#Army Job fraud

[mothman-etd]

I have talked a few times about Psychological Operations or psyops on here, but I would like to point out a real world example of a PO Operation that was found out recently by the Department of Justice.

Before that though, If you would like to read more about the actual position of a PO soldier, you can look no further then the PO benefits page on the US Army special operations recruitment website (https://www.goarmysof.army.mil/PO/).

Personally I feel like many people still believe psyops to be some kind of conspiracy theory instead of a fairly standard military division in almost all modern militaries, anyways onto the example.

The US Department of Justice is going after (indicting) two RT (Russian state media) employees for committing fraud and violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Basically they created a front "media" company in Tennessee, translated russian propaganda videos into english, then paid right-wing influencers to promote (reblog/retweet/talk about on streams) said videos.

Three of the named influencers that I could find were Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson.

I honestly have no idea who these three are, but supposedly their platforms have millions of followers. Also, some of these influencers were paid up too $100,000 a week to promote their videos and messaging.

So to summarize, Russia setup a fake company to pay American influencers to repeat their lies so that their followers would interpret those lies as legitimate since their were coming from a source they trust.

When people talk about election interference this is what we are talking about.

$100K a week is insane money for most, I am sure many people would be hard pressed to not sell their soul for that much money. Many of the videos from this media company were lies about the Ukraine war, and looking into Tim Pool it seems he also has a very anti-Ukraine stance (Audio from one of this podcasts https://v.redd.it/41xgvuri0vmd1/DASH_AUDIO_128.mp4)

I generally do not talk about my job on here, but corporations used to pay me to run seminars to help train their employees on spotting these types of attacks--mainly targeted psyops attacks from nation states to hack into their company via end user interaction.

Or in layman's terms, to help companies protect themselves from Russian Ransomware Thieves and Chinese Intellectual Property/Information collectors. Both of these being extensions of the Psychological Operations military divisions of each country.

I am really not sure how to end this post other than I am just trying to show people how real it is that the militaries of the world are spending obscene amounts of money in trying to influence your opinions and day to day life via your internet consumption.

Surf responsibility, be very wary of anyone telling you not to vote and don't believe everything you see/hear on TikTok/youtube/twitter/Insta etc etc

[sgt-tombstone]

Marriage Fraud

John MacTavish and Kyle Garrick had gotten married at 15:00 on a Tuesday afternoon in October. There was little fanfare; the civil ceremony took place in the Register Office closest to base with Price and Gaz’s sister as witnesses. They had signed their names on the dotted lines with a flourish, had kissed each other through crooked, boyish grins, and that had been that.

John MacTavish and Kyle Garrick hadn’t dated for a single day prior to their nuptials, with the exception of a week-long drunken bet during basic that both of them had been too stubborn to back out of, and their engagement had lasted the legally-required 28 days. It was marriage fraud, plain and simple; the two men had met in basic training and had forged a brotherhood in between grueling days and sporadic nights, and then the pact was formed. Both of them had gotten thoroughly sick and tired of living in the barracks and relying on mess hall food and, without any long-term significant others to pop the question to, they had decided to take matters into their own hands. When they both passed SAS selection, both setting new records, it had seemed like a sign.

The marriage pact had been Kyle’s idea, so Johnny had been the one to propose, if his half-slurred, half-asleep suggestion could even be called a proposal, but Gaz had readily agreed and the next morning, they had burst into Price’s office, demanding both his blessing and presence at the ceremony. His eyebrows had disappeared into his hairline and he had nearly choked to death on his cigar smoke, but he had agreed to both nonetheless.

That had been over three years ago.

In the three years since, as they climbed the ranks from Private to Corporal to Sergeant, the topic of their marriage hardly ever came up. They wore their respective rings, both made from recycled bullet casings, on their right hands instead of their left, and they never mentioned it to anyone. If anyone wondered how they had gotten permission to live off base or why they commuted to work more often than not, no one ever thought to ask them, and they never volunteered any answers. They shared their house like roommates, respecting both each other’s privacy and dating lives, which were few and far between. Dating in the military was hard enough without being Spec Ops, so any relationship either of them ever had never lasted long enough for their fake marriage to ever be remotely close to an issue.

And then the 141 was formed.

It was a dream come true for both of them. They had both already been SAS under Price’s command, but the specialization of the task force brought a certain job security that ensured their continued cohabitation. The SAS’s base of operations was in Herefordshire, so that’s where Soap and Gaz had bought their house, but there had always been the threat of relocation to any of the other British Army bases across the world, and there was no guarantee that they would have been transferred together. The 141, however, was a cohesive unit, a permanent placement. Wherever one went, the rest were sure to follow.

The task force also brought Ghost.

At first, Johnny hadn’t given Ghost much thought, especially where his fake marriage was concerned. Ghost didn’t seem the type to concern himself overmuch with the personal details of his teammates, up to and including their sexual orientations, living situations, or marital statuses. He himself lived off base, courtesy of being a commissioned officer rather than enlisted, and never seemed to devote a first thought, much less a second one, to Soap and Gaz’s own off-base housing. More often than not, they were in the field anyway, which limited nearly every avenue of personal conversation and, after nearly four years of their marriage being little more than a technical detail on a form somewhere, both Soap and Gaz often forgot that they were even married in the first place.

So Soap didn’t think much of it when he started flirting with Ghost over the comms. Ghost was a scary son of a bitch, but that had always been his type, and he couldn’t deny that the mask did something for him. Hell, everything about Ghost did something for him. It had started as banter, really, but Soap loved to toe the line, and it was a slippery slope that he was all too eager to throw himself down. What was truly shocking was Ghost’s own willingness to play along. And then the flirting turned into… more. Turned into casual physical touch that Ghost would’ve slit anyone else’s throat for even thinking about initiating, turned into whispered promises in the backs of helos before missions, turned into kisses pressed into gloved knuckles and masked cheeks.

And suddenly, Soap realized that his marriage might be an issue.

His relationship with Ghost, while technically undefined, was by far the most serious and potentially long-lasting relationship he’d had since signing his marriage license. Most of the people he had dated over the years hadn’t been military and had quickly grown tired of the inconsistency, the missed birthdays and anniversaries, the lack of communication while he’d been on mission, and the lack of leave time in general. But not Ghost, because Ghost got it. Half of the time, Ghost was right there in the field with him. There wasn’t any inconsistency with them, no lack of leave time to grumble over, no shortage of communication between them, both in person and over comms. Their relationship worked for exactly the same reasons why his and Gaz’s non-relationship had worked for so long: they both understood.

And suddenly, Soap realized that, after four years of hiding a marriage to his best friend in the world from quite literally everyone he knew, he’d have to fess up. Not only that, he’d have to file for divorce, which was something that neither he nor Gaz had taken into consideration when they had signed their names in the Register Office all those years ago.

It all came to a head when Johnny got injured in the field. Nothing major, just a few broken bones and a hell of a concussion, but he had woken up to Gaz and Ghost sitting on either side of his hospital bed, Gaz’s clear contrition only matched by Ghost’s clear confusion. The first question out his mouth was why Gaz was listed as Soap’s next of kin and emergency contact, which snowballed into a full confession, corroborated by Price when he stuck his head in to check on Soap a few minutes later.

Ghost, after recovering from his initial shock, found the entire situation hilarious and, months later, after both the divorce papers and the new notice of marriage had gone through, took delight in calling himself Johnny’s second husband, which never failed to make any rookie caught eying the sergeant shake in their boots at the thought of what someone like Ghost did to Johnny’s first husband. Soap and Gaz still wore their rings, because they had always been more like friendship bracelets than anything else, and Johnny’s left ring finger was quickly occupied by a silver ring made from one of Simon’s ID Discs.

Gaz was disappointed about having to move back into on-base housing, but it didn’t last long because Price had been waiting for four years for his sergeants to figure their shit out and file for divorce so that he could make his move and he wasn’t about a waste a single second. And if anyone accused them of moving too quickly, well… they were all military men, after all.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Gig apps trap reverse centaurs in Skinner boxes

Enshittification is the process by which digital platforms devour themselves: first they dangle goodies in front of end users. Once users are locked in, the goodies are taken away and dangled before business customers who supply goods to the users. Once those business customers are stuck on the platform, the goodies are clawed away and showered on the platform’s shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Enshittification isn’t just another way of saying “fraud” or “price gouging” or “wage theft.” Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that only comes with a digital businesses. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can’t rapidly change the price of eggs at Whole Foods without an army of kids with pricing guns on roller-skates. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can change the price of eggs on Amazon Fresh just by twiddling a knob on the service’s back-end.

