Tumblr isn't social media, it's a habit. Like smoking. We're all gathering by the dumpster in the cold, reblogging posts.
The 23rd of January was meant to be another strike day at the Ministry of Justice. Just like the day before, an anti-strike workforce of cleaners, receptionists and security guards had been brought in to keep the building running. Early in the morning, Purma and the other strikers turned up to form a picket line. But then, all at once, they walked inside to do their jobs like normal. Rather than continuing the protest, the workers had secretly coordinated to go back to work a day early.
The unexpected non-strike meant that all the outsourced staff turned up for work and needed to get paid, and so did the anti-strike scab workforce. Someone was going to have to pay a double wage bill.
–
Deliveroo and UberEats riders, however, are masters of the mindfuck. Because they’re technically self-employed, the laws on strike action and trade unions don’t apply to them. That means that the slow bureaucracy of postal ballots and turnout thresholds designed to prevent workers from taking collective action goes out the window. Instead, these workers can just do what makes sense to them. The result has been an explosion in militancy, as the platforms try to cut their workers’ already-low wages. Strikes are now breaking out every couple of weeks with little or no prior notice. They’re organised through complex networks of encrypted messenger chats which are completely invisible to platform bosses, meaning that all their standard management techniques need to be rewritten.
Remind them that the alternatives to them treating us fairly at the negotiating table is Open Goddamn War
Love seeing little pawprints. So fucking magical. There was a little guy here.
there was a little guy at the place where they made my grandma’s floor tiles
there was a little
guy at the place where they made
my grandma’s floor tiles
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
personally i think there should have been at least one episode where sokka collects aang and zuko and is like, “looks like we’re running low on supplies. time for a GUYS-ONLY field trip. three days of hunting and fishing and polishing our swords. y’know, manly warrior stuff. (aang, sotto voce: actually sokka i’m a vegetarian as you know–) you girls have fun sitting around braiding your hair and talking about your crushes” and then the entire episode is just zuko and sokka lying around by a river, plucking blades of grass and staring up at the stars confiding in each other their deepest feelings and most secret insecurities while aang braids flower crowns, and whenever the screen cuts back to katara and toph and suki, they’re fighting and screaming and hacking away at river pirates and evil spirits and legions of assassins and hired mercenaries with swords. you know, as girls do.
and when the boys finally drag themselves back to camp (they stayed up way too late discussing what true leadership really means and whether or not power always corrupts) they find suki and toph and katara lounging around with black eyes and fresh bruises and bloodstained weapons and sokka shrieks, “what were you guys DOING while we were gone???” and karata just shugs innocently and says in her sweetest voice, “oh, you know. just girly things”
they are absolutely still wearing the crowns and they don’t have a single fish to show for their efforts
My favorite response to “that’s not a word” is “then why do you know what it means?”
okay now i can kind of understand why people were freaking out about that train motion picture in like the late 1800s
I had no idea the Pied Piper is probably based on a true story. 800 years ago some guy stole 130 children and they never found them.
I thought the moral of the story was “pay exterminators or they might exterminate your babies next” but it is in fact “this happened and it was truly really very fucked up”
Murphy, a rescued bald eagle who is known for fiercely protecting a rock he considers his egg, will be getting the opportunity to become a father to an orphaned chick ❤️
Previously Murphy was the eagle known for:
[id: first image is a screenshot of a facebook post from World Bird Sanctuary. It has three picture of an adult bald eagle’s face, a bald eagle chick sitting in a plastic tub, and a human holding a small wood and wire cage with the chick in it. text reads:
Here’s the Murphy update you’ve all been waiting for…Murphy will be given a chance this week to bond with the eaglet we received last week.
Step one will be placing the chick in Murphy’s enclosure during the day (with a warmer) within the small cage shown by Kylee here, so we can see how Murphy reacts to the chick without having full access - just in case the reaction is negative. We affectionately call this the Baby Jail.
We will not be able to give you constant photo updates since we don’t want to disturb the process at all.
