I reblog stuff sometimes

[alimpson]

Hi, I was replaying the Tomix saga- long story short, I just reread the part when Tomix, during his farewell speech, said about the Hero 

“They mean the world to me”

I am not okay.

[slipping-into-madness]

[thaumbody]

Here's a source for the analysis, but it probably is not the source.

Labor share of income hits record low as corporate profits soar

Workers’ share of US economic output has fallen to its lowest level since the government began keeping records in 1947, according to data th

Some points of interest:

Corporate profits are soaring. After taxes, they now take 12.3 percent of national output, far above their postwar average of 7.3 percent.

Adjusted for inflation, hourly wages have risen 3 percent since the end of 2019, Ip noted. Corporate profits over the same period have risen 50 percent.

The Economic Policy Institute calculates that since 1979 the productivity of American workers has grown 90 percent while the pay of the typical worker has grown 33 percent. Had wages tracked output, the average worker would earn $16.40 more an hour today.

The profits are concentrated among the largest corporations. Earnings at the 500 biggest US firms rose 28 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, the fastest pace since 2021, and their profit margins reached 14.8 percent. The seven technology giants known as the “Magnificent 7”—Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla—grew their profits 63 percent.

In the United States, the richest 1 percent of households hold 31.7 percent of all wealth. The bottom half hold barely 2.5 percent.

[renthony]

I NEED people to understand that condoms aren’t free because “MEN like to FUCK lol,” they’re free because thirteen thousand people die from AIDS every year in the US alone.

Stop framing free menstrual products as more essential than free condoms. They should BOTH be free.

[renthony]

This post is going around again, and I feel the need to finally make an addition that adds some context, because the notes keep picking up comments along the lines of “who cares if it’s just because people want to fuck? Fucking is great! Why are menstrual products even being brought up?”

Yes. Fucking is great. I enjoy it myself on occasion. But condoms are not free just because people enjoy fucking. Condoms used to be much, much, much harder to come by, and they were significantly more expensive. Many humans have always enjoyed fucking, but condoms have not always been available, much less for free.

This post was originally made in September of 2020. It was made after I got into a pitched argument with a straight cisgender woman, who argued that free condoms are actually oppressive in a society where free menstrual products are hard to come by. Her argument was that it is an act of violent misogyny for free condoms to be available anywhere when menstrual products are not, and that the prevalence of free condoms is clearly due to male privilege.

That is not why condoms are free, and if you think free condoms are in any way oppressive, you need to get your head out of your ass. You cannot drag free condoms into the conversation about free menstrual products without acknowledging the massive, grueling efforts of queer activists and allies–including WOMEN–that brought condoms into wider use.

Condoms are often free because AIDS activists put endless amounts of effort into education and distribution of resources for safe sex. Condoms are free because they keep everyone safer, not just the people (NOT JUST MEN!) who use them.

Free condoms are not patriarchal, and they benefit everyone. Please read up on the history of AIDS activists. There’s even a convenient Wikipedia page all about HIV/AIDS activism.

And since I didn’t include a source link in my original post (nor do I remember where I got that number by this point), here is some updated, properly sourced data on global HIV/AIDS infection rates, courtesy of unaids.org:

39.9 million [36.1 million–44.6 million] people globally were living with HIV in 2023. 

1.3 million [1 million–1.7 million] people became newly infected with HIV in 2023. 

630 000 [500 000–820 000] people died from AIDS-related illnesses in 2023. 

30.7 million people [27–31.9 million] were accessing antiretroviral therapy in 2023. 

88.4 million [71.3 million–112.8 million] people have become infected with HIV since the start of the epidemic. 

42.3 million [35.7 million–51.1 million] people have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the start of the epidemic

[elfwreck]

Griswold v Connecticut is 60 years old this year. (Please tolerate weird Oyez link; some legal archive sites do not have fancy embed features.)

{{meta.description}}

That’s only 60 years of “condoms are legal FOR MARRIED PEOPLE, WITH ADVICE FROM A DOCTOR.”

