It's called the Global Justice Report, it is here. This is an actionable plan which can be sent to legislators and demanded of political parties. We could save the world within our lifetimes.
It has always been possible. It is still possible.
genuinely I'm so sick of people wanting all fiction to be ethical. can we all just get a little gross with it. the point of fiction is that it's not real. we can be unethical in fiction; same goes with being perverted with fiction, being unrealistic with fiction, and being grotesque with fiction. not all fiction has to be ethical, not every character has to be ethical, and that's okay. can we stop with the puritanism. be gross. be unrealistic. be whatever. if I don't like it it's not my business as long as we're all clear that its fictional.
via ered.bsky.social, the only kinds of unethical fiction:
people in the replies are going "what about books glorifying unethical things" and "what if it's propaganda" and you, my friends, are who this comic was made for
My great great grandfatherâs first wife (who was also my great great grandmotherâs younger sister because my great great grandfather married his deceased wifeâs widowed sister after her death, yes, my great grandmother had older siblings who were simultaneously her half-siblings and first cousins, my family tree is a bizarre wreath and this is the tip of the iceberg) contracted scarlet fever as a child and it caused rheumatic heart disease which is where the inflammation triggered by the strep infection causes chronic damage to the heart and makes the heart valve malfunction and grow more narrow over time. In her final pregnancy, she contracted measles (or possibly rubella/German measles, this occurred in rural Appalachia in the 1910s so the medical care was spotty) and it caused her to go into labor prematurely. Pregnancy already puts extreme stress on the body and the combination of viral disease, a chronic heart condition and preterm labor caused her heart to fail right after she gave birth to her stillborn daughter.
Her death and the death of her baby would have been totally preventable in the modern day. Strep throat is still a common childhood illness but it can be easily treated with antibiotics and it rarely progresses into scarlet fever and rarely causes rheumatic heart disease with proper treatment. Measles and rubella are both prevented by the MMR vaccine, which is safe and effective. Proper prenatal screening would have detected her heart weakening and been able to monitor and treat her and her baby accordingly. Modern medicine would have been capable of monitoring fetal heartbeat during labor and they could have performed a c-section when the baby showed signs of distress, saving the life of her child and preventing this poor woman from going through hours of agonizing labor that ultimately killed them both.
Her death was due to damage caused by a common and treatable childhood illness, caused by a vaccine preventable illness and a lack of obstetrical monitoring and emergency intervention. And people want to give their children homeopathic bullshit instead of taking them to the doctor and receiving actual appropriate treatment for common childhood illnesses. People do not want to vaccinate their children because they forget these viruses are a bigger threat than the small risk of vaccine reactions OR they truly believe vaccines cause autism and would prefer to have a dead child instead of an autistic child. People want to forgo any prenatal treatment and have wild pregnancies and free births with no medical supervision because âour bodies are made to do thisâ.
And I get it, I get it. I do understand why there is a lack of trust in the medical system, I understand the extensive failures of obstetrical care and why pregnant people may be afraid to entrust these people with their lives. The answer to your stress and fear and desire to do what is best for your child and yourself is not to shun modern medicine but to fight like hell to make it better.
Because we canât go back. Because we shouldnât go back. Because my great great grandmotherâs sisterâs death was 100% natural and unmedicated. She did not deserve that. Her baby did not deserve that. No one should die like that in the modern world where it can be prevented. Healthcare should be free and accessible and patient focused. Public health and preventative measures like vaccinations should not be matters of political debate.
Given the way israel and its allies have always exploited the Holocaust, concentration camps are the perfect places to expose the Westâs disgusting hypocrisy
Lego's Q3 2025 earnings announcement, October 2025
So Lego just posted another monster quarter and everyone's doing the usual "timeless appeal of analog play in the digital age" garbage and like, no, the actual story is that Lego is a privately-held Danish family company that spent the 2000s nearly going bankrupt and came out of it having figured something out that almost nobody in consumer products has figured out, which is that your core IP is the manufacturing tolerance.