Keep your talons crossed!
the second and third images are an adult bald eagle lying contentedly in the grass in the back of an enclosure and a close-up of a sign on the enclosure that says, “Is that Eagle hurt?! If you see an eagle lying down in the back left corner under a perch, that’s Murphy! Murphy is not hurt, sick, or otherwise in distress. He has built a nest on the ground, and is very carefully incubating a rock! We wish him the best of luck!” end id]
UPDATE: Murphy seems to be interested in the chick! A post on 4/11/23 said:
The eaglet (inside the baby jail) was introduced to Murphy’s new enclosure last week, and Murphy has displayed the behavior we were looking for. He has responded to the peeps of the baby, and begun protecting the area.
They plan to take the baby out of its cage this week and let it and Murphy have full contact!
Their post outlined the full story (and I will add it under the cut because it is long) but I think my favorite part is that Murphy was actually housed in an enclosure with multiple females and had no interest in mating. He just decided to be a dad, made a nest, and started “defending” his rock egg by attacking the other eagles when they got too close. King shit.
Full post from World Bird Sanctuary under the cut:
#CHECKED THE FB!!! THE LATEST UPDATE IS MURPHY FED THE BABY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AAAA#sobbing (via @skyteglad )
YOU’RE RIGHT! :D
[id: An adult bald eagle perches on a the edge of a shallow wooden nesting box and looks down at an eaglet. end id]
[id: The eagle and eaglet stand beside one another right outside of the nest box. the eaglet eagerly extends its head up and opens its mouth at the adult. end id]
They’re asking for donations to help fund feeding this little family on their fb page. I’m so happy for Murphy and his new baby!
Being followed by all the questionable bots when you’re ridiculously asexual just feels like
Anyone else have that thing where you get stressed out when someone else is in a bad mood because now it's your responsibility to make them feel better, but if you're in a bad mood and someone tries to cheer you up you get stressed out because now it's your responsibility to pretend that it's helping to make them feel better.
Oh so this is probably a trauma thing too. Bitches have one terrible childhood and then make it their whole personality. I'm bitches.
It's one o' them days, folks.
I told my doc that some days I wonder if I’ve even taken my pills. His response was to ask if I have a pill box. Which, was just such a fair cop for an ADHDer 😆. Like, cool, no worries, just one thing first - did … you take them? 😆
What i hate so much is that the pill sorter (weekly) actually works for me. I hate that it works. I hate it. But I had to:
Get one that is a garish unlosable rainbow color
Find a place to store it where I would notice it repeatedly right when I wake up and go to sleep
Find a place near the pill box to store my big bottles of pills
Remember to refill it weekly
Remember to put the big bottles of pills back where they go weekly
Remember that have water and a snack near where I store the pill box
Not lose either the box or the pills
Remember to take my meds daily
Remember to put the pill box back where it goes daily
More steps that i probably forgot due to having an executive function disorder.
Fam, it has taken over three years to get this system up and running consistently and I still have hiccups with it as an adult woman.
im so done with seeing articles about kids and screen time that doesnt mention parent behaviors even once. “kids are always on their phones” so are the parents! which the kids look to for how they should behave! ipad babies didn’t chose to only play on their ipads, thats what their parents gave them!
an anecdotal example: when i was a kid, all my parents would do in their minimal free time was watch tv and then they would be surprised when in my sister and i’s minimal free time we would also only watch tv/play video games. they scolded us for not reading books, but they never read books. they scolded us for not going outside but they never went outside.
“kids are always on their damn phones” my mom is in her 60s and opens up candy crush anytime she’s sitting — it isnt just the kids
the idea that your friends won't like you if you're too weird is wrong you just need better friends for example one time I told a friend whenever I was losing my mind I laid down on the floor under my desk and stared at it until I was better and next time she visited me she taped a bag of salami snacks to the underside of my desk with a message saying "going insane all by yourself, handsome?" which I only saw months later when I had a breakdown. that's friendship.
tumblr might enjoy this one. humans are cognitively incapable of properly conceptualizing big numbers so it’s important to find other ways to think about just how much money the wealthy have.