…Several people on the current SCOTUS are trying to figure out how to overturn Griswold.

That right got extended to unmarried people in 1972, with Eisenstadt v Baird.

Condoms used to be a felony. And then they were a felony for unmarried people. And even after that, they carried a lot of stigma - why would you need a condom, unless you were being promiscuous?

AIDS activists fought hard for access to condoms as a public health issue, not as “a way for sluts to keep being slutty.” Free condoms save lives.

[groovysarity]

I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue

[mrshamill]

everything about this is gold. Er, platinum.

[omgsamchap]

I know this is horrible but this comment was left on a true crime youtube video and I cannot stop laughing. 

[peg-the-empire]

shoutout to everyone in small fandoms who takes a character with one minute of screentime and decides to build an entire universe around them. to the oc creators, the rarepair shippers, the canon-divergence enthusiasts and the people who can’t stop asking “but what if?” and then proceed to spend 50k words answering their own question.

i genuinely think your joy is contagious. fandoms grow because people see someone having fun and think, “wait, i want to play too.” <3

[chelsmay]

Thought this was a good chart to add here, because I’m so tired of explaining myself. I’m sure most of you are, too.

[cucurb]

hey guysss so unfortunately the rumors are true and im leaving the narrative. Buttt the good news is my absence will create such a gaping hole in your lives that it will become a sort of presence itself, and so in a way it will kind of be like i never left! But i am. Leaving just to be clear.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

You can’t Abstain your way to a Better World.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

The Burger still gets made, even if you go Vegan. If you don’t buy it, it just winds up in the trash. If you want to do something meaningful about waste, you need legislation: It must become a crime to waste food in those ways.

If you care about Animal Cruelty in Factory Farms, you need to get legislation passed. It must become a crime to mistreat animals in those ways, and when malfeasances occurs, the onus of responsibility for those crimes must fall upon wealthy shoulders. That, also, requires legislation. It requires regulations, and regulators.

The largest source of Microplastics is wear and tear on automobile tires. It doesn’t matter what brand of shampoo you buy. It doesn’t matter which company you support with your dollar. The issue of Public Transit is too large-scale to be handled at anything less than the municipal level.

It’s not enough to just not participate in society

If you want the world to Change, you must leverage the mechanisms of political power.

You need Government.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

STOP PROPOSING INDIVIDUAL SOLUTIONS TO COLLECTIVE PROBLEMS

[baybelletrist]

Americans Are Cutting Down Flock Cameras. The Company Calls Them Terrorists.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

Become ungovernable.

[ansitru]

Can someone explain something to me?

If someone were to tell you they stole a keychain from the stall of a small creator, we'd call that theft and disapprove of it. Right? (Right??)

So then WHY, when it comes to people stealing digital items from small creators, like refusing to buy a crossstitch pattern and stitching off of the pixel art instead, do people suddenly start with the excuses of "personal use" and "fair use" if it's "not monetized or only gifted".

If we can call it what it is when it concerns a physical item, how is it any different with a digital item?

The artist is selling something. You decide, nah, I'll just take it instead of paying. Congrats, you've stolen from the artist.

[fuzzytheduck]

because when you steal something physical the owner doesn't have it anymore. Recreating a cross stitch from a reference isn't stealing. You didnt "take anything. You made a copy. Nothing is lost. There is literally only gain.

[ansitru]

"nothing is lost", except income for the artist. 🙄

ETA: "loss of income is not something I can take seriously" is a seriously shit take. Don't come whining when your favorite artists can no longer afford to keep creating.

ETA²: And actually one more thing. Some of y'all are equating "small independent creator" to the same level as a megacorp as Disney. Disney won't feel the loss of income. A small independent creator absolutely will.

A single sale for an independent creator HAS an impact. Anyway.