Twiddling is the key to enshittification: rapidly adjusting prices, conditions and offers. As with any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Tech monopolists aren’t smarter than the Gilded Age sociopaths who monopolized rail or coal — they use the same tricks as those monsters of history, but they do them faster and with computers:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

If Rockefeller wanted to crush a freight company, he couldn’t just click a mouse and lay down a pipeline that ran on the same route, and then click another mouse to make it go away when he was done. When Bezos wants to bankrupt Diapers.com — a company that refused to sell itself to Amazon — he just moved a slider so that diapers on Amazon were being sold below cost. Amazon lost $100m over three months, diapers.com went bankrupt, and every investor learned that competing with Amazon was a losing bet:

https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-bezos-went-thermonuclear-on-diapers-com.html

That’s the power of twiddling — but twiddling cuts both ways. The same flexibility that digital businesses enjoy is hypothetically available to workers and users. The airlines pioneered twiddling ticket prices, and that naturally gave rise to countertwiddling, in the form of comparison shopping sites that scraped the airlines’ sites to predict when tickets would be cheapest:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

The airlines — like all abusive businesses — refused to tolerate this. They were allowed to touch their knobs as much as they wanted — indeed, they couldn’t stop touching those knobs — but when we tried to twiddle back, that was “felony contempt of business model,” and the airlines sued:

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/30/airline-sues-man-for-founding-a-cheap-flights-website.html

And sued:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/southwest-airlines-lawsuit-prices.html

Platforms don’t just hate it when end-users twiddle back — if anything they are even more aggressive when their business-users dare to twiddle. Take Para, an app that Doordash drivers used to get a peek at the wages offered for jobs before they accepted them — something that Doordash hid from its workers. Doordash ruthlessly attacked Para, saying that by letting drivers know how much they’d earn before they did the work, Para was violating the law:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

Which law? Well, take your pick. The modern meaning of “IP” is “any law that lets me use the law to control my competitors, competition or customers.” Platforms use a mix of anticircumvention law, patent, copyright, contract, cybersecurity and other legal systems to weave together a thicket of rules that allow them to shut down rivals for their Felony Contempt of Business Model:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Enshittification relies on unlimited twiddling (by platforms), and a general prohibition on countertwiddling (by platform users). Enshittification is a form of fishing, in which bait is dangled before different groups of users and then nimbly withdrawn when they lunge for it. Twiddling puts the suppleness into the enshittifier’s fishing-rod, and a ban on countertwiddling weighs down platform users so they’re always a bit too slow to catch the bait.

Nowhere do we see twiddling’s impact more than in the “gig economy,” where workers are misclassified as independent contractors and put to work for an app that scripts their every move to the finest degree. When an app is your boss, you work for an employer who docks your pay for violating rules that you aren’t allowed to know — and where your attempts to learn those rules are constantly frustrated by the endless back-end twiddling that changes the rules faster than you can learn them.

As with every question of technology, the issue isn’t twiddling per se — it’s who does the twiddling and who gets twiddled. A worker armed with digital tools can play gig work employers off each other and force them to bid up the price of their labor; they can form co-ops with other workers that auto-refuse jobs that don’t pay enough, and use digital tools to organize to shift power from bosses to workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

Take “reverse centaurs.” In AI research, a “centaur” is a human assisted by a machine that does more than either could do on their own. For example, a chess master and a chess program can play a better game together than either could play separately. A reverse centaur is a machine assisted by a human, where the machine is in charge and the human is a meat-puppet.

Think of Amazon warehouse workers wearing haptic location-aware wristbands that buzz at them continuously dictating where their hands must be; or Amazon drivers whose eye-movements are continuously tracked in order to penalize drivers who look in the “wrong” direction:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

The difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur is the difference between a machine that makes your life better and a machine that makes your life worse so that your boss gets richer. Reverse centaurism is the 21st Century’s answer to Taylorism, the pseudoscience that saw white-coated “experts” subject workers to humiliating choreography down to the smallest movement of your fingertip:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

While reverse centaurism was born in warehouses and other company-owned facilities, gig work let it make the leap into workers’ homes and cars. The 21st century has seen a return to the cottage industry — a form of production that once saw workers labor far from their bosses and thus beyond their control — but shriven of the autonomy and dignity that working from home once afforded:

https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d

The rise and rise of bossware — which allows for remote surveillance of workers in their homes and cars — has turned “work from home” into “live at work.” Reverse centaurs can now be chickenized — a term from labor economics that describes how poultry farmers, who sell their birds to one of three vast poultry processors who have divided up the country like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” are uniquely exploited:

https://onezero.medium.com/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs-b2e8d5cda826

A chickenized reverse centaur has it rough: they must pay for the machines they use to make money for their bosses, they must obey the orders of the app that controls their work, and they are denied any of the protections that a traditional worker might enjoy, even as they are prohibited from deploying digital self-help measures that let them twiddle back to bargain for a better wage.

All of this sets the stage for a phenomenon called algorithmic wage discrimination, in which two workers doing the same job under the same conditions will see radically different payouts for that work. These payouts are continuously tweaked in the background by an algorithm that tries to predict the minimum sum a worker will accept to remain available without payment, to ensure sufficient workers to pick up jobs as they arise.

This phenomenon — and proposed policy and labor solutions to it — is expertly analyzed in “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination,” a superb paper by UC Law San Franciscos Veena Dubal:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

Dubal uses empirical data and enthnographic accounts from Uber drivers and other gig workers to explain how endless, self-directed twiddling allows gig companies pay workers less and pay themselves more. As @brianmerchant@mastodon.social explains in his LA Times article on Dubal’s research, the goal of the payment algorithm is to guess how often a given driver needs to receive fair compensation in order to keep them driving when the payments are unfair:

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-04-11/algorithmic-wage-discrimination

The algorithm combines nonconsensual dossiers compiled on individual drivers with population-scale data to seek an equilibrium between keeping drivers waiting, unpaid, for a job; and how much a driver needs to be paid for an individual job, in order to keep that driver from clocking out and doing something else. @ Here’s how that works. Sergio Avedian, a writer for The Rideshare Guy, ran an experiment with two brothers who both drove for Uber; one drove a Tesla and drove intermittently, the other brother rented a hybrid sedan and drove frequently. Sitting side-by-side with the brothers, Avedian showed how the brother with the Tesla was offered more for every trip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UADTiL3S67I

Uber wants to lure intermittent drivers into becoming frequent drivers. Uber doesn’t pay for an oversupply of drivers, because it only pays drivers when they have a passenger in the car. Having drivers on call — but idle — is a way for Uber to shift the cost of maintaining a capacity cushion to its workers.

What’s more, what Uber charges customers is not based on how much it pays its workers. As Uber’s head of product explained: Uber uses “machine-learning techniques to estimate how much groups of customers are willing to shell out for a ride. Uber calculates riders’ propensity for paying a higher price for a particular route at a certain time of day. For instance, someone traveling from a wealthy neighborhood to another tony spot might be asked to pay more than another person heading to a poorer part of town, even if demand, traffic and distance are the same.”

https://qz.com/990131/uber-is-practicing-price-discrimination-economists-say-that-might-not-be-a-bad-thing/

Uber has historically described its business a pure supply-and-demand matching system, where a rush of demand for rides triggers surge pricing, which lures out drivers, which takes care of the demand. That’s not how it works today, and it’s unclear if it ever worked that way. Today, a driver who consults the rider version of the Uber app before accepting a job — to compare how much the rider is paying to how much they stand to earn — is booted off the app and denied further journeys.

Surging, instead, has become just another way to twiddle drivers. One of Dubal’s subjects, Derrick, describes how Uber uses fake surges to lure drivers to airports: “You go to the airport, once the lot get kind of full, then the surge go away.” Other drivers describe how they use groupchats to call out fake surges: “I’m in the Marina. It’s dead. Fake surge.”

That’s pure twiddling. Twiddling turns gamification into gamblification, where your labor buys you a spin on a roulette wheel in a rigged casino. As a driver called Melissa, who had doubled down on her availability to earn a $100 bonus awarded for clocking a certain number of rides, told Dubal, “When you get close to the bonus, the rides start trickling in more slowly…. And it makes sense. It’s really the type of shit that they can do when it’s okay to have a surplus labor force that is just sitting there that they don’t have to pay for.”

Wherever you find reverse-centaurs, you get this kind of gamblification, where the rules are twiddled continuously to make sure that the house always wins. As a contract driver Amazon reverse centaur told Lauren Gurley for Motherboard, “Amazon uses these cameras allegedly to make sure they have a safer driving workforce, but they’re actually using them not to pay delivery companies”:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88npjv/amazons-ai-cameras-are-punishing-drivers-for-mistakes-they-didnt-make

Algorithmic wage discrimination is the robot overlord of our nightmares: its job is to relentlessly quest for vulnerabilities and exploit them. Drivers divide themselves into “ants” (drivers who take every job) and “pickers” (drivers who cherry-pick high-paying jobs). The algorithm’s job is ensuring that pickers get the plum assignments, not the ants, in the hopes of converting those pickers to app-dependent ants.

