UPS has reached an agreement with the Teamsters union to equip its iconic brown delivery trucks with air conditioning for the first time for new units.

The agreement, announced by UPS on Tuesday, comes as the delivery giant and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters negotiate the terms of a new contract for more than 330,000 U.S. employees. (source)

Unions work, unionize.

They only just now got air conditioners?!?!?!

Yeah it’s a huge win. Those trucks are death traps on a good day. A bunch of drivers died and more got severely ill last year from heat stroke. The temperature in the back of those vans is usually 10 degrees hotter than outside. It’s terrible, and I’m so proud of my union for how harshly they’re negotiating right now. We’ve got a bunch of smaller consessions already but this one was big.

This round of negotiations is difficult. The UPS Overlords are trying very hard to keep their billions of dollars in three pockets instead of spreading the wealth we (the workers) earned for them during the pandemic’s influx of home delivery. They’re trying to give us as little as possible and spinning the news articles to make it look like they’re super generous. Meanwhile almost everyone in my warehouse is on food stamps cuz we aren’t paid shit.

The UPS Teamsters Union are currently voting on whether or not to go on strike in August, so prepare for that. Stock up on essential supplies, just in case. We’ll let everyone know how to support us when the time comes.

This job is my first time being part of a union and I never wanna go back to not having one. It’s amazing to have so much fighting power.

capitalism will work it's people to death if it is legally allowed to do so it's good to see unions fighting back against that

jsyk, USPS trucks don't tend to have air conditioning, either.

nor do they have airbags.

This is how you cover up a pandemic

So weirdly when I do a web search for "covid saliva test cost" I get a lot of articles saying "the new saliva test will cost only $5" but if I actually try to shop for it, all the results are in the price range stated in this video.

@milf-adjacent nailed it: this is how you cover up a pandemic. The Powers That Be don't want to find COVID any more. They want the narrative to be that COVID is gone. That's why they're shutting down various kinds of monitoring, reporting, etc. as fast as they can. And it's why reliable tests are so unavailable.

Not so fun fact: my mother died with COVID last month. We'll probably never know for sure if she died from COVID (its presence was discovered post mortem) but also no other explanation presents itself. No sign of infection, or any other issue except for the ones she has been successfully living with for years. If not COVID, then what?

Contrary to what all the deniers say, it is not true that every death with COVID is counted as a death from COVID to inflate the seriousness of the pandemic. It was never true. The exact opposite happened for my mother. There's no mention of COVID on her death certificate, even though it's medically the most likely cause by far, because hospitals and nursing homes and rehab centers get politically motivated pushback from the agencies that are supposed to collect such statistics. "When in doubt, throw it out" has become their mantra. The funeral director, bless her heart, did mention it on her part of the paperwork because she felt it was important, but then they're not subject to the same pressure.

And don't even get me started on this "comorbidity" bullshit. So what if COVID was merely "the last straw" for someone whose health was already poor? It would still be the proximate cause. It still caused a death that would not have occurred, as surely as if a stray bullet killed somebody who already had heart problems. People who didn't even know the word before 2020 - and still don't really know what it means - just use that as a dogwhistle for "if they're not like me their lives don't matter".

So yeah, they are twisting the narrative. I really feel for this young woman, whose anguish is so apparent in her voice as she tells her story. There is no reason for her or anyone else to be living with this kind of uncertainty, except that continuing to acknowledge COVID might hurt "the economy" - by which rich folks and politicians mean the world's largest casinostock market and not the actual economy that most people live in.

Oh thank fuck, someone with the know how to make videos finally said it !

Spread this ticktock far and wide, people. Share it in every single one of your gardening groups. Share it everywhere.

Baker Creek, aka "rareseeds" are racist as fuck, ableist, anti-science, fear-mongering scam artists.

There's so many more things I could say here. But I'll just sum it up with this:

Any seed you find on Baker Creeks website I can pretty much guarantee they're on Seed Savers Exchange (aka Seedsavers . org) , Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Kitazawa Seeds, and the million other seed companies out there.

Heck, you can probably go onto Etsy and directly support small gardeners who save their own seeds from what they originally bought and grew!

Yeah, Baker Creek has pretty seed packets, and yeah, they throw in a random extra packet with each order -- but is supporting a racist, fear-mongering, anti-science profiteering company worth it?

If you've already placed an order with these people, don't go throwing your packets away-- Plant them. Grow them out, and share those seeds, and a warning about where they originally came from, and tell them how to save those seeds so that no one makes the mistake of buying from this company again.

*( You are literally never going to be able to accidentally buy GMO seeds. This is not something you can do by accident. You need to sign a million contracts first and buy a commerical-scale amount of seeds. And also there's only like. 10 or less "kinds" of GMO crops in the USA you're not going to run across GMO Goji berries or tomatoes or peppers or lettuce or what-have-you.

