V

Unemployment affects a small cohort acutely, inflation annoys everyone a little bit.

a take I've been sitting on is that people mock software engineers for unionizing one of the cushiest industries in all of human history but tbh "give us more of your colossal monopoly profits" is like the only way 20th century unions seemed to work.

You got significantly more engaged teachers though. I had a much better time in AP classes than normal ones, because the teachers were trying harder.

I would love to someday, and I don't really care if you're not a good person to go out with, I'll do things on my own. It's just nice when traveling to have someone to visit so it's not just being in touristy places all the time.

Thanks, it's been nice to feel closer to old friends.

I also pulled the ripcord on my entire Midwest life, so... yeah, pretty much. I'm living in the backwoods of norcal now, trying to scrape something together.

Yeah street parking an EV will always be a nonstarter. I could see complexes being bribed to install chargers but then you just add a maintenance problem from hell.

Yeah I have just kinda surfaced into all of this, I suppose I'm just not ready to fight.

I think we have to be a bit pathetic, if only because pathos is an important part of rhetoric! I don't believe in a magical, logical argument that will convince people who are dug in, I just think we need to make some kind of human connection with everyone we can.

Maybe they believe it's in their self interest to care but maybe not, maybe it's just that they heard something once about how tough it is not to know you exist, and this seems just pointless and cruel. Maybe they think you're cool for denouncing it. Anything, so long as they want us around.

In a word, persuasion. That's complicated and situational but, like, I'm always trying to figure out how someone who's not trans would care about something like this.

Maybe you're right, maybe the mood of defiance and persistence is the right one to win people over. It's certainly more admirable than throwing ourselves upon the mercy of others. I don't especially care what works, I just hope something does.

I don't think we can go back. I also don't think we can ever really protect ourselves with just our own power. We need more people who really understand and care about us.

I'm now in agreement on the second point, but the first, idk... The era of "fear," really a strategy of enforcing politeness towards us, setting rules that a lot of people simply never understood, seems in retrospect deeply precarious.

You're the one in a position to know the best, and I trust you. I thought initially it was all people getting mad on your behalf.

I do see the, like "if you wrote for latter day waypoint you're a scab" subtext from aftermath. That sucks. The scale of the reaction and the choice to direct it at Gita is what confused me.

Idk, honestly. I just can't really get behind the "it's better to be feared than ignored" approach. We can't force people to actually care like that.

I just don't read gita's post as sniping in the way people seem to! It's an exhortation, not a condemnation of people working for dogshit rates.

In that the level of anger directed at both seems utterly excessive, yeah. What is any of this accomplishing?

I don't actually understand how this is seen as a bad thing to say? It's exhortation, not castigation!

I can see how you could put together these elements unaware of their connotation but surely, at some point he would show some little selfishness or lack a perfect intuition for women, right? You can't just independently reinvent the trans lesbian sub.

Maybe that's the intention, but over and over again women trust him and confide in him, his sexual encounters are focused entirely on them and their emotional needs, and in the book I've reached now (Double Share) the challenge he faces is a sexist command staff abusing the crew.

The first thing is that apart from one close friend, just about everyone he interacts with is a woman. He clearly takes well to female authority figures, and at first I thought that he was just intended to be a "good male feminist" type character, or just kind of a sub.

He finds himself as a lowly deckhand on a space ship after his mother, who raised him alone, dies in an accident and he just has to get off planet before he's deported. Blah blah, stuff happens, he takes to the work and climbs the ranks over the series.

So I picked up the Solar Clipper books (Quarter Share, Half Share, etc) randomly because I needed something to listen to while building a fence and liked the idea of some nautical fiction in space. I did not expect the main character would have the most intense egg vibes.

art

It's a shame that bills of attainder are explicitly barred by the constitution: I feel like that's actually the right solution for blatant official criminality.

"may you live in a natural experiment"
- ancient economist's curse

states are going to end up with so many bad choices to make after this passes.

Haven't they rolled out improvements to personal context (that was when they accidentally tuned it to be a synchophant) and added some bad computer use feature?