im still here @smilessofia - Tumblr Blog

'People are panicking about AI tools the same way they did when the calculator was invented, stop worrying' cannot stress enough the calculator did not forcibly pervade every aspect of our lives, has such a low error rate it's a statistical anomaly when it does happen, isn't built on mass plagiarism, and does not obliterate the fucking environment when you use it. Be so fucking serious right now

byjove

I don’t think humans should be living in studio apartments or little one bedroom apartments you can barely turn around in. It’s like how the minimum tank size requirement for a betta fish is technically 2.5 gallons but you’re a monster if you put them in anything less than 5 gallons. I think people deserve at least one extra room in their house.

byjove

I get wanting to avoid urban sprawl, wanting to use space efficiently or whatever but goddamn. You should have space for potted plants, for a pullout couch for when your mother comes to visit, space to pursue your hobbies. I don’t think that’s a greedy thing to want.

byjove

I see some of the apartments listed in NYC and it’s like. that should be illegal. I’ve seen snakes with enclosures bigger than that

allsadnshit

being alive is like a whole fucking thing dude ive only been here 23 years and can only really remember like 10 of those years at most and yet im literally immobilized by fear and anxiety i have no clue what i want and yet i am mad at myself for not moving fast enough? like towards what? for who? who is even going to hand me a medal for living correctly? like what would happen if i was just content but like no one knew and i told no one. would that still count? i think it would

modogoblin

flagellant

I truly don't have any words about what's happening in Ohio right now. I want to post something like I usually do. Give vocabulary, etc, whatnot. It's important, it's so important. But I don't have words. What could I possibly say about the level of devastation that has happened, is happening, will happen in the future? This is worse than the BP spill. And I don't know how to respond to that with anything other than a shocked numbness.

flagellant

There has been a complete media black out regarding the catastrophic and deadly environmental disaster currently happening in Ohio right now, which began a full week ago at time of writing.

A train filled with extremely toxic and reactive chemicals, specifically vinyl chloride, was derailed. A cloud of poisonous chemicals has sprouted and since the cloud is heavier-than-air, it will persist to continue to travel downwind, polluting the atmosphere and environment of everything it touches. All pets will die. Reaching the Mississippi will completely eradicate the safety of all its waters from that point and everywhere downstream. Creeks are already filled with dead fish which the Ohio government claims is not to be worried about. The entire state's soils and ecosystems will be contaminated to deadly carcinogenic levels for the rest of all our lives and far beyond it. If and when it reaches the Gulf of Mexico the currents will carry its poisons globally.

I wish I could say anything of hope right now. I wish I could even say I'm angry. But I'm not right now. I just feel numb. The scale of this is just so beyond anything I can comprehend and there's an explicit and purposeful refusal to report on this.

tarilaran

Article discussing some of the safety concerns:

While vinyl chloride itself is a carcinogen, the burning of the chemical, which releases hydrogen chloride and phosgene, can be immediately lethal. Phosgene, a highly toxic, colorless gas with a strong odor, was notoriously used as a weapon during World War I.

Another article:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90848025/ohio-train-derailment-toxic-chemicals-pvc-spill-fire-disaster

Meanwhile, the crash site was leaching other hazardous materials besides vinyl chloride. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says they seeped into surrounding waterways, and “were immediately toxic to fish”—though it added that “actions were taken to minimize that.” The agency has assured the public that, the poor aquatic life’s fate notwithstanding, everybody’s drinking water was “protected.”

Yesterday [Feb 9 2023], the agency announced that the air in East Palestine was finally deemed safe enough for residents to return.

The oldest source I can find discussing this is from Feb 8.

WHEELING — West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice on Wednesday said Norfolk Southern’s train that derailed Friday in East Palestine, Ohio, did lead

ms-demeanor

Here is the New York Times reporting on this on February 4th.

Here are NBC and The Daily Beast reporting on this on February 5th.