And people will point out: most of this money is fake. It’s theoretical. It’s an idea of how much their investments are worth and it can vanish over night because of ‘the market’. They’re not stockpiling an actual valuable resource somewhere, a kind of vault that we could break into to take their wealth.
But because they have this vast imagined wealth, they can decide which resources are gathered and created, how they are used and how they are distributed. They can decide that we need to build a private jet and not a new clean energy plant. They can decide who gets drinking water.
So when you’re talking about taking that wealth, you’re talking about taking all that power.
So much of richness is credit. When a person or business earns a lot of money, they can ask someone else “Hey can I borrow more money? As you can see I’ve earned a lot of money, so you know if you give me some of your money to use, I’ll make even MORE money for the both of us” And then they’ll use that money to make a business or do something that will make some more money. But 1/3rd of the total money they use is now credit, it’s borrowed from someone else.
And then someone else will be like “can I borrow your money so I can make more money?” And they go “sure!” But then they pretend like they already earned the money back from the person that borrowed from them. This means that 2/5ths of their money is hypothetical, it’s credit, it’s just pretend.
Companies will do this over and over until one day one of the attempts to earn money doesn’t go well. They then have to pay their real money to fix the problems that causes. Until eventually people realize that one of the companies who borrowed money isn’t worth having credit, but all the other companies have credit with them. So because one company went broke, a whole bunch of companies now have a lot less money to use. Now imagine those companies are banking companies.
What we have just described is the Great Depression.
What stops that from happening now is any time it happens, a company will go to the government and say “I don’t have any real money, but if my business collapses it will drag down the entire economy and ruin the country again. Instead of that can I borrow some money?” And the government will go “well…I guess…” and the company will go “yay!” And the cycle continues.
the problem with capitalism is not “commerce” - a system of trade where money is a placeholder. Lots of people think they’re interchangeable, but they aren’t - commerce is an ancient, pleasant and practical facet of life that simplifies trade.
The problem with capitalism is that it relies very much on the “imaginary” money (which is then used to recreate feudal relationships.) the imaginary money is then held in systems so that the money itself makes more money than any human can. A sufficiently large pile of money, generating interest, easily earns a greater wage than a human working every hour of their biological life.
By divorcing money from meaning and creating a game of amassing money, you create a game whose endpoints and values and outcomes can only point to “using up the world as quickly as possible.”
Money is great & good & interesting but you can’t give it a prime place in the economy above human interests.
Reminder that capitalism is the death of art
are you whiny bitches seriously acting like faster and more affordable and more accessible translation is bad? it’s a bad thing? it’s a thing we should be against now? is that seriously where we’ve arrived? can you people think for ten fucking seconds just ONCE?
machine translation is really good for many languages - esp the romance ones - and while its not perfect or anything, like.. i don’t know how to tell you it’s a good thing we’re able to instantly speak to people, 80% accurately, from anywhere in the world
I went through the notes on this post specifically to find this reply - or one like it. Because it has a point, and it’s a decent point for you, the person. But it’s also missing the info of the larger scale problem.
(Or it isn’t; as you rightly point out in the tags, it’s a capitalism problem. But I’ll expand on this point of “capitalism”. I need to rant. I need to scream.)
I’m a professional translator. I work in video games and software, with an occasional dash of literary translation. I’ve worked in translation proper, I’ve worked on editing other people’s work, I’ve led a couple of translator teams. I’ve worked the occasional miracle, working around some Really Dumb Choices the developers made.
(Spoiler alert: other languages have different syntax and grammar, if you give me a list of nouns to translate, and then give me the plural “s” to translate separately, this is not good. Even in English, woman -> womans is dumb.)
I am a fan of making things affordable and accessible. I am really happy that Google Translate and similar things can tell me the gist of what people are saying in conversations I only half care about. As the poster above says, it’s great! Not perfect, but ok!
Do you know what’s not great? Do you know what the OP in the original image means?
