Local Lonely Lesbian *in recovery*

Documenting the strange phenomenon that is my life. Feel free to join in on the ride. (This blog is half dead and I’m very inconsistent)

[call-me-cd]

[whitepeopletwitter]

[70slesbian]

i do care if someone hires someone to clean though like you can’t just throw that out there as if it isn’t well known that those people that are hired to clean your home exist because they’re poor. wash your own dirty dishes

[raging-fan-human]

I understand what you’re saying, but you also seem to be ignoring the fact that people who are hiring these poor people to clean their houses are giving those people jobs. If they weren’t hiring them to clean their houses, these people may not have a job at all.

[70slesbian]

i don’t agree with this logic. i don’t think we need to settle for a job or nothing, is the same to be said for women who work under slavery like conditions in clothing factories in poor countries? why can’t we fight for change instead of accepting that some people just have to be maids

[jellybeanforest-a-go-go]

Before she moved in to take care of her, my aunt hired a maid to come to my disabled grandmother’s house once a week to clean for like 2-3 hours and paid her $80 every time she came over. There’s no way my grandmother, who had a bum hip from a car accident and hobbled around with her walker (back when she could even walk), could clean her own house. Maids provide an invaluable service, especially for the elderly and disabled, and they shouldn’t be eliminated just because you think their jobs are somehow not good enough for anyone to be doing. Many jobs like housecleaners, gardeners, etc., are great for people who may not speak the local language, who may have had a limited education, or who came here as adults with limited opportunities. My grandfather, who could speak four languages fluently but his English sucked, became a janitor at the age of 58 to support his family when they first came to America, and his kids always advocated that you should treat blue-collar and traditionally low-paid workers with respect because those jobs are valuable and even someone who cleans toilets is a person who is trying their best. Basically, we shouldn’t try to eliminate these jobs; they should just be better compensated.

[70slesbian]

yes i agree! i think that disabled people should have help and that it should be easily available for them but to me that wasn’t what the post was talking about!! i read it as a wealthy people simply hiring help to clean just because they can not because they need to. in an altruistic society people who love to clean could become a maid without having to depend on it, if everyone’s basic needs where met and no one would be walking hungry without their job that’s a different story to me! so while yes we do need to bring respect and wages to these jobs i also don’t think it’s unfair to think about if people actually need their houses cleaned by someone else! some do, including the disabled, some don’t!

[star-anise]

But here’s the thing.

By focusing our attention and wrath on people who might buy things they don’t really “need” (OH the wailing over AOC’s $300 purse) we lose sight of the actual problem (Uber and Lyft spending $200 million dollars to defeat legislation that would require them to treat their workers as employees).

Rich people hiring cleaners because they’re “lazy” is not the problem. It is a symptom of the problem. If all rich people started picking up their socks and doing their own dishes tomorrow, it wouldn’t increase the wellbeing or economic security of the rest of us one iota. No small cosmetic change will do that. Only fundamentally changing the legal and economic landscape will do that.

And in the meantime, people’s goalposts for who is “rich” and who is “lazy” will always be so flexible that it will inevitably hit a lot more poor people with disposable income than actual 1%ers.

I know as a disabled person that we are constantly put under scrutiny to prove we’re “disabled enough” to afford accommodation so you absolutely CANNOT say “this is the rule but of COURSE disabled people are excepted uwu.” If the rule isn’t built to accommodate disabled people in the first place, it WILL be used to treat us like shit unless we can meet whatever level of “disabled enough” a random unqualified stranger has decided is today’s benchmark, and meeting that will mean a constant surrender of our rights to privacy and dignity.

This is all probably useless when talking to someone named “70s lesbian” but I really truly promise you, policing people’s choices and “rescuing” people from immoral or “demeaning” work is not nearly as useful as focusing on improving societal and material conditions for workers and poor people.

[jabberwockypie]

As a disabled person, I don’t want to rely on someone being “altruistic” to do necessary housework I’m too fatigued and in too much pain to do  - and on people deciding I was “disabled enough” through some arbitrary standard to require help. I get enough of “you’re just lazy and your pain is made up” already, thanks. I’d love to be in a position able to pay someone a fair wage to help deal with housework that I can’t do without hurting myself.

In the same way, I don’t drive. If I need to go somewhere, I really like when I’m able to pay someone for this service! I don’t like having to wait for a friend or acquaintance to be available, and coordinate their schedule with mine, and take time out of their day, and possibly resent me for it (especially if I need to go several places), and have the option of withholding this help in the future if they decide to be an asshole. (I’ve been in abusive situations before where my basic needs have been used as leverage against me. e.g. “Well, you set boundaries I don’t like, so I’m not going to take you to your doctor’s appointment”.)

If I can just say “Here, have money in exchange for doing this thing I can’t/don’t want to do”, things are a lot simpler. Relying on other people to help out of the goodness of their hearts isn’t practical or realistic for longterm, day-to-day survival stuff. (If it was, disabled people wouldn’t be in the shitty situations we’re so often in, and so many of us wouldn’t live in poverty.) It’s a nice IDEA, but it doesn’t tend to happen on a large scale. Cleaning is unpleasant! I’m sure there exist people who enjoy some aspects of it, but if I had to wait for someone to clean out the cat box because they want to, it would never get done. Because cleaning up another animal’s bodily functions is gross and stinky, and if it’s not your cat you really should be compensated in some way for this. I want everyone to have UBI, too, so that they’re not in a position where they HAVE TO do it or starve, but that’s a separate issue.

[leopharry]

Hi, I’m employed part-time by a cleaning service, and I also work full-time as a janitor, and I gotta say, I’m not loving some of the takes in this thread.

1. First of all, there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with employing a service to make your life easier, whether you need it or not. I feel like we should start with that. A person who hires the services of a maid or cleaning company is well within their right to do so, whether it’s because they can’t do it themselves or it’s because they just don’t want to. That’s their choice! They are paying money for a service! Except in cases where they are hiring someone directly, they do not control how much the employees who clean their homes/offices/businesses get paid!

