverse ripple effects on military readiness and the ability of service members to deploy around the world.

While White House officials have deferred to – and explicitly sided with – Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s opposition to rescinding the mandate, Democrats concluded that including the GOP priority was a necessity in order to get the bill across the finish line. Administration officials have quietly acknowledged that means their opposition to the vaccine language will not get in the way of the bill’s passage.

[holocene-sims]

List 5 facts about a favorite sim of yours, and send this to 10 simblrs whose sims you adore ♥♥♥

hii!!! thank you so much for the ask!! 💌 i apologize for taking so long to get to this as well 😭

this might be an odd choice of character (idk how many people pay attention to him) but i absolutely adore grant's uncle paddy and think he's a king, so have some info about him 👑

some of this info is repeated but oh well, it's all in the name of character establishment

i briefly mentioned this in a story post but he did NOT finish high school 👀 he dropped out for [REDACTED STORY REASONS], despite being a straight A student. he went straight into the workforce instead and he did construction work for a really long time. he switched jobs when aoife and joseph opened the bakery, though, and now he's worked there for a long time and it makes him very happy. (1) because he loves his parents dearly and (2) because baking is so chill and fun

he's kind of (emphasis on kind of) mellowed out now as a 60-ish year old dude but he was the "wild" child his whole life 😈 as a small child, he was definitely the kid who would just run off across the street to follow a squirrel, and as a teenager and young adult, he got in trouble a bunch (not with his parents, mind you) for smoking weed or sneaking into concerts and movies he did not have any intention of paying for. he also was a total whore and slept around a bunch. he never ever cheated or did anything awful like that, but he did make his way around the local dating pool (i mean...he got divorced twice...) 🤐

his voice claim is roger clark (aka the voice of arthur morgan) because paddy has a unique combo accent like him! paddy grew up in america but has exclusively irish/immigrant family and lived in a very insular cultural community, so he barely sounds american but also kind of does at the same time... 🍀

he is genuinely an excellent and talented musician, hence the founding of his celtic punk garage band! 🎻 he kind of sucks at singing (though he won't acknowledge that) but he started playing violin as a child with one he inherited from his uncle. he learned to play by exposure and a single, very old violin lesson book. the odds weren't in his favor to master it but somehow he pulled it off! 🎵

his love language is very much acts of service! he takes after his mom in that manner for sure. he just wants to take care of his loved ones and make sure they're okay and not overburdened with tasks, and he appreciates if that is reciprocated to him 🥺