Stranger Things
todays bird
One Nice Bug Per Day
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
dirt enthusiast
No title available
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
No title available
Andulka
Cosimo Galluzzi
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
roma★
tannertan36
cherry valley forever
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Origami Around
izzy's playlists!
★
NASA
YOU ARE THE REASON
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@perchingominouslysmwh
@argumate
you verb noun?
You verb noun? You verb noun like the comparison? Oh!! Punishment for title! Punishment for amount of time!!!!
You deconstruct meme? You deconstruct meme into its base parts? Oh!! Explanation for readers! Explanation for one thousand reblogs!!!!
Miette, the gift that keeps on giving.
i love explaining the etymology of the word "rickroll" because the story starts with "ok, so at one point 4chan applied a filter to everyone's posts that changed the word egg to duck"
grandfather....
@babsbabbles
do you think two pennies is still enough for the ferryman or has inflation driven up the fare
if he makes me use an app I am simply not crossing the river Styx.
I love how whenever ATLA recognizes Sokka is smart enough to solve a problem but it’d be too fast they just stick him in some kind of situation. Like he COULD’VE stopped jet from drowning a town so they tied him up and dumped him in a forest. He COULD’VE figured out what that spirits deal was so they lost him in the spirit world for 24 hours.
One time they just stuck him in a hole in the ground for a whole episode.
This is how writers should deal with characters who are too smart for the arc instead of making them suddenly dumber for no apparent reason.
If you frequently find yourself in random situations while your friends happen to be experiencing problems maybe you, too, are too smart for the narrative.
My favorite is that Sokka absolutely would've just navigated them out of the desert, so they had to put him on acid the entire time.
patricia lockwood has officially completed 6 years of her full 1000 year sentence
patricia lockwood has officially completed 7 years of her full 1000 year sentence
I was playing obey me!: shall we date? and I was telling my sister that I didn't like Lucifer because dilfs weren't my type and she went
"you know who likes dilfs? Sovieshu."
She then went on to elaborate that's why he married Rashta because she had white hair
...
Lowkey he does give that vibe.. yk, his daddy issues...
@perchingominouslysmwh
Direct your questions here
....keep me out of this-
locked the fuck out. distractionmaxxing
did you know that you can increase the quality of your quesadilla by adding seasoning
did you know that you can decrease the quality of your quesadilla by making a tumblr post while it's cooking and burning it
I don't get how autumn always makes life feel so Intensely Real. All of a sudden you're so so aware of how fresh the air touching your skin is, the fragrant scents of wet earth, dying leaves and growing mushrooms, and how the sudden black shadows feel like cool velvet, smell like ink and taste like rowan berries and black tea. And everything is so fucking keenly, intensely, overwhelmingly ordinary and real.
Hello I am crawling out of the woodwork again to explain an American political thing in too much detail.
So. Basics. What is a tariff? In short it’s a tax that people pay when they import things.
In long, imagine you want a thing. Say, a really nice baseball bat. You want to buy it from a company that makes them in, let’s say, Japan. You’d likely buy them from a store in the US that bought that baseball bat from the Japanese manufacturer.
Let’s say for simplicity’s sake that the store bought it for $50 and they charge you $100 for it. This margin is enough for the baseball supply store to pay their employees, pay their rent, buy more stock, buy some advertising, etc.
Now imagine the government decides that Americans aren’t buying enough baseball bats locally. Or perhaps they have some sort of issue with Japanese baseball. I dunno. For whatever reason though they put a 20% import tax, known as a tariff, on Japanese baseball products.
Now that store in the US in addition to paying $50 to the manufacturer in Japan is also paying $10 in tax to the US government. That baseball bat now essentially costs them $60. And since they need more money to buy stock now and they needed that markup to run their business anyways your $100 Japanese baseball bat will now cost you $120.
In an ideal world (if you like tariffs) this would cause only the targeted product to cost more while locally manufactured goods cost the same. So maybe you’d be encouraged to buy an American made baseball bat because those still only cost $100 while imported ones now cost $20 more.
In the past and in our modern day Congress, and in some circumstances where Congress has allowed it, the president have put tariffs on specific products do discourage people from importing them or buying them. For example, during the Biden administration they determined that Chinese electric cars, with their incredibly cheap cost, could become a real threat to the American automotive industry so a 100% tariff was put on Chinese made electric vehicles which made them way more expensive. This tariff has worked. People don’t really import Chinese electric vehicles and generally buy American or European ones instead.
So in short again, it’s a tax that a business pays on imported goods to discourage people from buying those goods because the business will be forced to charge their customers more to buy it in order to cover their own costs.
So what’s going on with tariffs right now?
