love or similar

Ellie • Woiwurrung land • 🌿♾🌈

[beautifuldarkmind]

I’m jealous of those who can function like a normal human being. They don’t have anxiety holding them back from everything, they don’t struggle to get out of bed or have to put on an act that everything is fine when its not. They don’t struggle to hold friendships and relationships… they don’t feel sad for no fucking reason everyday. Those that can hold jobs and work towards their dreams, the ones who have self esteem and see the beauty in themselves. Those that know what its like to feel safe and secure, not insecure and fearful of it all. 

[ubernegro]

Lying Biden: Omni Post

Biden said he’d give $2,000 stimulus checks. Instead he gave only 1400 and means tested it to be given to people making under a certain amount based on pre-Covid income.

Biden said he’d forgive student debt. Instead he backed Betsy Devos and her campaign against loan forgiveness and while he did cancel 3 billion, he allowed the national Student Debt to increase by another ~40 billion.

He said he’d he raise the minimum wage to $15. Instead, he secretly told his colleagues that he was not trying to and scapegoated the parliamentarian, someone who can be ignored and fired.

Biden said he would lower the Medicare for all eligibility and create a public option. Instead he has blocked any attempt on Medicare expansion in spite of raging pandemic.

Biden promised that he would listen to experts to defeat Covid. He meant economic experts apparently as his strategy is nearly identical to Trump in spite of Vaccines.

Speaking of which, Biden said that he would make sure no parents would get in the way of distributing the vaccine worldwide.

Instead he has coddled the patents and prevented exports of the vaccines to developing nations. This allowed Big Pharma to extort developing nations.

[ubernegro]

But I am not finished lol.

Biden said he’d cure cancer if elected. Not only he didn’t cure cancer, his sanctions have prevented cancer patients from receiving treatment.

Biden promised he’d decriminalize Marijuana and expunge the records of those convicted of the possession of the drug.

He fired his own staffer for past use after tricking them into revealing that info and has sent the ones that Trump pardoned back to Prison.

Biden promised to remove the racist mandatory minimum drug sentencing that he instilled in the first place with assistance from a segregationist.

He is expanding on Trump’s expansion of them.

Biden promise to end Trump’s racist Muslim Ban. He has continued them instead.

[ubernegro]

But I am still not finished.

I’ve been talking about this for awhile now but liberals have been moving goal posts on this particular issue.

Biden promised to halt deportations. Instead he expanded on them, increased ICE’s funding, and doubled the amount of migrants in concentration camps.

Biden promised to end the practice of putting children in cages.

Biden just renamed them, and opened more for profit detention facilities while tripling the amount of children in cages with the added quality of denying them masks and other basic amenities like food, medicine, and clothes.

Biden promised to end family separation. He didn’t end family separation.

Biden promised to end the construction of the Border Wall. He stalled when he was perfectly capable of doing something about it and continued to seize property from families in order to continue the construction of the border wall.

To be continued

[ubernegro]

Biden promised to believe in Climate Science and fight the climate crisis. Instead, he increased the oil drilling, defended the pipelines, and placed fossil fuel executives in his administration.

Biden pledged that he’d stop supporting the genocide in Yemen by US ally, Saudi Arabia.

He gave them more weapons and support.

Biden promised that he’d rejoin the Iran Deal and improve relations with Iran.

He refused their offer, and chose to bomb Iranian forces illegally, seize their lands, and kill their citizens with sanctions.

Biden promised to improve US relations with Cuba. I am starting to think that Biden thinks sanctions and blockades are not acts of war and oppression, but how we make allies.

Can’t stop. Won’t stop.

[ubernegro]

Biden promised to stop giving the police weapons of war. He actually increased the militarization of the police.

Biden promised to punish the Saudi Royal Family for brutally murdering Jamal Khashogi with US trained assassins.

Biden promised to give more refugees an opportunity to seek asylum in America.

He has been Trump-esque.

I am pinning this for posterity and in case there be updates. Yes I am that petty. You liberals pissed me off.

[ubernegro]

I was waiting for at least two weeks to update this but since Liberals want to play, “discredit the black man, he bad” with me and super monitor everything I post. Cool. Fact check this.

