Nickelodeon was concerned enough to offer Jeannette McCurdy a lot of money to shut her up. She doesn’t use his name, but does describe an incident where it is clearly him pressuring her into drinking alcohol in her book. What she describes is similar to what other victims have described.
We also know that Brian Peck assaulted Drake Bell, and that almost everyone on set knew about it. There’s evidence of a culture of coercion and silence.
They weren’t cops in Jackie Chan’s Animated Adventures, they’re like secret agents.
Chan plays a cop in the Police Story movies, which would be interesting to look at from a copaganda angle.
I don’t get when a fancy restaurant does it. If it’s not a Cajun boil or similar vibe, please don’t try to make me look polite deconstructing seafood.
The funny thing is, I probably wouldn’t have had gender surgery if it wasn’t a legal requirement. I barely had anything and could pass topless anyway. I just needed to be able to get a job, which was proving difficult with the non matching ID. It is 100% legal where I live to fire someone for being trans, and it had happened at multiple times by that point.
When I had top surgery (getting the fat sucked out of my tits so I could put an “M” on my drivers license, funny how many jobs fell through right I9 verification…), I did a lot of research into what I needed to do to get it covered. I got letters from doctors and therapists, I’d been in hormone therapy for a while, and my policy said it covered it. I checked with a rep, they said yeah, you just pay for it up front and submit for reimbursement.
So I took out a $5500 loan, had surgery, and then attempted to file for reimbursement. Turns out that my specific policy, from my step-dad’s employer had a rider that exempted it. Somewhere buried in the fine print, didn’t come up until after I had taken out the loan.
It’s pretty common for trans people to end up turning to sex work to finance their medical care (and tbh, survival in general). That’s how I joined that statistic.
I like the classic Usenet “Micro$oft.” Producers of Microshaft Wind-blows.
Plastic recycling is a farce to make it appear as a “personal responsibility” issue.
Notice also how the labeling for plastics uses a sign that looks remarkably similar to a recycling logo - whether that specific type of plastic is actually recyclable or not.
It is all a public relation campaign, because fundamentally plastic is unsustainable and harmful. Governments have collectively shat the bed by placing the burden of dealing with plastic on the consumer. (This is very similar to the “carbon footprint” idea - which was a creation of the oil industry.)
I toured the place where my city collects its plastic recycling - the director in charge was very open about the fact that most of it isn’t used and can’t really be used anyway.
Good example is the 2016-2021 Honda Civic! Tons of electrical issues, and refrigerant that is incompatible with the ac condenser, so you sink thousands into your AC for it to stop working after a couple of months.
A lot of suicide prevention has to be community based though.
Affordable housing, accessible and good quality mental health services, career development programs… some people are suicidal because their situation legitimately sucks.
For all the talk about ending stigma, I also think there needs to be a discussion about the way suicidal people are treated. In the US, involuntary holds can be hell and fucking expensive - especially when we consider how many people are suicidal because of finances. Lose your job because the 72 hour hold, during which you get to see a psychiatrist once. (From my personal experience, no guarantee they got a great score on their TOEFL).
988 is a great idea, but patchy in execution and assuming a lot of other systems are already in place. It’s a can of fix a flat when you haven’t changed your oil in so long it’s starting to look like tar.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with seeking help; I just think we really need to recognize that help is not always readily available. It’s not free, appointments aren’t always readily available, and you can end up with really bad providers. Services like BetterHelp are preying on that gap too, and have cooped the destigmatization of mental health into their ad campaigns that are uncomfortable.
Teenager I was traveling with couldn’t figure out how to use the turnstiles at the metro. Random French guy, in English: “you disgust me.”
Also got scammed by an Uber. The Louvre was worth it though, we hated Paris so much we spent the entire day inside the museum.
I have fairly severe social anxiety; when I went to France, the negative response to the French I was able to stutter out ensured I’d never try to speak French again. (I read it fairly well, because Candide was good enough to read ten times)
In high school, I had an assignment to go to a local Chinese restaurant and order in Chinese. The response to my “我要broccoli 牛肉” was so enthusiastic that I still do a set of Chinese flash cards everyday.