2. That said, maid/cleaning services may get tipped, but they are still beholden to minimum wage laws. If you want to talk about paying us more, THAT’S how you’re going to do it, not by policing who is and is not “allowed” to hire these services. That said, it might be a good idea to actually do some research into how much a maid or cleaner actually gets paid. I think it’s going to surprise quite a lot of you. Obviously not every person who cleans is going to make a fair wage, but like. Quite a lot of us do, actually. For example, at my part time job, I make $17.50/hour. At my full time job, I’m salaried at $34k/year, with full benefits–and I mean full, including full health, eye, and dental coverage, retirement plan, accruing PTO, the WORKS–and a yearly raise, because,

3. Anyone who cleans in state- or federal-owned buildings are state or federal employees. I’m not sure if the same can be said for municipalities, but I know at the very least, public school janitors are… I’m fairly certain ALL employees of the city in which they work, if not the state. I work as a janitor at a state college, which makes me an employee of the state, which entitles me to the benefits and union protections of literally any other employee of my state. So, like, to make my next point,

4. Please get it out of your head that we need to be pitied for our “demeaning” work. First of all, that is incredibly condescending. Second of all, our work is extremely important! We perform necessary services to society across the board! Please stop looking down your nose at people who clean for a living!! Third of all, I obviously can’t speak for every person who cleans for a living, but from my own personal experience, I have been treated with significantly more respect by my clients at every cleaning job I’ve ever worked than I ever had working retail or food service. Obviously you’re going to get an occasional client having a bad day or who is generally unkind, but even then, they’re almost always appreciative of the work we do. I do not feel demeaned for my work. The only time I have ever felt ashamed of my work is when people TREATED my work like it’s something to be ashamed of.

5. Maybe some people “just have to be a maid,” but like. A lot of us enjoy our work? We take pride in it?? We get a sense of satisfaction seeing something that was dirty and gross NOT BE dirty and gross anymore??? Like, yeah, if I had the choice I’d prefer not to clean strangers’ houses or a bunch of classrooms, but that has nothing to do with the work itself, and everything to do with the fact that I’d just? Like not to work?? But even if UBI were instated tomorrow, I’d still want something to do with my time, and if I, with my level of experience and education, had to choose between the types of jobs available to me, I’d still pick what I’m doing, just because I enjoy it more! I don’t have to deal with vast hoardes of the general public! In fact, most of the time I’m alone! I work at my pace! Nobody’s standing behind me, rushing me or telling me to smile or docking my hours because I’m not up to some arbitrary standard. I LIKE MY WORK!

I know my experiences are not universal. I know there are plenty of cleaning companies that aren’t going to treat their workers with respect, and I know there are even more clients out there who are going to look down on us for the work we do. I know full well that we deserve better wages and better benefits and better treatment for the important work we do (and the fact that none of us qualify for the covid vaccine despite consistent exposure to everything from hospitals to public schools to private offices to private homes is definitely one thing that boils my blood when I think about it too hard).

But, again, this is not demeaning work. This is not shameful work. And there is no line to say whether or not the work I do is justified. I am being paid to perform a service. Whether that service is in the home of someone who can’t clean up after themselves or someone who just wants their time at home not to be interrupted by chores isn’t my business, and it certainly isn’t the business of someone who’d see me out of a job just because they don’t like that fact.

[musicalhell]

I hire a house cleaning service once a month, simply because cleaning is a skill I do not have. And yes, it is a skill–I can pick up my dirty clothes and empty the dishwasher and all the other basic adulting things, but really getting into corners and sweeping and scrubbing and all the other minutae? If it were up to me it would happen maybe three times a year. So I pay someone else to do it–not because I’m above doing it myself but because they’re much better at it.

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

Glad to finally have a version of this post with someone who actually does this kind of work chiming in. Cleaning is absolutely skilled labor. It would take me two days to accomplish what a professional does in three hours and they’d still do it better than me.

Leftists who think the solution is to eliminate certain professions they’ve been taught to look down are literally buying into capitalist propaganda. “Play the game or you might have to become one of *those* people.” Instead we should treating all workers and all types of labor with dignity and respect and make sure everyone earns not just a living but a thriving wage.

[akinmytua2]

I have someone clean every other week. She helps me clean and she cleans (she can give me a task and I can do it but I get overwhelmed if I clean on my own). Thank you to all the cleaning people, food delivery people, and mail and FedEx drivers who make my life so much easier.

[clockworkspider]

Also, getting into the original point, there is still a gap between having disposable income and being middle class. Not rich, just middle class.

People can have disposable income because of their saving or spending habits or their living situation, even if they make very little money. And it is not your place to judge their priorities and what they choose to spend their money on.

Someone with a higher income may choose to put all their money in investment, may choose to retire early and become a full time homemaker, may clean to relax, someone with lower income may decide that cleaning is too overwhelming for them and hire someone to do it. You simply cannot judge someone’s financial situation based on how they choose to spend their money. (Excluding things like rigging the market or buying up multiple investment properties.)

For example, I make much more money than I did 3 years ago. However, I have less disposable income than I use to due to having a mortgage. I also have the spare time and energy to truly enjoy doing chores because I am working in a less stressful job. My past self, who was overworked and overwhelmed, needed to hire cleaning service. My present self do not.

When you shame people for their individual financial decisions, you shame poor people for enjoying nice things and getting the services they need, you shame people who aren’t “disabled enough” from taking necessary steps to improve their quality of life.

[sacredfire44]

IF EVERY JOB WAS PAID BETTER, MORE “DEMEANING” JOBS WOULD HAVE MORE PEOPLE WILLING TO WORK THEM.

SOME PEOPLE LIKE CLEANING

SOME PEOPLE LIKE GARDENING

SOME PEOPLE LIKE MANUAL LABOR THAT LETS THEM WORK WITH THEIR HANDS

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

How fucking condescending is it to act like people working in service industries are inherently exploited by those horrible evil people who want to… pay them for the services they’re selling. Comparing being a janitor to slavery? Really? If you think hiring a cleaner is immoral but, say, commissioning artwork isn’t, then it’s your attitude to service workers that’s the problem.

[naamahdarling]

I already have people judging whether I am disabled enough to receive what little help I get from the government. I don’t want to have to fucking prove how disabled I am to obtain services I am going to PAY FOR FROM MY OWN POCKET so people won’t judge me. Leave disabled people the fuck alone. You can’t know who is or isn’t disabled. And you can’t act like we are the pitiable exception, and it’s okay if WE can’t do our own dishes, WE aren’t like THOSE lazy fucks over THERE, we DESERVE help. That kind of judgment is exactly why we struggle so much as it is.

We can’t rely on altruism. We do right now and it isn’t working, and we know better than to think we are anywhere NEAR the top of the list as far as allocating resources is concerned.

Why someone does or does not hire a cleaning professional is way less important than them finding a company that TREATS their employees like human beings providing a valuable service and PAYS them as such.

There’s nothing inherently moral about doing your own dishes. Hire someone if you can. I wish I could. Just fucking pay them well. It’s hard and dirty work, and a lot of folks are assholes about it.

[genderkoolaid]

Not to add more to this already long post, but:

The way people on this post talk about hiring maids reminds me of the way anti-sex work people talk about sex work. As if there’s something inherently suspicious about hiring someone for a task that isnt strictly necessary for your survival.

And in both cases people act like they are defending the workers in question. Because obviously these jobs are inherently degrading and morally evil and by hiring them you are complicit in sex trafficking/slavery!!!!!