Biden tweets out that he will fight for the climate science. But he not only won’t ban fracking, he urged OPEC to boost oil output to subsidize for the Covid Pandemic, and arrested protesters who are actually fighting for climate change.

Line 3 Drew Thousands of Protesters to Minnesota This Summer. Last Week, Enbridge Declared the Pipeline Almost Finished - Inside Climate New

In the dense coniferous forests of northern Minnesota, they’ve shown up nearly every day to chain themselves to equipment and block traffic

To quote one indigenous water protector:

“I drove people to the polls for you, Joe Biden. I drove people to the polls who had never, never voted in their lives,” Winona LaDuke said in a July 7 press call. “We believed in you.”

Sorry, Winona, you aren’t one of the oil lobbyists that Biden put in his administration so your council don’t mean shit to him.

By the way, if you are worried about the recent IPCC report that said in more certain terms that we are fucked if we don’t do something, support the StopLine3 movement. And you should because well…

Back to the Biden bashing that you assholes don’t have an answer for.

Remember that promise Biden made that he will have Covid down by Independence Day? I found a nice little parallel.

Not like they handled it too differently. I think that’s the definition of insanity.

But Biden wouldn’t mind being associated with Trump since the fucker has been actively defending him in court.

Well I guess that is a common courtesy Presidents have: shield each other from their own bullshit.

Game on, liberals. Let’s fucking go.

[samsketchbook]

“My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean”.

- Nine Stories by J D Salinger

—————————————

at a junk sale once I saw the most beautiful picture I have ever seen, of a little dog drinking milk from a glass. On the back it said GIGI 1969. I love you Gigi. I dug through the bin and found many more pictures of you, being held by people who loved you. One was a man named Hussein. None of the others were labeled.  There was a sweet motherly woman, and also someone who looked like a Hollywood actress with big glossy hair, all holding you like the prize.  You are dead, because you are a dog from the 60s. 

[cherrylipssara1]

Matilda (1996) 💐

[libraford]

I think part of the issue is people assuming that everyone MUST want to move upwards. Like... it's the next logical step for a person to want to move up the chain: from worker to manager, to district manager, eventually owner.

But I always think of growth like plants.

Aspens grow tall to reach the sun, for sure. But dandelions grow deep, understanding themselves fully so that if some misguided fool tries to uproot them they'd have to try damn hard. And then there's thyme and other creeping plants, which spread themselves out so much that if you chop a part of it off it roots wherever it can find dirt to root in.

It's okay not to have lofty dreams. You know what kind of plant you are better than anyone else.

[aphony-cree]

This reminds me of a business problem called The Peter Principle that’s been written about for years but few businesses have been willing to make changes because of it

The concept is that a worker is really good at their job, so good that they clearly deserve better compensation for all they bring to the company, but business is structured so that the only way to get more money is to be promoted to a higher position. A new position comes with new job requirements, but not everyone is going to be right for those. Example: an amazing computer programmer might be useless at managing staff, but if you promote that programmer to head of the department they’ll be required to manage staff. It seems like the best thing for everyone, the company included, would be to put that employee back in their original job and let them keep the higher salary since they clearly do the job well enough to deserve it. However companies want those lower level jobs to be seen as undesirable so workers will feel upper staff deserve their higher wages. Because of this, putting the employee back in the job they’re right for is considered a demotion, so instead companies let the employee keep the upper level job they’re bad at forever or until they have just cause to fire them. Clearly the company was better off with them in the job they were good at, but the illusion of hierarchy to justify higher waged employees is more important

Just because capitalism says everyone should climb the corporate ladder doesn’t mean it’s actually the right thing for everyone

[antique-scarecrow]

this is also an important way employers justify paying significantly less than a living wage. there's this huge pretense that

these (very necessary, essential) low-wage jobs are supposed to be temporary, something that students do on the weekends before starting their "real" career (statistically this is profoundly untrue).

that no one is supposed to spend their entire career working as a barista, cashier, waiter etc (again, all necessary jobs that our economy relies on) despite the fact these jobs offer very little upward mobility, and that plenty of people spend decades in these professions.

therefore low-wage workers are poor because they choose to be poor, because their essential jobs aren't 'real' careers, and because they are too irresponsible to move on to something better

never forget that minimum-wage jobs are the most incredibly lucrative jobs in existence--for corporate employers who are making an incomprehensibly enormous profit off of workers being paid a microscopic fraction of the profit their labor generates.

