roma★
$LAYYYTER
Andulka
Xuebing Du
occasionally subtle
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
tannertan36
we're not kids anymore.
Product Placement
Discoholic 🪩
No title available
NASA
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
YOU ARE THE REASON
⁂
Kaledo Art
pixel skylines
Claire Keane
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Not today Justin
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
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seen from Russia
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@chaoticheese
a talking point i often see when defending the consumption of dark content is that it’s a coping mechanism for those with trauma which is very valid and true but i also want to make this abundantly clear: you can like dark content for no reason. you can enjoy fucked up shit in fiction because it’s enjoyable and entertaining. trauma is not required as a ticket for entry. enjoy your dark content bc it’s fun and sexy and don’t let anyone take that away from you
Just in case any bitter has-beens feel like bitching and moaning again.
Greetings from your friendly neighborhood National Park Service worker.
The government wants you to think a shutdown is no big deal. It's is. They want things to keep running in the meantime. They will- but not safely and not paid. Because not everyone is necessarily aware what a shutdown means for Gov workers, this is how it works...
Employees fall into one of the following three categories:
Excepted: Unpaid, required to work (those needed to protect life and property).
Exempted: Paid, required to work (those funded by non-lapsed sources)
Furloughed: Unpaid, employees that are neither excepted nor exempted. These employees have been ordered to "expeditiously complete orderly shutdown activities" then head home. This may be a few minutes for some employees or a few days depending on their job duties and what it takes to perform an "orderly shutdown" of their activities.
Who is furloughed? Legit everyone but "safety" workers. So fees, maintenance, timekeepers, facilities, everybody. And no, those thousands of people will not be paid for whatever amount of time they aren't working.
Who is Exempted? In my neck of the woods (pun intended) it's law enforcement, fire, ems, search and rescue and dispatchers. Hey that sounds like a lot? Guess what - almost all of the law enforcement in the park are simultaneously EMS, search and rescue and the Fire department. One person, four jobs. That's the way... It always is by the way, which is HIGHLY PROBLEMATIC (but that's a different rant). We will keep doing those four jobs, unpaid and unsupported. When will we get paid for our work?- who knows. You may ask yourself - why do we have to keep working when everything is shutdown? Because they're not closing the national parks. Yeah. So people are going to keep coming, keep using the bathrooms that won't be cleaned, keep using the roads that won't be maintained safely, keep getting hurt and in trouble.
Right now, there is a massive rollover DUI car accident on one side of the park and someone just got gored by an animal on the other side of the park. So all of us (the three people on shift at the moment) will be figuring out which one to heading out to. We have to choose. And it's going to be extremely dangerous when we do get on scene because those "non-essential workers" that were furloughed? -Those are the people we count on daily to go above and beyond their own normal duties and help.
Those are the people who manage traffic around the accident for us so we don't get hit. Those are the people that get extra resources for us (lights for night time, blankets, Gatorade if it's a long extraction on scene). Those are the people that make sure we get paid for being called out in the middle of the night, the people that make sure all the protocols are being followed so everyone is safe, the victim advocates that talk to the families, they are the essential hands needed because- if you haven't all forgotten- they already gutted our limping agency staff by like 30%.
What can you do?
The usual things you see - pester your local and government officials. Pester your money makers though even more - the businesses that give money to your local officials. But more immediately? Please do not come here. Please do not further burden the system. Tell other people not to come. Don't let the government think we can make it work still- we can't. Do not make us have to function as if things were okay, because they are really really not.
Greetings from Week Five of the shutdown.
What’s new?
Well, for a small group of us first responders, the government has now ordered that we be paid… from our park’s admission fee money fund. The admission fee money fund that is supposed to go directly towards improving the park – fixing roads, cleaning and fixing facilities, visitor experience stuff. The admission fee money fund that’s supposed to cover those improvements for the entire year… Is now being used to pay us. So guess what happens when that runs out? A.) no more pay, B.) no improving the park.
But the parks are still open? So wouldn’t the fees of people still coming in cover part of that? No. Because we’re not allowed to collect fees during the shutdown. The parks are open, not gaining any revenue, burning through their reserves, and becoming significantly more unsafe and generally trashed and destroyed, by the day.
What does that look like?
Last week it was very icy and a tour bus of 50 people slid partially off the road, blocking a whole lane of traffic. This was on the MAIN ROAD, on a blind curve, only 10 miles into the park.
We only have one remaining, non-furloughed plow/sander driver. For reference, we normally have 4-5. He was 50 minutes away (and then the sander broke so he had to go back to the garage for a bit to try and fix it.) The one remaining tow truck driver was almost 90 minutes away. There was only me and my coworker on shift to deal with traffic and we couldn’t direct people around the accident because the road all around it was still icy because the sander hadn’t gotten there and someone was bound to slide off again. So we had to just keep traffic stopped. For almost a two hours, every single visitor to the park was in stopped traffic. About 10 miles worth of cars just sat, parked in the road. Hundreds and hundreds of people.