[nextlevelsmp3]

[exhaustedcatgirl]

Frankly, I think companies presenting basic health and consumer safety information as "boring," "uncool," and "not worth your care" should carry a hefty fine based on the revenue that company generates

[boobachu]

The lameo gay crap we're legally forced to tell you: You may die of diseentary

[clinging-to-decency]

[argumate]

it's easy to get the feeling that LLM coding agents making software development "free" now because a skilled engineer can do what used to take them two weeks in one intense day and that is a 10x speed up which is amazing but it's not free and they're working even harder than they did before, with zero downtime, and will burn out that much faster.

[sacrebleuth]

I saw a psychologist talk about how automating the 'easy tasks' means everyone's jobs will just get harder. Because the human has to do the hard stuff all the time now.

Her example was in call centers, where an agent might take 1 difficult call in 10, which is stressful, but the person has the 9 easy calls to offset that stress and recalibrate their nervous system. But when 'AI agents' take those 9 easy calls, you, the human, are left with 100% difficult calls. What used to be a small, unpleasant portion of your day now becomes your entire day, all day, every day.

And to make things worse, your boss fired all the other humans, so rather than spreading out the bad amongst a team of people who could commiserate and provide support, it's just you, absorbing the stress, alone, forever.

And that's miserable.

[argumate]

yeah that's a weird inversion of what happens in some other fields, most famously when autopilots steadily took away more pilot work in the easy situations, only to dump human pilots into impossible situations when they cut out at the worst possible time.

[worst-roommates-ever]

i think americans should have to put a banner above their post that says U.S. CENTRIC ADVICE/INFORMATION. i think political posts should clarify that they are giving protest/societal/class information relevant only to the USA i think i would like to stop getting halfway through a post with really good information and then realising it is not widespread advice and is only applicable in the united states of america

[worst-roommates-ever]

for the love of GOD can we PLEASE stop treating us-centric advice as applicable to the whole entire world. Please. beyond anything else, i do not think you guys understand how difficult it makes it for young people to interact with and learn information relevant to them.

at a certain point, treating us-american advice as universally applicable borders on misinformation. i am not saying that it is done maliciously, but it is dangerous at worst. i do not want younger people going around assuming that certain laws do/do not apply to them and getting in trouble because of it. i worry about what 'fundamental/constitutional/labour rights' are only legally defensible in the USA. i worry about kids who do not know yet to wonder where the advice is for, and take it as fact because a post that reads "EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW THIS" begins with "EVERYONE".

[worst-roommates-ever]

okay yes all the tags are very very good points but i would like to point out the main reason i made this post, which is that

if you are non-american then it can be dangerous to hold beliefs about your rights that are only applicable in the US.

i am australian and i have seen young australians have completely us-american perceptions on the rights they hold (or do not hold) in regards to protest, police officers, self-defense, medical care, higher education, debt, and legal proceedings. i am not talking about "boooo americans" i am talking about the genuine danger it might present to have us-centric assumptions in high-stakes situations

(please do not chalk this up to 'if you don't do research then you are stupid'. i made this post with young people in mind. that being said i am willing to bet it also applies to others, ie those who are newer to non-local internet, older folks, or those escaping high-control environments.)

[imjunebitch]

in a world where happy rich people sell the discontent lower class the lie that money cant buy you happiness it is at least reassuring to know that our sole trillionaire is the most pathetic, unloved, miserable, alone human being on the planet, and that NOTHING could make him happy. get fuckeddd lol

[or-fi-s]

"money can't buy you happiness" factoid actualy just statistical error. average wealthy person buys happiness every day. moneys georg, who has a trillion dollars and is miserable for 30 hours each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

[velvetvexations]

Like, this isn't discourse, this isn't even about non-trans women drawing trans women, this is about me wanting people to stop saying the only way a real woman could only ever possibly want to look like me is as a form of self-harm.

And wild too that people are like "you're making them think it isn't actually really easy to look like cis women" like okay miss fucking My Mom Works At Raytheon but a lot of people legitimately do not have the time, money, or any other favorable circumstance which would enable them to do look like cis women, so why don't you shut the fuck up about how they'll look like Gross Men until they can scrounge up the fat stack of resources for those things?

Do you get it? This is horrible even for trans women who want to pass!