fortytworats

[fortytworats]

fingers in his ass sunday

[fortytworats]

The loss of the GDR was a fucking catastrophe

[fortytworats]

northernlion: charlie brown had hoes? no he didn't. no he fucking didn't. what are we doing here.

northernlion two weeks later: charlie brown kinda had the most hoes out of anyone in the sunday paper.

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(alien being shown yaoi) and you're saying, the men... have sex with each other? the men?

(alien being shown yuri) ohhh ya we do this shit too lmao

[fortytworats]

[fortytworats]

The local population in countries that export bananas typically eat different varieties grown primarily by small farmers. The ones for the Americans and the Europeans, Cavendish variety bananas, are grown in huge, monoculture plantations that are susceptible to disease. The banana industry consumes more agrichemicals than any other in the world, asides from cotton. Most plantations will spend more on pesticides than on wages. Pesticides are sprayed by plane, 85% of which does not land on the bananas and instead lands on the homes of workers in the surrounding area and seeps into the groundwater. The results are cancers, stillbirths, and dead rivers.

The supermarkets dominate the banana trade and force the price of bananas down. Plantations resolve this issue by intensifying and degrading working conditions. Banana workers will work for up to 14 hours a day in tropical heat, without overtime pay, for 6 days a week. Their wages will not cover their cost of housing, food, and education for their children. On most plantations independent trade unions are, of course, suppressed. Contracts are insecure, or workers are hired through intermediaries, and troublemakers are not invited back.

Who benefits most from this arrangement? The export value of bananas is worth $8bn - the retail value of these bananas is worth $25bn. Here’s a breakdown of who gets what from the sale of banana in the EU.

On average, the banana workers get between 5 and 9% of the total value, while the retailers capture between 36 to 43% of the value. So if you got a bunch of bananas at Tesco (the majority of UK bananas come from Costa Rica) for 95p, 6.65p would go to the banana workers, and 38p would go to Tesco.

Furthermore, when it comes to calculating a country’s GDP (the total sum of the value of economic activity going on in a country, which is used to measure how rich or poor a country is, how fast its economy is ‘growing’ and therefore how valuable their currency is on the world market, how valuable its government bonds, its claim on resources internationally…etc), the worker wages, production, export numbers count towards the country producing the banana, while retail, ripening, tariffs, and shipping & import will count towards the importing country. A country like Costa Rica will participate has to participate in this arrangement as it needs ‘hard’ (i.e. Western) currencies in order to import essential commodities on the world market.

So for the example above of a bunch of Costa Rican bananas sold in a UK supermarket, 20.7p will be added to Costa Rica’s GDP while 74.3p will be added to the UK’s GDP. Therefore, the consumption of a banana in the UK will add more to the UK’s wealth than growing it will to Costa Rica’s. The same holds for Bangladeshi t-shirts, iPhones assembled in China, chocolate made with cocoa from Ghana…it’s the heart of how the capitalism of the ‘developed’ economy functions. Never ending consumption to fuel the appearance of wealth, fuelled by the exploitation of both land and people in the global south.

[fortytworats]

hey i just got rejected from a lifechanging job oppertunity after they sent me a job offer, that i signed, and strung me along thru the rest of the hiring process for like a fucking month before sending me a shitty lil "lol nvm" email, can someone send me some moeny to order some food so i can at least wallow in my feelings along w some fried rice

venmo@monicore

[fortytworats]

They’re putting Pjackk in Philly

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Kinda wish I wasn't feeling more and more vindicated every day about calling it from the start that treating the AI issue like a moral crusade where you have like a moral obligation to prioritize signalling and reaffirming your hatred of generative AI at any possible chance would lead to a lot of ostensibly "progressive" people uncritically parroting extremely reactionary rhetoric.

[fortytworats]

*scrolling tumblr* hmmm. i agree with the sentiment of this post, but the phrasing feels off to me. it doesn’t really have that Reblog factor, you know? *scrolls* oh good, a post that just says “i jerk off till my penis scrweam” . i better reblog this

[fortytworats]

i jerk off till my penis scrweam

[fortytworats]

mySCOOBERT.mp4

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[fortytworats]

There is an entire societal apparatus that defines assigned sex at birth as deterministic and immutable. Enforced in clothing, family roles, education, Healthcare, government documents, bullying, and media. There are a million things telling you not to transition, that you should never consider it an option, that being cis is the default and natural state of things.

But somehow a trans woman implying an ostensibly cis man might not actually be such is equally as violent as all of those things put together?

I dunno sounds like transmisogyny to me.

[fortytworats]

English added by me :)

[fortytworats]

astronomy club sent up a weather balloon w a gopro in it last friday. put in three packs of fruit snacks so they could have a giggle over eating fruit snacks that had been to space.

balloon went up into inner space, about 90,000 feet. came down right near the dinosaur park. a few physics teachers drive out to get it, crack it open on the way home to start watching the footage.

fruit snacks are missing.

multiple sources confirm that fruit snacks were put in balloon and sealed in with duct tape. physics teachers check entire balloon. no fruit snacks.

physics teachers watch footage. all 7 hours of it. right in the middle of footage, there are about 8 minutes of visual and audio static when balloon is in orbit. no other interference with balloon recorded.

conclusions: ???????

[fortytworats]

(x)