And the people making these statements, 9/10, are not former or current workers in the industry. They are morally outraged by an industry and proclaim themselves defenders of people they don’t actually listen to. Because if they did, they couldn’t be the saviors they see themselves as. They’d have to admit that the situation is complicated and workers can have various feelings about their work and maybe their moral outrage is fueled more by ingrained biases than anything.

For one, it’s some weird Calvinist shit to act like it’s bad to pay people for a nice experience. Like yes, disabled people do benefit from both cleaning services and sex work, but also it’s just. Fine to pay someone for pleasure or a clean house.

And two: we need to recognize how easily someone “defending the working class” (or working class women specifically) just re-stigmatize an already stigmatized industry. Often by reusing already bigoted tropes, but in the workers “defense.”

People think of sex workers as disposable things to buy? SWrs say that, no, just because we are sex workers does not mean we are disposable or that you are buying us instead of the service we provide, you need to have respect for us. as workers Anti-SW people say actually, everything they said is right, and the solution is for your job to not exist anymore :)

People think of maids as slaves to treat terribly and demean? People working in cleaning services say no, just because we do literal dirty work doesn’t mean you have the right to underpay us, control us, demean us, you need to have respect for us as workers. Anti-cleaning service people say actually, everything they said is right, and the solution is for your job to not exist anymore :)

If you can’t imagine a world in which people can do sex work or cleaning work with safety, respect, and good pay, that is your failing. You have so little respect for the people in these industries that you can only see them as respectable if their jobs no longer exist? You think the reason why their working conditions are often poor is because of some inherent moral failing in the work itself, and not because it’s often done by people society views as expendable? You really don’t think that your views on these issues may be influenced by the very same bias that normalizes the abuse of these workers?

It’s like the labour version of “love the sinner, hate the sin.”

[kaz2y5tiel]

Unfortunately adding my voice here. Just one more on the pile.

I did not grow up rich. I grew up with government peanut butter and stale loaves from the used bread store. I grew up with shoes that didn’t fit and nine, ten, fifteen hours alone in my home at age fucking six because my single mom had to work split shifts at her unskilled union job for the amazing benefits and a goddamned pension plan. She bought a house at 30 on that income, and yet we were considered poor enough to qualify for government “surplus” food. (Did you know the US government used to just give out food? And that the threshold to qualify was actually pretty high?) Do you know even one single person with a pension plan in their contract anymore? ‘Cause I don’t. Mom hated that job. But she had to do it. If she wanted her kid to eat and have a roof, she had to. She got to choose what job, though, and while the job sucked, at the end of the day she clocked out and went home and nobody emailed her. She worked her forty hours and then she was done for the week. No second job, no roommates, no monetized hobbies.

My Spouse, on the other hand, grew up with actual, literal, held in bondage slaves. Her mother had one slave in particular — Spouse doesn’t know the man’s name because they only ever called him Boy — who had been a fourth birthday gift. He was also four at the time, and he was part of her dowry when she was shipped off to cook a stranger’s meals and be his wife and be domestic help to his parents. She was a doctor and yet her “most important” duties were trying to have sons and serving her family.

Spouse is also a doctor. We have disposable income enough that I can fritter away my hours at stupid shit like volunteering at soup kitchens and making art and keeping a humongous garden full of produce that I donate and dropping everything when friends or family need mental health support or have a stroke or need end of life care. We buy products that are way too expensive for what they are because coffee is a luxury, actually. We look for companies that pay a good (not just fair, but good) wage to farmers and factory workers for the product they sell and give their profits to, oh I dunno, trying to reduce maternal and infant mortality in the poorest country in the world or build toilets in parts of Spouse’s home country where women are often raped when they try to relieve themselves because they have no safe place to pee. We dispose our income in ways that matter to us. We have a cleaner and a lawn guy and a handyman because neither of us ever had the chance to learn those skills. We get takeout a lot of nights, meaning someone else is even cooking our food. The idea that laziness indicates a lack of worth is extremely Christian and I invite y’all to reflect on that a little.

Thing is, my mom’s job sucked and she hated it, but it let us live without fear. She is enjoying a wonderful retirement now, because she worked during a time when companies weren’t allowed to be so fucking greedy. We never had to go hungry. We were never in danger of losing our home or beholden to a landlord. She got to decide if she wanted a kid, was able to divorce the man who cheated on her while she was pregnant, and could apply for a mortgage to get a home of her own without needing a father or husband to co-sign. Her life has been hard at times but it was always hers.

My Spouse’s mother was a doctor from a very rich family and yet she both held slaves and was herself enslaved: not allowed to drive, not allowed to leave the house alone, lamented rather than celebrated at birth for having the wrong kind of body, not allowed to pick her own career, sent off to the lowest bidder as a teenager to be some other kid’s “wife.” She was only able to escape that life because her in-laws passed and she and her husband were able to take their children to somewhere they wouldn’t have to worry about their daughter being acquired like so much property. Somewhere their granddaughter would never experience owning another human being, either.

Ultimately, it’s not either of those women, nor the kids they raised, who are the problem.

It’s misogyny.

It’s greedy corporations.

It’s corrupt politicians.

It’s dishonest, money-grubbing landlords.

It’s income inequality so stark that people die from it every hour of every day.

It’s religious extremism that insists certain bodies, or certain families, or certain beliefs, &c., make someone worthless beyond what they can do for light-skinned men.

It’s people who look at what they have and sit on it rather than using it to employ others in ways that benefit rather than harm them, or using it to try to ease someone else’s suffering. People who hoard wealth they couldn’t spend in a hundred lifetimes simply because they like the look of the numbers. People who gleefully accumulate power and human lives. People who send kids in matching outfits off to murder each other. People who make the world a place where families have to sell their four year old sons into slavery just so they don’t have to watch them starve to death.

Cripes, y’all are over here bitching about some people having jobs you don’t respect instead of, oh I dunno, making a plan to vote so that your lives in ten years look more like my mom’s rather than my mother-in-law’s. Stop mistaking envy for oppression. It’s perfectly alright to be pissed at the circumstances and to want to change them. Best way? Stop your country from becoming a theocratic dictatorship, to start. Fucking vote.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Stop mistaking envy for oppression

[guiltyidealist]

the op really said, overtly, that the wealthy people that should be toppled ARE NOT JUST THE PEOPLE WHO HIRE OTHERS TO CLEAN.

and that person really said. “I thought it was wealthy people hiring cleaners just because”

[somehow-cathartic]

There’s quite a lot going on here but I’d like to add a little side note that it’s just wild to me that the idea of hiring a maid is some sort of out-of-touch upper class thing to do. I worked with my mom and we cleaned houses for some side income a couple of years and while some of those houses were on the bigger side, plenty of them were below average size in below average condition. I think hiring maid services is a very typical way of spending disposable income even if there isn’t much disposable income to begin with. It’s sad to me that people associate home cleaning services with such a lavish life and it’s a great illustration of just how little disposable income most people have these days. Adding this little convenience to life seems so out of reach for a lot of people and even just less than a decade ago it was so normal for me and my mom to provide these services to ordinary non-upper middle class households. I think our generation doesn’t have an accurate concept of what “disposable income” actually looks like anymore

[somehow-cathartic]

Prev tags said it perfect!