Here's what I mean. A Lego brick made in 1958 still clicks perfectly onto a Lego brick made last week. That is not a marketing claim, it's a manufacturing fact, and it's enforced by tolerances measured in like two thousandths of a millimeter â the stud diameter variance on a standard 2x4 brick is famously smaller than most medical device manufacturers hit on parts going inside human bodies. Which sounds like trivia until you realize it's the entire business model: every brick ever made is compatible with every brick that will ever be made, which means the installed base isn't a depreciating asset, it's an appreciating one, because every new set expands what you can do with the bricks already in your kid's bin (and your bin, and your dad's bin in the attic).
Now compare this to basically every other toy category. Hot Wheels from 1972 don't interface with Hot Wheels from 2024 in any meaningful way â they're both little cars, sure, but the track systems have changed, the scales have drifted, the accessories are incompatible. Barbie has gone through probably a dozen body molds. American Girl dolls from the 90s have different proportions than the current ones. The entire video game industry is structured around planned incompatibility â your Switch games don't work on Switch 2, your Xbox 360 discs mostly don't work on Series X. Incompatibility is the business model, it's how you get people to rebuy.
Lego said no. Lego said the brick from 1958 will fit the brick from 2058. And this is insane, if you think about it, because it means they have voluntarily foreclosed on the single most powerful lever in consumer products, which is forcing obsolescence. Every company that sells a durable good spends enormous amounts of R&D figuring out how to make this year's product not work with last year's product without pissing the customer off too much. Apple is a master at this, Microsoft is slightly worse at it, car companies have built entire industries on it (proprietary charging connectors, OBD-II access, right-to-repair fights). Lego just... doesn't do it.
What they get in return â and this is the thing the "timeless analog charm" people miss â is that the brick becomes infrastructure. A Lego brick is not really a toy. It's a piece of durable manufacturing infrastructure that gets distributed into hundreds of millions of homes worldwide, and every new set is basically an expansion pack for an operating system that already has universal install. Which means the network effects are doing most of the work. When a grandparent buys a Lego set for a kid, they're not buying "a toy" in the sense that a Mattel product is a toy â they're depositing compatible substrate into an accumulating household stockpile, and every deposit raises the marginal utility of the next deposit.
This is also why the IP licensing deals (Star Wars, Harry Potter, the recent Nintendo stuff) work for them in a way they work for basically nobody else. When Hasbro does a Star Wars license, they're making Star Wars figures that sit on a shelf. When Lego does a Star Wars license, they're making bricks in Star Wars configurations, which means even if the kid loses interest in Star Wars in six months, the bricks get absorbed into the general pool and keep producing value. The license is temporary, the substrate is permanent, and the substrate was already the valuable part.
The near-death experience in the early 2000s is the instructive piece here, because Lego almost lost this. They went on a diversification binge â theme parks, video games, clothing, Galidor (look it up, it's hilarious) â and they started loosening the tolerances on the actual bricks because the bricks were seen as a commodity and the "brand" was seen as the valuable part. Which is exactly backwards. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp comes in in 2004, basically says the bricks are the company, tightens tolerances back up, narrows the product line, and the company starts printing money again. The takeaway the business press drew was "focus on your core competency" which is such a domesticated reading of what actually happened â the actual lesson is "the boring manufacturing discipline IS the moat, and when you think the brand is the moat, you are about to destroy the company."
Which is interesting because right now there's a huge knockoff market â Mega Bloks, Chinese brands like Lepin (which got sued into oblivion), various others â and they make bricks that are almost compatible with Lego. Almost. And it turns out almost-compatible is actually worse than incompatible, because when a kid tries to fit a knockoff into a real Lego build and the stud is 0.03mm off, the whole structure gets wobbly, and the kid learns not to mix them. The tolerance is a credential. You can counterfeit the shape but you can't counterfeit sub-thousandth precision at scale without becoming, essentially, Lego.
Anyway, the Q3 number is like 13% up year-over-year in a consumer products environment where basically nothing is growing, and the analyst takes are all about "emotional connection" and "intergenerational brand equity" which â sure, fine, those are downstream effects. The upstream cause is that a Danish family spent fifty years obsessing over whether their plastic rectangles were within two thousandths of a millimeter of spec, and it turned out that was the whole game.
