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live fast and get fucked or whatever 🖖

@klingonlesbian

kat || 30 || ♉ || she/they || open poly lesbian || communist || 18+ only || girlcock aficionado

just a reminder that t*rfs are not and will never be welcome on my blog i think you are embarrassments to humankind and you should be ashamed of subscribing to a belief system based on hate and white supremacy

dome sweet dome

As some of you may know, I have been going to language school for the last few months in order to learn the world's most widely spoken and useful language: Slovenian. At this point, my Slovenian is about as coherent as, well, a McMansion. In order to feel better about myself, I have sought out a McMansion that is worse than my cases and word-order. This house (in Naperville, IL, of course) does, in fact, make me feel better, but will probably make you feel worse:

This Cheescake Factory house, built in 2005, boasts 5 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms and can be yours for the entirely reasonable sum of $3.5 million dollars. Also for some reason all the photos look like they are retouched with 2012-era Instagram filters.

First of all, trying to visualize the floor plan of this house is like trying to rotate seven cubes individually in my mind's eye. Second, if you stand right beneath the hole in the ceiling you can get the approximate sensation of being a cartoon character who has just instantaneously fallen in love.

Even if this was a relatively mundane McMansion it still would have made it into the rotation because of the creepy life-sized butler and maid. Would not want to run into them in the middle of the night.

The mural is giving 1986 Laura Ashley or perhaps maybe the background they use for Cabbage Patch Kids packaging but the floor? The floor is giving Runescape texture.

Have you ever seen so many real plants in your life? A veritable Eden.

The overwhelming desire to push one of the chairs into the haunted jacuzzi...but in reality they probably put those chairs there to keep from accidentally falling into the tub at night.

(elevator music starts playing)

This is one of the all time [adjective] rooms of McMansion Hell. I personally am in love with it, though I don't think I understand it. Perhaps it is not meant to be understood.....,

Continuing with the baseball theme, the guy in the painting looks how I feel after it's been raining in Ljubljana for two straight weeks. (Not ideal!!)

And finally:

We love a house that has four unused balconies and also a sporting grounds that is large enough to build a whole second McMansion on top of. Everyone should so value their health.

Thank you for tuning into another edition of McMansion Hell. Be sure to check out the Patreon for the two bonus posts (a McMansion and the Good House) which both also go out today!

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar, because media work is especially recession-vulnerable.

kneeling down beside my bed and folding my hands and closing my eyes: dear god please let me have some gay sex soon and also maybe let me win the lottery so i never have to get a job again. okay goodbye i mean amen

breakingbowties-deactivated2021

PSA

autistic people! spark research, partnered with autism speaks, is trying to find a prenatal link to autism so they can practice eugenics and eradicate autism from the gene pool.

do not give your dna to spark research!

allistics pretty please reblog this!

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Oh hey, auteach is one of my mutuals on tiktok who was (wildly and falsely) accused of recruiting young autistic people for the NXIVM sex cult last year by a group of autistic people who go around doxxing and mass reporting anyone they dislike for a multitude of reasons (that sounds exaggerated but it's really not)

Autism tiktok is the wild west

me: idk man...with the way things are right now in the 2020s it just feels like the labor movement in america is hopelessly doomed, you know? like everything's so fucked up...what do you think?

Eugene V. Debs, fighting for his life after taking 0.5 hits off the penjamin:

The more I read into reports about industrial and transportation accidents the less I feel like “operator error” actually exists

Ok so “doesn’t exist” may be a slight overstatement. A better way of phrasing it might be “operator error is often used as a way of warding off close examination of how systems fail.”

You read about airlines accidents attributed to pilot error, and almost universally you find overworked, overtired people who have to deal with inadequate training, and poorly maintained equipment. Often investigations uncover a pattern of management ignoring problems that pilots regularly have to deal with. Out-of-date terrain data, false sensor readings, confusing systems presentation, fatigue.

The cargo airline industry fights to keep its pilots exempt from crew rest requirements and a fatigued crew crashes a mile short of the runway. Only the two crew on board die, so really it’s no big deal, right?