In my work on enshittification, I call this the “giant teddy bear” gambit. At every county fair, you’ll always spot some poor jerk carrying around a giant teddy-bear they “won” on the midway. But they didn’t win it — not by getting three balls in the peach-basket. Rather, the carny running the rigged game either chose not to operate the “scissor” that kicks balls out of the basket. Or, if the game is “honest” (that is, merely impossible to win, rather than gimmicked), the operator will make a too-good-to-refuse offer: “Get one ball in and I’ll give you this keychain. Win two keychains and I’ll let you trade them for this giant teddy bear.”

Carnies aren’t in the business of giving away giant teddy bears — rather, the gambit is an investment. Giving a mark a giant teddy bear to carry around the midway all day acts as a convincer, luring other marks to try to land three balls in the basket and win their own teddy bear.

In the same way, platforms like Uber distribute giant teddy bears to pickers, as a way of keeping the ants scurrying from job to job, and as a way of convincing the pickers to give up whatever work allows them to discriminate among Uber’s offers and hold out for the plum deals, whereupon then can be transmogrified into ants themselves.

Dubal describes the experience of Adil, a Syrian refugee who drives for Uber in the Bay Area. His colleagues are pickers, and showed him screenshots of how much they earned. Determined to get a share of that money, Adil became a model ant, driving two hours to San Francisco, driving three days straight, napping in his car, spending only one day per week with his family. The algorithm noticed that Adil needed the work, so it paid him less.

Adil responded the way the system predicted he would, by driving even more: “My friends they make it, so I keep going, maybe I can figure it out. It’s unsecure, and I don’t know how people they do it. I don’t know how I am doing it, but I have to. I mean, I don’t find another option. In a minute, if I find something else, oh man, I will be out immediately. I am a very patient person, that’s why I can continue.”

Another driver, Diego, told Dubal about how the winners of the giant teddy bears fell into the trap of thinking that they were “good at the app”: “Any time there’s some big shot getting high pay outs, they always shame everyone else and say you don’t know how to use the app. I think there’s secret PR campaigns going on that gives targeted payouts to select workers, and they just think it’s all them.”

That’s the power of twiddling: by hoarding all the flexibility offered by digital tools, the management at platforms can become centaurs, able to string along thousands of workers, while the workers are reverse-centaurs, puppeteered by the apps.

As the example of Adil shows, the algorithm doesn’t need to be very sophisticated in order to figure out which workers it can underpay. The system automates the kind of racial and gender discrimination that is formally illegal, but which is masked by the smokescreen of digitization. An employer who systematically paid women less than men, or Black people less than white people, would be liable to criminal and civil sanctions. But if an algorithm simply notices that people who have fewer job prospects drive more and will thus accept lower wages, that’s just “optimization,” not racism or sexism.

This is the key to understanding the AI hype bubble: when ghouls from multinational banks predict 13 trillion dollar markets for “AI,” what they mean is that digital tools will speed up the twiddling and other wage-suppression techniques to transfer $13T in value from workers and consumers to shareholders.

The American business lobby is relentlessly focused on the goal of reducing wages. That’s the force behind “free trade,” “right to work,” and other codewords for “paying workers less,” including “gig work.” Tech workers long saw themselves as above this fray, immune to labor exploitation because they worked for a noble profession that took care of its own.

But the epidemic of mass tech-worker layoffs, following on the heels of massive stock buybacks, has demonstrated that tech bosses are just like any other boss: willing to pay as little as they can get away with, and no more. Tech bosses are so comfortable with their market dominance and the lock-in of their customers that they are happy to turn out hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, convinced that the twiddling systems they’ve built are the kinds of self-licking ice-cream cones that are so simple even a manager can use them — no morlocks required.

The tech worker layoffs are best understood as an all-out war on tech worker morale, because that morale is the source of tech workers’ confidence and thus their demands for a larger share of the value generated by their labor. The current tech layoff template is very different from previous tech layoffs: today’s layoffs are taking place over a period of months, long after they are announced, and laid off tech worker is likely to be offered a months of paid post-layoff work, rather than severance. This means that tech workplaces are now haunted by the walking dead, workers who have been laid off but need to come into the office for months, even as the threat of layoffs looms over the heads of the workers who remain. As an old friend, recently laid off from Microsoft after decades of service, wrote to me, this is “a new arrow in the quiver of bringing tech workers to heel and ensuring that we’re properly thankful for the jobs we have (had?).”

Dubal is interested in more than analysis, she’s interested in action. She looks at the tactics already deployed by gig workers, who have not taken all this abuse lying down. Workers in the UK and EU organized through Worker Info Exchange and the App Drivers and Couriers Union have used the GDPR (the EU’s privacy law) to demand “algorithmic transparency,” as well as access to their data. In California, drivers hope to use similar provisions in the CCPA (a state privacy law) to do the same.

These efforts have borne fruit. When Cornell economists, led by Louis Hyman, published research (paid for by Uber) claiming that Uber drivers earned an average of $23/hour, it was data from these efforts that revealed the true average Uber driver’s wage was $9.74. Subsequent research in California found that Uber drivers’ wage fell to $6.22/hour after the passage of Prop 22, a worker misclassification law that gig companies spent $225m to pass, only to have the law struck down because of a careless drafting error:

https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2021-08-23/proposition-22-lyft-uber-decision-essential-california

But Dubal is skeptical that data-coops and transparency will achieve transformative change and build real worker power. Knowing how the algorithm works is useful, but it doesn’t mean you can do anything about it, not least because the platform owners can keep touching their knobs, twiddling the payout schedule on their rigged slot-machines.

Data co-ops start from the proposition that “data extraction is an inevitable form of labor for which workers should be remunerated.” It makes on-the-job surveillance acceptable, provided that workers are compensated for the spying. But co-ops aren’t unions, and they don’t have the power to bargain for a fair price for that data, and coops themselves lack the vast resources — “to store, clean, and understand” — data.

Co-ops are also badly situated to understand the true value of the data that is extracted from their members: “Workers cannot know whether the data collected will, at the population level, violate the civil rights of others or amplifies their own social oppression.”

Instead, Dubal wants an outright, nonwaivable prohibition on algorithmic wage discrimination. Just make it illegal. If firms cannot use gambling mechanisms to control worker behavior through variable pay systems, they will have to find ways to maintain flexible workforces while paying their workforce predictable wages under an employment model. If a firm cannot manage wages through digitally-determined variable pay systems, then the firm is less likely to employ algorithmic management.”

In other words, rather than using market mechanisms too constrain platform twiddling, Dubal just wants to make certain kinds of twiddling illegal. This is a growing trend in legal scholarship. For example, the economist Ramsi Woodcock has proposed a ban on surge pricing as a per se violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act:

https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-105-issue-4/the-efficient-queue-and-the-case-against-dynamic-pricing

Similarly, Dubal proposes that algorithmic wage discrimination violates another antitrust law: the Robinson-Patman Act, which “bans sellers from charging competing buyers different prices for the same commodity. Robinson-Patman enforcement was effectively halted under Reagan, kicking off a host of pathologies, like the rise of Walmart:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

I really liked Dubal’s legal reasoning and argument, and to it I would add a call to reinvigorate countertwiddling: reforming laws that get in the way of workers who want to reverse-engineer, spoof, and control the apps that currently control them. Adversarial interoperability (AKA competitive compatibility or comcom) is key tool for building worker power in an era of digital Taylorism:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

To see how that works, look to other jursidictions where workers have leapfrogged their European and American cousins, such as Indonesia, where gig workers and toolsmiths collaborate to make a whole suite of “tuyul apps,” which let them override the apps that gig companies expect them to use.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

For example, ride-hailing companies won’t assign a train-station pickup to a driver unless they’re circling the station — which is incredibly dangerous during the congested moments after a train arrives. A tuyul app lets a driver park nearby and then spoof their phone’s GPS fix to the ridehailing company so that they appear to be right out front of the station.

In an ideal world, those workers would have a union, and be able to dictate the app’s functionality to their bosses. But workers shouldn’t have to wait for an ideal world: they don’t just need jam tomorrow — they need jam today. Tuyul apps, and apps like Para, which allow workers to extract more money under better working conditions, are a prelude to unionization and employer regulation, not a substitute for it.

Employers will not give workers one iota more power than they have to. Just look at the asymmetry between the regulation of union employees versus union busters. Under US law, employees of a union need to account for every single hour they work, every mile they drive, every location they visit, in public filings. Meanwhile, the union-busting industry — far larger and richer than unions — operate under a cloak of total secrecy, Workers aren’t even told which union busters their employers have hired — let alone get an accounting of how those union busters spend money, or how many of them are working undercover, pretending to be workers in order to sabotage the union.

Twiddling will only get an employer so far. Twiddling — like all “AI” — is based on analyzing the past to predict the future. The heuristics an algorithm creates to lure workers into their cars can’t account for rapid changes in the wider world, which is why companies who relied on “AI” scheduling apps (for example, to prevent their employees from logging enough hours to be entitled to benefits) were caught flatfooted by the Great Resignation.