There has to be a motivating force for you to learn something. Whether that is social approval/encouragement, needing to be able to ask for certain things… Some people can be motivated by an intrinsic love of learning things, but for most I think this is confined to specific topics.
For language, I think you need a show that you want to watch, a space you can navigate by only using that language, something that gives you meaningful feedback and places to go that a grade simply doesn’t.
It’s not like that’s stopped them from using licensed music before…
Remember when being unable to spell “potato” was enough to derail a political career?
It’s frustrating, because you can tell they spent a lot of time making the words weaselly enough. The one about climate models especially enrages me, because yeah, they’re predictive tools with limitations (which I’ve discussed with students when I’ve taught with climate sims). But I know my old department head (who used to compliment kiddos for forgoing masks in 2020) is going to have those “uncertainties” do a lot of work.
There’s been deliberate dismantling of social services.
I was married to a wealthy man. He was controlling and abusive, and had the police remove me from our home. It wasn’t legal, but the police have lost the records of whatever they did that night. I couldn’t get a lawyer to help me, he had access to my bank accounts and emptied them. I reached out to multiple domestic violence agencies - there is no shelter, there are no lawyers, there are maybe one or two therapists if you are lucky. But I’m basically completely helpless.
The Franklin Standards need to be on everyone’s radar. They don’t want your kids to learn about climate change.
Explain how and why Earth’s climate changes over time.
Climate changes continually at all time scales and Earth’s climate has never remained constant.
The Earth’s climate has varied greatly between glacial advances and retreats that correlate with cyclical oscillations in Earth’s orbit around the Sun (Milankovitch Cycles, precession).
In addition to being affected by the climate, the biosphere also has a significant effect on the climate, including self-regulation and resiliency (carbon-oxygen cycle, hydrological cycle).
Humans are just one of the many influences on Earth’s climate (urban heat island effect, wetland drainage, deforestation, agriculture).
Computer models of climate are simplified simulations of the real world, and make prognostications that are inherently uncertain.
Global weather forecast models (short term) and climate models (long term) are quite different in their design, their strengths, weaknesses, value, limitations, and uncertainties.
The wording is subtle, but you can see how they are attacking the idea of anthropogenic climate change. (There’s similar fuckery with evolution and some subtle anti-trans stuff.) Oil and gas companies have a lot of money and can afford a lot of propaganda. No states have adopted these standards yet - we think Florida and Texas will go first, then Oklahoma will follow. But this information warfare.
The psych part is key too - if they can claim you are mentally ill, not only can they ignore your concerns but they also have a convenient way to dump you in a psych word if you get to annoying.
Friendly reminder that 988 = 911!
I have to use a windows 11 machine for work, and it genuinely surprises me how terrible it is. I don’t understand the opposition to local accounts - if I’m working somewhere with public WiFi/capture portal, I have to use my phone as a hotspot first.
The PIN log in seems to roll a random number and decide each morning whether it is going to work or not.
I also got a laptop with 11 on it for gaming. So much spyware I’ve had to uninstall, configuring anything is a nightmare. I was trying to adjust my mouse sensitivity/figure out why the scroll wheel is either 0 or to the moon, but even when you dig into the control panel, half the settings are missing.
I also had to turn off my WiFi and google commands to make a local account, because otherwise Microsoft accounts are mandatory.
Every change seems to make the experience actively worse for the user.
As someone who was traumatized by reading the entire Left Behind series at roughly 8, it’s very upsetting to see how happy the evangelical Christian’s that have spent the last attacking LGBT people based on faith have fallen behind a serial philanderer who has very likely raped children. They threat him like a golden calf.
Then again, I don’t know how one could read things like “when I was hungry you fed me” and vote against free school lunches or cutting EBT. I don’t believe in the divinity of Christ or any supernatural powers, but I don’t see how they don’t understand that they are acting like the “chaff.”
Ah. I think Jackie Chan wasn’t really a CCP apologist/propagandist until the past ten years or so. He’s from Hong Kong - his movies are actually great to watch if you are learning Mandarin because of how simple his lines are, Mandarin wasn’t his first language. I’m not sure what changed, but being pro-CCP is a relatively new development.