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...horses?

Uh pretty sure the cost of ownership of a horse is higher than a car, not to mention the hours per week required to take care of them, space needs, etc. Is there even a subset of people in the US who can't afford a car but can afford a horse?

How can one live rurally without being car dependent?

Horses and small towns can still be walkable

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@jewishpangolin yo if you're ever short on posts for your "are the xtians okay?" tag, uhhh what the fuck? I grew up in an area with a lot of fundamentalists so I've heard some stories but this is a new one.

When I was a kid my family pretended to get raptured so I would think I was left behind on earth while they all went to heaven.

I was like 8 years old and my sister and mom had gotten really into the Left Behind novels (bible fan fic about the rapture). In the books when the rapture happened the clothes that people were wearing when they got raptured were left behind in neatly folded piles.

One day when I was getting home from school my family decided that they would leave piles of neatly folded clothes around the house, and then hide in the basement.

The intended effect was that I would get home and see the clothes then, think that my family had been raptured and that I wasn’t good enough to get into heaven… or something?

The problem was that I had never read these books, and didn’t really think about the rapture very often. There was no reason that I would see some laundry on the floor and think “The rapture happened and I’ve been abandoned by God! I’ll never see my family again!! Oh nooo!!!!”

I just sat down and watched cartoons and eventually my family got bored and revealed that they were all hiding in the basement.

It’s a good thing I didn’t understand the joke, otherwise that shit would have been traumatic.

#religion #come the rapture can i have your car #child abuse tw #comically ineffective attempted child abuse but still #yikes #religious trauma

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spun

Change a single letter and change the word game

I want to play a game with you all.

You have to make a new word by changing only one letter of the last word.

Dirt

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Those problems are not mutually exclusive and both have the same root causes: employers don't want to invest in teaching employees to do highly complex jobs but do want a pool of desperate employees willing to accept horrible wages and working conditions for lower-complexity jobs.

Overinflated apprenticeships satisfy this by gating the relatively small amount of actual training behind a huge amount of shitty underpaid labor that "compensates" employers for the cost of training. Internships and shitty entry level jobs in theory work similarly.

Overinflated qualifications are an attempt to outsource the cost of job training to the educational system and/or your competitors, and also because actual indentured servitude is now generally illegal they serves as psychological warfare against employees to get them to put up with mistreatment: if there are no entry level jobs that entry level candidates are actually "qualified for" it feels like getting any job at all is a miracle and quitting is a scarier prospect. Except now employees also started trying to game the system by not even doing the "train entry level employees / interns to do the complex job" part because it's easier to just poach an employee some other sucker invested in training than to invest in your own employees and motivate them to stay with upward mobility, but when everyone starts doing it you end up with a situation where nobody is actually doing the training part.

Adam Smith in 1776: "There's an obscene amount of waste that goes into the accreditation system for labor. Yeah a clock inventor needs to be a genius, but a clock-maker can learn everything he needs to know in a month tops. Making him serve a 7-year apprenticeship is absurd."

2024 entry-level stem position: Your job duties will be data entry, sample conciliation, and glassware cleaning. Read sample labels and enter appropriate data into this database with a UI that only runs on Windows 94. You will not be permitted to manipulate samples or testing procedures beyond what is necessary for rote data entry. 9th-grade reading comprehension preferred but not required. Pay is $11.50 per hour, non-negotiable. Shifts are in 12-hour increments, non-negotiable. REQUIRED: Bachelors of Science in chemistry or related field, Masters preferred, 3 years lab experience or 2 years lab instruction+2 years field work.

#corporate dystopia

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From what I've seen of Game Changer, it's basically Whose Line Is It Anyway but:

The points still don't matter except to Brennan but they're slightly more systematized.

The host gets to troll the contestants too instead of just the other way around.

from what i understand from seeing tumblr posts about it, game changer is a show where a man locks game show contestants in some sort of chamber and psychologically tortures them like some sort of evil wizard. also i think he's a ceo?

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Really spicy take but if you want to actually be serious about getting residents of the USA to use an English demonym other than "American," I think "Murican" unironically has a better chance of getting traction outside the Extremely Online Progressive Discourse Bubble than most of the alternatives proposed like "USAmerican" or "Unitedstatesian" or "USAian."

Like, this is the country that practically turned Yankee Doodle into our second national anthem, you can absolutely get the Murican public on board with making fun of ourselves if it's not in a mean spirited way, and "only say the whole word if you're talking about the whole continent" is kind of a catchy mnemonic.

#discourse

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this may be the greatest thing in history, or at least this month

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#rain world #survivor (rain world) #monk (rain world) #slugcat #other people's art #cute

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Top 10 ways I Would Improve the US Government

1: I'm not a fan of complete Athenian style direct democracy but I think in the Senate each state should have one seat that's elected and one that's chosen by lottery.

2: The Speaker of the House has to dress up like Uncle Sam during proceedings. Yes including the stilts. We'll give them a 10 foot high podium. This ought to thin out the incumbents on their 6th or 7th term a little.

3: Instead of giving all the surplus armored vehicles the military doesn't want to the cops and horrible four letter federal agencies, give them to the USPS with the condition that they aren't allowed to use them in enforcement of mail fraud. I just want the comedy factor of guys delivering packages out of the back of a Stryker or whatever.

4: We should have a 4th branch of government formed from committees of random assholes pulled off the street, who we will drag from their somewhat tolerable lives and impound in a stuffy building with expensive parking, where we'll pay them sub-poverty wages and give them the power of life and death over other citizens what do you mean I just reinvented the jury system? Jesus Christ it's so hard to come up with an original idea these days, everything's already been done.

5: Okay new idea: if you get every single number wrong in the lottery ten consecutive times you get Jury Duty.