[flowertreat-cats]

# Naps

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Give prev a little gift:

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Cuddles with a dog

A moon necklace

Voting ended onOct 14, 2024

[whitepeopletwitter]

[70slesbian]

i do care if someone hires someone to clean though like you can’t just throw that out there as if it isn’t well known that those people that are hired to clean your home exist because they’re poor. wash your own dirty dishes

[raging-fan-human]

I understand what you’re saying, but you also seem to be ignoring the fact that people who are hiring these poor people to clean their houses are giving those people jobs. If they weren’t hiring them to clean their houses, these people may not have a job at all.

[70slesbian]

i don’t agree with this logic. i don’t think we need to settle for a job or nothing, is the same to be said for women who work under slavery like conditions in clothing factories in poor countries? why can’t we fight for change instead of accepting that some people just have to be maids

[jellybeanforest-a-go-go]

Before she moved in to take care of her, my aunt hired a maid to come to my disabled grandmother’s house once a week to clean for like 2-3 hours and paid her $80 every time she came over. There’s no way my grandmother, who had a bum hip from a car accident and hobbled around with her walker (back when she could even walk), could clean her own house. Maids provide an invaluable service, especially for the elderly and disabled, and they shouldn’t be eliminated just because you think their jobs are somehow not good enough for anyone to be doing. Many jobs like housecleaners, gardeners, etc., are great for people who may not speak the local language, who may have had a limited education, or who came here as adults with limited opportunities. My grandfather, who could speak four languages fluently but his English sucked, became a janitor at the age of 58 to support his family when they first came to America, and his kids always advocated that you should treat blue-collar and traditionally low-paid workers with respect because those jobs are valuable and even someone who cleans toilets is a person who is trying their best. Basically, we shouldn’t try to eliminate these jobs; they should just be better compensated.

[70slesbian]

yes i agree! i think that disabled people should have help and that it should be easily available for them but to me that wasn’t what the post was talking about!! i read it as a wealthy people simply hiring help to clean just because they can not because they need to. in an altruistic society people who love to clean could become a maid without having to depend on it, if everyone’s basic needs where met and no one would be walking hungry without their job that’s a different story to me! so while yes we do need to bring respect and wages to these jobs i also don’t think it’s unfair to think about if people actually need their houses cleaned by someone else! some do, including the disabled, some don’t!

[star-anise]

But here’s the thing.

By focusing our attention and wrath on people who might buy things they don’t really “need” (OH the wailing over AOC’s $300 purse) we lose sight of the actual problem (Uber and Lyft spending $200 million dollars to defeat legislation that would require them to treat their workers as employees).

Rich people hiring cleaners because they’re “lazy” is not the problem. It is a symptom of the problem. If all rich people started picking up their socks and doing their own dishes tomorrow, it wouldn’t increase the wellbeing or economic security of the rest of us one iota. No small cosmetic change will do that. Only fundamentally changing the legal and economic landscape will do that.

And in the meantime, people’s goalposts for who is “rich” and who is “lazy” will always be so flexible that it will inevitably hit a lot more poor people with disposable income than actual 1%ers.

I know as a disabled person that we are constantly put under scrutiny to prove we’re “disabled enough” to afford accommodation so you absolutely CANNOT say “this is the rule but of COURSE disabled people are excepted uwu.” If the rule isn’t built to accommodate disabled people in the first place, it WILL be used to treat us like shit unless we can meet whatever level of “disabled enough” a random unqualified stranger has decided is today’s benchmark, and meeting that will mean a constant surrender of our rights to privacy and dignity.

This is all probably useless when talking to someone named “70s lesbian” but I really truly promise you, policing people’s choices and “rescuing” people from immoral or “demeaning” work is not nearly as useful as focusing on improving societal and material conditions for workers and poor people.

[jabberwockypie]

As a disabled person, I don’t want to rely on someone being “altruistic” to do necessary housework I’m too fatigued and in too much pain to do  - and on people deciding I was “disabled enough” through some arbitrary standard to require help. I get enough of “you’re just lazy and your pain is made up” already, thanks. I’d love to be in a position able to pay someone a fair wage to help deal with housework that I can’t do without hurting myself.

In the same way, I don’t drive. If I need to go somewhere, I really like when I’m able to pay someone for this service! I don’t like having to wait for a friend or acquaintance to be available, and coordinate their schedule with mine, and take time out of their day, and possibly resent me for it (especially if I need to go several places), and have the option of withholding this help in the future if they decide to be an asshole. (I’ve been in abusive situations before where my basic needs have been used as leverage against me. e.g. “Well, you set boundaries I don’t like, so I’m not going to take you to your doctor’s appointment”.)

If I can just say “Here, have money in exchange for doing this thing I can’t/don’t want to do”, things are a lot simpler. Relying on other people to help out of the goodness of their hearts isn’t practical or realistic for longterm, day-to-day survival stuff. (If it was, disabled people wouldn’t be in the shitty situations we’re so often in, and so many of us wouldn’t live in poverty.) It’s a nice IDEA, but it doesn’t tend to happen on a large scale. Cleaning is unpleasant! I’m sure there exist people who enjoy some aspects of it, but if I had to wait for someone to clean out the cat box because they want to, it would never get done. Because cleaning up another animal’s bodily functions is gross and stinky, and if it’s not your cat you really should be compensated in some way for this. I want everyone to have UBI, too, so that they’re not in a position where they HAVE TO do it or starve, but that’s a separate issue.

[leopharry]

Hi, I’m employed part-time by a cleaning service, and I also work full-time as a janitor, and I gotta say, I’m not loving some of the takes in this thread.

1. First of all, there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with employing a service to make your life easier, whether you need it or not. I feel like we should start with that. A person who hires the services of a maid or cleaning company is well within their right to do so, whether it’s because they can’t do it themselves or it’s because they just don’t want to. That’s their choice! They are paying money for a service! Except in cases where they are hiring someone directly, they do not control how much the employees who clean their homes/offices/businesses get paid!

