#working class lives

[whatbigotspost]

I need y’all to understand that every time that somebody who makes $10,000 a year thinks that somebody who makes $30,000 a year thinks that somebody who makes $50,000 a year thinks that somebody who makes $100,000 a year thinks that YES EVEN somebody who makes $150,000 a year is the real enemy

…a billionaire wins and we all lose.

And every time that somebody who makes $150,000 a year thinks that they’re better than somebody else who makes $100,000 a year thinks that they’re better than somebody else who makes $50,000 a year thinks that they’re better than somebody else who makes $30,000 a year thinks that they’re better than somebody else who makes $10,000 a year

…a billionaire wins and we all lose.

Privilege and comfort rises with income, obvi. It’s not all “the same.” But please zoom the fuck out and look at the whole picture. The WHOLE picture.

[gildasbadonicus]

London Canal Museum, Kings Cross

A trip to the London Canal Museum - a fascinating little museum near King’s Cross that looks at the history of canal and details the lives of people who worked and lived on them

Horses feature heavily because of their key role in pulling barges

Later small tugs pulled barges through tunnels, replacing the need for barge men to use their legs to push against the side of the tunnel to move through

People lived in tiny cramped cabins on the barges. Whole families would grow up here

People also made their livings around the canal. One of the worst jobs was sifting rubbish piles for anything that was recyclable and sellable. The people doing this suffered great discrimination.

The canals, threatened with infill when they weren’t needed for transporting, would later be rescued as places for leisure, sport, wildlife and even living on. This is the Camden Lock Market which started as craft workshops in 1972. Campaigners saved many miles of canal from being lost.

The tiny terrace and mooring at the back of the museum, only accessible through the museum

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[stardew-bajablast]

if you haven’t at least tried sewing or crocheting or knitting your own clothes, you really should. even if it’s just one time and you never do it again, i really think everyone should do it at least once

learning how to crochet was what finally made me grasp the abject horror of the fast fashion industry and realize just how laborious and time consuming it is. i have to take a few days off a week so my back/wrists don’t get sore — and i get to do this as a leisure activity in the comfort of my own home, rather than in a sweatshop. it takes dozens of hours to produce a single item. there is just something about trying it yourself that makes you realize just how little the people making our clothes are being paid for retailers to be able to sell clothes at such obscenely low prices.

i understood in the abstract that people were earning literal slave wages to make my clothes, but that concept wasn’t real to me in a way i could understand until i spent 14 hours making something that i myself wouldn’t have even been willing to pay more than $10-20 for if i saw it in a store.

i have not bought any new clothes since learning how to crochet. every time i see clothes at a store (especially obviously handmade items like crochet), and i look at the price tag i feel genuinely sick to my stomach.

i’m not saying everyone needs to make their own clothes in order to be against fast fashion, but what i am saying is if hearing about the conditions and wages secondhand has not been enough to make you stop buying it, if you find yourself becoming desensitized to the suffering of the people who make your things, you should try making something yourself.

you need to see firsthand how physically and mentally demanding it can be and imagine how much worse it would be if you were forced to sit in a sweatshop for 16 hours a day doing it nonstop, earning pennies an hour to do so. you need to spend weeks laboring over something only for it to turn out looking like shit so you realize just how much wisdom and technical skill goes into these supposedly “unskilled” and undervalued jobs. if the abstract concept isn’t enough to get through to you, then you need to get hands on.

[ffcrazy15]

Someone needs to do an analysis on the way the Kung Fu Panda movies use old-fashioned vs. modern language ("Panda we meet at last"/"Hey how's it going") and old-fashioned vs. modern settings (forbidden-city-esque palaces/modern-ish Chinese restaurant) to indicate class differences in their characters, and how those class differences create underlying tensions and misunderstandings.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

hope you feel better soon!

I am riddled with ailments, but I stay silly!

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

putting my prediction on record now that the coming decade is going to see the rise of viral-marketed fancy at-home water filtration systems, driving and driven by a drastic reduction in the quality of U.S. tap water (given that we are in a 'replacement era' where our current infrastructure is reaching the end of its lifespan--but isn't being replaced). also guessing that by the 2030s access to drinkable tap water will be a mainstream class issue, with low-income & unstably housed people increasingly forced to rely on expensive bottled water when they can't afford the up-front cost of at-home filtration--and with this being portrayed in media as a "moral failing" and short-sighted "choice," rather than a basic failure of our political & economic systems. really hope i'm just being alarmist, but plenty of this already happens in other countries, and the U.S. is in a state of decline, so. here's praying this post ages into irrelevance. timestamped April 2023

[cryptid-quill]

new colorfes cards made me rise from the dead, I give art of gay people as offerings

[bixels]

The idea that uni protesters are "elitist ivy-league rich kids larping as revolutionaries" on Twitter and Reddit and even here is so fucking funny to me if you actually know anything about the student bodies at these unis. Take it from someone who's going to one of the biggest private unis in the US, 80% of the peers I know are either from the suburbs or an apartment somewhere in America, children of immigrants, or here on a student visa. I've heard about one-percenter students, but I've never met one in person. Like, don't get me wrong, the institution as a whole is still very privileged and white. I've talked with friends and classmates about feeling weird or dissonant being here and coming from such a different background. But in my art program, I see BIPOC, disabled, queer, lower-income students and faculty trying to deconstruct and tear that down and make space every day. So to take a cursory glance at a crowd of student protesters in coalitions that are led by BIPOC & 1st/2nd-gen immigrant students and HQ'd in ethnic housings and student organizations and say, "ah. children of the elite." Get real.

