..in the year of the chewable ambien tab

[siobhan-siob-shiv-deactivated20]

“Being proper and sweet and nice and pleasing is a fucking nightmare. It’s exhausting. As women, we get the message about how to be a good girl – how to be a good, pretty girl – from such an early age. Then, at the same time, we’re told that well-behaved girls won’t change the world or ever make a splash. So it’s sort of like, well, what the fuck am I supposed to be? I’m supposed to be a really polite revolutionary? … It’s impossible.”

— Phoebe Waller-Bridge

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union

Anton Troynikov:

Waiting years to receive a car you ordered, to find that it’s of poor workmanship and quality.

Promises of colonizing the solar system while you toil in drudgery day in, day out.

Living five adults to a two room apartment.

Being told you are constructing utopia while the system crumbles around you.

‘Totally not illegal taxi’ taxis by private citizens moonlighting to make ends meet.

Everything slaved to the needs of the military-industrial complex.

Mandatory workplace political education.

Productivity largely falsified to satisfy appearance of sponsoring elites.

Deviation from mainstream narrative carries heavy social and political consequences.

Networked computers exist but they’re really bad.

Henry Kissinger visits sometimes for some reason.

Elite power struggles result in massive collateral damage, sometimes purges.

Failures are bizarrely upheld as triumphs.

Otherwise extremely intelligent people just turning the crank because it’s the only way to get ahead.

The plight of the working class is discussed mainly by people who do no work.

The United States as a whole is depicted as evil by default.

The currency most people are talking about is fake and worthless.

The economy is centrally planned, using opaque algorithms not fully understood by their users.

JWZ

[nevver]

RIP

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Private equity bosses took $200m out of Toys R Us and crashed the company, lifetime employees got $0 in severance

Private equity’s favorite shell game is to take over profitable businesses, sell off their assets, con banks into loaning them hundreds of millions of dollars, cash out in the form of bonuses and dividends, then let the businesses fail and default on their debts.

The result is the retail apocalypse, where predatory giants like Walmart and Amazon are able to topple their vulture-capitalist-weakened prey, creating a feedback loop that enriches the shareholder class and destroys American businesses, leaving workers high and dry.

The (current) poster child for this con game is Toys R Us, whose private equity owners borrowed more than $5 billion to buy the company (with a $400 million annual debt service plan). The new owners quickly took the company into bankruptcy, defaulting on that giant debt, after paying themselves $200 million (including tens of millions in performance bonuses to the C-suite in the same year the company declared bankruptcy).

Now the company has announced that it will also default on all severance payouts to the company’s 30,000 employees, including employees who worked at the company for decades, skipping Christmas and Thanksgiving with their families to staff the stores, now slated to get literally not one penny.

https://boingboing.net/2018/06/03/are-there-no-workhouses-6.html

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

Happy Pride Month Eleanor Roosevelt was queer, the Little Mermaid is a gay love story, James Dean liked men, Emily Dickinson was a lesbian, Nikola Tesla was asexual, Freddie Mercury was bisexual & British Indian, and black trans women pioneered the gay rights movement.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

Florence Nightingale was a lesbian, Leonardo da Vinci was gay, Michelangelo too, Jane Austen liked women, Hatshepsut was not cisgender, and Alexander the Great was a power bottom

[saddest-faery-gothmother]

Honestly just reblogging for that last one

[sp8b8]

Probably not historically backed but fuck yes

[aphony-cree]

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote love letters to Lorena Hickok

Love letters Hans Christian Anderson wrote to Edvard Collin contain elements that appeared in The Little Mermaid, which he was writing at the same time

Several people who knew James Dean have talked about his relationships with men 

Letters and poems allude to a romance between Emily Dickinson and at least two women 

Nikola Tesla was adverse to touch. He said he fell in love with one women but never touched her and didn’t want to get married 

Freddie Mercury is well known for his attraction to men but was also linked to several women, including Barbara Valentin whom he lived with shortly before he died. Friends have talked about being invited into their bed and walking in on them having sex (documentary Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender) 

Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are two of the best-known activists who fought in the Stonewall riots

Florence Nightingale refused 4 marriage proposals and her letters and memoir suggest a love for women 

Leonardo da Vinci never married or fathered children, was once brought up on sodomy charges, and a sketch in one of his notebooks is 2 penises walking toward a hole labeled with the nickname of his apprentice 