[hellanne]

[angel]

Oh wow the plants through the glass look like an oil painting

[eoeoeyuka]

愛でも叫んどこ。

[milkandheavysugar]

Marsha P. Johnson within the crowd at a New York Gay Pride (1982)

[kenmarten]

Plants in the Window of a Therapy Classroom

[guerrillatech]

[annoyingalchemist]

Ok so can someone explain to me how cryptocurrency pollutes? Like what crazy calculations are they running that they need enough brainpower to significantly effect things? Like I’m assuming what’s causing the pollution is increased electricity consumption but… how does sending lil pretend money tokens back and forth or whatever cause so much pollution?

Also, what the fuck is “mining”? How d'you mine… like bitcoin is not a naturally occurring resource, and I assume that you can’t just make it, cause that would make it instantly worthless… help?

[commiemartyrshighschool]

So you get “coins” as a reward for performing the cryptographic calculations necessary to update the public ledger which is the blockchain. This is, by design, an increasingly complex and resource intensive process to slow down the collection of (intentionally finite) coins.

So every transaction with bitcoins requires the ledger to be updated with the current ownership of every already existing bitcoin, which also requires encrypting and decrypting a bunch of information and sharing it across the public ledger. So every transaction made with bitcoins increases the energy requirements of updating the ledger making it harder and harder to complete the latest version and get the coin which is a reward for doing that work.

There’s a lot I don’t fully understand myself but the long and short of it is that the actual value of any crypto currency is pretty much just what people agree on, except instead of a fiat currency where a government says it’s worth something and a mint that makes physical currency, there’s a bunch of nerds who agree that solving certain math problems is worth rewarding.

[brokenmachine3553]

Feeling like adding on for a bit of context, I know it’s kind of hard to understand how mining for really any kind of crypto is hard to imagine, but seeing what a bitcoin mining facility looks like for the first time really helped me realize just how energy intensive it is.

See all these warehouses? They’re quite literally filled to the brim with specialized computers that do nothing but mine, each one filled with thousands of these computers, just row after row of this:

So all the power consumption winds up adding up like crazy.

[white-throated-packrat]

Yep, that’s why cryptocurrency and NFTs are considered major contributors to pollution – because the energy needs of all those computers doing the calculation are equivalent to a medium sized country. Currently, crypto consumes more energy than Argentina.

[ralfmaximus]

Guess what’s inside a lot of mining rigs? Gowan, guess.

Graphics cards! 

Lots and lots of these puppies side by side, spinning their little fans as fast as they can go because as it turns out: GPUs are perfect for doing the calculations required for mining cryptocurrency.

Which means amateur miners buy a lot of these things.

So many, in fact, that there is now (May 2021) a world-wide shortage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards and building a new gaming rig is damn near impossible because of the shortage. 

OR you can pay a ridiculously inflated price by GPU scalpers on eBay.

Seriously. Places that sell GPUs impose quantity limits because if they don’t… some crypto asshole will buy out their entire stock in one go.

But the “good” news is that the professional miners (like the Bitmain site up there, in the photos) use dedicated ASIC mining rigs which don’t use consumer GPUs. But (bad news) they DO use the same sort of chips that NVIDIA & AMD rely on to make their products, which just starves the supply pipeline at a different point.

Bottom line: not only does cryptocurrency mining consume terawatts of electricity, it also consumes megatons of computer hardware. Which is expensive to produce (in resource terms, like rare metals, petroleum, water, electricity, paper) and will, someday, require even MORE resources to recycle. Or else it ends up in a landfill.

Note that current dedicated mining rigs are so highly specialized they are useless for anything other than mining. They cannot be easily repurposed to  (say) sequence DNA or fold proteins for miracle cures.

What a waste.

[smute]

was anyone gonna tell me that some nerds peepee poopoo “currency” is the reason why graphics cards are sold out everywhere or was i supposed to find that out from comments under a screenshot from twitter user whoreganic cop puncher explaining how bitcoin is just an artificially complicated math problem

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

Once my boyfriend told me: "You're not a burden. A burden is something you're forced to carry against your will. I freely choose to be a part of your life and that means you aren't a burden to me." I'm passing it on in case some of you need to be reminded of that.

