You know, it occurs to me that the known internet phenomenon of Reddit “am I the asshole?” posts having completely misleading headers is actually a really great example of a far less known but far more common practice of extreme journalistic spin in cases where there are large monetary incentives to diminish the story in question.
Like, if you see a Reddit post titled “Am I the asshole for buying my wife a new dress?”, the post is pretty much always something totally deranged like: “I (48) really dislike the way my wife (20) dresses, because I think it’s too revealing and makes her look slutty, which was fine when we started dating five years ago, but it makes me feel like she’s going to cheat on me now that we’re married. I’ve politely asked her to get new clothes multiple times, and every time she refused because she said she liked her clothes, and didn’t want to waste money buying new ones. Yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore so I threw out a bunch of her old dresses and bought her a new one that was more modest looking. She started crying because one of the dresses I threw out had been left to her by her mom who died when she was a teen, but I couldn’t have known that it had sentimental value. She said that I should have asked, but obviously if I asked she’d have just told me not to throw out any of her clothes, including the ones that weren’t sentimental. Also, the more modest dress I bought was pretty expensive, and she never thanked me for it. Am I the asshole here, or is she being unreasonable?”
Similarly, whenever you see a headline like “Woman Wins Millions From McDonald’s Because Her Hot Coffee Was Too Hot”, if you dig a bit, you’ll almost always quickly find out that what actually happened was: A 79-year-old ordered coffee which, unbeknownst to her, was being served extremely dangerously hot, because McDonald’s was trying to have coffee that stayed warm over a long commute without spending any extra money on cups with better insulation. The coffee spilled on the old woman’s lap, giving her severe third degree burns over a huge portion of her body, including her genitals. She got to a hospital and they managed to save her life with skin grafting, but she became disabled from the accident, and her genitals and thighs were permanently disfigured. She tried to settle with McDonald’s for her medical costs, and McDonald’s refused to cover any portion of her medical expenses at all, and so she sued. At trial, the jury discovered that this same exact thing had happened seven hundred times before, and McDonald’s had still decided not to change their policy because paying out individual suits was cheaper than moderately reducing their coffee profits. As a result, the jury awarded punitive damages designed to penalize McDonald’s two days worth of their coffee profits, in addition to the woman’s medical costs.
I think it’s largely the same phenomenon, but I know a lot of people who are familiar with the first case, but don’t know to look for the second. If you see some totally outrageous “how could a person ever sue over this stupid thing?” case, you should immediately be incredibly suspicious that that’s all that actually happened, because a lot of the time, it absolutely isn’t. The people who have the most incentive to make their opponent look not only wrong, but completely crazy for having any sort of grievance at all, are often the actually unreasonable ones.
Anyway this is all to say that if I see ANY of y’all automatically siding with McDonald’s over the recent case where 4-year-old girl was severely burned by their chicken nuggets because “hurr durr dumb kid didn’t know that chicken nuggets were hot, people sue over anything lol”, I will grab that McBoot you’re licking and shove it all the way up your McFuckingAss.
lawyer fun fact! sometimes you need to sue someone before your insurance will pay for your medical bills (because your insurance would rather the other person pay for your medical bills so they don’t have to)! sometimes you need to sue because what you’d get from insurance isn’t enough to pay for all of your medical bills! sometimes you want to change a specific thing, like a dangerous practice or defective part, and that’s not going to happen if you just ask nicely!
most truly ridiculous lawsuits get screened before they’re even filed (because someone goes to an attorney and that attorney is like “yeah you don’t have a case here”) or very shortly after they’re filed (because judges can toss out cases that have zero merit). 99% of the time, if it sounds ridiculous but somehow it went all the way to someone suing and winning in a jury trial, it probably wasn’t actually as absurd as it sounds.
The beekeeper forgot to insert the frames in the hive in which the bees collect the honey. The hardworking insects then built their own architecture from the honeycomb so that the air can flow freely and maintain a stable temperature.
Creative gardening group post
well see it can do the work of the colon, the semicolon, or the parenthesis with more speed and less formality than any of these, plus you can use it to capture the stream-of-consciousness effect of a comma splice with much less loss of clarity. sort of an all-purpose punctuation for the casual yet elaborate written construct.
it’s important to make sentences as long as possible, because they like to be long. I think short sentences feel bad about themselves.
Watch every Zelink fanartist ignore Link being shorter than Zelda for the second game in a row
Me when I'm in denial
There's something wrong with you people I think
Anonymous asked:
As a fellow trans person, do you by chance have an up to date map of "safe states" in the US? bc as someone who lives in florida and is getting Very Concerned about my health and safety, i can't seem to find any that are more recent, and i don't trust trying to google that shit rn.
As of May 19 2023
accidentally fell into somebody’s chimney
They really said
i love how OP is wailing over being set on fire but manages to remember to close the door behind him when he leaves the house.
hang on . how many clicks does it take to get from the wikipedia page for yaoi to the wikipedia page for gerard way . give me a moment i need to do some investigating
fastest i could get was 9 :( yaoi -> fan labor -> fan fiction -> real person fiction -> celebrity -> list of celebrities -> list of musicians -> list of emo artists -> my chemical romance -> gerard way
i've got a slightly shorter one: yaoi -> manga -> comics -> american comics -> batman -> grant morrison -> gerard way
tumblr: real scientists. real results.™️
Today in niche genres of joke that I can never get enough of and will probably still be secretly thinking about four years later
yeah I've been getting really into metalworking these days
YOU CAN BE FAGGOTED MORE THAN ONCE???
IT'S AN EMBROIDERY STITCH AS WELL
it's fucking everywhere
Our possibilities are endless...
no they aren't
neurotypicals are so funny sometimes. “well, just don’t forget it next time.” holy shit. you’ve done it. you’ve fixed me. who knew memory problems could be solved so simply? i am no longer autistic, i am ready to join you at the social function. by god.
absolutely stellar news for everyone who mentioned adhd in the tags, as that is also what this post is about! why didn’t i mention adhd in the actual post? well that’s a very funny story,
children outside screaming: annoying but ultimately for the greater good. children need Going Outside and Screaming Time for proper emotional development. an auditory burden I am willing to bear
neighbor with his car he made louder on purpose: jail for neighbor. jail for ten thousand years
Going insane this took over 4 and a half hours ??
(Reblogs > likes pls god)
Add “distress” to your pain scale
Pain scale? More like pain in the booty. No two people seem to read it the same way, and chronic folks tend to downplay their pain.
So here’s an idea: when asked to rate your pain, provide a number to rate your distress levels in addition to your pain levels.
Some examples:
“I’m at a 5 on the pain scale, but my distress is basically a 1 because this is my usual.”
“I’m at a 3 on the pain scale, but my distress is a 7 because this is new pain and affects a part of my body that’s very important to my work.”
It’s a great way to consider how your pain is impacting you—and to get a doctor’s attention where it’s actually needed.
OP is a genius
Ingo hears the rumbles of something massive and metal rushing through the underground caves. It sounds somewhat familiar.