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Seein' too many Twitter refugees asking if they'll get in trouble for saying "kill yourself" to people and while no, you're not gonna get nuked from orbit, that is maybe something you just shouldn't be doing in general perhaps?? Maybe telling people to kill themselves is bad actually?? Some of y'all are wild, why is the first thing you can think to ask on a new platform if you can send one of the worst kinds of harassment to people?? Grow tf up and learn how to use the block button. It'll do wonders for your mood, trust me.

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My boss is having us all pitch in to do office work while we're understaffed for the spring season, but instead of doling out orders she asked us what responsibilities we'd like to have, enjoy having, or be comfortable doing. It means getting more hours, which I'm kind of desperate for these days.

So I said I'd do anything that involves design (making info cards for clients, designing yearbooks, cropping photos). And she said cool. Done. You get those things, I'll let you know when we need them.

Time came last week where she needed me to do 15 separate info card designs, each with it's own qr code to the gallery, unique passcode, and I had to make it look cute but readable.

It took me about 5 hours. I came up to her desk at the end of the day with a thumb drive. She asked me how they were coming.

"This is them." I handed her the usb.

"You're done already?"

"Yeah."

"How did you do them so fast?"

"You asked me to do a task that plays on my strengths and that I enjoy doing. This is what happens when you put people in roles that suit them."

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American urban planning!

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“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

— Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928)

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Every single craft has been paying “The Passion Tax” for generations. This term (coined by author and organizational psychologist Adam Grant) — and backed by scientific research — simply states that the more someone is passionate about their work, the more acceptable it is to take advantage of them. In short, loving what we do makes us easy to exploit.

Guest Column: If Writers Lose the Standoff With Studios, It Hurts All Filmmakers

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Just putting this out there to let people know to watch what they post because you can be found and if you think that the government can't do this ...

Well, you better think again!!

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Yep.

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There is a common reaction among people with progressive views to deem anyone who disagrees with them “hateful” for simply expressing a different opinion. Particularly when it comes to the topics of sexuality and gender.

Let me tell you, I get it. Believe it or not, I used to be a devoted leftist. And I know from experience that when you’re on the left and you’re surrounding yourself with other people on the left, you are told repeatedly and affirmed in your belief that people who are conservative are hateful and ignorant. That you need to “educate” them and it is justified, even meritorious, to belittle and shame them. A big part of the reason why this happens especially when people hold different views on sexuality and gender is because people in leftists circles are constantly pushing and internalizing the narrative that those who have different views on the subject are literally harming and endangering the supposedly marginalized LGBT+ community.

I can only speak to the way things are in America because I am an American but firstly, in this day and age it seems a stretch to say that the LGBT+ community is marginalized when it makes up a fraction of society and yet it is loudly celebrated and championed by the federal government, most state governments, all of academia and all of the media except for a very small hand full of conservative media outlets.

Additionally, the majority of people are completely fine with people who are gay, the main issue causing strife in our society right now is transgenderism. And that is for good reason. Any questioning or push back on the narrative of affirmation and celebration of transgenderism is met with complete vitriol from progressives because they have accepted the idea that anyone who doesn’t toe the line and agree wholeheartedly with them on the topic is perpetrating violence against trans people. They are told in leftist echo chambers that there is a genocide of trans people happening and anyone who disagrees with them is a hateful bigot. The entire thought process is built around nothing but seeking to accommodate the feelings of trans people at all costs. It is a misguided form of empathy that I used to engage in myself.

The thing is, now that I have exited the leftist echo chamber and actually allowed myself to think critically about it after listening to both sides of the argument, I am against transgender ideology. I do not hate people who feel that they are transgender. I bear them no ill will at all. I feel sympathy for people who experience genuine gender dysphoria, just as I feel sympathy for anyone experiencing mental health struggles that are causing them mental and emotional distress. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with the notion that your feelings change material reality.

While I do support traditional gender roles personally, I also understand and accept that not everyone fits into them or identifies with them. I don’t have any issue with people who like to present themselves in a way that is associated with the opposite sex. If a man wants to wear a dress and makeup or a woman wants to wear baggy basketball shorts and get a buzz cut, that’s their right. I don’t have to like it in order to respect their freedom of expression.

What I do take issue with is the idea that if you present yourself in a way that is associated with the opposite sex, that actually makes you the opposite sex. I take issue with the idea that we have to change our foundational conceptions of the observable reality of binary biological sex to cater to people’s self-perceptions. I take issue with people thinking that it is their right, if not their duty, to push these factually incorrect, confusing and potentially damaging beliefs on to other people’s children. I take issue with the notion that the science is “settled” around transgenderism when it is far from it. I take issue with the lefts disregard, and even disdain, for detransitioners and the apparent lack of concern for the very real, often permanent and severe, medical problems they face as a result of HRT and “gender affirming surgeries”. I take issue with the way people on the left refuse to engage with any of the issues that are unfolding since the push for society to accept transgender ideology has begun in the last 10 years or so— from men who claim to be trans women taking away opportunities and accolades from actual women to women being endangered in rightfully sex segregated spaces such as women’s prisons to women having their rights to privacy and security ignored and infringed in bathrooms and locker rooms. And I take issue with the belief that if anyone dares to express any of these concerns, we are somehow violent, hateful and ignorant, and therefore it is justified to degrade us and attempt to silence us by shame or by force. I have no malice in my heart, but I will not concede.

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“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”

— Margaret Atwood

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Fucking Christ.

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I'll take off the cuff blog post. But fleshing out the ol' sanity checking toolkit is way under rated these days.

Related to this is, I quite like Brian Kernighan's (yes that Brian Kernighan of C and Unix and .roff🥰 fame) Millions Billions Zillions. Its a short book on navigating numbers. Most of the tools in it were already in my toolkit, the simple obvious things we all tend to pick up, but the refresher was valuable just as reinforcement, plus Kernighan is quite enjoyable to read. It's all sanity checking tools everyone should have in a digital, numbers based world.

The take of "only the imperial core can afford UBI, therefore it's an implicitly extractive policy" is kind of glossing over the fact that no one can afford anything like what people imagine when they say "UBI" under actually-existing economic systems. Like, the US' budget this past year was $6 272 000 000 and it has 257 279 447 adults. If you tripled its budget and channelled that all into UBI, that'd be $75 per person per year. If you means-test it so that only the bottom 10% of the income ladder is eligible, that's roughly $750 per person per year; at "$7500 per year for the bottom 1%" you start to have something resembling a real economic policy, but not enough to justify tripling the budget and spending it all on that. I don't really see any way to make the economics work for anything other than very narrowly targeted, very aggressively means-tested direct transfers, without beginning with a radical transformation of the US economy that completely decouples it from current models of revenue and inflation, and if you can do that there I presume you can do it elsewhere.