Condivi said that Michelangelo often spoke exclusively of masculine love

Jane Austin never married and wrote about sharing a bed with women (Jane Austen At Home: A Biography by Lucy Worsley)

Hatshepsut took the male title Pharaoh (instead of Queen Regent) and is depicted in art from the time the same way a male Pharaoh would have been

“Alexander was only defeated once…and that was by Hephaestion’s thighs.” is a 2,000 year old quote

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

I want to hire you to follow me around and defend my honor with meticulous research

[inothernews]

“Wisdom comes from the unlikeliest places. And on Saturday, Ben Bowling, the valedictorian of Bell County High School in Pineville, Ky., made an inspirational appeal that left his graduating classmates and their parents dumbstruck. “This is the part of my speech where I share some inspirational quotes I found on Google,” he told the packed auditorium. “‘Don’t just get involved. Fight for your seat at the table. Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table’ — Donald J. Trump.” The crowd burst into applause. President Trump is quite popular in Pineville and the surrounding area, which is the heart of coal country and overwhelmingly supported the president in the 2016 election after he promised to bring coal jobs back to America. Mr. Bowling, though, wasn’t finished. “Just kidding,” he said. “That was Barack Obama.” The cheering abruptly stopped. The crowd went mostly silent. There was a lone boo. Mr. Bowling was quoting a May 2012 commencement speech President Obama gave to the graduating class of Barnard College in New York City. He offered this message to graduates of the women’s college then: “Women shape not only their own destiny but the destiny of this nation and of this world.” “He’s very politically aware,” Richard Gambrel, the principal of Bell County High School, said of Mr. Bowling. Mr. Bowling, 18, and his parents, who live in Middlesboro, Ky., declined to be interviewed. The valedictorian, though, told The Louisville Courier Journal on Saturday that he quoted Mr. Obama because the president offered a good message. He was aware how the crowd would react, even if he shared it in a lighthearted and funny way. “Most people wouldn’t like it if I used it,” he told The Courier Journal. “So I thought I’d use Donald Trump’s name. It is southeastern Kentucky after all.””

— The New York Times, “Kentucky Crowds Cheers Valedictorian’s Trump Quote, Then Learns Obama Said It”

[adulthoodisokay]

Bryan Fuller Pitches Pushing Daisies Revival to Replace Roseanne

After the cancellation Roseanne, Bryan Fuller suggests ABC should consider a revival of Pushing Daisies to replace the hit comedy.

PLEASE DON’T TEASE ME LIKE THIS

[ginandphonics]

T

[adulthoodisokay]

ah yes, june 1st, the day i become so much more vocally and aggressively bi than i normally am

[thelastmemeera]

What does it mean to be a billionaire?

So there’s been a lot of discussion floating around regarding billionaires and society, and I’ve noticed that most people have no idea what a billion dollars is for practical purposes - people tend to think of it as a vague, nebulous concept of “a lot of money” rather than something concrete you can wrap your head around. This is understandable, considering 1) a billion of anything is really hard to visualize and 2) the average person has no real reference point for an amount of money that large. So I’m going to try to break it down for everyone:

Okay, so imagine you have a billion dollars. What can you actually buy with that?

This is a mega mansion that will have an Imax cinema, a bowling alley, and a spa when it’s fully complete. It costs around 4.6 million dollars.

Now let’s buy one of these in every country in Europe - that’s 50 mansions you now own. So how are you going to travel between all your many homes?

This is a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the fastest street-legal car in the world. It has a maximum speed of a face-melting 254 mph and can go from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds. It costs around 2.5 million dollars.

Let’s buy a dozen of them - you know, in case you total a few of them racing around the highway. But maybe a sports car is still to slow for you:

This is an Embraer Lineage 1000. It’s private jet that can seat up to 19 passengers, and we’re going to buy it for 53 million dollars.

How about a boat? The Tatoosh is a 303 ft private yacht, meaning it’s longer than a football field. We’ll take it for 369 million dollars.

Do you like art? Just for fun let’s buy Monet’s most expensive painting ($90 million) Van Gogh’s most expensive painting ($151 million), and this monstrosity, which is made with 8,601 diamonds and costs 65 million dollars.