Here are People Magazine, the Sacramento Bee, The Daily Beast again, CBS News, Reuters, and Reuters again reporting on this on February 6th.

Here is CNN reporting on it on February 7th.

The EPA response profile has been active and updating since February 4th.

I want to preface this by saying THIS IS NOT GOOD, and we shouldn't act like nothing is happening. This is bad. This is a serious environmental disaster. There are currently risks to humans and animals, and risks to humans and animals will be ongoing for quite some time at various levels.

However I think that "this will kill all the pets in the area and will lay a swathe of poison from Ohio to Mexico, burning the world between" is perhaps something of an overstatement and I'm aware that folks are upset about this but holy shit let's please try not to catastrophize the catastrophe.

The purpose of an intentional burn at the site was as a containment measure, because it is better to temporarily have extremely toxic chemical byproducts in an evacuated area than it is to allow an extremely carcinogenic chemical to slowly disperse.

There was a similar chemical spill in New Jersey in 2012 (still not a good thing! Not something that we should let go lightly!) and it did not result in "all pets dying" or a mass poisoning of rivers and streams.

Here is the DHHS Toxological Profile for Vinyl Chloride, a nearly 300-page document that goes over risk factors and harms caused by the chemical. Given the tone of the original post, here's what people probably want to see right now:

At the moment, there appears to be one man who claims that his pet fox died as a result of exposure to the vinyl chloride, and it sickened some of his other pets. There is some discussion of dead chickens and one dead hawk was found. Dead fish were found in some bodies of water, and the EPA is monitoring other bodies and has issued directives for dams and spillovers to collect chemical runoff to prevent as much downstream contamination as possible. At the moment, it is very difficult to say whether there will be a significant amount of acute animal deaths (wild or domesticated) as a result of this, though I would guess there will be a very significant increase of cancer in the area in the coming years.

One reporter at a press conference from the Ohio governor was arrested, he has been released and the AG's office is investigating his arrest. There are a lot of photos of the derailment and its consequences on social media and other news websites, and it does not appear that anyone is preventing people from taking or sharing photos of the disaster.

Look. I am not someone who thinks that you should blindly trust the government. There are huge issues here. This is a disaster that happened for a number of reasons, many of which are related to absolute shit regulation of chemical transportation and which were probably exacerbated by overworked railroad employees who got fucked over for the sake of the economy in December. There is bad shit here that is worthy of criticism, there are legitimate things to be concerned about.

But just because I don't trust the government doesn't mean I think it's a better idea to trust a shitpost account on twitter that provided "evidence" in the form of an instagram account posting screenshots of text messages from one guy who had a collection of exotic animals he wasn't able to retrieve from the evacuation area and a tiktok video.

There are definitely things to worry about with this, but please don't panic.

Also look, if the news is too miserable and you don't want to look at it too much but you want to at least pretend to stay informed, the Daily Beast's Cheat Sheet is a constant stream of paragraph-long reports on breaking news. Two of the stories I linked up above are from the Cheat Sheet. Just. Keep it open in a browser tab and check headlines once a day, okay? This has been news for an entire week, if People Magazine is doing human interest stories on it there isn't a media blackout please don't get your news from twitter or tumblr please I am begging you.

emphasisonthehomo

Imho the idea of ‘cruelty free’ products or food shouldn’t mean that nothing died to create it, but rather that anything and anyone involved in the creation process hasn’t been exploited or harmed.

Leather is good actually. Veganism isn’t the end all be all to morality and consumption. The issue isn’t that a chicken died for those nuggets, but that while the chicken was alive, it’s life fucking sucked. Vegan chocolate means little if the cocoa that made it was gathered by child slave labor.

Factory farms, abuses of the people who pick the fruit and vegetables we eat, the focus profit and productivity over all else - that’s the fucking issue here. It’s capitalism folks.

zibaldoni-elzapoppin

edensmidian

This is exactly why I come to this hellsite

markwateneymemorialcrater

silksarchive

fairycosmos

the nostalgia of living in your hometown as an adult can really make you sick. your childhood doesn’t exist anymore yet you can see it all around you all the time

asfgjfkgjnfkjgnkfjg

Welcome to Tumblr, Twitter users!

