Roboco Says

Intersectional feminism, Steven Universe, and cats. Sometimes other things. Also visit our comic collective, Ditton Comics!

[practicalsolarpunk]

How to share a house: a case study

As a companion to her essays "The slow homes manifesto" and "How to stop foreclosure through homesharing," Janelle Orsi offers this nuts-and-bolts case

Sharing a house can be awesome for many reasons (saving money, lower environmental footprint, sharing household workload …) but jumping into house-sharing with no forethought doesn’t always work out. This article talks about how two households with different lifestyles managed it.

[michigrim]

Japan’s complete lack of understanding of declining birth rates in relation to its work culture reminds me a lot of how America has an assumption that millennials are killing industries when the truth is they are more frugal because of a lack of funds.

Both come from a conservative mindset that neglects the impact that a toxic work culture can have on society.

[michigrim]

A 80+ hour work week in order to maintain financial stability isn’t exactly a solid ground to date people and eventually build a family from a healthy relationship.

A workforce comprised of 20 somethings that make between 20-40k a year in entry positions isn’t a good ground to build a reliable consumer base when a huge chunk of that is going to rent, utilities, car payments, and student loans.

[kropotkindersurprise]

July 9, 2022 - Thousands of protesters stormed the Presidential palace in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and enjoyed the luxurious facilities. [video]/[video]/[video]

[nietp]

I went to a bookshop and I got dizzy at the amount of books on stuff like “astrological feminism” “reclaiming womanhood through numerology” and all that shit…… One was called “cosmic fanny” or for my french speakers out there, “foufoune cosmique”. I think the fight against patriarchy is going really well

[tepot]

“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”

Ursula K Le Guin, from What Women Know

[guerrillatech]

[mylittlelarryheart]

Is it just me or should prisoners work for free....? You're in prison because you committed crimes, some of them incredibly heinous and disturbing..... Why should we pay you for manual labor whilst in prison?

[lordandgodoftheobvious]

Hey shit-for-brains, you’re giving the state a financial incentive to incarcerate you. You know that Larry Niven story where the guy gets the death penalty for a parking ticket? That’s the future you’re trying to create, only instead of organ harvesting it’ll be fucking slavery.

[mentally-homeless]

[neurotypical-karen]

It's also my birthday!

[devilswalkingstick]

[specseven]

I don't like being the bearer of bad news, but it is imperative we know what is going on right now. So many people are still playing catch-up after a week of atrocious SCOTUS decisions, and I'm sure when they realize this has happened (and it absolutely will happen), SCOTUS will already be on to the next horrible thing.

Better let the smart people explain:

More info:

It’s Hard to Overstate the Danger of the Voting Case the Supreme Court Just Agreed to Hear

An extreme decision here could fundamentally alter the balance of power in setting election rules in the states and threaten future election

If you want to know what this could lead to, this is a very, VERY bleak thread explaining the upshot of SCOTUS recent fuckery:

To sum it all up:

[falsedetective]

this is so funny this literally sounds like a right-wing paper from 1860s france

[werewolfapocalypse]

This is really fucking funny, and op is right about how it sounds. But I felt a strong need when moving to reblog this to say something about the situation-- not aimed at op who just dunked on clickbait propaganda, but just as something to keep in mind the more this kind of thing gets said by news outlets. This is way more public than I usually comment on posts (I like posting in the tags) but it felt a bit important.

My store successfully managed to both get the unionization vote underway and win the vote with only one ‘no’ to speak of, and the people who worked the hardest and put the most sweat and tears into making that possible were not college-educated. The people who went out of their way for several months now to provide information to combat the slew of lies and fearmongering that corporate directed at my coworkers were people whose formal education ended at high school and who came from all different walks of life.

The (returning) CEO of the company put out a statement in an hour long video we were forced to watch right after our votes were read where he chalked the unionization efforts up to “outside influences” who take advantage of the ignorance of the other employees to push an agenda, and listening to that made my blood boil for so many reasons.

But what I want more than anything else to say to H.S and all the people pushing this narrative is that the people who are unionizing have been there-- in the trenches-- for years, and they aren’t stupid or easily manipulated by sneaky college students. They’re single mothers who have been with the company for 15 years; they’re people who’ve been previously-homeless, putting in extra effort to foster an environment of love and respect among coworkers; they’re people from other parts of the restaurant industry who’re using their spare time to learn sign language to better communicate with others; they’re 17 year olds who can see that the way things are are so far from the way they should be.

I’m a college-educated worker who took a job because I had no options, but when I said we should join the tide of stores unionizing the work had already been done and they’d just been waiting to see if I was a person they could trust. I have so much love and respect for the people who will never get the credit they deserve, and that’s why I felt like I wanted to speak. The incredible strides being made in this country right now in terms of unions are being made on the backs of people being called “uneducated” and “unskilled”.

[programmerhumour]

Programmers being like programmers

[whitepeopletwitter]

5000 years ago, 6 feet tall made her a giantess

[whitepeopletwitter]

Why is it pink???

[pangur-and-grim]

What's an egg song?

it’s where chickens get to emit the foulest and loudest sounds available to them, as a way of saying “egg came out of me”

[mischievousquokka]

This is referred to as “gackern” in German.

