no titles

[breelandwalker]

Periodic reminder that time and energy are finite resources and you only feel like you're lazy and not doing enough because the devil that is Late Stage Patriarchal Capitalism has conditioned you to think that your value is intrinsically tied to constant productivity.

It is lying to you. A perpetual state of 110% is neither practical nor sustainable.

You're doing the best you fucking can under the circumstances and it is perfectly right and natural to need a goddamn break.

[balioc]

If you provide no incentive to Do the Thing, then very often people just won't Do the Thing.

If you provide an incentive to Do the Thing, then very often people will Do the Thing just because they want the incentive, and they'll do it in the most mercenary and antisocial way possible.

These are both, potentially, huge problems. These are both looming failure states.

(It gets super mega obvious with parenting, right? We have a ton of kids who need people to raise them -- orphans, children of abusive families, etc. This need, when it arises, is a desperate need. Having someone not show up to meet it is really really really bad. And parenting clearly isn't something that you can just make people do coercively, not if you want good results, so you need volunteers. But: if you hear the words "this person is raising kids for the money," the scenario that comes to mind is also really really really bad.)

A lot of high-level policy engineering must consist of wrestling with this nightmare dilemma, making judgments about the least-bad place on a spectrum of awfulness, and tinkering with the incentive structure accordingly.

A lot of high-level social engineering, in the ideal case, consists of finding ways to change culture and values so that you can transcend the dilemma, by inducing people to Do the Thing through methods other than direct incentives. (Or, alternatively, by reallocating a rare and precious resource -- The Right People -- to the problem of Thing-Doing. But a lot of folks are allergic to that kind of thinking these days.)

A lot of really dumb discourse consists of people understanding one of the maxims above but not the other one.

[ravenfleesfire]

Can I say for real actually this is so stupid

Yeah so we found out that directly providing the requested body alteration completely relieved patients of all expressed desire for the alteration and they went on to live functional lives. We also found out telling them to stop feeling that way doesn't work. There is no known cure and nobody has absolutely any clue how we could possibly treat this condition

[myfootyrthroat]

When the health food store unionized, something wild happened that I thought was just a goofy one-off, but makes more sense now.

There was a big push to eliminate "degrading jobs" but the strategy was to eliminate the position, then create a new position outside of the bargaining unit to do the work. So like, we wouldn't have dishwashers, but we'd have people who washed dishes that weren't eligible to be in the union.

I was like A) what the actual fuck? Dish washing isn't "degrading", it's fucking vital. B) What the actual fuck? You want to create a union just to exploit different people?

There were enough of us to be like "Absolutely the fuck not," and put a stop to it, but I was absolutely flummoxed that people involved in a union would say that out loud. Working with more leftists now, it makes sense.

[myfootyrthroat]

I think it was coming from a background that viewed labor as necessary to accomplish anything, but advocated for the equitable distribution of the gains made by labor... and then being thrown in with people who just thought labor was icky.

The first time someone told me that busing tables was "degrading", I was like "Oh, uhh, yeah, like it's very necessary work but under compensated for how vital it is?" and they responded "No, touching plates that other people have eaten off of is disgusting."

But I want to eat off of clean plates. So somebody is going to have to touch/clean those plates. And I respect that person and want them to be able to afford to live.

[official-torfmoor]

Those people sound like a guy I'd make up to be mad at.

[myfootyrthroat]

I mean, that job definitely had a Truman Show vibe. If they hadn't been in-person interactions, I'd think I was getting trolled.

[myfootyrthroat]

Just to put a bow on it:

In bargaining, someone on the Union side suggested that we eliminate all the cashiers and exclusively use self-checkouts (they were a cashier and didn't like it). The organizer told them that the union wasn't in the habit of eliminating bargaining unit positions. (This is the same person I've talked about how said that "as a prison abolitionist" we just needed to execute most criminals.)

When I explained holiday scheduling (time off requests granted in order of seniority, shifts assigned in reverse order of seniority). Someone was angry and said that time off requests potentially being denied "wasn't in the spirit of the union". When I pointed out that our departments made like 30% of our annual revenue between Thanksgiving and New Years and that required production staff to be working, they said that we just needed to create a class of positions ineligible for the bargaining unit that wouldn't be able to request time off. (Which again, most of us figured we'd just rotate holidays or something, but assumed that some holiday production was mandatory.)