You do not need to be paying out the wazoo for "always GMO free!!!!" Labels; literally every single seed packet you buy is GMO free unless you've already jumped through all the legal hoops to get your hands on a farm's worth of corn or sugar beet seeds. And no, you can't accidentally save GMO seeds from storebought produce, they're not ever going to be sold in a form you can save seeds from-- how else would corporations control their patent if any random person in the world could save the seeds?)

This does not surprise me at all.

I'm sure you all remember the Doomsday Prepping Boom of the 2010's on account of Zombies got super popular. Well... that was a Boom, not the beginning.

As someone whose extended family has been what is now called Prepping before I was born I can tell you exactly the sort of person who's been doing that. They're sweet little old ladies who suddenly send out an e-mail to all the women in the family about how you shouldn't date black men.

Why are they Prepping? Prophet foresaw the end of the world. It'll be any day now.

Meanwhile, another segment of the family are all-natural hippies who just want to garden so they can control what's going in their bodies. Because the skillsets overlap.

There is a thin line between "wants to live more in tune with nature" and "Religious nutjob who thinks the world is ending."

the homesteading and permaculture communities are rife with issues. its an absolute shitshow. glad to see awareness being raised about baker creek.

hey friends.

I want ya’ll to be aware of a situation going down in Tampa.

5 student activists facing up to 10 years in prison on bogus charges.

the fascists are seeking to build their capacity to crush dissent. we cannot allow them to do this unchallenged.

please read about all this and get involved. and reblog!! repost if you want too.

here’s the carrd for the organization these students are part of, the Tampa Bay Students for a Democratic Society: https://tampabaysds.carrd.co/

please get in the know on this one. there needs to be civilian pressure on this case. if people can be beaten, choked and groped by police and threatened with jail for up to 10 years for carrying signs and chanting against the reactionary policies of Ron DeSantis, it’s gona get bad very quick.

we all know Florida is the testing ground by which the most reactionary and fascist members of the American ruling class are amping up their capacity of repression.

if they aren’t beaten back right here, they will go for your towns and cities, your schools and universities, your local government and eventually the whole of the country.

they cannot be allowed to win this one.

Link to the gay porn library of Alexandria.

Happy pride.

There was an arrest across the street from my place in Oakland one day – three cop cars with a bullhorn and guns out – and before I could even get out the gate there were a couple people posted up and one of them was filming and another one was narrating in a calm but very loud voice, just

“HE IS COOPERATING! HIS HANDS ARE EMPTY! HE IS DOING WHAT HE IS TOLD TO DO! HE IS HOLDING STILL! HIS HANDS ARE EMPTY! HE IS NOT BEING THREATENING! HE HAS PUT HIS HANDS BEHIND HIS HEAD AS ASKED! HE IS NOT RESISTING!”

and that was something I hadn’t thought to do before. It certainly let the cops know what the narrative of eye witnesses was going to be. 

I especially liked “his hands are empty” because this statement would still be true and a witnessed reason the police should not become violent even if it turned out he had a weapon on his person somewhere.

I see people in NYC stop and record a lot. Even if they are just being nosey, that’s still witnesses if shit goes down.

We must be vigilant.  The New Solidarity.  You might just save a fellow human being.

If you don’t feel comfortable with doing the narrating thing (which really is quite clever), even just standing around and blatantly staring actually legit helps immensely.

There are studies that show that even an image of someone looking can be effective to change people’s behaviours.

Sidenote: If you see a cop stopping an Indigenous person, the same protocol applies.

I did this in a parking lot when I saw a group of Black men and teens being harassed by a cop. Stayed in my car, but whipped out my phone and started to record, pointing out via narrative when I could hear the cop contradicting himself and changing his story. At the eight-minute mark, when I knew he was past the reasonable-stop guideline time (thanks, legal tips side of tumblr!), I flipped on my dome light.

Fam, what happened next was INCREDIBLE.

The cop had been gesturing in a wild way, almost flailing, like he was actively trying to get these guys agitated. He saw my dome light, saw a white face with a phone, and suddenly his hands came to rest on his vest. Within 90 seconds he’d packed his shit up and gone.

The most outspoken gentleman in the group came up to me and went “whatchu doing in there?” So I straight-up told him “it looked like you were being harassed, so I was recording.” The whole group recognized someone who was on their side, and started venting about the shit that had just gone down.

Turns out the asshole had had them stopped for a good five minutes before I pulled in. That means they were stopped, with no probable cause and a cop changing his story no fewer than three times, for AT LEAST THIRTEEN MINUTES. While chatting in a parking lot. One car had pulled in next to another that turned out to belong to one of his buddies and they were just shooting the shit when Officer Bacon came by.

Want to know the kicker here? One of the cop’s stories was that a group “matching their description” had been reported by the grocery store security guy for shoplifting. Black man, red shirt with a sports logo, jeans. Know what this convenient report didn’t mention?

HIS HEIGHT.

This guy was, without exaggeration, at least 6’10”. I assure you any report of him would have mentioned his height FIRST. And you’d best believe I pointed that out in my narration.