2. That said, maid/cleaning services may get tipped, but they are still beholden to minimum wage laws. If you want to talk about paying us more, THAT’S how you’re going to do it, not by policing who is and is not “allowed” to hire these services. That said, it might be a good idea to actually do some research into how much a maid or cleaner actually gets paid. I think it’s going to surprise quite a lot of you. Obviously not every person who cleans is going to make a fair wage, but like. Quite a lot of us do, actually. For example, at my part time job, I make $17.50/hour. At my full time job, I’m salaried at $34k/year, with full benefits–and I mean full, including full health, eye, and dental coverage, retirement plan, accruing PTO, the WORKS–and a yearly raise, because,

3. Anyone who cleans in state- or federal-owned buildings are state or federal employees. I’m not sure if the same can be said for municipalities, but I know at the very least, public school janitors are… I’m fairly certain ALL employees of the city in which they work, if not the state. I work as a janitor at a state college, which makes me an employee of the state, which entitles me to the benefits and union protections of literally any other employee of my state. So, like, to make my next point,

4. Please get it out of your head that we need to be pitied for our “demeaning” work. First of all, that is incredibly condescending. Second of all, our work is extremely important! We perform necessary services to society across the board! Please stop looking down your nose at people who clean for a living!! Third of all, I obviously can’t speak for every person who cleans for a living, but from my own personal experience, I have been treated with significantly more respect by my clients at every cleaning job I’ve ever worked than I ever had working retail or food service. Obviously you’re going to get an occasional client having a bad day or who is generally unkind, but even then, they’re almost always appreciative of the work we do. I do not feel demeaned for my work. The only time I have ever felt ashamed of my work is when people TREATED my work like it’s something to be ashamed of.

5. Maybe some people “just have to be a maid,” but like. A lot of us enjoy our work? We take pride in it?? We get a sense of satisfaction seeing something that was dirty and gross NOT BE dirty and gross anymore??? Like, yeah, if I had the choice I’d prefer not to clean strangers’ houses or a bunch of classrooms, but that has nothing to do with the work itself, and everything to do with the fact that I’d just? Like not to work?? But even if UBI were instated tomorrow, I’d still want something to do with my time, and if I, with my level of experience and education, had to choose between the types of jobs available to me, I’d still pick what I’m doing, just because I enjoy it more! I don’t have to deal with vast hoardes of the general public! In fact, most of the time I’m alone! I work at my pace! Nobody’s standing behind me, rushing me or telling me to smile or docking my hours because I’m not up to some arbitrary standard. I LIKE MY WORK!

I know my experiences are not universal. I know there are plenty of cleaning companies that aren’t going to treat their workers with respect, and I know there are even more clients out there who are going to look down on us for the work we do. I know full well that we deserve better wages and better benefits and better treatment for the important work we do (and the fact that none of us qualify for the covid vaccine despite consistent exposure to everything from hospitals to public schools to private offices to private homes is definitely one thing that boils my blood when I think about it too hard).

But, again, this is not demeaning work. This is not shameful work. And there is no line to say whether or not the work I do is justified. I am being paid to perform a service. Whether that service is in the home of someone who can’t clean up after themselves or someone who just wants their time at home not to be interrupted by chores isn’t my business, and it certainly isn’t the business of someone who’d see me out of a job just because they don’t like that fact.

[musicalhell]

I hire a house cleaning service once a month, simply because cleaning is a skill I do not have. And yes, it is a skill–I can pick up my dirty clothes and empty the dishwasher and all the other basic adulting things, but really getting into corners and sweeping and scrubbing and all the other minutae? If it were up to me it would happen maybe three times a year. So I pay someone else to do it–not because I’m above doing it myself but because they’re much better at it.

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

Glad to finally have a version of this post with someone who actually does this kind of work chiming in. Cleaning is absolutely skilled labor. It would take me two days to accomplish what a professional does in three hours and they’d still do it better than me.

Leftists who think the solution is to eliminate certain professions they’ve been taught to look down are literally buying into capitalist propaganda. “Play the game or you might have to become one of *those* people.” Instead we should treating all workers and all types of labor with dignity and respect and make sure everyone earns not just a living but a thriving wage.

[akinmytua2]

I have someone clean every other week. She helps me clean and she cleans (she can give me a task and I can do it but I get overwhelmed if I clean on my own). Thank you to all the cleaning people, food delivery people, and mail and FedEx drivers who make my life so much easier.

[clockworkspider]

Also, getting into the original point, there is still a gap between having disposable income and being middle class. Not rich, just middle class.

People can have disposable income because of their saving or spending habits or their living situation, even if they make very little money. And it is not your place to judge their priorities and what they choose to spend their money on.

Someone with a higher income may choose to put all their money in investment, may choose to retire early and become a full time homemaker, may clean to relax, someone with lower income may decide that cleaning is too overwhelming for them and hire someone to do it. You simply cannot judge someone’s financial situation based on how they choose to spend their money. (Excluding things like rigging the market or buying up multiple investment properties.)

For example, I make much more money than I did 3 years ago. However, I have less disposable income than I use to due to having a mortgage. I also have the spare time and energy to truly enjoy doing chores because I am working in a less stressful job. My past self, who was overworked and overwhelmed, needed to hire cleaning service. My present self do not.

When you shame people for their individual financial decisions, you shame poor people for enjoying nice things and getting the services they need, you shame people who aren’t “disabled enough” from taking necessary steps to improve their quality of life.

[sacredfire44]

IF EVERY JOB WAS PAID BETTER, MORE “DEMEANING” JOBS WOULD HAVE MORE PEOPLE WILLING TO WORK THEM.

SOME PEOPLE LIKE CLEANING

SOME PEOPLE LIKE GARDENING

SOME PEOPLE LIKE MANUAL LABOR THAT LETS THEM WORK WITH THEIR HANDS

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

How fucking condescending is it to act like people working in service industries are inherently exploited by those horrible evil people who want to… pay them for the services they’re selling. Comparing being a janitor to slavery? Really? If you think hiring a cleaner is immoral but, say, commissioning artwork isn’t, then it’s your attitude to service workers that’s the problem.

[naamahdarling]

I already have people judging whether I am disabled enough to receive what little help I get from the government. I don’t want to have to fucking prove how disabled I am to obtain services I am going to PAY FOR FROM MY OWN POCKET so people won’t judge me. Leave disabled people the fuck alone. You can’t know who is or isn’t disabled. And you can’t act like we are the pitiable exception, and it’s okay if WE can’t do our own dishes, WE aren’t like THOSE lazy fucks over THERE, we DESERVE help. That kind of judgment is exactly why we struggle so much as it is.

We can’t rely on altruism. We do right now and it isn’t working, and we know better than to think we are anywhere NEAR the top of the list as far as allocating resources is concerned.

Why someone does or does not hire a cleaning professional is way less important than them finding a company that TREATS their employees like human beings providing a valuable service and PAYS them as such.