[bees-and-mice-and-frogs-and]

I was on leftie tiktok (as a creator) for a bit and I saw this attitude there as well. I specifically remember one argument around cleaners where someone said that employing a cleaner was, like, ethically bad, and that "after the revolution" we wouldn't have cleaners.

It got me thinking, along with Ann Russell talking about how to treat cleaners (being a cleaner herself), about how we conceptualise domestic service as particularly degrading in all its forms, when, really, why is that? Why is paying someone to do something intrinsically bad?

Like, even in a moneyless, gift economy society, there would still be people whose primary contribution to their communities would be cleaning. Some people like to clean, and are really rather good at it.

I've talked ad nauseam in the past about how British attitudes towards cleaners and other service based positions today are the descendants of Victorian attitudes. That is, both the attitudes of conservatives and many progressives of that time. The trade union movement was particularly exclusionary towards service workers.

I think people on the left thinking about forms of labour can sometimes be worse than people on the right. People who have taken these positions generally just conceptualise them as something you need to do to get by, and there are particular employers where these positions are degrading but in general the jobs themselves aren't.

[myfootyrthroat]

Yeah, that really sums it up. There's stuff that needs to get done, so I'll never be of the opinion that it's degrading work. I worked in kitchens for a long time, and every other position is reliant on having clean dishes, so nobody can really be "above" washing dishes. The shitty thing about washing dishes or busing tables is how people treat the people doing it. The work itself is vital.

And some of those jobs are like, sure, you can throw almost any warm body at it and get it done adequately, but you still run into people where you're like "Holy shit, you're good at this."

[leebrontide]

People doing a job most people don't want to do should be paid MORE in order to get people to do it. That's how it would work if we weren't mired in a schema assuming that less-frequently-desired jobs are the province of people who "can't do better" and "deserve" poverty because they have less value as people.

[toreblogallthethings]

Peer reviewing the tags: #these attitudes are also why ppl are weird about sex work#and weirdly enough visibly disabled people working - like esp thinking of like#places that employ ppl w LDs as workers and volunteers#what they FEEL is 'these people make me uncomfortable'#and they say 'they shouldn't have to do that'#so the solution is. no visibly disabled people getting to work#the fact that. they want to work. and want jobs#is irrelevant#too many people base their politics off their like. gut feelings of discomfort and unease#which are completely disconnected from both practicality and actual morality

[dragon-in-a-fez]

you need to be leaving your dumbass comments in the tags

how about I do what I want and you stick your head in a beehive

[dragon-in-a-fez]

beehive. get in the beehive, fucker.

[temposoup]

putting this in the body just to piss anon off: its not that deep bro 💀

[dragon-in-a-fez]

we should all put comments on here until this post is longer than Do You Love The Colour Of The Sky

[thesilverhunt3r]

Reblog and comment your favorite color

[dragon-in-a-fez]

blue, like a green-blue or teal, but not bright like aquamarine, more like the colour of a glacier fed lake at sunset.

[kalira]

A nice scarlet or crimson, like a rich blood red (but not oxblood because that's too brown, which I felt personally betrayed by as a child).

[kitsunekage1988]

Blue, all shades of it but mostly the deep blue of the ocean. Or the blue of clear summer sky.

[taw21]

I have a deep love for purple. Like, royal, rich, vibrant purple. It's just so beautiful. Second fave is red but I don't know which shade. Just not the red they have in target stores. That job has ruined that red for me.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

anon I know I blocked you but you seem like the kind of person who would make an alt account to check up on people who blocked you so I hope you see this post and it makes you punch a wall

[sufficient-tenacity]

I know it's not technically *one* color but I'm a huge fan of Polar Glow by Diamine.

It shades so beautifully and it really nails that aurora effect.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

this is the You Can Do What You Want post. your favourite colour can be the entire rainbow for all we care. it can be fuckin "Tuesday" if you want

[sunderwight]

my favorite color is Safe For Work Sasuke

[ceescedasticity]

Forest green

[holyfootstool]

Forest green.

[creature-wizard]

So, you know how certain Christian missionaries are trained to act in a very obnoxious way, so that most people they preach to will reject them outright, so they feel like the world hates them for being Christian and they can only be friends with fellow Christians? You know that thing?