6: We'll reshuffle the acronyms of the 3 letter administrations to freshen things up. For example the DEA will now be the Department of Educational Achievement, and the FBI will be the Federal Borders and Immigration agency.

7: Repaint the White House red or blue depending on what party has the presidency. It should only be white when we elect a 3rd party candidate or independent.

8: Add a third chamber to the legislature. This will have 2 seats per state like the Senate, except the top 10 and bottom 10 states by population get a bonus seat and so do the top and bottom 10 by land area. Members are elected every 4 years, in midterm years only to make people pay attention to them.

9: Every 10 years each state has the option to adopt out one of its counties to another state that doesn't border it for purposes of highway funding.

10: End Gerrymandering by making all the congressional districts evenly spaced North-South bands. Bar code district maps for everyone.

#shitpost #politics #us politics

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In an era where our daily lives are increasingly plagued by Gadgets, Gizmos, and Devices, the humble garbage disposal represents one of the last true Contraptions. You're telling me I have a forbidden switch next to the kitchen light that turns on a noisy spinning vegetable shredder underneath the sink? What is this chitty chitty bang bang ass invention?

#shitpost #lets do the fork in the garbage disposal #DINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDING

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I'm a fan of the approach of taking inspiration from really long conflicts in real history where really the vast majority of the time the conflict is really low intensity or nonexistent and there may have been significant changes in the political entities involved but it's being classified as one war for various reasons. Most of the time the belligerents are "at war" the same way we're in an ice age.

"Various reasons" may include:

The war has restarted many times for reasons that aren't really all that related but the belligerents have refused to ever sign a peace treaty and the periods of peace are regarded as "temporary ceasefires" even if they sometimes last for multiple generations.

The belligerents are mostly not even the same, it's just classified as a single war because the conflicts are being driven by the same immortal beings in a longstanding feud who keep dragging others into their proxy wars.

The belligerents aren't really the same political entities and have gone through numerous regime changes and occasional breakups and amalgamations, but they keep fighting over the same land over and over again, so it's classified as one really long war.

The belligerents aren't the same on one side: the war is actually one aggressive empire repeatedly invading other polities as it expands for hundreds of years: the combatants on the other side aren't really connected to each other besides existing in the same general area that got absorbed into the empire. May be classified as a single war by historians seeing the smaller absorbed polities as interchangeable figures in the history of [glorious empire], or alternately be classified as one war to promote a sense of national unity among the parties conquered by [evil empire].

Classified as one war by historians who are really separated from the conflict by time, distance, or not thinking the conflicts are important enough to make distinctions between them. (e.g. will people thousands of years from now still see WWI and WWII as truly separate, or as part of the tail end of Europe's "Warring Intercontinental Empires Period"?)

A "civil war" that has lasted generations because of ongoing oppression and/or armed resistance by a minority or separatist region in a long-lived, stable state.

Logistical constraints naturally cause the "war" to be really long. E.g. it's a hard sci fi setting and two civilizations are trading tit for tat potshots at each other with relativistic missiles/bombers. By the time one fleet reaches its target hundreds of years later so much history has gone by that they've almost forgotten the conflict until their planet gets bombed, then the generational trauma fuels the construction of a new fleet to retaliate but the will to fight dies off after a couple generations and the "send a second fleet to finish the job" projects get cancelled. They've technically been at war for over a thousand years even if the cycle has only repeated a few times.

(even then, like... wars lasting hundreds of years may be plausible, war lasting thousands of years is really, really pushing it)

Most sci fi/fantasy: this civil war has been waged for a thousand years. These great houses have ruled the realm for eight thousand years. These two families have been feuding for ten thousand years. This single political institution has stood for twenty-five thousand years.

Animorphs: there is a war waged across the galaxy, waged by countless species. Entire planets have been conquered, entire species have been enslaved. Multiple genocides have been committed, even by the "good guys." It's been going on about, oh, thirty-two years now.

#writing meta

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Mormons as in the infamously racist, misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic borderline cult that has "black people and native americans have dark skin because God is punishing them and they'll turn white when their souls are redeemed" or something along those lines, as well as "The Jews killed Jesus" blood libel, in their actual doctrine? You mean those Mormons?

Yeah uh I think Mormonism is pretty much Exhibit A of why religions making up "ideologically satisfying" pseudohistory is bad. They usually present a false narrative about other people's history. Even just "Jesus went to North America" is presumably kind of politically loaded with shit like Manifest Destiny.

General reminder to the pagans out there:

Making a supreme goddess figure part of your spirituality? Great! Worshiping a mother goddess? Wonderful! If that brings joy and meaning into your life, excellent!

"Once upon a time long ago, people all worshiped a great goddess until THE PATRIARCHY conspired to overthrow her and replace her with a CRUEL PATRIARCHAL GOD" - that's pseudohistory and conspiracism; there's literally no evidence for it whatsoever, and it can and does drag people down the new age to alt right pipeline.

#discourse #mormonism #religion

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#discourse #dandelions #people getting really mad on the internet #this is directed at the 'Lawnpilled Coloniser' post not at Prev just to be clear

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fascinating to me how quickly we forget that the cycles repeat. people treating 5-15 year olds like this breed of superchild created to do evil and taint the world. that was all of us. "they're wrecking sephoras" you would not survive a 2015 hot topic with this mindset. "they're falling for the stanley cup thing" buying on trend overly robust camping gear for every day use is like. a middle class tradition in this country. our glorious kånken backpack vs their wicked stanley cup.

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Why rickrolling is problematic

The post got a bit long so I put it under a readmore. This is important, please read

Keep reading

#important psa #don't just scroll past read the whole thing #discourse

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I’ve developed a new obsession with

And it’s with Rain World

#rain world #slugcat #scug #Survivor (rain world) #angy #other people's art