Which is also very common slang for gleeful, though not exactly graceful, loud laughter.

Also, there is that proverb where it’s meant more like “announcing something big”: “wer gackert, muss auch Eier legen.” Meaning, if you take the stage with your infernal egg song, you better have some eggs to show for it, too.

And yeah, with that sounds in my ears, I’d put limitations on when it’s ok to be sung, too.

[whetstonefires]

wait this is the origin of the english word ‘cackle’ isn’t it

[howieabel]

"I am not interested in dry economic socialism. We are fighting against misery, but we are also fighting against alienation. One of the fundamental objectives of Marxism is to remove interest, the factor of individual interest, and gain, from people's psychological motivations. Marx was preoccupied both with economic factors and with their repercussions on the spirit. If communism isn't interested in this too, it may be a method of distributing goods, but it will never be a revolutionary way of life." - Che Guevara, As quoted in The Many Faces of Socialism Comparative Sociology and Politics (1983) by Paul Hollander, p. 224

[katianovak]

“We only see the violence of change…Are we aware of how much violence goes on just to keep things the way they are?”

— Slavoj Žižek

[blackfemmejeanvaljean]

I’m about 90% sure the economy is never gonna “improve” 

this is capitalism in it’s final form

this is it honey 

[wumblr]

except, you know, those companies that do a charitable thing for every thing they sell

that’s kinda new and interesting. benevolent capitalism

[blackfemmejeanvaljean]

lmao

[wumblr]

Pay attention, class: This is what it looks like when one is unwilling to consider new information.

[alexandra-erin]

It’s not new information, though. It’s misinformation.

First, it’s not that new.

Did you know that there was a time in U.S. history—which is by definition recent history—when a corporation was generally intended to have some sort of public interest that they served? I mean, that’s the whole point of allowing corporations to form. Corporations are recognized by the commonwealth or state, and this recognition is not a right but a privilege, in exchange for which the state (representing the people) is allowed to ask, “So what does this do for everyone else?”

The way the economy is now is a direct result of a shift away from this thinking and to one where a corporation is an entity unto itself whose first, last, and only concern is an ever-increasing stream of profits. What you’re calling “benevolent capitalism” isn’t benevolent at all. It’s a pure profit/loss calculation designed to distract from—not even paper over or stick a band-aid on—the problems capitalism creates. And the fact that you’re here championing it as “benevolent capitalism” is a sign of how ell it’s working.

Let’s take Toms, as one example. The shoe that’s a cause. Buy a pair of trendy shoes, and a pair of trendy shoes will be given away to someone somewhere in the world who can’t afford them.

That’s not genuine benevolence. That’s selling you, the consumer, on the idea that you can be benevolent by buying shoes, that the act of purchasing these shoes is an act of charity. The reality is that their model is an inefficient means of addressing the problems on the ground that shoelessness represents, and severely disrupts the local economies of the locations selected for benevolence.

(Imagine what it does to the local shoemakers, for instance.)

The supposed act of charity is just a value add to convince you to spend your money on these shoes instead of some other shoes. It’s no different than putting a prize in a box of cereal.

Heck, you want to see how malevolent this is?

Go ask a multinational corporation that makes shoes or other garments to double the wages of their workers. They’ll tell you they can’t afford it, that it’s not possible, that consumers won’t stand for it, that you’ll drive them out of business and then no one will have wages.

But the fact that a company can give away one item for every item sold shows you what a lie this is. A one-for-one giving model represents double the cost of labor and materials for each unit that is sold for revenue. Doubling wages would only double the labor.

So why are companies willing to give their products away (and throw them away, destroy unused industry with bleach and razors to render them unsalvageable, et cetera) but they’re not willing to pay their workers more?

Because capitalism is the opposite of benevolence.

“Charity” is by definition exemplary, above and beyond, extraordinary, extra. “Charity” is not something that people are entitled to. You give people a shirt or shoes or some food and call it charity, and you’re setting up an expectation that you can and will control the stream of largesse in the future, and anything and everything you give should be considered a boon from on high.

On the other hand, once you start paying your workers a higher wage, you’re creating an expectation. You’re admitting that their labor is more valuable to you than you were previously willing to admit, and it’s hard to walk that back.

Plus, when people have enough money for their basic needs, they’re smarter and stronger and warier and more comfortable with pushing back instead of being steamrolled over. They have time and money to pursue education. They can save money up and maybe move away. They can escape from the system that depends on a steady flow of forced or near-forced labor.

So companies will do charitable “buy one, give one” and marketing “buy one, get one” even though these things by definition double the overhead per unit, but they won’t do anything that makes a lasting difference in the standard of living for the people.

Capitalism has redefined the world so that the baseline of ethics is “How much money can we make?” and every little good deed over and above that is saintly.

But there’s nothing benevolent about throwing a scrap of bread to someone who’s starving in a ditch because you ran them out of their home in the first place.

[left-reminders]

This is one of the best anti-capitalist posts on the entire site.

[whitepeopletwitter]

We’re all having a good time /s

[normal-horoscopes]

Everyone shut up and look at this carving of a whale from the 1200-600 CE Chumash culture