I think as activists, we sometimes need to stop and ask ourselves whether we're acting like those missionaries. I think this type of behavior is a little more ingrained into our society than some of us realize, and some of us have internalized it without realizing what it's actually meant to do.

[penrosesun]

OP I know that this is probably a different direction than you were going, but genuinely this advice would do so so much to help people not fall into secular political cults.

A lot of high control groups use this tactic to isolate their members. It’s absolutely not just evangelizing Christians. New age wellness cults often encourage their members to make outlandish and offensive accusations regarding the mental and physical health of other people or their children, because they know that the backlash their members receive will reinforce the idea that the “mainstream” simply has no room for people who like crystals and essential oils. White supremacist cults will seed the vocabulary of new recruits with Nazi dog whistles that fly over those recruits heads, specifically so that they will get clocked as possible neo-Nazis and shunned by anyone who might offer them another perspective and help them to get out before it’s too late. And a lot of left-leaning political cults strongly encourage members to share their views in the most inflammatory ways possible, and then say “you see? everyone outside of this small circle is evil and cannot be relied on” when, inevitably, that produces bad results.

Sometimes I think that activists fall into these patterns completely accidentally, either because they were raised in culturally Christian evangelical environments and never unpacked it, or else because they just aren’t any good at approaching things in a non-inflammatory way and no one’s shown them how.

…But sometimes, these structures emerge in activist circles because those circles are legitimately becoming high control groups.

I think some things to watch out for especially in this regard are:

Are you being directed to behave in an extremely hostile and alienating way? (even if it’s by someone who you trust!)

Does the group you are in immediately shut down any conversation about the effectiveness of an antagonistic strategy? In particular, do they shut that conversation down using in-group stock phrases?

Is experiencing harsh rejection seen as something of a rite of passage?

Do you receive more validation from the group you are in after you have been rejected by someone outside the group than at any other time?

Have you ever been concerned that the antagonistic strategy you are using hurt someone you cared about, only to be quickly advised by members of the group that that person was toxic and that you should actually completely cut them out of your life?

These to me are all pretty significant red flags about the group in question, whatever the specific thing that brings people together there is. If you start noticing them in a group that you are a part of, be that an in-person activist circle or a Discord server or anything in between, take a step back and seriously consider the possibility that the good thing that you joined is turning into something different, and possibly dangerous.

In the words of Jonestown survivor Deborah Layton, “Nobody joins a cult. You join a self-help group, a religious movement, a political organization. They change so gradually, by the time you realize you’re entrapped – and almost everybody does – you can’t figure a safe way back out.”

[livebloggingmydescentintomadness]

this is a pdf detailing the BITE model of authoritarian control, a method for determining whether or not you're in a cult.

even if you feel confident you are not and have never been in a cult, it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with the signs, just in case one begins to sneak up on you in the future.

[penrosesun]

Ok, I actually want to talk about this for a moment.

Jonestown, one of the most infamous cults in history, with a mass suicide / mass murder that left more than 900 people dead of cyanide poisoning, hundreds of whom were children… was a leftist political cult. That fact is an unambiguous and completely undebatable matter of historical record.

This isn’t a footnote in the story of Jonestown, and it isn’t a weird anti-leftist gotcha either. Jonestown attracted people to their cause with anti-segregation and anti-poverty activist work, and they did actual, meaningful good for those causes. The People’s Temple was a leftist org, unambiguously. They created mutual aid networks for food aid, and rent assistance, and job placement services, and clothing donations, and winter heating. They leaned heavily on the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission in order to push desegregation, and led sit-ins and boycotts and protests. They participated in significant voter registration efforts. They led the fight against the eviction of tenants from San Francisco's International Hotel.

People joined The People’s Temple because it was a good thing when they joined it. They didn’t start out as brainwashed cultists, and they didn’t gravitate towards the leadership of Jim Jones out of masochism, or inherent submissiveness, or a perverse love of creeping authoritarianism. They fell in line under Jim Jones because he’d built a community that was genuinely helping people, and was advancing a political cause that seemed worth fighting. They followed Jim Jones because he earned their trust.