Don’t worry, we don’t have Elon Musk here…

But hipsters beware, you’re in for a scare!

*GOOSEBUMPS THEME INTENSIFIES*

This isn’t Twitter. This isn’t your average every day site. This is Tumblr. We’re crazy. We’re weird. We don’t fit in. We’re the fangirls, the fujoshis, the Superwholockers, and the Steven Universe Critical bloggers. We forgot what “normal” was. So if you’re expecting a normal website…

chirmartir

Ch😅

camm-the-cleric

Momma Possumbus

r4cs0

She's taking them to school too

libraford

I wonder if work just.. got harder in the 2000s, comparatively.

libraford

So like... ok. I haven't researched this and I'm mostly thinking out loud, so forgive me.

I entered the working world in 2005. I had a few odd jobs for a few years and then finally just bit the bullet in 2009, got a job at a grocery storeas an inventory clerk. My job was to count surplus items in the backroom and update the counts. Additional responsibilities included helping stock the front end. I left that job in less than a year.

A friend of mine now works at the same chain, different location, same job title, in 2022. But where I shared that title with two other people, he's the only one with that job title. Additionally, there are less stockpersons, and he is often called out to the floor to help them, which impedes his primary job function. He is also expected to clean bathrooms and some other maintenance things that I cant imagine doing as an inventory clerk.

And I thought maybe it was just that his location is understaffed, but looking back on the past few years where I was expected to do everything (be the front end, the dispatcher, the manufacturer, the teacher, trainer, janitor, delivery driver, account handler... christ, how did I do all this?) I'm looking at the issue with fresh eyes.

I hear sometimes about the 'slim down,' where a lot of companies took on a trend of hiring less people than they need to cut down on the cost of labor, and I look at how fast a person can burn out at a job. And how many jobs are considered 'high pressure sales' when they dont need to be.

Like I'm looking at the possibility of starting a business and I'm looking at the jobs I've had that burned me out and why. And it's almost always been 'I was always juggling responsibilities because we needed more staff'.

Like it seemed like I was doing everything, but getting paid the same.

And I think about that backroom job, where occasionally i would have to help out the stockers on big days, but mostly my job was one function.

It's not like that anymore, is it?

libraford

So when I hear someone bemoan that 'no one wants to work anymore' I just think... y'know, work ain't what it used to be. When you're working the work of 3.5 people because someone at corporate decided it was right and good to hire less people than they need because it saves them 20$ per hour per store, but you still dint get your bonus because shrinks too high or they didnt make the amount of money they thought they would or you gave too many coupons ONCE. And it's like they're actively trying to chase people away, and then threaten you with automation but they do t make work attractive enough for people to show...

Work dont want no one anymore.

libraford

Oh damn, the notes on this. Apparently it's not my imagination and y'all have lived some horror stories.

I feel like we should be able to do something about this. Like we should be able to say 'no' to lean staffing and we should have a say in what our responsibilities are.

I'm thinking about all the times i should have just straight up said something. Like I think I had it in my head that if I took on all the responsibilities in the shop, eventually I would be rewarded with higher pay. But it doesnt work like that anymore. The reward for digging the best hole is a bigger shovel.

That's no way to live, though. And I just put up with it like it was normal to be so tired at the end of the day that I couldnt move. Maybe I should have just said 'no, you do it' when they started making me work outside my title.

Because that took a serious toll on my mental health.

startledoctopus

i know so many people have said it but

UNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONSUNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONSUNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONSUNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONSUNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONSUNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONS

sixpenceee

"My turtle follows me and seeks out affection. Biologist have reached out to me because this is not even close to normal behavior. He just started one day and has never stopped. I don’t know why"

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