EdgeCityRed
14d ago
Who paid for the director of the FBI to travel to another country to hang out in the locker room with the USA men's hockey team? Was it me, the taxpayer? Or was it Kash Patel?
EdgeCityRed
20d ago
There is definitely a class element to grocery store positioning, but Amex Plat giving out free Walmart+ memberships is a boon to the comfortable middle class. Why would I pay extra for oyster crackers?
EdgeCityRed
20d ago
Veterans are not eligible for Worker's Comp, FMLA, or long term disability, and OSHA is certainly not a concern in the military. Don't die on that hill.
EdgeCityRed
2mo ago
The idea that, your argument is that people should feel like they have to cower in the safety of their homes if there's ever a federal agent in their neighborhood is fucking crazy.
Also, citizens should not have to cower in their homes if there's an immigration enforcement officer in their neighborhood.
Said citizens should also not have to fear using their right to free speech to express their opinions to federal officers, whom we are supporting with our tax dollars.
It's interesting that the Obama administration was able to deport many more people without this theater and now-routine violence.
EdgeCityRed
4mo ago
You photocopy these documents. You can leave a copy in the hotel safe (if you're not leaving your original passport in there). You should also keep phone numbers handy: your credit card company, for one, though you can probably google that. I have Amex and the concierge had my phone I'd left in a rental car FedExed to me. That's the card provider I prefer for service like that. They will also wire you money and find you a lawyer or directions to a consulate. https://www.americanexpress.com/content/dam/amex/us/credit-cards/features-benefits/PGA_Benefit_Guide_Rev_09-17-final.pdf
You can black out anything sensitive like your SSN, etc. if you put copies of things like this in your luggage.
Also, get luggage tags. A big, colorful tag is extremely handy at airports anyway if you have nondescript black bags that look like everyone else's at the carousel. Mine is a large lime green circle tag.
EdgeCityRed
4mo ago
Criminals vastly outnumber inventive geniuses, and women were barred from equal access to education for centuries.
EdgeCityRed
9mo ago
Weirdly (or, actually...predictably) the last three cars we've owned were the peak popular colors at the time: blue, black, and now dark gray, but we've chosen blue or gray/silver cars forever. Having grown up in a snowy place, I instinctively dislike white cars, because they scream "hard to see against the landscape" and "please deposit mud here."
Fashion is trying to tune people into "dopamine dressing" currently, with fun, bold colors, but people are reacting to actual or perceived economic distress and still choosing Quiet Luxury neutrals; if you can't be rich, as least you can look rich.
Interiors are still in the Magnolia Home modern farmhouse gray and white vice grip, and flipping hasn't helped.
EdgeCityRed
9mo ago
I read it due to the buzz and I have deep regrets.
EdgeCityRed
9mo ago
Cassandra Cla(i)re was well-known in the fandom space. https://fanlore.org/wiki/Cassandra_Claire
EdgeCityRed
9mo ago
Something really amusing regarding Malfoy given your mention of 50 Shades, which was Twilight fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off (meaning the author changed the names to be allowed to publish it as original fiction). There's a Draco/Hermione story that is also being published.
The nearly 16 million individual downloads of the author’s works; the 84,000 likes on Archive of Our Own, aka AO3, where it was first published in 2018; the 19 languages to which it’s been translated; the 71,000 ratings on Goodreads; the 470 million collective TikTok views. The TikTok readers (aka BookTokers) are especially vexed: People are clipping together their emotional states before and after reading — going into it excited and chipper, and finishing with red-rimmed eyes and stifling sobs.
And the latest flick of the wand: SenLinYu, 32, has leveraged all this into a book deal, a reimagined version of “Manacled” that will leave the characters and world of “Harry Potter” behind.
By 2025, the enemies-to-lovers romance centered around Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy will undergo a transformation to become a novel called “Alchemised,” Sen announced Feb. 5. It’ll be a dark fantasy with new characters, published by Del Rey at Penguin Random House in the U.S. and Michael Joseph in the U.K.
The upshot here is that female romance fandom commonly takes franchise characters and smushes them together in transformative works. This is VERY true of Avengers fandom, but a lot of it is slash, because Marvel/Disney are never going to let Cap and Bucky bang onscreen.
Personally, I'm not particularly interested in romance in superhero movies. It feels shoehorned-in.
EdgeCityRed
1yr ago
Well, they're not condemning Trump for pardoning Kushner's dad and then naming him to the post of Ambassador to France.
EdgeCityRed
1yr ago
Spotify researches the playlists that users make and will make similar ones. This is something I've noticed over the years; it's just serving a userbase, because some people won't bother to actually create themed playlists but will search for them. For example, I've made a playlist or two for (NFL) football season, and if I enter "football" it shows me a Spotify-created list called Hype Football Mix. There's a Vampiric Mix (which is actually garbage) because I've favorited some user's playlist to make fanvids for an Anne Rice series. Most of these are probably AI-driven.