Jim Jones then used the trust and the social capital that he had gained from all of the above in order to elevate himself to the status of a messianic figure, and abuse and profit off of his followers. Slowly but surely, he boiled the frog. It was all good – and then it was mostly good – and then, well there was some abuse, but it wasn’t that bad, and it wasn’t really his fault – and then there was a lot of abuse, but the outside world would destroy them if given the chance, so wasn’t it the lesser of the two evils? And then, eventually, it got so bad that hundreds of people poisoned themselves and their children at his command, and murdered everyone in the compound who refused and resisted.

Your cause of choice is not immune from abusers taking advantage of it!

It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It doesn’t matter if your cause is just. It does not matter if your good thing really is a good thing, because there is always the possibility that it will one day be co-opted by a monster. And if the fact that it started good is enough for you to ignore that gradual, subtle change, you could end up in a truly horrible situation.

One of my best friends in undergrad got sucked into a cult. Years later, we talked about it, and he told me something that I’ll never forget which is, it’s only when you look all the way back at things that they seem crazy. You start off with things that are totally normal and innocuous: “we’re stronger together”; “oppression is bad”; “you can accomplish more if you believe in yourself”; “empathy is important and we should all try to bring more of it into our lives”; etc. Then, you move to something that’s just a little step away from that. And then again. And then again. And then again. But it never feels like a big jump, because it’s not! A -> Z is crazy, but A -> B wasn’t, and B -> C wasn’t, and C -> D wasn’t, and…

This friend was smart, and rational, and independent, and normal, and by the time he and his wife left, they’d gone from just thinking that we should all practice more emotional mindfulness, to being terrified that leaving the cult and the cult leader would literally kill them, via the cult leader having magical powers.

If your only analysis is “Where I started was good, and no single step since then has been crazy” that is utterly insufficient to keep you safe.

“This can’t possibly be a cult, because when I joined it was a leftist political org and there’s never been a single instance where it suddenly changed” is literally the exact logic that kept people in Jonestown until it was too late.

[jbeshir]

Respectable vs Disreputable Ways To Make A Living

One point of difference I've noticed between myself and some other people around is that I'm a lot more suspicious, generally, of some business behaviour than other people I know. SIM locking, drip charging, various forms of microtransaction-based revenue models, limits and restrictions on insurance coverage, slot machines, free trials if you remember to cancel, free credit if you don't mess up your autopay.

I think some of this is that under a simple model of trade, any time you interact with a person consensually, and they agree to voluntarily give you money, presumably mutual benefit was obtained, and you are reasonable to be making a living by engaging in those interactions.

Under a still simple but slightly more complex model, you can acknowledge this isn't necessarily always true but hold politically that it's always a mistake for any third-party to second guess it.

On the model I tend to work with, though, both respectable and disreputable ways to make a living exist and are fairly recognisable. Making a living by engaging in positive sum interactions that leave the world better off is respectable; making a living by leaving other people worse off for having known you is disreputable. I think this would benefit from a more extensional definition so a long unsorted list of takes:

Making a living by cleverly finding a way to make something more cheaply so people get it more easily is respectable; making a living by shifting some of your revenue from the headline price to a later fee so people find you at the top on comparison websites for the same or higher price is disreputable.

Making a living by doing things an employer believes to be useful and worth your pay is reputable. Making a living by finding a job where no one is checking what you're doing and doing no work is disreputable.

Making a living by working on software you expect to be an improvement for users is respectable. Making a living by working on software you expect to wow decision-makers but be no better or worse for actual users is disreputable.

Making a living by charging in exchange for helping with medical needs is respectable; making a living by charging slightly less for help in an emergency so you win deals away from the first person while drafting fine print or deliberately creating supply constraints so you surprisingly don't have to pay out is disreputable.

Making a living by offering mobile phone contracts is respectable. Making a living by offering slightly cheaper mobile phone contracts to undercut the first company but charging huge fees for international use while blocking the customer from taking out an additional contract with someone else for this is disreputable.

Providing someone a service in exchange for an upfront fee is reputable. Providing someone a service for free so long as they don't screw up (in which case you charge a much larger fee), because your analytics and modelling department says they screw up more than they think they would is disreputable.