Some of them turned around to go back to the entrance, but an RV slid off the road going the other way, so now traffic was blocked in both directions. Which meant when the sander WAS fixed, it couldn’t get through the traffic. And because it was just me and my coworker, we didn’t have anybody who could leave the scene of the accident to go down and clear that traffic for the sander.
As I stood there in the cold (thankful that I had pulled my yaktrax out of storage soon enough to use them for the occasion because the road was SOLID ICE) people kept getting out of their cars, coming up to me, and complaining. I’m not allowed to give political opinions at work, but I was able to provide them facts:
Fact: We only have one plow truck driver, because everyone else has been furloughed. If we had our normal amount, all the roads would be sanded and this probably wouldn’t have happened.
Fact: We only have two officers on right now. Usually, we can try to pull some people from other divisions to help with traffic- those people are also furloughed.
Fact: The reason you are in traffic right now is directly caused by the government shutdown.
The main thing I want to communicate to the general public, though, comes from the repeated question I got “Well, if the roads were so dangerous why didn’t you just close the park?”
Ma’am?
Fact: The administration has forbidden us from closing National Parks.
We were ordered to “Continue operations and services as normal”… with at least 65% of our staff furloughed.
Fun epilogue to the story is that 2 hours in, just as the sander and tow truck finally arrived, another car went careening off the road about 30 miles from there, blocking traffic for both lanes. I left one scene and came to that one we discovered the drive was HURT, and needed an ambulance. My coworker and I are also the EMTs/ambulance drivers (and fire department and search and rescue and…) so we had to have our dispatch center start calling people at home to come in and help. (Their overtime won’t be paid until the government restarts by the way).
Five people came in on their day off and we managed to transport to the hospital, do the crash report, clear the road… and deal with SEVEN MORE slide offs in the following two hours.
What are the takeaways from all this complaining I’m doing:
Fact: 65% or more of National Park Service staff that are furloughed and have no income right now. They still have bills though, and some people are in significant trouble financially (because it’s not like they paid us much in the first place).
Fact: Coming to your national park right now is not only extremely dangerous for you, but also causing significant and irreparable damage to the park- to the actual natural resource, to our infrastructure, and to our facilities.
Fact: Parks were ordered to use the finances that we usually would put towards keeping up said facilities and infrastructure, to pay the people we are forcing to work right now. BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT HAS FORBIDDEN PARKS TO CLOSE THEIR DOORS AND SHUT THEIR GATES.
Please don't come here. Please contact your local representative. Please spread the word
Because it looks like it's going to be another busy day.
Friday night Xena x Callisto from my patreon
Normally you'd be right about gay fanart of media from the 90s but just this once it's actually like this.
so much of being an ok person is just 1) not panicking, 2) not taking things personally, and 3) not letting the vindictive gargoyle that lives in your head tell you what to do. this sucks because brains love doing those things
I-I'm sorry but I can't stop thinking about this
My roommate just called from the kitchen to ask what was wrong because I laughed so hard I gave myself a coughing fit.
I'm so glad the music is what I thought it'd be.
I love that the nature of humanity is to repeat itself
hello child born between the end of the 1990s and beggining of the 2000s, welcome to my saw trap. in front of you is a computer, you can learn to code and guarantee yourself the only career that will be available in a couple of decades, or you can play around on ms paint and develop a beautiful creative mind that will starve to death forever, you have a few years to choose but by the time you do it'll be too late
Not only should teachers be paid more, they should have paid work hours dedicated to lesson planning and paperwork. Drops mic and walks away
pleaseeeee use wool guys it doesnt actually hurt the sheep at all and its a really great material and doesnt break down into micro plastics when you're done with it. they need shearing anyway for their wellbeing. farmers have so much of the stuff because no one buys it any more.
just buy wool please please please
Merry Clickmas!
Merry Clickmas 2021!
Merry Clickmas 2022!
Merry Clickmas 2023!
Merry Clickmas 2024!
checks out lol
change does not come from a place of comfort
I find pennies and nickels in my couch all the time, so I don’t know what you are talking about
Supportive!
squidward cleaning your filthy ass blog
hey here’s a comp of vines so rare and endangered it took me 5 hours to track them all down
Out of all of those vines, I only recognized one
I really missed out on the whole vine era
I'm at a
For words
actually, i originally transformed her into a dragon as an ironic punishment! took me a week to realize that, ironic punishment or not, she was now an unstoppable dragon, the ruin of nations, scourge of god.
