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armchair philosopher

@musingsofananxiousgremlin

writing and random thoughts

It feels taboo as a childfree person to admit this but I actually do have concerns about who is going to take care of me when I'm old. The elder care system in our nation relies A LOT on the unpaid care labor of adult children. I just don't think that's a good reason to have kids.

"But you'll have more money!" does not completely put this to rest for me. Neither does "Buy care insurance!" Even if I can afford direct personal care, who is going to advocate for me to get it? Who is going to navigate bureaucracy for me when I'm 80?

"If you do have kids, there's no GUARANTEE that they'll take care of you when your old!" That's true, but doesn't solve my problem.

I think childfree people get very defensive about this question because its used as a kind of "gotcha!" against us, but I actually do not feel we can afford to be in denial about this reality. Based on current trends of more people in their 30s stating they intend to be permanently childfree, we are going to see a huge wave of childfree adults hitting the eldercare system at once in a few decades. Childfree people in their 30s should be advocating around eldercare NOW.

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We desperately need to cultivate a society in which everyone, even the most bitter, unlikeable, miserably lonely person in the world, has a social safety net that they can rely on from the day they're born to the day they die, and that includes their elder care.

We are not going to achieve this meaningfully under capitalism. :')

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A real thing that happened to me as a teenager.

I had what turned out to be a dangerous walking pneumonia, for a week, but the manager at Burger King wouldn’t let me off.  My breathing was very loud and ragged.  I was coughing on and breathing on the food.

I wasn’t allowed to leave.  I was told if i called out, I was fired.

So Im shuffling around wheezing loudly swaying with my high fever as I work drive thru by myself, and a paramedic walked in to order dinner.

He goes ballistic, My friends.  He demands to see the Manager.  he chews him out at the top of his lungs so the whole restaurant can here.  Guys working the back came up to watch.  Customers staring and thinking hard about the infectious food they were eating.  Dude losing his shit about how infectious I was and all the people management had been endangering for days judging from my breathing and I needed to be home on antibiotics RIGHT NOW and the health Department was going to hear about this.

I went home.  i got the week off.  Didn’t even need a doctor’s note.

Getting friends management doesn’t know to do this WOULD WORK.

Same manager not letting me take my influenza home a year later  despite repeated vomiting?  Threw up in front of customers.  Customers demanded money back and started threatening the manager with lawsuits.

I got to go home and got time off until I stopped vomitting.

GO AHEAD and THROW UP in front of Customers.  THEY will Complain.

Don’t be shy.  

They are supposed to let you stay home when you are sick.  Stop protecting management. (Hiding how sick you are protects management).  They are abusing you.  Let them reap what they sow.

Oh this is going to get bad isn’t it

your reminder that twitter verification started because they were being sued by a baseball manager over an account pretending to be him

elon straight up removed one of the site’s largest built-in legal protections

Conservatives finally say the quiet part out loud:

They would rather have a dead child than a trans child.

Family values, right?

People like this are abusers are and the ones who should be investigated and have their children taken away, not LGBTQ parents. This is neglect, this is open contempt for the life of your child.

If you can't handle the idea that your child will be LGBTQ, you will openly abuse them if they are, if you would not accept and love them for who they are no matter what, and you allow them to die through neglect then you should never have children. Period.

"Big Labor"???? Be more obviously anti worker lmao

“Ease limits on Youth employment”….???

They’re called Child Labor Laws.

I literally hate that the entire editorial is written like “B-but…how will the literal babies get work experience by losing fingers in the Baby Shredder 5000 machine shop now? Truly our society is too soft. U-U”

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I know some people find it cringey but fuck I love the word enby.

It's so cute, it's fun to say, it implies nothing about specific gender identity while holding the seed of a shared expression. Referring to myself as a girl is nice, sometimes, in certain situations, but enby always makes me feel good.

I've seen people turning their nose up at its use in fiction but I don't care. Use it in contemporary, use it in fantasy, whatever.

Totally valid if a given nonbinary person doesn't like it! But, dang. That's a good word to me.

The London marathon is a not a race. It is a marathon for charity. Frank in particular was running for Whizz Kidz, a charity that provides young children with wheelchairs. The headline should be "fuck your childhood: transphobes insulted that people were busy giving money to kids' charity rather than screaming at random woman".

Oh and "they might not have even known" she's wearing a trans flag cape and rainbow gear. The other runners knew perfectly well and none of them gave her shit for it during or after the race, nor have any actual runners of the marathon come forward to complain about being "cheated". You may be loud, but you are a tiny minority, and you have absolutely no basis to claim you were "cheated" from a marathon you never ran in. Stop putting words in the mouths of other women because you think they don't deserve to speak for themselves.

this is maybe the funniest thing to happen, ever. thank you spacex for once again pushing the boundaries of trashy scifi

Can we not, this time? Musk had nothing to do with the design or construction of that rocket. He's just slapping his name on it.