Making a living by creating and marketing a spare part is respectable; noticing that some people are buying it even though it's the wrong part for their equipment and buying Google Ads on the name of that wrong equipment, is disreputable.

Making a living by selling a game to someone for $300 is respectable; making a living by giving a game away for free initially and then drip charging them to continue such that they pay $300 overall, when they wouldn't endorse that spend in retrospect as a better use of the money than all the other games they could buy, is disreputable.

Making a living by trying to find ways to be helpful to people around you is respectable; making a living by trying to find ways to talk bureaucracies into giving you money decoupled from anyone being benefited is disreputable.

Making a living by producing research reports that you hope to inform the world is respectable. Making a living by producing deliberately biased reports for Philip Morris to muddy the water on whether tobacco causes cancer is disreputable.

Being out to make cool things, positive sum deals and split the surplus fairly is respectable. Being Out to Get You is disreputable.

You can come up with galaxy-brain models in which everyone just has weird preferences and no trades actually look disreputable. Maybe the people who aren't paying attention to whether you do any work are getting value out of you in some sense! Maybe people would endorsedly prefer being drip charged to upfront fees. Maybe people... value... having ineffective comparison websites... These models are probably occasionally true. But I think they're usually wrong. Gaps between incentives and the good aren't that rare, counterparties are cognitively bounded, and most things that look like a gap between incentives and the good are.

And I'm pretty sympathetic to people getting by in less respectable ways without a choice. If it's hustle or go hungry, then really I'd rather fix it by offering better choices. But if you're a smart, functional person who could be contributing to the project of civilisation and instead you're choosing to drive wedges into the gaps between incentives and the good because it's mildly convenient, then I judge that. Not all disreputable things are as bad as each other but still.

I'm ambivalent about the extent to which politically it's effective to try to prevent bad trades by regulation; freedom to trade overperforms in surprising ways and regulatory agencies tend to underperform in surprising ways relative to their intent when established. I think it is nevertheless probably ever a good idea but probably less often one than seems to be the political equilibrium.

But I think it's a big deal. I think possibly one of the significant problems of modern times is people getting better at gaming incentives faster than incentives are adapting, the simple market model can't recognise when this is happening at all, and I'm inclined to at least notice and be judgey about it.

[jbeshir]

From replies:

The weeds here is where price-gouging discourse meets rent-seeking, doesn't it? Is renting a house during a housing shortage analogous to driving to a disaster area with high markup water? Is it respectable or disreputable?

My take is that I don't actually think applying a high mark up to water you brought to a disaster area is disreputable! I think it's difficult for making something available that otherwise wouldn't be, that functions as the person expects, for a price declared upfront, to leave people worse off for you being around.

I can imagine adjacent things you could do which might be, e.g. if you posted on social media that you "have water" without naming a price and carefully left out that it was $50 a bottle until people showed up to get it from you, because you thought they might go somewhere else if they knew it was that pricy, that'd be pretty disreputable. If you knew full well someone else was offering the same water for $10 and were relying on your counterparties not knowing that, I think that would be disreputable if you thought they'd have found out about and bought from that other person if you hadn't grabbed their business first while they were panicking. I suspect that in practice a lot of opportunistic hustling goes on during disasters but bringing in supplies for a high price itself I think is fine.

High prices for things that'd be there anyway are a bit more complicated from a social good standpoint; on one hand there's the bit that upsets everyone, which is that it redistributes from the buyers to the sellers, and probably the sellers are better off already. On the other it normally helps distribute the things better. If you have 500 bottles of water and they go for $1, it's easy for a single person to grab the entire supply for $500 for an increased sense of safety and a bath. If they go for $50 each, they'd need to spend $25000 to grab all the water. Probably they buy closer to what they need, have a bit less of a sense of safety and wait on the bath, and other people get water too. It's pretty easy to construct scenarios where this means a lot of people who would otherwise go without get the essentials they need (though paying a lot for it).

(If there's really massive wealth gaps and amorality such that one person will bid more for another bottle for their bath than other people are able to bid for their drinking water, then things are bad whatever you do, at that much inequality the only difference is how much you make Scrooge McWater pay for the privilege of monopolising the water supply. I think it's no bad thing for them to be charged a lot. But at the low price you get this problem by default without needing an amoral superrich person to show up in your disaster zone.)