There’s nothing inherently moral about doing your own dishes. Hire someone if you can. I wish I could. Just fucking pay them well. It’s hard and dirty work, and a lot of folks are assholes about it.

[genderkoolaid]

Not to add more to this already long post, but:

The way people on this post talk about hiring maids reminds me of the way anti-sex work people talk about sex work. As if there’s something inherently suspicious about hiring someone for a task that isnt strictly necessary for your survival.

And in both cases people act like they are defending the workers in question. Because obviously these jobs are inherently degrading and morally evil and by hiring them you are complicit in sex trafficking/slavery!!!!!

And the people making these statements, 9/10, are not former or current workers in the industry. They are morally outraged by an industry and proclaim themselves defenders of people they don’t actually listen to. Because if they did, they couldn’t be the saviors they see themselves as. They’d have to admit that the situation is complicated and workers can have various feelings about their work and maybe their moral outrage is fueled more by ingrained biases than anything.

For one, it’s some weird Calvinist shit to act like it’s bad to pay people for a nice experience. Like yes, disabled people do benefit from both cleaning services and sex work, but also it’s just. Fine to pay someone for pleasure or a clean house.

And two: we need to recognize how easily someone “defending the working class” (or working class women specifically) just re-stigmatize an already stigmatized industry. Often by reusing already bigoted tropes, but in the workers “defense.”

People think of sex workers as disposable things to buy? SWrs say that, no, just because we are sex workers does not mean we are disposable or that you are buying us instead of the service we provide, you need to have respect for us. as workers Anti-SW people say actually, everything they said is right, and the solution is for your job to not exist anymore :)

People think of maids as slaves to treat terribly and demean? People working in cleaning services say no, just because we do literal dirty work doesn’t mean you have the right to underpay us, control us, demean us, you need to have respect for us as workers. Anti-cleaning service people say actually, everything they said is right, and the solution is for your job to not exist anymore :)

If you can’t imagine a world in which people can do sex work or cleaning work with safety, respect, and good pay, that is your failing. You have so little respect for the people in these industries that you can only see them as respectable if their jobs no longer exist? You think the reason why their working conditions are often poor is because of some inherent moral failing in the work itself, and not because it’s often done by people society views as expendable? You really don’t think that your views on these issues may be influenced by the very same bias that normalizes the abuse of these workers?

It’s like the labour version of “love the sinner, hate the sin.”

[kaz2y5tiel]

Unfortunately adding my voice here. Just one more on the pile.

I did not grow up rich. I grew up with government peanut butter and stale loaves from the used bread store. I grew up with shoes that didn’t fit and nine, ten, fifteen hours alone in my home at age fucking six because my single mom had to work split shifts at her unskilled union job for the amazing benefits and a goddamned pension plan. She bought a house at 30 on that income, and yet we were considered poor enough to qualify for government “surplus” food. (Did you know the US government used to just give out food? And that the threshold to qualify was actually pretty high?) Do you know even one single person with a pension plan in their contract anymore? ‘Cause I don’t. Mom hated that job. But she had to do it. If she wanted her kid to eat and have a roof, she had to. She got to choose what job, though, and while the job sucked, at the end of the day she clocked out and went home and nobody emailed her. She worked her forty hours and then she was done for the week. No second job, no roommates, no monetized hobbies.

My Spouse, on the other hand, grew up with actual, literal, held in bondage slaves. Her mother had one slave in particular — Spouse doesn’t know the man’s name because they only ever called him Boy — who had been a fourth birthday gift. He was also four at the time, and he was part of her dowry when she was shipped off to cook a stranger’s meals and be his wife and be domestic help to his parents. She was a doctor and yet her “most important” duties were trying to have sons and serving her family.

Spouse is also a doctor. We have disposable income enough that I can fritter away my hours at stupid shit like volunteering at soup kitchens and making art and keeping a humongous garden full of produce that I donate and dropping everything when friends or family need mental health support or have a stroke or need end of life care. We buy products that are way too expensive for what they are because coffee is a luxury, actually. We look for companies that pay a good (not just fair, but good) wage to farmers and factory workers for the product they sell and give their profits to, oh I dunno, trying to reduce maternal and infant mortality in the poorest country in the world or build toilets in parts of Spouse’s home country where women are often raped when they try to relieve themselves because they have no safe place to pee. We dispose our income in ways that matter to us. We have a cleaner and a lawn guy and a handyman because neither of us ever had the chance to learn those skills. We get takeout a lot of nights, meaning someone else is even cooking our food. The idea that laziness indicates a lack of worth is extremely Christian and I invite y’all to reflect on that a little.

Thing is, my mom’s job sucked and she hated it, but it let us live without fear. She is enjoying a wonderful retirement now, because she worked during a time when companies weren’t allowed to be so fucking greedy. We never had to go hungry. We were never in danger of losing our home or beholden to a landlord. She got to decide if she wanted a kid, was able to divorce the man who cheated on her while she was pregnant, and could apply for a mortgage to get a home of her own without needing a father or husband to co-sign. Her life has been hard at times but it was always hers.

My Spouse’s mother was a doctor from a very rich family and yet she both held slaves and was herself enslaved: not allowed to drive, not allowed to leave the house alone, lamented rather than celebrated at birth for having the wrong kind of body, not allowed to pick her own career, sent off to the lowest bidder as a teenager to be some other kid’s “wife.” She was only able to escape that life because her in-laws passed and she and her husband were able to take their children to somewhere they wouldn’t have to worry about their daughter being acquired like so much property. Somewhere their granddaughter would never experience owning another human being, either.

Ultimately, it’s not either of those women, nor the kids they raised, who are the problem.

It’s misogyny.

It’s greedy corporations.

It’s corrupt politicians.

It’s dishonest, money-grubbing landlords.

It’s income inequality so stark that people die from it every hour of every day.

It’s religious extremism that insists certain bodies, or certain families, or certain beliefs, &c., make someone worthless beyond what they can do for light-skinned men.

It’s people who look at what they have and sit on it rather than using it to employ others in ways that benefit rather than harm them, or using it to try to ease someone else’s suffering. People who hoard wealth they couldn’t spend in a hundred lifetimes simply because they like the look of the numbers. People who gleefully accumulate power and human lives. People who send kids in matching outfits off to murder each other. People who make the world a place where families have to sell their four year old sons into slavery just so they don’t have to watch them starve to death.