You're mocking the hard efforts of teams of engineers trying to do what is still the hardest activity humanity engages in.

Space flight is not and probably will never be easy. A failure is not a spectacle, it's an opportunity to learn and make the next design better.

The reason it was so destructive is the lack of a fire trench at the base, something he is not only responsible for but actually tweeted about prior to the event. He made the decision to forgo a fire trench, and as a result the base was obliterated and the debris hurt a nearby town. This was his fault.

*An item won’t scan*

EVERY. SINGLE. CUSTOMER. EVER: Well, I guess it’s free. ^-^

I have found the best way to combat this! Look the customer dead in the eye and with the most serious, deadpan face say “No. That means I get to pick the price.”

“I GET TO PICK THE PRICE.”
I think you’ve destroyed the dreaded “it must be free,” phrase once and for all!
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WTF

Who in the fucking world would say something like that when an item doesn’t ring in any supermarket?

People generally say it as a joke, but when you’ve heard it 574468 times in a single day you know exactly when it’s coming and it’s like a dark cloud that eats all of your humor away in one go.

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THIS IS IT.  THE ANSWER TO THE STUPIDEST GODDAMNED JOKE OF ALL TIME.

I think one of the reasons drag kings aren’t as popular as drag queens, aside from the fact that straight women don’t like us, is that people are uncomfortable acknowledging masculinity as a performance. Like we as a society know that femininity is a performance, with its own costumes and rules. Masculinity is also a performance, and nothing makes that more clear than someone making an exaggeration of it

Hey y'all. With the Writer's Guild of America on strike, you might be hearing a lot more about something called "residuals," which are payments that the writers get for the studios continuing to air their work on reruns and such. Already I'm seeing people trying to frame the union trying to bargain for better residuals as greedy and unreasonable, so I just wanted to give you guys a peek into my dad's full, 100% real residual payments for writing some of the most watched episodes of American late night television.

Yeah lol. If u hear anyone trying to frame the conversation around residuals as writers being greedy, please do me a favor and punch them straight in the face ❤️🙃🙃

The last time I saw any real money from residuals in film and TV was in 2008, when I got a substantial cheque from the WGA (who administer residuals and such) for my share as cowriter of the Beowulf film on DVD. And then DVDs were over and done and became a niche market.

These days residuals are... well, something you can take a friend to dinner with. Not something you could pay a monthly mortgage or the rent with.

(And I'm fine. My TV work over the last 5 years has been subsidised by my book and comics work.)

But I just got one even smaller than the one cent residuals...

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I think my favorite bit i do with customers is when white women are like ‘i dont know what to getttttt’ and i hit them with the ‘you should be bad~ 😈’

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More stories from hell (retail) today I was ringing up this lady and she goes oh I want to do part of this on a gift card and the rest on normal card and I go ok and then she hands me a folded piece of paper. I think oh OK it must be folded around the gift card, right? Wrong. It is a folded sheet of 8×11 printer paper with "$40" written on the inside in ballpoint pen. I go what is this. She says a gift card. I say this is not a gift card. She says yes it is. I say this is a piece of paper with "$40" written on it. She says "well it's a gift card." I say it absolutely is not. I am grinding my teeth. She says well I want to use it. I say you physically cannot do that bc it is a piece of paper. I cannot scan or swipe it. I apologize, as if this is my fault, and not because she is completely insane. I hate it here

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The whole LGBT Positive Cave Johnson meme is fun and all, but when I try to picture it in a way that's actually consistent with his established characterisation, what I get is that boss who you're... pretty sure is cool with your Alternative Lifestyle? (The way he says it you can hear the caps.) You're just constantly ending up in interactions where you're asking yourself, okay, am I being microaggressed, or does he genuinely not know that's a slur? You never do figure it out.

/oh god, he's trying to be supportive, can he just call me a slur? Please just call me a slur, Cave, just one measely slur. For the love of the moon you just said "we believe you Trans Genders are the same as us Normals, and should have Equal Rights. please call me a slur or die suddenly please please/

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"Cave Johnson here! Good news, the boys at the lab tell me we've invented a way to change your gender with a laser beam. Free for all testing employees! No complaining, its a free medical benefit. Next stage is deciding which one in advance."

I Am Not Your Asian American Doll: a comic for AAPI Heritage Month 2023

I usually spend a lot of time editing and fine-tuning my comics so that they come across as polite and inoffensive. But honestly, I’m really tired of the way Asian cultures and countries are treated / talked about while Asian people themselves are excluded, and thought it was about time I really let my rage out lol.

id in alt