Overall I think the prices floating up is probably for the best even for things already present, so I wouldn't e.g. think of a store manager repricing goods under the circumstance as being disreputable. (The state definitely shouldn't block it because high prices being allowed -does- encourage things to come in from the outside.)

For similar reasons I think a property manager setting a high rent on an existing property isn't disreputable. I think that "rent-seeking" in the sense of deliberately engineering things so you can charge higher rents or it's harder for people to swap out what you're providing for someone else is, so I would say e.g. opposing construction because you think it'll reduce the rent you can charge, or price fixing across lots of properties, is disreputable, for example. But just charging the high price isn't any of these things.

More in general, usually when I don't like the price someone feels like offering something for I think it's better to make more better offers available and let people switch voluntarily rather than considering the person offering the high price to be doing something iffy, if that's all they're doing and they're not doing anything sneaky to try to make it so better offers don't exist.

[recursivewitch]

I've never read Homestuck but there's a type of media that I call "a Homestuck" and I think it's a useful categorization. The main criteria are:

long enough that the time investment is a serious barrier to entry

irrevocably changes your personality

brings something genuinely unique to the table. there is no real substitute for reading/playing/watching it in its entirety

Fate/Stay Night is a Homestuck. Worm is a Homestuck. When They Cry is a Homestuck.

Undertale has cultural impact similar to a Homestuck at first glance, but the fact that it's a pretty short and accessible game means that you don't get the particular mix of sunk cost fallacy and an intimate experience with a piece of media that results in you needing to connect with others who have already put in the time investment. You can buy your friends Undertale and expect them to play it if they're not too busy; telling a friend to read Homestuck is giving them a quest that, if accepted, will spark an odyssey. to read someone's Homestuck is an act of love without true equivalent.

[holyfootstool]

Emacs and vi are both homestucks; hence the holy wars.

[pull-the-thren]

I think "what if we molded ourselves to each other perfectly" has legs as a kink dynamic if we could ever get anyone to take off their compulsive "understand any kink dynamic through dominance and submission" glasses

[pull-the-thren]

The best part about it genuinely is your movements get scary synced. Put all your energy into mirroring and learning and being suitable to each other and suddenly you get bored and miss them and they message that they were just thinking about you. Suddenly a cup of water appears in your hand when you're thirsty. It's weird and a little bit magical.

It takes time to set up. But it's super achievable and you can definitely start with like. Basic mimicry and hypnosis to get your feet wet. Later you start discussing your every boundary and value, nothing kept sacred, full agreement almost always the goal. This isn't exactly SSC but like. Per that other post neither is heavy obedience training. I think that's actually the hard part - society says it's fucked up to spend all your time devoted to someone, and a lot of people don't know how to reconcile wanting that without painting the person they're devoted to as evil and saying it's ok because it's consensual and the fact that it's evil is hot. You do not have to think this is evil. You can just staple your identity and sense of reality to someone and have them do the same back and watch your life get weirder. Make strange paracosms together. Lose track of who did what and whose tongue is whose. Join me in knowing the feeling of "I would answer that but I store that information in my other body."

I need more of you to become inseparable and borderline interchangeable. It's way too messy to be realistic for most but it's way too fun and achievable to be as underrepresented as it is.

[henezmoj]

[rannulfr]

The View...

[unicoherent]

Timelapse fungus gifs

[thefledgling33]

Rattle likes these mushrooms

[lurelurk]

Dirt is sacred.

There is nothing wrong with leaving offerings on the naked earth.

When we die we are returned to the ground be it whole or as ash.

From the ground comes all our food, be it directly grown or eaten from to what else we eat.

There is nothing wrong with leaving offerings on leaves or stone, plates or trays but...

There is nothing wrong with laying them to the soil either.

The compost pile is as hallowed a hill as any shrine or shelf.

[ohholydyke]

Reminder to only do this if what you’re putting is biodegradable and non harmful to the specific environment including any animals that may come by and/or try to eat it, and to be mindful about amount and how it’s left, but with those considerations in mind yes absolutely get in the dirt

[ninenine-brooklyn]

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

RODRIGO NO

[woefully-undercaffeinated]

So I’m currently enslaved employed by a cable company, and I can offer a few pointers:

Find a copy of the customer agreement online. Read it. Have the “big cats in boxes” YouTube video on standby so that you can renew your will to live periodically while reading it.