Amtrak builds a new bypass to cut 10 minutes off the travel time from Portland to Seattle but doesn’t give the engineers enough training to prepare them for it, nor installs adequate signage to warn of a 30mph curve, so on the inaugural run the engineer hits the curve at 80 mph.

Construction on a nuclear power plant runs into trouble and so to make a key pressure-bearing component fit, they install an S-bend around a pipe, which causes falsely water level readings. Operators open a valve to reduce what they think is excessively high pressure in the reactor and it melts down.

And all of these get simplified, either initially, or in perpetuity, as operator error. Because operators are cheap and easy to replace. Firing someone and laying the blame on them is cheaper than reassessing and restructuring a management culture built on passing the buck.

This is an extremely valuable addition thank you selky ❤️

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was just pondering the other day how the push for accountability in business has largely just resulted in the generation of a class of employees whose job role is largely "take the fall for if we're caught doing something awful"

If you want to get delightfully angry about this exact thing, I suggest reading There Are No Accidents by Jessie Singer (ty to @wafflelate for pointing me at this book!). It pokes at who the structures and systems of the world actually benefit, and what it means when we dismiss those issues with "it was an accident".

I also recommend the podcast "Well There's Your Problem" (which I discovered here on Tumblr), which is a podcast about engineering disasters. I'm only 14 episodes in, but it's a healthy mix between 'the problem was caused by the person who wanted to build this thing deciding to go with the cheapest possible contractor and materials etc' and 'this could have been prevented if the crew had been allowed to rest or had been properly trained' and sometimes both

I believe @aliceavizandum is here on Tumblr, she is one of the hosts. Don't know about the other two

You all just lost reblog privileges.

Alright so, instead of locking this post down and telling you all to go to hell, I have convinced myself to instead assemble a list of actual books for you guys to read on these matters instead of listening to a couple of DSA dilettantes go on about poop planes.

I have read most of these. I have noted where I have not read them, but they are highly recommended by authors of the other books. I have not linked to any stores because I know that somebody will yell at me no matter which store I link to.

James Mahaffey's Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters, From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima is a series of very detailed but still easily-digestible vignettes about various nuclear accidents, as well as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He is openly pro-nuclear and also very strongly pro-regulation.

The Flight 981 Disaster: Tragedy, Treachery, and the Pursuit of Truth, by Samme Chitum covers two airline accidents (technically, one incident, and one accident, but that's getting into the weeds) involving the same root cause: the cargo door latch on the McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 jetliner. It is a fascinating case study in exactly how far a corporation will go to cover their ass, even when fixing the problem would be far, far cheaper. If you're short on time, the documentary program Mayday (known by a slew of names including Air Crash Investigation and Air Disasters) did an episode on these flights, which you can watch legally, for free, on YouTube.

Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, wrote a righteously compelling book on nuclear weapons design and safety called Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, that I will gladly talk your ear off about any day of the week. It goes into exhaustive detail about how the US Air Force really kinda didn't care about the possibility of a nuclear weapon detonating by accident and how a bunch of engineers spent decades trying to prove to them that it was a serious threat. It also indicts the top-down organizational structure that dictates that people at the bottom follow exact orders from the top, even when those orders are dangerous or nonsensical.

Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster, by Allan J. McDonald and James R. Hansen, is McDonald's first-person account of the Challenger disaster. McDonald was the director of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor Project for Morton-Thiokol, the manufacturer of the SRBs, as well as the Morton-Thiokol representitive at the launch of STS-51-L. McDonald refused to sign off on the launch, but was overruled when NASA went over his head. He later testified before the Rogers Commission and was demoted by Thiokol for embarassing them, a demotion which was later reversed after intense congressional pressure. This book is, as far as I am aware, the only book on the Challenger disaster that was written by someone who was involved in the Space Shuttle program and the investigation into that disaster.

My final recommendation is one that I have not, personally, read yet, (it is on my list, I promise) but which is cited by several of the above books. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, by Charles Perrow, is about how complex, integrated systems, like nuclear power plants and space launch systems, have so many moving parts and interactions that there can be no one root cause of any accident. It also argues that the main issue in any accident is a systemic one.

Anyway, thank you for reblogging this post so much and please stop recommending me Joe-Bob and Bob-Joe's 'y'all done fucked up' podcast. Don't make me regret this.