The client the original image is talking about isn’t you. It’s not some person on the internet trying to find out what someone said in a Post. The client they’re talking about is, essentially, the corporation: the translation agency, the publishing house, the IT giant.
You, the individual, do not have the power to demand how I do my job. If you come to me and say, “Sarshi, I want you to take this 300-word post, run it through Google Translate, and then charge me half of what you usually do for translating it”, I can take it or leave it.
But I get contacted by agencies - half of them want this. “We have a game, Sarshi! Just post-edit the results of a machine translation!” “We have support articles, Sarshi! We’re paying you a lot less to post-edit the results of machine translation!”
You say it’s ok to have 80% accuracy, and I feel you! Yes, sometimes it is! But companies are like “lol, this works”, too!
It’s happening over and over. And these aren’t… they’re not people, you know? They’re not Auntie May trying to figure out what the dough recipe she got from her niece in Indonesia says. They’re agencies, trying to increase their earnings by promising top quality to companies, then going, “gosh, we said we’d do it for cheap, how can we manage that?”
Or they can even be large companies themselves. Oh, you’ve spent a bajillion trillion dollars trying to create the CryptoNFTVirtualRealityAI hybrid that everybody knew wouldn’t work and now you panic because your earnings are lower than usual? Oh, and you want to “cut costs” by screwing over every contractor you have? Great. Just great.
This is going to screw you over - you, the individual. Not my client, not the translator’s client in general - the company’s client. The corporation is too big to really care about how you feel about their product - the employees individually might, but the company’s only metric is if you buy it or not. And the company makes decisions based on what brings the most money for the least cost.
So your hardware manuals might be crap and you might be in tears because you have no idea how to make your new appliance do the thing. You’ll go on YouTube and you’ll find a solution, and you’ll eventually figure it out. And maybe you’ll forget about the crap manual in time. So next time, they still won’t get a good translator, because they already have a cheaper solution that seems to work.
So your game looks like it was translated by a bunch of rats in a bunker and you can barely understand what anyone’s saying? Well, maybe they got a bottom-feeding agency overpromise that they totally have legit translators working for $1/hour. Pinky swear! Did you buy the game? You did. So… the system worked! They’ll hire the same agency again!
It’s like the clothing industry all over again. We could have better clothes, but it’s cheaper not to. They’re doing us a service by selling us shoes that won’t last a season, and T-shirts that will look like crap after washing them twice - they’re cheap, aren’t they? They’re affordable. Anyone can get clothes. (So you pay more in time are are more frustrated? Who’s counting!)
And meanwhile, it’s easy to forget things might be different. That we have the ability to create good things, pleasant things. That manuals can be easily readable, that games can sound great, that books can be awesome to read. It becomes harder to trust the market, harder to believe in quality, easier to say that this is normal, this is how things just are.
And if you speak English natively, well… You’re at a huge advantage. A lot of stuff is created by your people, for you. For countries like mine, that are small enough to import a lot, nearly everything is translated. I want you to imagine almost all movies subbed, every appliance made elsewhere (with menus needing translated and all), every app in a foreign language. And everybody who can cut costs will try to.
It’s not… it’s not great.
#excellent breakdown #i promise no translator worth anything is against individual people being able to use mt to understand texts and communicate #i’m a translator and i’m a big fan of machine translation in my everyday life but it should not be used commercially #machine translation in commercial products is at worst a health and safety risk #but NOBODY who actually understands the matter is saying that mt shouldn’t exist. for fuck’s sake
via @nailgun-nali
My husband and I developed a theory so please play along and tell me where you are in birth order (oldest, middle, youngest, only) and if you think having siblings is overall a positive or negative thing.
#I have been#oldest#only#and#middle#at various points#having siblings is a mixed bag and largely depends on your family dynamic#in my case it fucking sucked because I didn't have siblings I had responsibilities akin to raising them myself#and parentification is abuse#but I think if your parents don't suck and your siblings don't suck which is usually a byproduct of parenting#having siblings is a good thing built in support network learning to share etc#but if your parents or siblings suck it ruins the whole thing