Focus on the sections about cancellation

Examine any terms regarding early termination fees, notice required, proration of the time between cancellation and the end of the billing period, and equipment return policies.

Send a letter requesting cancellation to your carrier via certified mail. Include the date you wish for it to be cancelled. If you are not the account holder but have power of attorney, or the account holder has died and you are managing their estate, send copies of the relevant documentation with the letter. 

The day after, when it isn’t cancelled, call back. Ask for “retention” or “loyalty” and when asked why, state that you wish to cancel. 

They’ll ask you why you want to cancel. Say “I don’t want to discuss it, I just want to cancel my service.” (note: there are times when it pays to disclose your reasons; my company will waive all early termination fees and penalties if the account holder is being entering military deployment or a nursing home. Check their policies.)

They’ll offer something nice. Bundles, discounts, free channels, etc. Say “as nice as that sounds, and as much as I appreciate the offer, I just need to cancel my service.”

When they deflect again, ask how to return any leased equipment. They’ll launch into another spiel about that, thankful that you aren’t making them process the cancellation. Write down the process – they’ll either tell you to bring the equipment to a local office, or they’ll state that they are sending recovery kits. If it’s the latter, ask for the address that the recovery kits return to and write it down (you want to use the recovery kit if you get one, since it’s prepaid, but if they aren’t sent you’ll want to be able to return the equipment yourself.) 

After all of this has transpired, state “As I stated in the letter sent via certified mail on [date], I am ending our contractual relationship and terminating this subscription. Has my cancellation order been processed?”

If the cancellation order has not been processed, tell them to process it. Listen to their spiel. Ask for the date that it will be terminated.

Hang up, wait thirty minutes. Call back, ask if your account is pending cancellation or not. If not, ask to be transferred to retention and ask for a supervisor. Demand that your cancellation be processed and advise them that a complaint will be filed with the FCC if it is not. 

If more than an hour has been spent on the phone, file a complaint at FCC.gov. Forcing a customer to continue a service outside of the terms stipulated by the contract is illegal and the FCC hates it. 

[smitethestate]

This went from really funny to “holy fuck what kind of nightmare dystopia do we live in that we need to be educated on how to get a company to actually cancel an account with a company that bills you monthly” really fast.

[holyfootstool]

editor: andy ilu but this is the second novel in a row where a guy is alone in space. i am begging you please can we have a second character

andy weir: ...

andy weir: bob was there too

editor: who's bob

andy weir: his pet rock

[i-survived-that]

ID: A youtube comment with 11 likes by Niceone, it says "I've lived 46 years without knowing this. How nice of life to save some of the best bites for later." End ID.

Normally, people tend to get frustrated, even jokingly, if they miss out on something. This comment was on a song from 1974 and it made me smile quite much. Simply appreciative. Like a dessert after dinner.

[phinarei]

It is genuinely mind blowing to me just how many Tumblr posts have changed my life for the better and taught me to be happier. Not all of the thoughts originate on Tumblr, but the way people collect and frame them has literally changed my brain chemistry.

[kurulover]

I hate that when you’re stressed enough your body just starts falling apart. I think it should realize you’re already stressed and don’t need that and start functioning better actually

[kurulover]

[holyfootstool]

hm disagree. i like the thing where being nice to yourself makes you stronger. the ace strat should not be "making things worse on purpose to unlock the limit break"

[lotrmusical]

never let anyone tell you that trawling through mediocre victorian poetry isn't worth it. we just happened upon an absolute BANGER of a worm poem. go read it or else 🪱🪱🪱

[lotrmusical]

the reviews are in... glad everyone's enjoying song of the worm

[id: tumblr tags reading 'dude This Fucking Rules', 'holy fucking shit! that was legit so cool?', 'holy shit that is fucking metal', 'oh this fucks severely', 'yeah no this fucking SLAPS', 'yo this RULES']

[wilwheaton]

Holy fucking shit this is one of the most incredible things I have ever read. I am dead serious. I PROMISE you that you want to read this, and you're going to immediately send it to all your weird friends who you also know will love it.

[gutsncaska]

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

[sophia-epistemia]

@audacityinblack