Cops WILL try shit. You CAN stop them. I did it and it was as simple as having some patience and a camera.

Same for muslims!

Look out for your fellow marginalized people!

Honestly, this applies to everyone. It’s a higher priority for the aforementioned groups, but nobody is safe around the police. The police are the enemy.

We Take Care of Each Other.

Huh. You build an entire website almost entirely from UNPAID VOLUNTEER LABOR, then you try to make those UNPAID UNPAID VOLUNTEER LABORERS pay you for the "privilege" of using the tools necessary to perform that UNPAID VOLUNTEER LABOR, frankly, you deserve to have your UNPAID VOLUNTEER LABOR WEBSITE fall apart.

to all the people coming here from reddit: i'm sorry your website is getting tanked by such a complete asshole of a person

"Do not eat bread while another stands by, without extending your hand to him. There is always bread: people do not last for ever."

Fortieth maxim of "The Teachings of Ani" from "Writings from Ancient Egypt" by Toby Wilkinson

Anything can be a kink for somebody

And anything can be a trigger for somebody

“This triggers me so it’s disgusting that you’d like it” is an entirely unreasonable statement as is “but this is fun and makes me happy so it can’t trigger you”

A specific incident didn’t prompt this post, im just thinking about a lot of folks who get upset over some kinks, including ones I have, but themselves are, like, vocally enthusiastic to something that terrifies me for trauma reasons. Like, neither of us are actually hurting anyone but apparently one of us is a nasty freak and also needs therapy but the other one doesn’t and it’s usually me who gets branded as broken purely cause the other person fails to recognize that there’s no such thing as having the Right kinks and the Reasonable triggers. It’s an insufferable double standard that annoys me.

THIS.

“they're triggers not because of what they are, but the circumstances in which I experienced them. folks have got to accept that neutral things and even good things can become bad in the right circumstances. you lost something that other people get to keep. that doesn't mean you try to take them from other people too. figure out how to get it back or accept the loss. it's not actually someone else's problem”

I can’t abide the words “g**d g*rl” — that’s my baggage. Doesn’t mean you can’t praise your dog or daughter. Doesn’t make your praise kink gross. All that means is we use other words in my house and I have some chill coping strategies when that kind of thing sneaks up on me in the wild.

Welcome to tumblr's own AITA!

Asks are open and anon is on. Please submit your own stories to be judged by the court of tumblr! Each story will come with a poll, judgements are as follows:

YTA=You're the asshole NTA=Not the asshole (the other party is) JAH=Justified asshole NAH=No assholes here (everyone is some level of justified) ESH=Everyone sucks here (you're all assholes) INFO=Not enough information to judge

this is an incredible summary of what’s actually happening on reddit in case you don’t know

ten years of fighting and when shit hits the fan tumblr instantly has reddit’s back. the greatest enemies to lovers story ever told.

you understand

Oops, my hand slipped–

humanizations of websites have returned. nature is healing, capitalism is the virus

THE FANART

New York City just passed a rare hard trans sanctuary city order declaring New York City a transgender sanctuary city.

NYC will use NO resources to cooperate with out of state subpoenas or extraditions for those providing or obtaining gender affirming care.

Deep in the article, there’s this nugget:

When people say “fuck u/spez,” this is Spez. I do not have the sort of imagination that can readily convert the way Reddit communities currently work to “businesses.”

This sounds like making Tumblr the new PDF

With the power of cryptocurrency, you too can invest in r/overwatchfeet

the fact that they're wanting to make it where reddit itself can remove mods just makes me think they want to, essentially, take away users right to protest. how american of them.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada, @abpoli

There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”, and while I believe that creators should hold some level of responsibility to look out for potential unfortunate optics on their work, intentional or not, I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writers – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people. 

A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.

Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.    

Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast  – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.                          

That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?

It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.      

And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.                            

I’ve had people fuss at me for writing sassy effeminate gay men.

My bff in college was a sassy effeminate gay man. I write them being cool because of someone I love and miss who was very goddamn cool, thank you very much.

If you avoid stereotypes, you create obligations. “No effeminate gay men” means compulsory masculinity for them, and no representation for the ones that actually exist. “No angry black women” = black women not allowed anger. “No bury your gays, no dead women that’s fridging” or the like limits one’s ability to genderswap characters or put a same-sex romance into a story if the character in question is dying. “No queerbaiting or anything that can be accused of it” means bisexual characters can’t end up with the opposite-sex love interest if there’s a same-sex one around.

Obligations are a shitty thing to do to a story, and even worse to do to actual living people.

The real solution is more stories with more representation so the stereotype-hitting ones are a fraction of the total message, but also, well-rounded characters whose stories are built to showcase them as real whole people whose coincidence with a stereotype is only a part of them, should not be thrown out with the bathwater, so to speak.

The opposite of stereotyping is not puritanical avoidance of stereotypes. The opposite of stereotyping is complexity.

The opposite of stereotyping is complexity.