Workers suddenly found themselves with bargaining power thanks to the departure of millions of workers — a mix of early retirees and workers who were killed or permanently disabled by covid — and they used that shortage to demand a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The outraged howls of the capital class at this development were telling: these companies are operated by the kinds of “capitalists” that MLK once identified, who want “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”

https://twitter.com/KaseyKlimes/status/821836823022354432/

There's only 5 days left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon's Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: Stephen Drake (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Analog_Test_Array_modular_synth_by_sduck409.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

 — 

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

 — 

Louis (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chestnut_horse_head,_all_excited.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A complex mandala of knobs from a modular synth. In the foreground, limned in a blue electric halo, is a man in a hi-viz vest with the head of a horse. The horse's eyes have been replaced with the sinister red eyes of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'"]

[magapatriot64]

A brutally honest take on Ukraine from a U.S. Army Veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq that is also a Purple Heart recipient (edited):

I have never and will never support the war in Ukraine. I now understand the Military Industrial Complex and the trillions spent off of the lives of US, the people.

If you do support the war, this post is going to offend the shit out of you.

And I honestly don’t care what you think. Some of you may agree, and some of you probably truly need to hear this.

I have been shot at, blown up, returned fire, everything imaginable. War is serious shit. This is not Call of Duty, this is real fucking life. The term “War is hell”, is coined for a reason.

First: I will start with NATO and Europe.

Why the hell are we in NATO if they don’t barely lift a finger for shit? Why is America always the one that will carry the burden of these asshats. Even President Trump commented TODAY and was almost begging for an end to this. To NATO: If you want this war so badly, then grab a compass and head due East.

Second: You can say whatever you want about President Trump. You can like the man, or you can hate him. However, you cannot argue the point that none of this bullshit was going on when he was President. Just throwing that out there. This is an undeniable fact.

Third: Why is it that it took an Airman to leak classified documentation to totally disprove the efforts in Ukraine? Don’t you notice how this story has been completely wiped from the mockingbird media? They are concealing the truth as well. American taxpayers have been lied to since this began.

Fourth: Where is all of our American taxpayer money going? Let’s be honest about it. How do you “over-calculate” over $6 BILLION DOLLARS of our money for this effort? Where exactly is it going? Into Politician or Zelenskyy’s pockets? If any of us made an “accounting error” on our taxes, we would all be in prison now. This is fraud, waste and abuse putting it lightly.

Fifth: This brings me to another point. Are politicians making money off of this war effort? If so, sorry to say, but you belong in prison. Plain and simple. And that is bipartisan speaking. There are Americans working 2-4 jobs at times just to make ends meet. People are recovering from a lockdown that YOU created.

Sixth: To the Americans backing this war. Why don’t you book yourself a flight to Kyiv and partake in this fight? It’s easy as fuck to be okay with war, while you’re chilling with your Starbucks in your comfortable environment. You love to criticize our country but have never contributed a fucking thing to it.

Last: Why are we not discussing diplomacy? There have been ZERO attempts to sit down like grown fucking men and come to an agreement. None. It is all too clear that they want this war to continue.

I sure as hell don’t claim to know everything, but this bullshit has gone on long enough.

To the dickheads who will inevitably cherry-pick this tweet know this, your opinion does not matter to me. You can comment, but I won’t give you the benefit of replying. Thanks for playing.

I know this is a very long-winded post. But if you took the time to read, thank you for listening.

[darkenedreaper]

Pairing: Dana Scully x Fem!Reader

Warnings: Slight angst, light fluff, light smut

Summary: You and Dana have a history and are forced to work with one another, but feelings come flooding back when you see her partner in crime, Mulder

A/N: Been in the drafts for a while and I’m thirsty

Jealousy Does All Sorts (1)

You and Dana had gone through college and university with each other before she joined the FBI. You had wild night outs in university, in the prescience of simply each other and friends. Wild nights for you and Dana consisted of a few different meanings. It could’ve simply been a night out with all your friends drinking, a night out getting drunk with the pure intention to have crazy sex somewhere, a crazy sex night itself, studying and testing each other, or ordering takeaway and watching a movie. Although you were close and intimate with each other neither of you confirmed what you really were. Perhaps that’s why it was so easy for her to go her own way, at least you thought it was easy for her. You knew she wanted to join the FBI, you did yourself but things changed for you within a short time. Rather than continuing on down your career path alongside Scully you decided to join the military on short notice. You said to yourself you’d do it for a few months for the experience but little did you know a few months would turn into a few years. When you both graduated you drifted apart suddenly, your deployment was a few days after the graduation and Dana had her own plans starting the FBI as soon as she could. You never said goodbye to each other but you knew where the other was going. Neither you nor Dana kept in touch with anyone from University, everyone moved on.

A few years down the line you were a Captain for a few squads, you’d seen the enemy die, comrades die, you’d had your fair share of new recruits come and go. You were still young and you wanted to chase the FBI role before you were dedicated to the army for life, so you left. Your team threw a ‘party’ for you and sent you off with a stern salute. Dana had also seen her fair share of things over the years in her job. She’d seen things you couldn’t make up or draw on paper, but she was happy to say the least. She was partnered with Mulder and had been with him since she started, so the two of them were relatively close; him more so open about it than her. She was snapped out of her daydreaming and thinking by Mulder, he was joking about the new intake that was about to arrive. This intake didn’t need any training or a shadow phase of any sort, this intake would’ve been interviewed on skills, qualifications and background. Mulder liked to make fun of them and pick them apart, say that joining the job that way was the easy way in, or calling them a bunch of frauds. Scully didn’t like to take much notice of Mulder picking because she knew how extensive and experienced the background of the individuals had to be. She would question Mulder on it because after all they were the same rank.

You waited in the canteen fiddling with your new badge ‘Agent L/N’, it could grant you access to places and rooms you couldn’t access as a civilian let alone a Captain in the army. You’d be lying to yourself if you said Dana hadn’t been on your mind since your application got accepted. You never forgot what she looked like, you were sure she’d work here but you doubted yourself. There was every chance she could’ve walked past you and you hadn’t recognised her. But no that wouldn’t have happened. The mental and physical training you received from the army, your brain wouldn’t let you forget such a significant face. You looked a little different to what you did in University. You looked a little more stoic, your eyes had seen more than the normal citizen. You had a small but aging battle scar on the top of your eyelid cutting up to your eyebrow. Your hair was different, you were lean, but other than that nothing else had changed, at least you thought.

Your intake hadn’t been given offices just yet. It was still being worked out if anyone was going to be sharing an office or having their own. You wished for your own, you were a little bit more reserved now after being betrayed by who you thought were teammates but really were working for the enemy. But still you tried to keep a positive outlook for life. After examining the canteen and the agents in it, you thought it was chilled and relaxed. Your thought were interrupted when the boss came to speak to your intake, announcing those that got their own offices, and those that would share. You were pleased to see the sight you saw when you left the elevator and walked down a corridor. ‘Y/n L/, Special Agent was written on a piece of paper blu-tacked to the door whilst your plaque was on its way. You scanned around seeing some storage rooms, Skinners office, a break room, a meeting room, some other agents rooms, and a Fox Mulder Special Agent, was 4 doors down from you. You made a mental note of the names that were in your corridor. Unlocking your door with your new key you had a look around in your new office, it was cold looking, neat but cold. There was chalkboards and cork boards, a computer, a chair, another desk and a spare chair that was facing your desk. And there were some spare supplies for you to decorate your office with. There was a metal locker and a projector. Stuff that would come into use. You were happy to see that the clock was working because it read that it was lunchtime. Heading down to the canteen you slung your lanyard that carried your badge and key on it around your neck and shut your door to lock it.

Just as you were turning round a red haired woman flashed passed your eyes at the bottom of the corridor. You didn’t see her face but you couldn’t shake the colour of her hair. She was only short and petite, she was dressed and seemed to move elegantly. It was a flash, a blur even, but she was making her way into Fox Mulders room. You tried to shake it off, tried to shake Scully off of your mind. It was your first day and you didn’t want to piss anyone off. Off to the canteen you went, with a redhead on your mind. You didn’t really eat dinner. It was a little much and after being out the military for 2 or 3 months it was too much compared to what you ate there, so you pushed it around. Thinking about Dana you felt happy, sad, and angry. She left you, she dropped you like it was nothing and never made any effort to contact you. You thought you would’ve received a letter, but nothing. She knew you joined the army and nothing. You felt betrayed but you promised yourself that even if you did work 4 doors down from her you wouldn’t let it affect you work. You were here for change, here for a new start. Just as you stood up with a full plate of food if it wasn’t for your reflexes you would’ve spilt the food all over yourself and the man standing in front of you. “Good reflexes, let me guess, ex-professional circus actor?” He chuckled but your face didn’t change. He held his badge up to you showing you his name ‘Fox Mulder’, you tilted your head and he clocked on that you knew his name. “Ahh I see you know me, have you seen my name in the papers, on awards, at the bottom of case files?” “No”, you stated. He awkwardly nodded his head but explained that he saw a new name on the door that he been empty and had been on the hunt for you. “How’d you know what I look like from my name?” You asked, “I didn’t know whatcha looked like, but I’ve asked a hundred other girls if they’re Agent L/n but it seems like I’ve hit the jackpot. Leave that there and I’ll come up and show you where I am”. “That’s not necessary Agent Mulder I already know”. You were putting your plate back down when he shouted back already walking off, “Just Mulder is fine, come on”.