Well, most people don’t know what tariffs are exactly. A lot of people are also rightfully pissed that the US doesn’t have a lot of good jobs right now. I mean there’s jobs, but not very good ones. Not ones that’ll give you a nice quality of life and a comfortable retirement.
During the time when there were a lot of jobs like this in the 40s-60s, the US was a manufacturing hub. After the labor movement, working in a factory could give you a stable working class job with benefits. It might not have been a high paying job, but it was enough for a family to live on one income in a small house or apartment and to have healthcare and an okay retirement.
After the 1970s however, manufacturing started moving overseas to countries where the cost of living is lower and/or they have less workers rights like in China or Vietnam. Right after this was also the era of Reagan. Deregulation of banks and the media, cutting government services, anti-union activism. This set the stage for the 2008 recession and the current economy we have now in the US where more people are contractors, there’s less unions, more service jobs, and in many cases it’s nearly impossible to have a decent living and retirement on one income.
Many people in the US, especially in areas where manufacturing used to be huge, have a cultural memory of when life was better but instead of contributing this to government policy and corporate anti-union efforts, they contribute this to the loss of manufacturing jobs.
In fact, unemployment is fairly low right now. The problem is that jobs that are available don’t pay people enough or aren’t full time. I’m technically not unemployed for example because I occasionally get contracted by disabled relatives to do chores and errands for them through a state agency that provides those services but I still make less than $400 a month doing that. I don’t need to tell you that that’s not enough to pay rent and a lot of people in this country are in similar situations.
A lot of people don’t know all that though. They think that the problem is manufacturing leaving the US for foreign countries they don’t know much about and might not have a very good opinion of.
So, enter Donald Trump. Again.
What Donald Trump has been doing is blaming other countries for our economic problems. He points out that the US imports more than it exports. Which is true, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We don’t have every natural resource in the world. Our climate means we can’t grow certain things. Our manufacturing capacity is lower than it used to be. We produce oil but not every part of the country is in a convenient spot to get that oil to so in some regions it makes more sense to import it by sea. Also, international trade isn’t supposed to be a 1:1 exchange. It’s business. It’s an ecosystem. Not some sort of debt based system.
However, again, most people don’t know all that. So some of them hear Donald Trump say that these countries owe us for having a trade deficit. They stole our manufacturing jobs. The kind of jobs we had when living was easier. If we could bring manufacturing back to the US we could be prosperous again.
He also calls tariffs “taxing the other countries” which is just… a lie. That’s not what tariffs are. Tariffs are a tax on local businesses importing things, not foreign businesses making those things. Again though, most people don’t know this.
So the general idea with his tariffs is to bring manufacturing back to the US. Which isn’t going to happen.
Here’s the thing. Let’s return to that baseball bat. Okay, your imported baseball bat from Japan is $120 now. Will that American made baseball bat actually be cheaper? No, actually. Because we live in a globalized economy. That baseball bat factory in the US buys its wood from Canada. It buys its beeswax wood polish from a manufacturer in the UK. It buys the stamps for its logo from a factory in Vietnam and the paint used on that stamp was made in Germany. The machines themselves that they use to shape their baseball bats have parts that were made in several countries from materials imported from other countries. The manufacturer has to pay a tariff on all of those things. So, your American baseball bat also ends up costing $120.
Not to mention that we simply don’t have the manufacturing capacity that we used to and it takes years to set up the supply chains and build the facilities necessary to build things at scale.
And even with tariffs in place, it’s still cheaper to manufacture a lot of things overseas because of the low cost of living in those countries. So those jobs just aren’t coming back. Also, a lot of those jobs that used to exist have been automated. A massive large scale brewery and canning facility for example no longer requires you to have people to manually stir the vats and count things and stamp labels. You might only need three guys monitoring data on screens and a manager to run an entire factory these days because of automation.
So, Trump has started putting tariffs in place hoping it’ll bring back manufacturing (it won’t) and it’s bringing up prices which he also said he’d bring down.
Here’s the other thing though. Some manufacturing and resource mining could potentially come back to the US. Not most, but some. If these tariffs were a sure thing it would still ruin us for no reason but people could adjust to the new terrible normal over time and some investors could bring back some manufacturing and resource processing and over time a few things would get a bit less expensive.
However, these tariffs have proved to be WILDLY unpopular once people actually realized what they were. Especially since he decided to tariff Canada and Mexico which… makes no goddamn sense. They’re our neighbors, a couple of our closest friends, the countries we trade with the most, where we get a lot of our food and natural resources, and there’s a trade deal that Trump himself negotiated in his last term that says there can’t be tariffs between our three countries.