[loveorsimilar]

what a nice thing for someone to say to their partner

[berniesrevolution]

[zanmor]

these ones

[lavendermanna]

oh we can get even more specific than just a list of billionaires:

here are all of the scum who control oil, coal, and natural gas

here are the ones who run the factories

and here are the ones who extract the raw resources that the others need to make it all work

[libertarian-therapist]

23,000 people are reblogging a hit list

[bogleech]

Good.

[marvelslut16]

I would like to take this time before SNL starts to tell you all how much Elon Musk sucks. He's literally going to make a shit ton of money off of hosting; not only is he being paid to do it, but its projected the stocks in Tesla and Dogecoin will go up massively- effectively making him even richer than he already is.

Speaking of Dogecoin, cryptocurrency is literally polluting the Earth at alarming rates. It may be trendy to have, but the servers running it are literally putting out millions of megatons in carbon dioxide. Not only is Elon Musk polluting the Earth, but space too.

He sent a sports car into space, and for what? Because he could? He created more space junk, something that's already a decently large problem, just to show off how much money and technology he has. Not to mention the 1,300 satellites he's put in orbit, some of which are already no longer operational, plus he plans to send more to create something called starlink. But it's doing more damage than good, the satellites will create light pollution, causing a massive hit to astronomy and astronomical images, while continuing to create more space junk as well as "traffic jams" in orbit because of how many he's sending up. He has literally enlisted the help of famed car designer to design RC cars to race on the moon, they'll be sent to space in October.

Not to mention how he runs Tesla. The working conditions in Tesla factories are reportedly horrible. He's extremely anti union, going as far as to illegally threaten to take away stock options if his employees did unionize.

Tesla doesn't pay taxes, and now that Elon, SpaceX headquarters, as well as Tesla headquarters are going to be in Texas, he will save millions in taxes each year because Texas has no state income tax. Elon Musk is the second richest man, he is worth 164.2 billion dollars, and he's cheating the system so he doesn't have to pay taxes.  Oh! And let's not forget when he said another stimulus check was a bad idea in July of 2020, in the middle of a fucking pandemic, while he was making 4.9 billion dollars in government subsidies. He's a piece of shit.

Someone needs to stop him before he does irreversible damage to our planet. I get that he thinks this is just some simulated world and he's doing no real damage, but that simply isn't true. So fuck Elon Musk, and fuck whoever decided to feed into this vanity project and let him host. He isn't an actor, nor a comedian, nor a singer; he's a billionaire who's effectively killing our Earth and he gets rewarded by hosting a comedy show. This just goes to show that if you have enough money you can do anything you want. I'd say I hope the episode tanks, but that wouldn't be fair to the writers and cast members who put their hearts and souls into each sketch.

[m-interior-m]

Source

[patamus-warmer]

Great Basin

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]

Unfortunately, I do love you now that you can dance

[mishafletcher]

ok, but honestly, it is unfortunate. you know how we’re always passing around that ‘you are not immune to propaganda’ meme? this is the propaganda it’s talking about.

it’s cute dancing robots! they have a cute robot dog! it’s cute! it’s friendly!

well, the robot dog friend? cute little jumpy guy, does some careful ballet-esque steps, often between the humanoid robots? so far, both the boston police and the nypd (heads up: autoplaying video, with sound) have ‘deployed’ the cute dog friend. both departments say that the robots are being used as ‘observation devices’, sent into buildings with lights and a camera that sends a videofeed back to the cops. 

part of why i think this video (and others like it) is so interesting is because boston dynamics has defended police use of the robots, saying that there’s a clause that the robots can’t be used in a way that would ‘physically harm or intimidate people’. i don’t know about you, but if i were at, say, a protest, or honestly literally anywhere, and a robot dog started running towards me, i’d be pretty fucking intimidated. i’d assume that it was going to hurt me. if one of the humanoid robots were running towards me, i’d assume it was straight-up about to kill me. 