You rolled your eyes, following a trail of sun seeds Mulder had dropped on the floor. Walking slightly behind him you pulled out a gold lighter and sparked up a cigarette to calm your nerves, remembering this was the same room the red haired woman walked into.

🤭

Part 2 coming soon

[annie-creates]

Good enough for a hero

Pairing: Andromache of Scythia x reader

Genre: angst

Words: 900

Note: Another fic for Andy after a while, nothing big but I hope you'll like it anyway. It's inspired by this amazing song.

Death wasn‘t a stranger to you. You met regularly like old friends, under the cloak of night or at the hand of your enemies. You weren’t exactly proud of your job, robbery and fraud being your routine tools. Being immortal however gave you a certain advantage when it came to dangerous situations. It’s not like you always wanted to become the villain, there was a time you tried to do good. A time where you did your best to become part of the group of heroes, yet despite your exceeding efforts they never accepted you as one of them.

As you leave a high security building with the prized possession secured in your hands, you recall the months and years you spent trying to prove yourself to Andy and her group of soldiers. The exhausting training sessions where she took your life in a blink of an eye if you weren’t fast enough. The nights you spent eating dinner alone because you didn’t earn your place at the table. Mornings you were woken up with a bucked of freezing water, the excuse being they were trying to give you actual army training you lacked.

“Get up. We don’t need cowards.” Andromache gritted over her teeth after beating you down for the hundredth time.

“Can’t we finish for today.” You pleaded as your sweat mixed with the blood trickling from your bruised face.

“We won’t finish until you get at least a punch in.” She decided uncompromisingly kicking you in the side.

“That wasn’t necessary.” You grumble as you stand up with difficulty.

“It won’t be necessary after you become more than just a useless burden.” Andy said venomously and run at you once again, choking you until your weakened body passed out this time.

After years of tremendous torture excused by the higher purpose, you couldn’t take it anymore. So you got up at the middle of the night and left without a trace. If you are not good enough to become a hero, you’ll become someone much worse. Maybe you didn’t fit their strict requirements but on the street you quickly became friends with the night life and everything that happens under the brim of darkness. You found a group of shady traders whose business was hardly legal, but you didn’t care anymore. They accepted you in and you proved yourself to be actually quite skilled.

“Another successful hunt.” Tony, the leader of your group praised.

“What is it?” You questioned, usually stealing gold or original paintings to sell on the black market.

“It’s the Vestonic Venus, our buyer offered a lot for this piece.” He explains as he puts the package in his coat. “Alright, let’s go home. Good job guys.”

They drop you off a few streets from your flat and you finish the road on foot. It wasn’t anything fancy even though your job allowed you to squander money from time to time. You still preferred the modest minimalistic life, it’s how you made sure to stay hidden from both the government and the group of immortals who definitely wouldn’t be happy knowing all these jobs were your doing. It was questionable what you’ve become, but as long as it kept you fed and safe, you didn’t really care. You were never one to play for a higher moral ground anyway.

The next morning you visit your favorite coffee shop in the area, having a weakness for a good morning cup of coffee. As you’re waiting for your order of cappuccino and a blueberry muffin, you look around the calm room, unintentionally meeting eyes with a lady at one of the tables. She was sitting in a booth with a young girl you didn’t recognize. She looked tired and somehow older than the many years ago, and her hair was cut short this time, but you’d recognize the face that spit so many hurtful lies at you anywhere. Somehow in the whole wide world Andy found you once again.

“Miss Y/n.” The barista announces and you grab your paper cup and bag and practically run out.

You weren’t fast enough though cause you were hardly three steps out the door when her strong hand catches your arm, forcing you to look at the woman you despised most in this entire world and whole century. Unlike you, dressed in an elegant spring coat, she wore a worn-down jacket she probably owned even back when you first met her and her whole being looked tired and worn out, including her clothes. On the contrary the look in her eyes was full of resolve and determination.

“Y/n…” She starts warily.

“Don’t.” You warn her. “I don’t wanna talk to you.”

“Wait. A lot has happened okay? There’s this girl, Nile...” Andy starts explaining to you with urgency.

“I don’t care! I want to have nothing to do with you people!” You pull your hand out of her grasp. “Leave me alone. I don’t fuckin care about your business, so whatever it is, go bother someone else with it.”

You scold her and turn around quickly pacing away. You couldn’t comprehend the audacity she had to talk to you after all those years and want things from you without as much as an apology or acknowledgement of all the things she did to you. You couldn’t think of what would be so important to overcome her passionate hatred for you.

[buckets-and-trees]

Buck's Eleven

Title: Buck's Eleven Fandom: MCU Characters/Pairings: Bucky and Steve with mentions of Bucky x ex!wife Reader Word Count: 1.6k

Summary: Going into a job this big, you have to take the house or know the house will hunt you down and swallow you into its belly. Vegas is unforgiving. Good thing they're the best at what they do.

Content/Concept Warnings: Thief/Con Artist AU, smoking, 1960s elements, references to sexual acts

Notes: CONQUERING FOUR EVENTS/CHALLENGES, which is my crowning moment this summer:

@buckybarnesevents WEEK FIVE of Hot Bucky Summer: "When I First Met You..."

Sixth square of @buckybarnesbingo U4: "AU: Historical"Playing Games"

Featuring Lemonade and a Road trip for @the-slumberparty's June Challenge

AND MY FOURTH AND FINAL SQUARE for Connect4 Alternate June-iverse: C4 "Thief/Con Artist" (and including an Alpine sighting so I can collect my TOE BEANS)

This is an MCU homage to Ocean's Eleven drawing direct inspiration from the 1960 and 2001 films. The 2001 has been one of my favorite heist movies since it came out, and I had never seen the 1960s original until this week, but once I started watching it, my jaw dropped with excitement over how ripe it was to adapt for a Bucky (and Steve) AU because in the original, it's 15 years after WWII and the crew is a reassembled group of guys who were in the army together!

I borrowed some dialogue beats directly from the 2001 film, and those are in bold italics.

Story graphic by me, story dividers by @firefly-graphics, reblog graphic by @vase-of-lilies

Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest

“Good morning.”

“Good morning.” Bucky takes a seat in the chair across from the penitentiary’s release board and settles his hands casually in his lap.

The man in the center taps his cigarette in the ash tray before returning it to his lips. “Please state your name for the record.”

“James Buchanan Barnes.”

“Thank you. Mr. Barnes, you’re meeting with this board today to answer a few questions so we can determine whether or not you intend to break the law again.”

Bucky nods. Contrition. Congeniality. A touch of charisma, but nothing too memorable. That’s what he must serve up.

“This is your first conviction, but you have been implicated in a long list of other cases for confidence schemes and frauds. Is this a fair and accurate record?”

Bucky glances at the doll off to the side at a small table of her own, clicking away impressively at a typewriter.

“I expect your records to be nothing but accurate, though – as you said – I’ve been implicated but never charged.”

“Mr. Barnes, what we’re trying to find out is: was there a reason you committed this crime, or was there simply a reason you got caught this time?”

“My wife left me. I was upset. I fell into a self-destructive pattern.”

Exactly what he knows they would like to hear.

“If released, is it likely you would fall into a similar pattern?”

Bucky cocks his head almost imperceptibly. “She already left me once; I don’t think she’d do it again just for kicks.”

“Fellas, you know I’d do almost anything for ya, but not… not this,” Banner looks between them, rubbing the back of his neck.

Steve smiles warmly, the smile he knows tricks his friends and his marks into whatever he needs. “Why waste all the little tricks that the army taught us just because it’s sort of peaceful now?”

The din of the night club around them – games of cards, dames performing on stage, drinks being served up all around – gives them all the privacy they need to hold a sensitive conversation around the table, just the three of them.

“We’re trained men,” Bucky adds.

“I know. I know you are, and we always did good work.”

“Better with you on the crew, you keep us careful.”

“You remember a little operation called Stacks back on the Sokovian front?” Steve asks.

“Do I! Eleven of us in and out under the cloaking of the trees at night with more Axis piles of cash than was decent for either side to have stockpiled away.”

“We should have buried it,” Bucky says.

“Speaking of money, you’re going to need an enormous amount of backing to pull this off in Vegas. The city’s not a sleepy little town tucked away near the mountains and off the grid of the main occupation, it’s got a million neon lights glowing on it every night.”

“Fury, easy.”

“None of us are gonna be as easy as you think. You’ll need the best electrician around, and Tony’s out.”

“Got religion?” Bucky asks.

“Naw, he and Pepper have got a kid now.”

Bucky looks to Steve, but he seems unconcerned. “Morgan – she’s cute.” Steve looks back to Banner. “I think he’ll do it.”