Some doodles for my headcanon that Toph attracts animals because she's steady and strong like the Earth and they feel super comfortable and safe around her. Kinda like basking in the sun on a steady mountain top
Also a sadder one on how she bonds with Appa over a shared experience :)
Iâve been seeing ads lately for an ai fanfiction writing app, and like??????? Fanfiction is supposed to be a labor of love to the source material, using ai shows that you really donât care what actually happens in the fanfic, you just want clout. I get that fanfic is hard to write, but working through it shows how much you truly care about the source material and how dedicated you are to giving the fans more to munch on.
Also, I care so much about my writing and the little minute details like adding poetic lines that I know ai would make something I hate. And/or it would kill off a character and traumatize me.
Corporate Glossary: every Friday, learn the secret meaning of common corporate words
âTheyâre trying to discharge her constructively. Do you know what Constructive Discharge means?â She asked.
As soon as I heard the term âConstructive Discharge,â I knew Iâd never seen it on a vocabulary quiz.
âNo. What does it mean?â I asked.
She explained.
âConstructive discharge is a fancy way of saying âbeing forced out.â Itâs not good. And if youâre not a lawyer or in human resources, youâll probably learn what it means when itâs happening to you.â
âOh my God. Iâve seen this my entire career and never knew it even had a name.â I thought.
Youâve seen constructive Discharge too. You may have experienced it. Weâve all made choices to avoid it.
Constructive discharge defined
âWe canât fire you, but weâll make you so miserable youâll quit, and then we wonât have to pay your unemployment.â
Then thereâs the textbook definition:
âA constructive discharge occurs when your employer has made working conditions unbearable, forcing you to resign.â
Or as one person put it.
âI didnât get handed a pink slip, but when youâre not wanted, people have a way of letting you know.â
HR isnât always the secret police.
Employees arenât always victims of evil-doers.
However, employers push employees out all the time to maintain and protect the, âWe didnât do anything wrong, YOU did,â power structure.
Constructive Discharge looks like this:
â Meeting invitations slow to a trickle, and youâre excluded from emails and generally looped out of whatâs going on.
â People stop talking to you or stop talking when you walk in.
â Your emails donât get answers, or they arrive too late to be of value.
â Suddenly, your work is not good enough, though nothing about your work has changed.
â Reviews, once good or even glowing, are now mediocre or bad.
â Instead of a bonus, you get a Performance Improvement Plan.
â Warnings and write-ups start so they can justify your eventual termination with documentation of your âpoor performanceâ
â Your work, clients, assignments go away, or they overwhelm you with work.
â The words âSet up to failâ were practically invented to describe this scenario.
Constructive Discharge is illegal
It isnât easy to prove youâre a target, and itâs even more challenging if you donât even know constructive discharge is a real thing.
If youâve ever experienced this and donât fully understand whatâs happening to you beyond knowing youâre in the process of being excommunicated, it can be hell. Itâs not uncommon for the experience to leave long-lasting scars.
Talk to anyone whoâs ever been through it. Theyâll tell you.
Knowing constructive discharge exists and how itâs used gives you power to predict whatâs coming and to protect yourself.
Seeing the endgame helps you in two ways.
You know what to expect. Having a sense of whatâs coming next is enormously empowering.
You can go on the offensive and protect yourself. Constructive discharge works to crush your ego, making you feel you did something wrong and deserve this treatment.
Without strategy, you end up being a miserable pawn in your employerâs endgame.
Remember, theyâre almost certainly building a case to fire you in the event the hellscape they create for you doesnât persuade you to quit.
If youâre getting pushed out, and you know what to look for you can prove constructive discharge and you can get unemployment benefits, be released from payback obligations on a signing bonus, and protect your mental health.
Youâre not crazy, incompetent, or a failure. This is real and itâs carefully executed to leave you holding the bag and feeling like you did something wrong.
If they force you out, in addition to feeling horrible, you lose your paycheck, benefits health insurance, and possibly owe them money.
Sometimes having an OC is like "this character is an outlet for my insecurity and trauma" and sometimes it's like "this character is an outlet for my love of vampires :)". Sometimes it's both
Sometimes you think it's "this character is an outlet for my love and nothing more :)" and then you look it over later like "shit. product of the deepest depths of my soul again"
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