[silvermoon424]

Y'all the amount of posts from "liberal" men on Reddit crying about how women are being too mean to men after the election is making me want to commit a war crime.

"Men are being radicalized by online misandry" I know man vs. bear tweets hurt your feelings but you will never be at risk of bleeding out from a miscarriage because doctors were too afraid of anti-abortion laws to save your life. You are not the victims here.

[nellasbookplanet]

The fandom god discussion is interesting, but I feel it’s sometimes hindered by an unwillingness to separate gods from mortal society, or even a sort of over-eagerness to project our own reality onto them, which simply doesn’t work. I've seen the gods referred to as rulers or tyrants demanding worship (which I kinda understand because it’s something Ludinus says in-game, though it’s funny to see fandom corners confidently repeat the inaccurate talking points of the antagonist) but more interestingly I've also seen them referred to as a higher/the highest social class, as colonizers imposing themselves on mortals, the raven queen specifically as new money. Overall these comparisons tend to talk about the gods and their actions regarding Aeor in the past and predathos/the Vanguard in the present less as if they're about saving their own lives and more as if they want to preserve their powerful position.

The gods, by their very nature, are above mortals. They cannot be compared to any mortal ruling class because they didn’t choose or strive for that power and cannot feasibly get rid of it/step down/redistribute it (nor do they actually in any sense rule; killing the raven queen, unlike killing an actual queen, will not end the 'tyranny' of death), they simply have it by virtue of being gods. Saying that’s unfair or unequal and that the gods should be killed because of it is akin to saying it’s unfair a mountain is bigger than you and demanding it be levelled, except the gods, unlike mountains, are living, feeling beings who shouldn’t have to die because some people can’t stand the idea of not always being top dog. Thing is, the gods themselves ultimately understood this power imballance and that they can't help but hurt Exandria the way humans can't help but step on bugs, and thus removed themselves from the equation by creating the divine gate. Saying this isn’t enough and that they're clinging to power is just demanding they line themselves up to be killed.

[byler-alarmist]

Do people know most paper receipts are harmful to their health?

I'm going to get up on my soapbox for a minute, but do people realize how pretty much everyone is being overloaded with endocrine disruptors like BPA/BPS on a near-daily basis??

I don't think many people understand that ever since most of the world transitioned to thermal paper receipts (cheaper than ink), almost every receipt you handle from the gas station to the grocery store to the Square terminal printer at the local co-op is coated with Bisphenol-A (BPA) or its chemical cousin Bisphenol-S (BPS).

These chemicals have not only been proven to cause reproductive harm to human and animals, they've also been linked to obesity and attention disorders.

Not sure if your receipt is a thermal receipt? If you scratch it with a coin and it turns dark, it's thermal.

BPA/BPS can enter the skin to a depth such that it is no longer removable by washing hands. When taking hold of a receipt consisting of thermal printing paper for five seconds, roughly 1 μg BPA is transferred to the forefinger and the middle finger. If the skin is dry or greasy, it is about ten times more. 

Think of how many receipts you handle every day. It's even worse for cashiers and tellers, who may handle hundreds in a single shift. It is also a class issue, since many people who work retail and food service are lower-income and will suffer worse health consequences over time from the near-constant exposure.

Not only that, receipts printed with thermal ink are NOT recyclable, as they pollute the rest of the paper products with the chemicals.

People don't know this and recycle them anyway, so when you buy that "green" toilet paper that says "100% recycled"? Yup, you are probably wiping your most sensitive areas with those same chemicals (for this reason, I buy bamboo or sugarcane toilet paper as a sustainable alternative to recycled paper).

This page from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency has some good links if you want to learn more.

As consumers, we need to demand better from our businesses and from our governments. We need regulation of these chemicals yesterday.

If you are a buyer or decision-maker for a business, the link above also contains a shortlist of receipt paper manufacturers that are phenol-free.

If you work at a register, ask customers if they want a receipt. If they don't and you can end the transaction without printing one, don't print one!

As a consumer, fold receipts with the ink on the inside, since that's where the coating is. Some more good tips here.

And whatever you do, DO NOT RECYCLE THERMAL RECEIPTS

[th3e-m4ng0]

med student megatron....

[idk-bruh-20]

Irondad fic ideas #148

You know those homework assignments where you have to interview someone in your family and then write an essay about their responses? Fic where Peter's class is told to interview their dad / a father figure in their life. 

Peter decides to interview Tony. But, he doesn't want his class to accuse him of lying, and he definitely doesn't want Tony to know what the assignment is about. 

So for Tony, Peter makes it seem like the assignment is just to interview anyone. Then, he carefully chooses questions to ask that are domestic and personal enough to avoid any mention of superheroes, celebrities, or so on. The few details that do slip through he just leaves out of his final essay.

For the class problem, Peter solves it by referring to Tony in the essay exclusively as "dad"

Unfortunately for Peter, the teacher then announces a part 2 to the assignment. Right after collecting the essays, the teacher says they will now need to bring the people they interviewed to school for their presentations

Peter has pretty much decided to not even mention it to Tony and just say his dad is busy. But then Flash has to open his big mouth. 

He accuses Peter of just making his assignment up, loudly reminding the class that he's an orphan. Peter clarifies that this father figure thing is a new development, but now the teacher looks suspicious

Peter is going to have to ask Tony to come to his school. And he's going to have to explain why the class will be full of kids and their fathers

[luuxxart]

leaks from the anime post bnha 430……. #REAL #NOTFAKE

[pansyfemme]

i have been a ball of depression lately as well as my physical health worsening pretty severly this past week due to stress and so my friends have been. trying so hard to get me to get out and do things and its very sweet but i feel bad because the whole time i’m just a total mess