Banner shakes his head, but grins. “Pepper’s already unhappy he’s back in the game on the fluffy jobs, but if you think you can convince him… You get Fury and you get Tony, I’ll play ball with you.”

“You can’t do it. It’s impossible. I made it impossible. I invented casino security. When I first met you boys, you were bright young cocky upstarts. Now you’re bright and cocky – and just lucky that most of the time you’re not too cocky. Now I like you boys, but it can’t be done.”

“You know what? You’re probably right.”

“Eyes were too big for our stomachs.”

“You would know better than anyone.”

“Sure, sure. I just don’t want to see you boys behind bars, especially since you’re fresh out, Barnes.”

“Well, we appreciate the lemonade all the same,” Steve says, setting down his now empty glass.

“It’s hand pressed every morning down at the river market.”

“And thank you for taking care of Alpine while I was away,” Bucky scratches the the head of his white cat, who hasn’t stopped purring since being reunited. He scoops her up to his chest, and he and Steve stand to leave.

“It was good to see you, Nick,” Steve says.

“Give Maria your addresses on the way out, she’s got me a good source on Cuban cigars, I’ll send each of you a box.”

Bucky nods. “That’s sure nice of you.”

They turn and start to walk across the terrace toward the patio doors.

Fury looks after them. He sighs. “Tell me the marks.”

They slowly turn back, appearing to casually answer, but knowing this will bring him in.

“The… Sahara–“

“–Sahara, the Riviera, and the Dunes,” Bucky finishes.

“Hold on.” Fury stands. “Those are Pierce’s places. What do you two got against Pierce?”

“Pierce is the king on top of the mountain right now, nothing more than that.”

“I still owe him for how he got me with Project Insight,” Steve adds, “but I could get him back some other way. The golden opportunity to knock over his casinos on the fight night of the year, Thor vs. Starlord in a few weeks? That’s just destiny giving me the gift to make it sweeter that it’ll be his money.”

“And, Rogers, you’re okay with this knowing full well who the dame rumored to be attached to his son’s arm?”

“Yep,” Steve says without hesitation. “It’s not about her. Pierce is the king on the top of the mountain right now, we just want to topple him over. I still owe him for Project Insight. Besides, Buck’s not stupid enough to make this about a dame who divorced him, and like you said it’s only a rumor that she’s his doll.”

Fury turns his stare to Bucky. He shrugs. “She’s made it pretty clear with the divorce papers.”

He studies him for a moment, then seems satisfied.

“And you’re just going to go on your little road trip across the country recruiting your team?”

“Who doesn’t love a summer road trip?” Bucky asks, a full grin on his face.

“Sam’s already in Sin City, picked out a nice house for us to set up and lay low in Henderson.”

“Henderson’s nice and sleepy. Banner will be there by the end of the week, and we just came from seeing Tony.”

“You should swing through Salt Lake City, look in on the Maximov Twins, they’re pulling off some impressive stuff among the locals there.”

“I’ll put them on the list.”

Steve leans up against the side of the convertible while Bucky starts to pump the gas.

“Sam’s not eager about the kid.”

“I know he’s not,” Bucky smirks. “But he’s our grease man. There’s a reason they’re calling him the Spider Boy Wonder now. Besides, he was a kid before I went in, it’s been four years, he’s not a kid anymore.”

“He’s impressive.”

Steve lets silence fall for a beat.

“Tell me it’s not about her. Tell me you are not stupid enough to make this about her.”

Frankly Bucky is shocked and impressed that it took Steve thirty minutes to press him about you now that he knows.

“It’s not about her, it’s about five million cool a piece.”

Steve looks dubious. “Because when we say ‘till the end of the line…’”

“It’s not about her, she just happens to be there, but I’m not ignoring that fact – we’re just going to use it to our advantage because she’ll be a blind spot for him.”

“Because she was a blind spot for you?”

“No, she was never that.” She was fireworks, electricity, what kept him sharp when he was on his game, before he got caught and sulked behind bars.

Steve sighs and his face softens. “I know. Just promise me we don’t do anything stupid.”

"No, nothing stupid. Too much riding on this. Heist of our lives."

As they pulled out onto the street, car aimed for the interstate, Bucky wouldn't spend the duration of the road trip thinking about you, but you would cross his mind frequently, as you always had.

With the miles ahead of them, the memories of you could distract him in peace. Thoughts of when he first met you. Thoughts of sneaking into rooftop parties and pools at places like Fury’s like you two had done when you were both too broke to get in any other way. Thoughts of his hand disappearing under your skirt and up to tease the delicious heat between your thighs. Thoughts of your head falling back and exposing your throat to him. Thoughts of your head falling forward to rest against his. Thoughts of you gasping beneath him as he thrust inside you. Thoughts of you wrapped up in his arms, leaning against his chest as you watched the sun set on your little balcony of that third-floor apartment in the city. Thoughts of the soft mornings and late nights in the bed you had shared together until you didn’t. Thoughts he fights both to hold onto and forget.

But you were unforgettable. You were his. You had to be his again. He's waited for just the right angle to set you in his sights again, and he knows he can get you as sure as he knows they will walk away with over fifty million and without a trace.

Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest

[kharmii]

(Title of the book is Violet Agenda Materials)

Geten: (So-and-So) was wearing cat ears and having fun at the (Setsubun) Spring Festival.

Dabi: I don't care.

(Smoke sputters and sparks out of Dabi)

Geten: The smoke is amazing, Blue Flame?

(Under cut for inappropriate adult material featuring a cat costume with butt plug)

Geten: A soldier gave me these cat ears because he happened to have an extra pair. I want to see you wearing them.

Dabi: Just so happened, huh. *Emanating smoke*

Geten: *teasing seductively* I want to insult you while laughing behind your back as you imitate the bastard, and I want to attack you until you cry and beg for forgiveness from me, and I want you to die just like that.

Or rather, the room stinks, I'm going to die.

Just imagining Blue Flame feeling miserable in this costume makes me excited.

Dabi: ...This is why those who have not completed compulsory education... (A joke about how they were having a Team Violet meeting that went off track. Also, Geten is naive about sex.)

Geten: A soldier gave this to me because he happened to have it.

Dabi: Just so happened, huh.

Geten: Is it a tail? How do you attach it in this shape? He said he (soldier who gave it to him) would buy the photos for 300,000 yen and the videos for 1,000,000 yen.

Dabi: Hey, leave it to me. I'm good at photography. I'm practicing filming. It's the commander's job to satisfy the soldiers' twisted desires.

Geten: You're the damn cat, so wear it, Blue Flame, I want to see it.'

Oops...Dabi runs too hot.

Geten was sleeping normally, and he woke up covered in ice and water.

Meanwhile, Dabi is loving it. He feels cooler than ever.

(Geten runs cold when he sleeps, but he doesn't usually melt unless Dabi is there. Geten is mildly annoyed).

Geten: *full of fervor* ReDestro! For ReDestro! All for ReDestro!

Dabi: *sarcastically* You had a wonderful life. Poor guy.

Geten: (Unimpressed by his lack of enthusiasm) Don't think that a half-hearted flame will melt this ice.

Dabi: *doubles down in a perky tone to be a smart-ass* You've lived a wonderful life! Oh poor you!

Geten: My palate has become refined from the Meta Liberation Army's high-class cuisine, so I shouldn't be eating so much junk food! *bolts down food*

-But if you can do it, I'll try to cope! I'll accept it every day and every meal!

Dabi: He lived a wonderful life. Poor guy......

(Comic is a play on their first meeting when Geten was sent to kill Dabi, the League of Villains long-ranged attacker. Geten talked about how he never went to school because he was devoted solely to training his meta abilities, and Dabi had replied sarcastically, "What a wonderful life. NOW DIE!!" They had opposite upbringings. Dabi's neglectful douchebag father was a hero who meant well. Geten was raised by a villain father figure who loved him and valued his abilities, and yet he was extremely sheltered, raised in a most appalling manner and taught terrible ideals).

(Where Geten hears Dabi telling him over and over about how he 'lived a wonderful life' but he doesn't understand he's being sarcastic. He tries to share his happiness with him in an eerily touching way).

Dabi: I've lived a wonderful life. Poor you...

Geten: Blue Flame.... If you want to hear more about me and ReDestro's wonderful story, just say so.

Do you need life counseling? For clothes, go to Detonerat. Support Item Development Department. Just ask for a support item you need. Look, this is the application form. For meals, there is a request box in the cafeteria. This is the request form.

If you have any questions about housing, there is a support person at the Meta Liberation Army Lifestyle Consultation Desk. Tower man is free for executives.

This is about lifelong financial support for executives and a list of professional introductions to tax evasion fraud. If you want to earn money steadily, the job magazine for PLA soldiers is "Destro☆Byte.

Dabi: Don't you try to make me live a wonderful life?

(Dabi and Geten are opposites and also kind of the same. They both are emotionally stunted from living questionable childhoods. Dabi might recognize something wrong with Geten's relationship with ReDestro/MLA but also at the same time, envy him).

