good.store just passed $13,000,000 raised for charity, which is both a lot and an amount that sometimes comes out when billionaires cough really hard.
anyway, why buy your household cleaning supplies, socks, soap, coffee, tea, and more at a regular store that enriches the few when you could buy it at good store and support vulnerable people and ecosystems?
Remember when Lil Nas X beautifully explored his sexuality, seduced and killed the devil to the banger of all time, and instead of cheering on this openly gay and proud Black artist for his artistry and fighting back against respectability politics, suddenly said respectability politics was all the Queerest Place on the Internet cared about? Hm. Wonder what happened there.
Anyway I miss him and hope he's doing better with his mental health 🙏🏾
Like say what you want about "bad queer representation", but this was the song that made me openly and happily accept that I was bisexual. To see him up there Black and beautiful, making music that I love, absolutely killing it? Yeah. You couldn't tell me shit. This man made me proud to be out. "This will make them think we're evil for being gay" hey newsflash dawg-
-become furiously angry over what seems to be small things
-hit a self destruct button over and over again
-lose all sense of reality
-becoming straight up unable to communicate
-view every situation as life or death
-experience delusions/become vulnerable to irrational worldviews
-perceive hostility where none exists
-become extremely nauseous and/or throw up
-stop engaging in sleeping/eating/basic hygiene
-stop processing sensory input
-process way too much sensory input all at once
-lash out at others/themselves
-and more!
being able to recognize when a human (ie. you or another person) is so stressed out they cannot think clearly is VERY important for conflict resolution and diffusing emotional crisis. highly recommend trying to train yourself at being able to recognize that state of panic- there is a point in which logic and rationality is useless and you have to address the underlying emotional issue first. knowing that saves everyone a lot of pain and struggle.
Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.
At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.
At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.
“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.
The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.
I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.
I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.
I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht.
i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.
i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.
as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.
disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.
at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.
i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.
i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.
ok sorry to double reblog BUT I just looked him up and he does these fantastic videos where he breaks down HOW he actually mimics the other artists’ styles. Like for ed Sheeran, he explains how he brings his voice forward in the mouth, while Adam Levine sings in the back of the mouth, stuff like that. It’s SO COOL, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone actually break down how to do this sort of thing, as a skill, instead of just treating it like a neat trick they just happen to be good at.
https://www.tiktok.com/@justinjmooremusic
Results on an international test of adults' math and literacy skills show a growing chasm between the highest and lowest performers.
Also preserved in our archive
By Sarah Schwartz
Test after test of U.S. students’ reading and math abilities have shown scores declining since the pandemic.
Now, new results show that it’s not just children whose skills have fallen over the past few years—American adults are getting worse at reading and math, too.
The connection, if any, between the two patterns isn’t clear—the tests aren’t set up to provide that kind of information. But it does point to a populace that is becoming more stratified by ability at a time when economic inequality continues to widen and debates over opportunity for social mobility are on the rise.
The findings from the 2023 administration of the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, or PIAAC, show that 16- to 65-year-olds’ literacy scores declined by 12 points from 2017 to 2023, while their numeracy scores fell by 7 points during the same period.
These trends aren’t unique in the global context: Of the 31 countries and economies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that participated in PIAAC, some saw scores drop over the past six years, while others improved or held constant.
Still, as in previous years, the United States doesn’t compare favorably to other countries: The country ranks in the middle of the pack in literacy and below the international average in math. (Literacy and numeracy on the test are scored on a 500-point scale.)
But Americans do stand out in one way: The gap between the highest- and lowest-performing adults is growing wider, as the top scorers hold steady and other test takers see their scores fall.
“There’s a dwindling middle in the United States in terms of skills,” said Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees PIAAC in the country. (The test was developed by the OECD and is administered every three years.)
It’s a phenomenon that distinguishes the United States, she said.
“Some of that is because we’re very diverse and it’s large, in comparison to some of the OECD countries,” Carr said in a call with reporters on Monday. “But that clearly is not the only reason.”
American children, too, are experiencing this widening chasm between high and low performers. National and international tests show the country’s top students holding steady, while students at the bottom of the distribution are falling further behind.
It’s hard to know why U.S. adults’ scores have taken this precipitous dive, Carr said.
About a third of Americans score at lowest levels
PIAAC is different from large-scale assessments for students, which measure kids’ academic abilities.
Instead, this test for adults evaluates their abilities to use math and reading in real-world contexts—to navigate public services in their neighborhood, for example, or complete a task at work. The United States sample is nationally representative random sample, drawn from census data.
American respondents averaged a level 2 of 5 in both subjects.
In practice, that means that they can, for example, use a website to find information about how to order a recycling cart, or read and understand a list of rules for sending their child to preschool. But they would have trouble using a library search engine to find the author of a book.
In math, they could compare a table and a graph of the same information to check for errors. But they wouldn’t be able to calculate average monthly expenses with several months of data.
While the U.S. average is a level 2, more adults now fall at a level 1 or below—28 percent scored at that level in literacy, up from 19 percent in 2017, and 34 percent in numeracy, up from 29 percent in 2017.
Respondents scoring below level 1 couldn’t compare calendar dates printed on grocery tags to determine which food item was packed first. They would also struggle to read several job descriptions and identify which company was looking to hire a night-shift worker.
The findings also show sharp divides by race and national origin, with respondents born in the United States outscoring those born outside of the country, and white respondents outscoring Black and Hispanic test takers. Those trends have persisted over the past decade.
There can be multiple factors, from fewer teachers (who are therefore stretched more thin) to teachers who don't know how to teach with ai so common and easily accessible, to kids using ai instead of learning, to, yes, social media (hasn't it been shown to substantially increase stress and reduce attention span and ability to retain information?) And kids don't exactly have a whole lot of stress outlets these days (not that there were a ton when I was in hs, but there were earlier in my schooling), either.
Not to mention the stress from politics, gun violence, increased police presence in our schools, ICE in general, more severe weather patterns (which stress the body out), and on and on and on.
Yes, covid absolutely plays a part. But it's also not the only reason, and if we ignore the other reasons, we can't advocate for improvements to help kids in all the ways they need.
Editing because I forgot half of what I was trying to say: most of this applies to adults. I can't find it in myself to weave it into what I already wrote because it's the middle of the night, but all of these things, on top of covid ofc, fuck with adults too.
Recognising multiple sources of this decline is critical to fixing it.
COVID-19 does not just affect the respiratory system, but also significantly alters the brain in people who have fully recovered from the in
I SURE AM GLAD PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO BACK-SEAT AND FORGET ABOUT COVID AND THE FACT IT'S STILL INFECTING HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS EACH YEAR, ESPECIALLY IN THE CONTEXT OF KIDS LEARNING AND REMEMBERING SHIT.
Yeah I'm *totally* saying white people are superior and your understanding of this isn't at all tinted by your inability to understand what privilege represents on a granular level. White privilege is better schools which was causing disparity long before covid. White privilege is access to better doctors and jobs that pay for insurance and give time off, which was creating disparity long before covid White privilege is access to privare tutoring and childcare which was causing disparity long before covid. Covid did (*and continues to*) hammer a wedge into this preexisting disparity.
Me pointing out that non-white people are most likely to suffer from the worst long-term effects of continued persistent covid infections due in part to existing societal and systemic racism is *totally* me saying white children are superior.
"cultural inclination to practice" fuck off with your hitler particles, goddamn brownshirt.
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