but these videos do a lot of work to erode that assumption. how can anyone claim that they’re intimidated by, say, a line of robot dogs at a protest? the robot dogs do funny dances online! the video above has been live for about two months, and it has thirty million views. people love them! they can dance!

so when they start being used as mobile security cameras, or when they start being used to maintain a perimeter or for crowd control or whatever, it’s not really a violation of the contract. the robots are friendly! my bet is that when they start setting them out to do security or whatever—and i don’t doubt that they’ll be used for security, etc—they might even do funny little dances and interact with people who stop to gawk at them. anything to normalize increasingly autonomous roboticized policing. get one of the humanoid ones out in the field, and it’s a remarkably short step to autonomous, mobile cctv—that can also detain you if it doesn’t like what you’re doing, or if there was a crime and you’re in the area, or if your face looks like someone from a database, or—

and all that assumes, of course, that the no-harm clause stays there forever, and that police departments, so famous for their love of doing things by the book, adhere to it. but just for fun, watch that video again, and imagine even one of those robots weaponized, outfitted with even ‘nonlethal’ crowd control. 

i’m not arguing that the robots are inherently bad, or that there’s no reasonable use for them, even by cops. but the time to get critical of them is now, not in five or ten years when their use has been largely normalized. this is cute propaganda, but it’s still propaganda, and we should acknowledge it for what it is.

[radicalurbanista]

anyway this is how to disable the Spot robo-dog that the NYPD just purchased

[wondersmith-and-sons]

also? the naming of “Spot the police dog” goes deliberately hand-in-hand with how the language of anti-protest policing deweaponises it from the actual harm caused. labels like “non-lethal” and “less lethal” guns, which fire “foam rounds”, “bean-bag rounds” and “rubber bullets” have taken out eyes and cracked open skulls, are deliberately named to make them sound more harmless than they are. 

foam bullets are solid metal and foam-tipped, bean-bag rounds are sacks of cloth filled with lead pellets and rubber bullets are metal bullets that have rubber-coating - it’s a deliberate trick of language to make writing and reporting about it diminish the violence they cause the victims. 

“police fired bean bag rounds and foam bullets at protestors” sounds like the cops are using kindergarden weapons and not shooting to kill. 

“police deployed spot the robot dog for crowd-control measures” (which is how it will inevitably be written) makes it sound like it’s some cutesy doctor who sidekick out there yelping at protestors, rather than a weaponised, mobile, agile hunk of metal that is designed to break your fucking arm. 

[deadmomjokes]

You know what we need?

Adult playgrounds.

No, I do not mean "adult" in the sense of "adult films" and stuff. I mean a legitimate playground but built for adults.

I wanna swing. I wanna climb a jungle gym. I want slides and rope bridges and merry-go-rounds and monkey bars and those rope platform zip line thingies.

"You can already go on existing playgrounds, nothing's stopping you."

It's not the same! A toddler going down a 6 foot slide is having a thrilling ride from twice their height. An adult going down that same slide is basically just sitting down. I want things made to my scale so I don't have to scrunch myself up to fit! I want the same relative experience I had as a child, where you feel like a dang superhero while you scale ladders and poles to platforms three or four times as tall as you.

Who decided grown ups don't want to play? Where are the adult playgrounds??

[villainous-queer-deactivated202]

Paige Johnson has a lot to say about this actually. The keywords you want are playscape and playsculpture. There are adult playgrounds but they are hidden inside public art installations and museum exhibits, water parks and 'outdoor gyms' so on. And in many American states, playgrounds are illegal to enter if you are not a parent with children under a certain age, so using a playground built for kids is not an option.

We have a very negative view of play in capitalist society, because play does not generate any kind of product or capital. It is not 'useful' and even outside capitalism, America in particular is founded on a seething nest of venomous hatred of anything that is not 'productive', i.e. 'idle hands are the Devil's own'. We also have a very negative view of children in WASP cultures (such as England and America), and anything associated with children is supposed to be summarily rejected.

Who decided grown ups don't want to play? The association of play with children, and the association of play with Evil/Wickedness/Sin. You're right, play is valuable--and surprisingly, championing the cause of Play For Grown-Ups has to go hand in hand with Childrens' Rights, with dismantling the anti-social capitalist principles baked into American society, with building a more pro-social and idle-friendly societal attitude.