Art credit: hrak (yaoi), Dabi, Apocrypha / Twitterログ15【外荼外】 - pixiv

[blueflipflops]

More snippets from my previous posts about introducing Feanorions to Scrabble...

Part 1, Part 2,

Next (part4)

Adzjrsfjxvmxgj

@youareunbearable

Babe, please. Dont hide these in the tags. Your brain is huge. This just changed my entire world view. We should kiss on the mouth.

Already did monopoly but I'll add it so that other people can see it too. Although I added more to this one.

@backgroundelf @arinele @weezlbot

Feanorions and Monopoly would be even MORE chaotic. No matter how they start the game, it would always end up with them taking it too seriously. They would somehow make it into a high stakes strategy game only not so slightly veering into warcraft. It'd be Silmarillion 2.0. No one really dies but theres always someone who gets close to being stabbed and someone flips the table at least twice a game.

Moryo is being a very stingy banker. He wanted to play too but was too preoccupied on the money distribution being Right that just took over the job. But when he does join in the game, everyone suddenly wants to team up against the guy on principle. Moryo double checks every piece of money everyone has. He somehow knows how much is left in your bank and can and will find a way to bankrupt you for the pettiest things. In fact, he enjoys driving people to backrupcy. Especially Curufin. And Maglor.

While he's playing, Maedhros vollunteers to be the banker and suddenly commiting tax frauds are 10x more harder and easier at the same time. It makes Moryo wanna rip his hair off.(His own or Meadhros. He's not that picky)

It is surprisingly, Maedhros who commits tax frauds when playing but they cant even call him out on it because he is somehow able to keep argueing his way out of the accusation and it blindsides them when he pulls out an Actual Literal Quenyan Property Law out of his ass and says that they cannot properly arrest him nor seize his properties without a warrant and evidence. He claimed the Ambarussa as his "vassals" (there are no such things as vassals in monopoly, Nelyo—) and therefore he has negotiated, with all the gravitas and political expertise he has learned from several years of leading armies and being an actual Lord of Himring, 25% of their own profits to be promised to him. ("This is basically daylight robbery, brother! From our own flesh and blood!—")

Maglor is somehow getting good investments at the first half before Curufin and Celegorm worked together to bankrupt him in one fell swoop. He is shouting crying throwing up but he cant do anything about it but become indebted to the two.

There was a near mutiny when Feanor and Nerdanel teamed up.

Before they knew it they're in a three way war with each other.

No one has more stronger opinions on property law than Feanorions.

[darkeagleruins]

America BUY GUNS & AMMO, Illegal Migrants Are Being Armed

Dr. Umar Johnson exposes what’s being going on in Chicago that’s not being reported “Whole bus full of migrants came to Chicago, and somebody from the army, brought bags full of weapons on there” “Immigrants are here for 3 main reasons:

- Number 1, to replace us at the polls, even though they're not citizens in many jurisdictions due to, uh, election fraud, if you have a work permit, you can damn sure get a voting permit. You follow me? So 1 of the reasons Joe Biden brought him in here is to aid him at the polls, so they hit and replace us at the polls. They hit and replace us in the labor market. ‌

- They're gonna take all of the low industry jobs, your Walmart, your McDonald's, your grass cutters, your floor sweepers. They're gonna tape all that, so it won't be nothing left for blacks. They started taking them already. Yeah. Yeah. ‌

- And the third reason, and I hate to say it because I don't want to see this, but this is America. I believe that at some point in the future, I don't know how soon, I don't know how distant, America is going to instigate a racial class clash between brown people and black people. If you look at Chicago, the brothers and sisters already talking about it in Chicago. ‌

They say the way where they putting these migrants at in our community, you know, they were telling me how some of the, uh, Latino gangs are recruiting them, arming them, uh, they're they're hurting black people. They beat up one black girl really bad, messed the whole eye up. Nobody went to prison. Uh, they said if you look at the writing on the wall, they are arming themselves to one day rise up against us.

There was something this white woman did a report on YouTube where she said, uh, a whole bus full of, migrants came to Chicago, and somebody from the army, brought bags full of weapons on there. ‌

She said she saw herself. If this doesn't go as quickly as they want it to go in terms of us being replaced by them, they're going to, uh, instigate a racial class that will lead to a mass loss of life for black folks, because the government is gonna stand with them against us.

You know, we're gonna be seen as the perpetrators, so black people need to get armed.

We need to get ready, but we also need to admit that part of this is our fault, though, because we have pushed this multiculturalism. We have preached this black and brown thing so long that, well, since they're always talking about black and brown, send the brown people in there. ‌

That's exactly what they did because we don't believe in having communities of our own.”

[celticcrossanon]

Harry is butthurt he wasn't mentioned in the book on 200 exceptional Sandhurst cadets so he reportedly is going to get another paid-for-award for "Living Legends of Aviation." I kid you not. Royal Reporter Robert Jobson said on True Royalty TV that Harry "was a gunner" and "never flew" an Army helicopter during his 10 year service. Harry is a fraud. It's sickening to see how much Royal PR went into shaping him as a cheeky lad when he couldn't pass anything in school or in the Army on his own.

Hi Nonny,

I've just been looking at old articles to try and determine exactly what Harry's status was when it came to flying, and the PR spin is amazing. The BRF PR definitely pushed the 'Hero Harry' angle. I don't blame people for falling for it at the time as it was very well done. It is enlightening, to say the least, to go back and look at those articles now.

I have heard multiple times that Harry never flew an Army helicopter for active service (he only flew or pretended to fly around the base for PR clips). I think this is true.

This is a quote from a Feb 2012 article that I found:

"Previously, the prince has hinted of his wish to return to Afghanistan after his first tour of duty was cut short.

Last April, he [Prince Harry] suggested it would be pointless to train as a helicopter pilot if he never served.

"I'd just be taking up a spare place for somebody else if they didn't have me going out on the job, " he said."

So he was taking digs at his brother even back then (Prince William qualified as a Search and Rescue pilot in Sept 2010 with the RAF, but he was not allowed to serve in active combat).

Harry's arrogance was and is astounding when you know that the only reason he got into Sandhurst was because of his grandmother (and imo they only passed him on the course for the same reason). As you said, he entered and (allegedly) passed his exams because of his connections, not on merit. Yet he thinks he is a Living Legend of Aviation. There are no words to describe that level of ego.

*

Article that has the quote - notice the difference between the headline and the actual facts in the article (the headline has Harry as an Apache pilot, the article mentions him as a co pilot gunner).

[michellesrandomwriting]

~Prologue~

Okay so this is the prologue to my Adam x OC fanfic, i hope you enjoy:)

English is not my first language so please correct me if i wrote something wrong:)

Saint Michael is the guardian angel, a warrior of the soul, and an advocate for justice. The one to whom people pray when they are in need, asking for protection from evil forces and assistance. When his followers are lost, he provides them with courage and direction, and he loves to support healers in their work.

He is a fraud.

A fake, if you will; he stole my fucking job and title. At the exact moment when Heaven decided to punish me for carrying out my damn duty, they grabbed the first man they saw and presented him as a saint. Taking all of the glory for my diligence and the many prayers I have heard and answered. All the help that I have provided.

And they are calling me back now, thousands of years after they left me here.

Right after we defeated their army of exorcists. Murdering The first man and a significant portion of their exorcists.

Grips of golden blood stain the floor.

I know that what I'm about to do goes against everything that I have ever said.

A dim red light slips through the holes in my black curtains, they frame the only window in my room rather poorly. A thought of getting new ones runs through my mind, disappearing quickly as soon as I become fully aware of the fact that I won't. I do not have the time for that.

I stretch, burying my face into the red pillows that frame the top of my bed. As a wave of tiredness crashes into my body, I realise that I need to get up.

I won't be the first one awake, regardless of the time.

And that fact is enough to motivate me into sitting up. As I do, I rub my eyes with my palms.

Today is going to be shit.

I get out of my comfortable, warm bed. Stretching and cracking my back, and with a sigh finally leaving my room. Not minding that I didn't even get to change clothing, there are much more important things on my mind.

I reach her room within a minute, the knuckle on my Index finger softly hitting the wooden door.

„Come in.” She's trying to sound cheerful, positive. But after all the destruction that happened yesterday.

The sadness and desperation almost drip from her voice as she speaks.

I reach for the doorknob and enter her room, a small smile on my face.

„Good morning.” I'm unsure of what to say, what can you say to someone who's just lost hundreds of her people? I doubt there are any words that could bring comfort.

„I didn't know you were awake already Nara.”

I sit down next to her, shrugging my shoulders slightly.

„I couldn't sleep anymore.“ Entirely false, I spend most of my night walking back and forth in my room. Trying to not give in to the urge to just scream. The frustration of not being able to do anything was catching up to me again, and if it weren't for her I wouldn't have enough motivation to get out of bed.