EdgeCityRed
1yr ago
Precisely. That's a tomorrow problem when you're in that state.
EdgeCityRed
1yr ago
If Muslims were making laws aimed at me, I'd care more about what they do.
Most people don't care about others' personal beliefs, as long as they don't affect people who don't believe the same things.
EdgeCityRed
1yr ago
The trans fantasy - and this part is true for both AGP and HSTS - is to be a 95th percentile hotness woman. The rest of womanhood or womenfolk don’t concern them or factor into it at all.
I can see the appeal of transitioning to become male (if the button-push scenario were real versus hormones and surgery); menstruation is a horrid, annoying hassle at best, pregnancy and childbirth can have severe deleterious effects on the body, and men don't have to be very concerned about aging, because their eye wrinkles and gray hair are viewed as distinguished and not extinguished by society. Men who go overboard with botox and surgery come off kind of sad. Wearing makeup and cute outfits are the FUN part of being female.
But if I were to transition, I wouldn't look like George Clooney; I have female hips, testosterone can cause baldness, and I'm 95th-percentile female tall, but as a man, I'd be average. It's shallow of me, maybe, but I don't see a point to doing it without a serious gender dysphoria element if you're not going to pass easily and end up hot.
EdgeCityRed
1yr ago
His family here in Florida have tens of millions of dollars. This grift would seem...unnecessary.
EdgeCityRed
1yr ago
Donating blood also helps lower your microplastics levels (and donating plasma is even better!) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8994130/
EdgeCityRed
1yr ago
This is much more of a "seedy bar/club with shady strangers" thing than a fraternity party thing. Not that young women shouldn't be in the habit of guarding their drinks, because in their 20s they'll probably in club spaces at times.
EdgeCityRed
1yr ago
Let's not confuse "cool" and "popular." Cool can suggest mystery, but transparently popular in a very conformist way is what these sorority girls are.
EdgeCityRed
1yr ago
Vance screwed up a conversation with normie minimum wage employees in a donut shop. He is bad at many types of public speaking, though he can write a decent essay.
EdgeCityRed
1yr ago
Changing the 2nd Amendment now would likely be a bad idea for the simple reason that there are already so many guns in the US that there is no plausible way that simply getting rid of the 2nd Amendment would lead to any outcome than a bunch of pro-social people handing in their guns while a huge fraction of anti-social people keep them.
That's where I stand. It seems to have worked in Australia, but it's much easier to smuggle guns into the US.
I'm fine with background checks to hopefully forestall some of the impulsively murdersome and going back to the assault weapons ban. The book should continue to be thrown very forcefully at people who use guns in the commission of a crime.
EdgeCityRed
1yr ago
Much of the time, unfortunately, it's the family who can't let go and insist that very elderly, very sickly people be coded and revived despite zero quality of life in the US. Whether it's guilt or love or inability to say goodbye or accept death or because "giving up" on grandpa might look bad.
I would like to outline my wishes with ZERO intervention from others if I, say, later become mostly incapacitated due to something like dementia. I should be able to state now that if I pass a certain threshold, I'll be given a nice spot in a garden at dusk with a blanket over my knees and an adulterated cognac that'll put me permanently to sleep in a dignified fashion.
In the absence of this, I do think that impartial physicians should be making the call NOT to break granny's ribs with vigorous CPR and keep her alive for an extra month of fun n' bedsores.
EdgeCityRed
1yr ago
The ACA is now ingrained enough in the American public that no Republican is making that the center of their campaign, even if they are nominally still in favor of overturning it.
Well, that was the assumption about Roe, too. And look what happened there.
EdgeCityRed
1yr ago
Liberal women steer clear of Trump supporters not because they worry "he won't be able to effectively prioritize my emotional needs in the relationship" but because they worry that the cops are going to knock on their door if they go the doctor after a miscarriage.
Being "hectored to death" is not equivalent. Being concerned about 2A restrictions might be somewhat equivalent in the sphere of rights being taken away.
Definitely a case of elite underproduction at that point in history and into the 1980s, at least.
People also sometimes overlook the social-signaling aspect of a degree; it would infer that someone was "a college man," who fits into an upper middle class environment and can interact comfortably with clients. This became something different a bit later: "it doesn't matter what you major in; you just need to graduate," and "a degree demonstrates that you can finish something," but the first aspect still (sort of) exists, depending on the degree/person.
I have seen people qualified on paper for things like account management positions in tech hit a wall in interviews and promotions because they're rough around the edges socially.
More options
Context Copy link