Cripes, y’all are over here bitching about some people having jobs you don’t respect instead of, oh I dunno, making a plan to vote so that your lives in ten years look more like my mom’s rather than my mother-in-law’s. Stop mistaking envy for oppression. It’s perfectly alright to be pissed at the circumstances and to want to change them. Best way? Stop your country from becoming a theocratic dictatorship, to start. Fucking vote.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Stop mistaking envy for oppression

[guiltyidealist]

the op really said, overtly, that the wealthy people that should be toppled ARE NOT JUST THE PEOPLE WHO HIRE OTHERS TO CLEAN.

and that person really said. “I thought it was wealthy people hiring cleaners just because”

[somehow-cathartic]

There’s quite a lot going on here but I’d like to add a little side note that it’s just wild to me that the idea of hiring a maid is some sort of out-of-touch upper class thing to do. I worked with my mom and we cleaned houses for some side income a couple of years and while some of those houses were on the bigger side, plenty of them were below average size in below average condition. I think hiring maid services is a very typical way of spending disposable income even if there isn’t much disposable income to begin with. It’s sad to me that people associate home cleaning services with such a lavish life and it’s a great illustration of just how little disposable income most people have these days. Adding this little convenience to life seems so out of reach for a lot of people and even just less than a decade ago it was so normal for me and my mom to provide these services to ordinary non-upper middle class households. I think our generation doesn’t have an accurate concept of what “disposable income” actually looks like anymore

[luetta]

idk if people on tumblr know about this but a cybersecurity software called crowdstrike just did what is probably the single biggest fuck up in any sector in the past 10 years. it's monumentally bad. literally the most horror-inducing nightmare scenario for a tech company.

some info, crowdstrike is essentially an antivirus software for enterprises. which means normal laypeople cant really get it, they're for businesses and organisations and important stuff.

so, on a friday evening (it of course wasnt friday everywhere but it was friday evening in oceania which is where it first started causing damage due to europe and na being asleep), crowdstrike pushed out an update to their windows users that caused a bug.

before i get into what the bug is, know that friday evening is the worst possible time to do this because people are going home. the weekend is starting. offices dont have people in them. this is just one of many perfectly placed failures in the rube goldburg machine of crowdstrike. there's a reason friday is called 'dont push to live friday' or more to the point 'dont fuck it up friday'

so, at 3pm at friday, an update comes rolling into crowdstrike users which is automatically implemented. this update immediately causes the computer to blue screen of death. very very bad. but it's not simply a 'you need to restart' crash, because the computer then gets stuck into a boot loop.

this is the worst possible thing because, in a boot loop state, a computer is never really able to get to a point where it can do anything. like download a fix. so there is nothing crowdstrike can do to remedy this death update anymore. it is now left to the end users.

it was pretty quickly identified what the problem was. you had to boot it in safe mode, and a very small file needed to be deleted. or you could just rename crowdstrike to something else so windows never attempts to use it.

it's a fairly easy fix in the grand scheme of things, but the issue is that it is effecting enterprises. which can have a looooot of computers. in many different locations. so an IT person would need to manually fix hundreds of computers, sometimes in whole other cities and perhaps even other countries if theyre big enough.

another fuck up crowdstrike did was they did not stagger the update, so they could catch any mistakes before they wrecked havoc. (and also how how HOW do you not catch this before deploying it. this isn't a code oopsie this is a complete failure of quality ensurance that probably permeates the whole company to not realise their update was an instant kill). they rolled it out to everyone of their clients in the world at the same time.

and this seems pretty hilarious on the surface. i was havin a good chuckle as eftpos went down in the store i was working at, chaos was definitely ensuring lmao. im in aus, and banking was literally down nationwide.

but then you start hearing about the entire country's planes being grounded because the airport's computers are bricked. and hospitals having no computers anymore. emergency call centres crashing. and you realised that, wow. crowdstrike just killed people probably. this is literally the worst thing possible for a company like this to do.

crowdstrike was kinda on the come up too, they were starting to become a big name in the tech world as a new face. but that has definitely vanished now. to fuck up at this many places, is almost extremely impressive. its hard to even think of a comparable fuckup.

a friday evening simultaneous rollout boot loop is a phrase that haunts IT people in their darkest hours. it's the monster that drags people down into the swamp. it's the big bag in the horror movie. it's the end of the road. and for crowdstrike, that reaper of souls just knocked on their doorstep.

[somehow-cathartic]

This whole thing is both hilarious, terrifying, and amazing. This cybersecurity firm that makes a product that’s supposed to protect from ransomware just accidentally made their own “ransomware” that was SO catastrophic that hackers could only dream of making anything as disastrous as it. This also raises a LOT of questions and concerns about why we have allowed a company to embed software with KERNEL ACCESS into billions of computers worldwide. The negligence of a single company caused thousands of critical enterprise systems to completely fail.

The “fix” to the problem is for the IT department of every company and organization impacted to hop around from computer to computer and delete a file in the one and only SYSTEM32 folder in Windows (the file folder that holds the files that make up the Windows OS and requires admin access to open or modify) which means the customer has to fix the problem that Crowdstrike made for them!!

No apology from the CEO yet (that i know of), just a lukewarm statement that says “an incident occurred” and “contact your local IT department”. That’s the response from the company at fault for a global disaster outage.

From what I’ve heard, the bug involves memory access error (like a segmentation fault). This is a classic security vulnerability that can creep into any piece of software and what software testing and quality assurance is there to prevent AND this company literally advertises themselves as a service that prevents security vulnerabilities- something they just deployed to billions of computers worldwide at the same time.

A mega tech dumbass moment can be funny and the memes about this one are rich and plentiful but it’s eerie how dependent critical systems are on this one company and their product. Hot take but technology is TOO integrated now and that’s why everything breaks all the time. And I’m glad that people have been asking the big question about why we’re allowing third party software to directly insert itself into the OS kernel and have such elevated permissions on a device.

This is incredibly wild and Crowdstrike’s stock price is 6 feet under but I’m hoping there’s more investigation into this and accountability for the company and a discussion on how to better segment these tech dependencies!!!

[kaijuno]

WHO tf keeping pads with no wings in production?? Put it in your draws and by the time you walk out the bathroom it’s down the street buying scratch offs at the corner store. Like girl

[the-real-seebs]

one of my favorite genres of post is "evocative imagery"

[kaelio]

Saying "voting doesn't matter" might reach your younger peers online but it certainly hasn't reached Clangus Hargbarg who was part of the kkk in 1951 and still sends in his ballot. He hasn't missed a one.

[seymour-butz-stuff]

[solreefs]

you ever get surprised by your own recurring issues. like come on man. I thought we were past this.

[just-your-average-tangerine]

Maybe this is the wrong platform to pose this question given the average tumblr user but

Is it just me or did our generation (those of is who are currently 20-30 ish) just not get the opportunity to be young in the 'standard' sense?

Like, everyone I talk to who's over 40 has all their wild stories about their teens and 20s, being young and dumb, and then I talk to my friends and coworkers and classmates, and we just... dont.