So he keeps taking them away, putting them back, putting them on pause, putting them back. Saying they’ll be 10%, saying they’ll be 20%, putting a 125% tariff on China, lowering it, raising it again. Nobody knows what the fuck is going on so why would investors put all that time and money in to setting up factories and processing plants in the US if they don’t know what tariffs might or might not be in place tomorrow?
Also. The president legally can’t do that. Congress hasn’t officially given him the authority to do that. In fact, they’ve already blocked him from putting tariffs on Canada and various people are taking him to court over it.
Also also, most economists agree that tariffs are generally a bad thing and they usually don’t work anyways unless they’re specific and targeted like the Chinese electric car thing I mentioned earlier.
So tariffs don’t bring back manufacturing jobs, they bring prices up, the way they’re being implemented is really unstable in a way that makes them hard to recover from, and Trump legally can’t be doing that anyways.
So in short, your coffee and baseball bats and everything else is gonna be more expensive if they end up sticking around or maybe not if they don’t go into effect but either way this has done some mega damage to the economy.
As an historian and having had to study economics, this is a pretty great explanation.
hey quick PSA but “reading before bed to wind down” only works if you’re normal about books btw. if you aren’t you are going to end up awake at 2:52am after finishing the whole book just trust me on this one
If you live somewhere where it gets darker now, here’s a few reminders:
- You can put up fairy lights at any time and leave them up for as long as you want
- Get out if you can, while there is still light outside
- Make it as cosy for yourself as you can. Dial up the comfort and the cosy, whatever that looks like to you
- Make plans to look forward to
- More people than we sometimes realize are affected, be cosy with your friends in person, call them or have a facetime hang out with tea or a movie. Maybe go for a short walk together or meet up for coffee, so you get out a bit too.
- You have made it through the darkness before, you can do it again. If you think back and remember something that helped you the last time, draw on that again
- Try to get outside, even if it means bundling up a ton. Fresh air and sunlight are good, and it makes you feel less trapped in your house!
- Try to get exercise in, whether it’s at the gym, at-home workout, whatever
Take your vitamins-- B complex, D, C, maybe some fish oil, combat that darkness-induced lethargy
Eat citrus regularly bc vitamins aside, you deserve bright, sweet things
Create a specific Cozy Drink Time and stick to it, let your 3:30 cup of tea be a pause to just sit and drink something warming
This is getting a lot of notes again and is reminding me that I should try to get out for more walks in the nice autumn weather
so uhh someone pls talk to me abt ninth house/hell bent i can't do this
book hangover is real i will never recover
also who was going to tell me the series wasn't over and i would be stuck waiting for a last book this is not healthy for me
The thing about Darlington is at first glance he seems so much more tame and straight laced in comparison to Alex, and, like he is to an extent, but its all about the packaging. (And isn't that the thing between these two anyways from the very start?) I just always get reminded how many of his character traits aren't some dignified or morally superior dichotomy to Alex and her ruthlessness. The thing is, Darlington is just as ruthless and ambitious, he just didn't have to confront it until Hell. The desperate, starving, consumption motif is so clear from Alex's very first chapter but it's not til later that you realize Darlington is the exact same way, just about things other than the extreme level of survival Alex had to endure. Instead, Darlington was able to scrap by and keep the legacy going, serving something and keep the roof over his head. It makes it less obvious then that he is also a survivor and has that same drive.
You can especially see it in the way he tries to prep himself (the exercises, the learning, the training) for the long awaited "grand adventure," the way he treats his study of the arcane (I mean seriously, you cannot paint that boy as the lawful good archetype if he decided to devote himself into brewing a mythic possibly fake archaic drink that might MIGHT let him see the great beyond just because he had to believe there was more to this life, he had nothing left to lose, and he just had to find out and couldn't be satisfied with only some instead of all), and even more clearly, the dream vision he is granted in Hell. Dawes gets a dream of academic success, Turner professional success, Darlington has a dream where his house is never empty and there is always more people, knowledge, and he finally knows the secrets of every mystery in the world. He just hides all this better. He has the polish, the East Coast rich vs LA rich, and the austere Puritanical upbringing that makes him seem as Alex puts it, "expensive." But the reason these two work (and the reason I am insane about it) is because of this shared character trait of never being satisfied and always wanting more (what's really interesting is Alex seems to want more comfort and security and Darlington wants more risk and adventure and that's what drives the conflict). I'm drawn to the parallel someone on here once said about how Darlington is a sword and Alex is a cannonball. Same effect just different methods. Different packaging. Add in the questions of who is the rabid dog, who is the soldier, the servant, the monarch, Dante, Virigil, Beatrice, Orpheus, and Eurydice? I just love how these two characters seem SO diametrically opposed at first glance but are actually so alike in childhood, character, and ambition.
It’s their greatest invention as of yet
Gallant, V. E. Schwab