„Yeah, me neither. It's always the worst after an extermination.“ Her tone is gentle and sad, I can't help myself but bring her into a hug.

„I know Charlie, it's going be okay. We'll figure something out.“ My hand rests on her back, trying to bring at least the tiniest bit of comfort. She nods into my shoulder.

[the-masked-reviewer]

Captain America The First Avenger (2011) Review

potential spoilers ahead...

This movie does a good job of introducing Captain America and showing his journey from a skinny kid from Brooklyn to the super solider saving the world. It further builds to the next movie in the franchise, The Avengers. It does use some aspects from the films before it, mainly the tesseract first seen in Thor. However because it's an origin story there aren't many old concepts or aspects in it and those that are there are given an explanation as what they are to the characters that makes sense in this point in time in the story. They do well to establish Steve's personality and drive, particularly by showing Steve trying over and over again to join the army to the point of committing fraud. Bucky, Steve's best friend and a further motivating factor for the mad, dies (or is at least presumed dead) twice in this film alone. These "deaths" are used to drive Steve's heroics further. However, Bucky's only real character at the point of his first "death" is only "Army Solider(tm)" and "Steve's Friend" and that just isn't enough to get me to actually care about the guy we've seen twice being presumed dead. Later in the franchise, Bucky gets more characterization and story to him, but in this film its hard to treat him as the motivator and Steve's drive to do good and help people.

Overall, the movie's enjoyable and full of amazing actors and special effects. I've always loved the effects with Red Skull and the face peeling (I was a weird kid). And watching now, I still find myself impressed and weirdly compelled by Red Skull pulling off the fake face he uses to reveal his red skull. It's just a cool moment and well performed. No actor's performances really stands out because of just how good the entire cast, including more side and background characters, are.

[kyros-tha-soldier]

CHAPTER 1011 spoilers

I'm back after two weeks of having stupid painful eyesore! Still not fully healed but lasik generally takes a while to heal, oh well... into the SPOILERS!

🌟The chapter's title is "Dear bonney", it's a reference to the letters Kuma has been sending to lil Bonney, but what about those letters? Are they important? Welp, let's see the rest of the spoilers and we'll understand more

🌟colorspread contains all the vegapunks!

🌟so, the chapter starts with A flashback INSIDE the flashback, with Kuma remembering how once he and Dragon were on goa and Kuma curiously asks Dragon abot why he knows a lot about Goa, and why does he always keep his eyes on one boy (the boy of course being our precious luffy)

🌟Dragon sternly answers "keep talking if you wanna die" (this might be a mistranslation since i heard somewhere else he said "if you want to kill me then keep talking" maybe as a way to show that the topic Kuma was talking about is too sensitive and dangerous Dragon) and honestly this felt so out of character for dragon to say to his comrade like...

Isn't he already on your team?

🌟Dragon drops s hot line to clear his "fraud dad" allegations and says "a child is a parent's weakness", strong enough that poor Kuma apologized and stopped talking

🌟mini flashback ends with Kuma entering mount Kolumbo and observes a 16 years old luffy practicing. He gets a call on his den den mushi and luffy ends up hearing it ring, and before he tries to check, we find that Kuma has already left. Luffy just shrugs it off as some very strong animal and continues on his shenanigans

🌟 the call was frim the world government about a merchant ship getting attacked by pirates. So basically they told him to give those pirates hell because that's basically his job as a warlord

🌟throughout the chapter kuma is writing bonney letters, he is narrating them and talks about how much he loves her, how much he cares for her and all the great and amazing things he saw while traveling and how bad he wants to travel with her.

h-he's so pure, my god he's such a gentle daddy! GOD ODA STOP GIVING YOUR TOUGHEST BATTLES TO YOUR MOST LOVING DADS/MOMS

🌟 however unfortunately for our favorite bearguy priest, his letters never reached Bonney since the nurse lady alpha, would get rid of them so Bonney won't read them because well... duh they might contain some sensitive info, and since they're trying to make this whole ordeal a secret away from bonney, she makes sure no letters arrive.

🌟Luckily, Bonney has queen connie on her side, and her being the amazing granny she is she tells bonney not to show her abilities to any of the cipher pol agents, saying that "a smart hawk must always hide it's claws!"

🌟 Kuma visits Vegapunk's lab for more pacifista stuff and meets stussy (the clone that was made three years ago) and she sarcastically tells him "i wonder who's more unfortunate, a human with no consciousness or a clone with consciousness" Vegapunk (now with the apple head) reprimands her and tells her that she's indeed a human...

But like

CUT MY MAN KUMA SOME FUCKING SLACK!!! Y'ALL BETTER START TREATING HIM RIGHT!!!!

🌟 Vegapunk explains to Kuma that his transformation will be complete soon in one year, and until then he won't have a single emotion or thought left.

🌟 we see Kuma helping the revolutionary army, however he's a lot more silent now since he has reached a point where the modifications have become a lot more radical. Dragon and the others sense that something isn't right with Kuma

🌟we go back to sorbet island where Bonney is celebrating her ninth birthday, she still didn't receive a single letter from the ones Kuma had sent her. Bonney is now 100% healed but Alpha won't let her out until she reaches her 10th birthday since that's what the deal with Kuma was about

🌟 however our precious and beautiful Qweenie, granny connie, tells Bonney that she heard from a local town bar that alpha and her "staff" aren't actually medical staff and are in fact world government agents. They realize how bad is the situation and the people of Sorbet as well as Connie prepare for Bonney's escape. They bring a pizza themed ship, Gyogyo, poteto and Totsu (the three guys we always see in Bonney's crew) embark with her to go find Kuma, and Connie switch clothes with Bonney.

🌟 however, alpha and her team find out about this and follow bonney. Alpha is using geppou and threatens bonney that if she doesn't come back she will beat her up and lock her up (way to be such a scum to beat a child)!

🌟 just then, Bonney imagines one of the instances where Kuma talks to her about Nika and she asks him what he looks like and he tells her he doesn't really know but his body is rubbery.

🌟 bonney uses her toshi toshi ability and warps herself into Nika, delivering a FAT punch right to the jaw of Alpha (that looked like a really painful punch in the panel)

AAAAAAAND that's all folks!

[beautifulpersonpeach]

BPP, since you live in Korea, do you know what the general population think of S Coups being too injured for ms or even alt service but being well enough to perform on tour?

***

I don't live in Korea. My job and temperament won't allow it. But I do try to make frequent/annual visits to see family.

That said, based on what I'm seeing, most people don't care that S.Coups of Seventeen got a military exemption. The topic of military exemption generally isn't something that makes the news or that most people care about when it concerns idols... who aren't BTS.

In fact, it was fairly common for idols to get exemptions for all sorts of reasons, like not doing high school in Korea or having a documented surgery at some point for everything from tonsils to ankle fractures. Some idols could engineer an exemption if they paid the right people to manipulate doctors' reports or create false diagnoses. This is the method Ravi - VIXX member and Kai's bff - used to try to evade military service, and it's ironically because of all the focus that BTS's possible exemption put on the topic, that he was discovered to have engaged in fraud to evade service.

Another example is how Jung Joonyoung, a (formerly) popular k-pop soloist, was exempted on the basis that he completed his high school abroad and not in Korea. But most people didn't know he was exempted until he was implicated in the Burning Sun Scandal for filming his gang rape of women on two occasions, and as one of the most active idols in the main group chat... That's when people realized he'd been exempted from military service several years before.

The only reason the regular Korean cared about the question of military service for BTS is because: (1) it's BTS; (2) k-pop stans of rival groups in Korea inflamed the issue into a controversy; (3) political factions in Korea hijacked the issue as a means to meet their own political goals.

BTS choosing to go was their choice. but one I'm very happy they made. S.Coups being exempted for his injury is, in some ways, the norm and what to expect. It's certainly not something anybody should attack him for.

Any ARMY doing that is an idiot. In my opinion.

[notchai]

Headcanon Designs #1

you guys sure like my headcanons and maybe my art???

So here is my first design

Its Whirlpool, everyone's favorite (I'm joking don't kill me)

I love how slimy I made him look but I hate the legs

Anyways I made him a backstory

Whirlpool was born in a very poor and crime ridden part of the Kingdom of the Sea. He was given a fierce name by his parents. Both of his parents were soldiers in Coral's mothers army. They wished that he'd join the army. Ironically, Whirlpool was very scrawny and hated to fight. He loved read and be alone. He was always stuck up and thought he was better than everyone.When he was older, his ego grew more and he had a lust for power. He started to lie to high ranking Seawings about his accomplishments. After a while, he climbed the social ladder and gained a job in the palace. He was one of the lower ranking advisors of the queen. Coral, then took power and she always thought Whirlpool was clever. She offered him a role in the Seawing council, and she let him oversee education. Whirlpool gained his place by fraud and lying. Years later, his thirst for power grew, however the Queen was already married to Gill and he believed that Orca was barbaric. And blah blah we know the rest of the story.

Also guys I dont like whirlpool as a character, his actions are horrible and disgusting