Now that we’ve gone on our ludicrous and absurdly wasteful shopping spree, how much money do we have leftover? About 12 million dollars, which is almost an order of magnitude more than the average American with a bachelors degree or higher earns in a lifetime ($1.8 million). So if you for whatever reason decided to buy the 50 houses, 12 sports cars, plane, yacht, art pieces etc. and immediately set them all on fire, you would still have enough cash leftover so you never would have to work again if you so chose. This is what it means to be a billionaire.

But we’re not done yet.

The richest person in the world is Bill Gates, with a net worth of 86 billion dollars. If he liquidated his assets, what could he buy?

Well, for starters, the Burj Khalifa - the tallest man-made structure in the world at 2,722 feet tall, costing around 1.5 billion dollars.

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most advanced particle accelerator for 9 billion dollars.

The Hubble Space Telescope for 10 billion dollars (including 20 years of operating costs).

The Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station in the world, more than a mile wide.

And to top it all off, a fleet of five Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the largest military vessels ever built for around 8.9 billion dollars each. If you look at the picture very closely you can see the people standing on it for reference.

If Bill Gates bought all of this, he would still have around 2.3 billion dollars leftover. That’s enough to go on the billionaire shopping spree I described above twice over (so 100 mansions, 24 sports cars etc.) and still have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank when it’s all said and done.

But we’re not done yet.

Currently, it’s estimated that there are 2,043 billionaires alive today, with a combined net worth of around 7.67 trillion dollars.

This is Russia, the largest country in the world, extending more than six and a half million square miles, with a population of more than 144 million people. The United Kingdom could fit inside Russia 70 times.

In 2016 Russia’s gross domestic product was about 1.28 trillion dollars. This means that if the two thousand and some odd richest people in the world - less than half of 0.1% of 0.1% of the Earth’s population - liquidated and pooled their assets together, they could buy every single product and service made in Russia for almost 6 years.

So yeah, make of that what you will.

[left-reminders]

Let this sink in next time someone tells you capitalism allocates wealth according to contribution. It’s empty ideology meant to shield billionaires from a revolutionary redistribution of wealth and power.

Down with capitalism

[madeline-kahn]

“I bet a fun way to commit suicide would be to cut in front of her in line and then go ‘Hey, Lady! Relax!’”

[rooeymara]

Aunt Lucy said, if we’re kind and polite the world will be right. 

Paddington 2 (2017) dir. Paul King

[thomasbarrowscigarette]

Happy International Women’s Day 💕

my 10 favorite female directed films of the past year

[stardust-devi]

Harrison Ford talking about Carrie Fisher at Mark Hamill’s Walk of Fame Ceremony

[discreet45]

[madeline-kahn]

@danieleis: I loved the fact that last night, like every time she has accepted an award this season, she was one of the few (if not the only) winners to shake the hand of and thank the non-famous person there on stage to hand over the statue.

[bob-belcher]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The father of the most hostile piece of street furniture in world history explains why he thinks he's right to make life harder for homeless people and socializing kids

Dean Harvey is the co-founder of Factory Furniture, the company that created the Camden Bench, a piece of street furniture designed to stop anyone from using it for anything except sitting very briefly; it is the nadir of the “Unpleasant Design” movement, a bizarre response to rising homelessness and hostility to children in public spaces, in which cities and private companies try to shove the problem out of sight by making street furniture as inhospitable as possible.

In a CNN debate with anti-unpleasant-design architect James Furzer, Harvey defends his practice, by simply defining all the things that people without privilege want to do in public spaces as “anti-social” and everything that makes life worse for those people as “pro-social.” For example, he defends his “Serpentine bench” (designed to prevent people from sleeping on it)  and other anti-lie-down boobytraps by saying that “I find it difficult to think why anyone would want to sleep on a bench. It’s no place for anyone to spend the night.”

The problems that these unpleasant designs are trying to solve are only going to get worse with rising inequality and privatization of public spaces. Unpleasant design is being used to make life harder for refugees with nowhere to sleep; to saturate homeless peoples’ clothes and belongings with icy water if they try to sleep in church doorways; and to stop people from resting their legs in public places.

The whole piece is fascinating. It uses an undefined “general public” to describe whose public space needs are legitimate, and excludes everyone else from legitimacy. As many have pointed out, when affluent people pitch tents on Sunset Boulevard to wait for Star Wars tickets, the police don’t beat them up, arrest them and destroy their belongings. But when homeless people pitch tents in the same spot so they have somewhere to sleep, that’s what happens to them.

https://boingboing.net/2017/12/07/out-of-sight-and-mind.html