[just-your-average-tangerine]

My mom tells stories of skipping school to sneak across the border and spend the day at a bar in Mexico. I was threatened with not being allowed to graduate because of senior ditch day. One of my friends had to go to his first hour class on senior ditch day because the teacher, who almost exclusively taught seniors, arranged a huge exam that day with no available makeup days, specifically to punish kids who took part in ditch day. Our wild and crazy ditch day was playing mini golf and then stopping for ice cream on our way back to one of our friends' houses to play cards against humanity.

Don't get me wrong, we had fun. But all of that, threats of not graduating, threats of failing classes over a single test, over some mini golf and ice cream?

Throughout high school and early in college, my friend group got kicked out of malls, stores, and even a parking lot just for being there wrong. Not being loud of disruptive. Not causing problems. Just being there too long, or without buying anything.

My mom graduated high school, after repeating her senior year, without a single grade above a D, and was offered a full ride scholarship to a state university to play on their women's football team. I had a 3.8 GPA, multiple extracurriculars, a summer job, and over 100 hours of volunteer work, and barely got into that same university, and then couldn't afford to go there anyway.

We've made getting into college so important and yet so difficult that kids are sacrificing their childhoods for it.

Then they become adults and it doesn't go away. Your employer/ potential employers are searching your social media and internet presence so you'd better hope no one has ever posted a picture of you at a party, or with alcohol, or wearing revealing clothes, or whatever else they've deemed unprofessional. And if you want to go out it's a 10 dollar cover and drinks are at least 8 dollars, and you need to tip if there's any kind of live entertainment, who can afford to do all that regularly?

My physical therapist, when I was 18, told me about his 21st birthday, how the last thing he remembers is people taking body shots off him. I spent my 21st birthday alone, was in bed by 10pm because I had to be at work the next morning. My boss had already told me that they knew it was my 21st, and if I called out, she'd write me up for improper use of sick leave because you're not allowed to use sick leave for a hangover. I don't know anyone whose 21st birthday was a big deal. No one went out and partied for it.

I dont really know where I'm going with all of this. I guess I just don't understand the point of it all. We spend our youth working hard to provide a future that we still can't afford. We have to be responsible and professional as teenagers. And we get nothing out of it. We can't afford life or friends or fun. At least our parents got to have fun being young and dumb, we just got groomed on kik.

[just-your-average-tangerine]

So I'm not the only one noticing this. I wish I had an answer or at least something to say about it. But I dont. I'm just tired.

[somehow-cathartic]

This is such a mood. I remember getting into my tween years and all the adults were grumbling about “teens up to no good” and rules at our shopping mall changing to require more adult supervision. And i think that’s at the core of it: so much more adult supervision. All the boomers and gen X-ers boasted about all their childhood adventures and “playing outside all day until the streetlights turned on” and then chastised us for being lazy and not doing the same. I had a few moments where i could escape from everyone’s watchful eyes and walk across the train bridge to cross the creek on the edge of our neighborhood and almost get lost in the forest. My parents would be mad at me and scared because they didn’t know where i was and couldn’t contact me, but it’s one of my fondest childhood memories. Adults and parents have become so much more paranoid of their kids getting in danger or misbehaving that we were being put into little stencils of acceptable things to do and ways to be a kid. I feel like a very common heartache of being a kid these past few decades is that we were expected to be so mature and do All The Right Adult Decisions yet being told that we’re “just a kid” and adults know what you need better than you do yourself. Kids have been losing more and more and more of their autonomy, even as they grow older.

[lesbian-archives]

Garden Variety Dykes: Lesbian Traditions in Gardening, 1994

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

OH it's a lesbian and her enormous sunflower

I thought she had her arm around the shoulders of her wife, who was dressed as a plant monster for some reason

[scientia-rex]

I am so glad you clarified. I was like “I’m glad that woman supports her wife in making increasingly weird ghilli suits”

[nudityandnerdery]

Many of us saw the picture, thought it was two women, one in a weird costume, and thought, "Hey, good for them."

[nebraskas]

opinion on public transit

we need more of it out here 🤲 too much of a sprawl to not have something better

[alittlemorenuancedthanthat]

A high speed rail between Lincoln and Omaha would be so rad. We wouldn't need a choked 8-lane interstate, just a single train zooming back and forth every hour.

And trains out of Omaha to Denver or Kansas City, oh my god. It wouldn't be such an ordeal to see my relatives in Kansas.

[nebraskas]

oh yeah, having a train just between the big cities would be nice. we've got so much Train History here idk why we don't have more passenger stuff

[somehow-cathartic]

There’s a couple state senators who have been trying to get a high speed rail between Omaha and Lincoln and it sucks because they keep on being overridden by others who want a giant artificial lake built as an attempted dupe of lake Okaboji (probably spelled that wrong)

[stinkyhat-deactivated20231213]

i am the administrator

2. sure save in the fucking stinky folder whatever

[shamebats]

We really do need to bring back the word "trolling" and warning ppl not to feed the trolls

[shamebats]

That TikTok of ppl pouring tomato sauce directly on the counter, adding spaghetti & mixing it with their hands while commenting how great of an idea it is? Yeah, we used to call that trolling, it's pathetic & bc all they want from it is attention, the best thing is not to give them any. Block & move on.

I keep seeing it on here too. Someone comments something outrageous on a post & gets dozens of ppl to respond, filling the entire comment section & making it unusable. And on Instagram, a comment saying "I hate colors" on a post of someone showing off colorful art gets 100 replies while positive comments get none. Congrats, you've fed the troll. Now stop doing it.

[shamebats]

Trolling used to get you banned from forums. Now they call you an influencer and give you brand deals & ad revenue. That's why it's more important than ever not to feed the trolls, especially in spaces where any attention is good attention and getting yelled at by 10k ppl in the comments counts as "engagement", boosting your troll post in the algorithm.

[one-time-i-dreamt]

I was sad, but a drag queen lent me her violin for a while, and I started playing it. I got quite good at it despite the fact that I didn’t really know exactly what I was doing, until I played it a little too hard and it broke. I cried, until she later came up to me and comforted me, saying something like, “All that matters is that you played,” and then I woke up.

[janeway-lover]

”All that matters is that you played”

holy shit

[somehow-cathartic]

Sometimes i feel like people encounter guardian angels in their sleep

[chaser]

This just in

[mallowmaenad]

Business Names in the 1800s: Primary Flour, Just Cement, Worldwide Copper, The Only Gasoline You Should Be Allowed To Buy

Business Names in the 1900s: Axiom, Artemis Manufacturing, Pinnacle Hygienics, Olympian Glue, Divine Yogurt, The Coolest Car Manufacturer With The Largest Hog In Town

Business Names in the 2000s: Gubi, Turna, Clooper, Jumbli, Dongr, Shnet, Pungu, Pooble, Weeeu