People are weird. But also, as an old, the influencer economy is so funny to me. Either they’re accepting money/gifts/promotion to “influence” on behalf products, in which case they are just going to stop taking the money? Or they’re editorially pure and they’re just going to stop supporting a product they have previously genuinely endorsed because more people can enjoy it? It’s all dumb.
I hate it in movies when the crime boss just casually executes a henchman for, like, giving him cold coffee because I always thought, “Why would you work for this guy when you know he’ll just murder you for no reason whenever he feels like it? So unrealistic!” But I guess it’s not!
I love the line about "we have 30 tools for [preventing this thing that keeps happening from happening] ". It’s marketing-speak all the way down. Like, wow! Thirty tools!
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Oh please. Allowing fascists to terrorize queer people and ban books about slavery isn’t going to save the Palestinian children. Who are you? I feel pretty confident that if someone wanted to examine your life for five seconds we could see how you bathe daily in the blood of innocent children. Let’s start with whatever device you’re posting on and the energy that powers it. Let’s clean up your life before we consider throwing trans people to the wolves. I’m sure you will gladly sacrifice yourself for the cause.
Trans people actually need to use the bathroom sometimes.
It’s sounds like we’re fundamentally in agreement, but I don’t even see the big deal if every once in a while there is one trans girl playing in a competitive youth league. Sure you could argue that there’s only so many spots on the team, so maybe some cis girl who would have made it loses out. But if you’re the 20th best player and you get cut because there’s one trans girl? I mean, you’re the 20th best player, you’re probably not going to be at the top of the recruiters list. I just feel like this time is so fraught for trans people. There are so many powerful forces literally trying to destroy them, I really don’t think we need to worry about hypothetical potential future slippery slopes in kids athletics. Once trans people feel safe, and ideologues aren’t using sports as a wedge issue to promote anti-trans panic, I’m sure we can come up with equitable solutions for these edge cases.
In competitive youth swimming, which I did as a child, the age groups are like 11-12, 13-14, 15-16. So, it was possible for someone who was 12 a week ago to swim against someone who turns 15 next week - a HUGE difference in terms of physical development. And if your birthday happens to fall in the weeks before the big championship meet every year, you are always at the bottom or middle of your age bracket for your entire childhood, never at the top. But the specifics don’t even matter. Age groups and grade classifications are to try to make things a little more fair so that little kids aren’t swimming against basically adults. But it’s not in any way perfectly fair. And also, it doesn’t matter! Let kids play sports and get the benefits of that activity. Your kid’s team winning - or losing - some sports game in 10th grade doesn’t matter. Keeping this girl from playing volleyball isn’t fixing any problem. In Utah they made a ban and there were literally 4 trans athletes in the entire state. It’s culture war bullshit. And people who start quoting bone density studies or whatever are either falling for it or willingly participating in it.
What is the distribution of athletic performance in volleyball between 14 year olds and an 18 year olds? In high school volleyball, it’s perfectly possible for a team made of all 18 year olds who are 6 feet tall to play a team that is all 14 year olds that are 5 feet tall. The idea that without the participation of trans girls, high school volleyball is completely equitable is ridiculous. High school sports are for fun, learning teamwork and discipline, and fitness. Who wins a high school volleyball game is not important. Certainly it’s not more important than the health and safety of trans girls - and non-gender-conforming cis girls who have been and will continued to be tortured by laws like this.
I am a giant music nerd and it is really weird how often I am completely wrong about the year that bands/albums came out. It’s pretty much just early 80s vs late 80s for me though.
Ok, so a million years ago me and a friend of mine were in Vegas and checked out Quark’s Bar at the Star Trek Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton. And it was great! I drank a dry-ice-powered “warp core” drink. A guy in a Klingon costume messed with me in a cringey but completely perfect “interactive theater” bit. The video screens all had Star Trek visuals playing. Super fun.
Anyway, a couple of years later we thought “Hey, let’s go back to Vegas and we’ll visit Quarks Bar again!” But we were big enough nerds that we didn’t realize when we booked it that it was superbowl weekend. So, all the pro sports gambler types were in town. The “free drinks as long as you are gambling” policy in the casino seemed to be suspended - all the servers ignored us. We had high hopes of escaping to the nerd refuge of Quark’s, but when we got there they had football on all of the screens, and a table of “Da Bears” style football dudes started fucking with us for, I don’t know, not being manly enough or something. It sucked, but it’s kind of funny in retrospect.
We all know what to call you.
I saw video of her being interviewed on stage at a conference and she seems just as weird and psychologically unhealthy as Musk. Smug and condescending while narcissistically unable to acknowledge unpleasant realities that every single person knows are true. I think I’m mostly talking about style here. All big CEO-types would lay off thousands of good humans who are hard workers in a heartbeat to make their rich investors more money, but some manage to do it without the delivery of a shitposting bond villain. Watching her answer questions for 5 minutes made my skin crawl.
I don’t know, man. The comment that is getting downvoted proposes a narrative where people steal things from Target and then Target has no choice but to move out of the poor neighborhood to open up stores in a nice neighborhood, and therefore the people stealing are responsible for that harm to their communities. I’m downvoting that because it’s wrong in like a thousand ways, some evidence for which is illustrated by the quote and article I linked to.
My bad on the “lemming” thing. I’m reading this on kbin so that’s not in my vernacular, and the patronizing “tiny worldview” insult had me reading your comment in a certain tone.
I just happened to be in that Ballard target for the first time last week to get my Covid booster and it was weird. Besides the pharmacy, there were basically no employees. No cashiers, one person who ushered you over to the self-checkout, and two greeters (aka loss prevention). It’s just anecdotal observation, but there was no visible sign of, you know, crime problem, i.e. nobody camped out on the sidewalk. But there were also zero customers. That store is tiny for a Target and seemed to have basically the same amount of inventory as a Bartells. For example, we bought a laundry basket while we were there and they just had one style and color (ugly as fuck!). And there is a CVS and a Walgreens basically a block away. And the Target has paid parking. So, I feel pretty confident that this Target was a loser due to bad business decisions.
The article this thread is about is talking about Target losing 2% of their $27 billion annual PROFIT (as in the money the shareholders keep after they pay their employees) to theft. And here you are blaming poor people for the state of their communities.
“The fantastic journalists at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) did an analysis and found that this single video spawned 309 separate articles about the Walgreens incident in the 28 days after it was posted. The researchers found that there was not a single article about a multi-million dollar wage theft settlement paid out by Walgreens to its California employees. (On January 5, 2023, after I wrote this essay, a Walgreens executive admitted publicly that the company had overblown their claims about retail theft.)”
https://equalityalec.substack.com/p/the-volume-of-news
You are the lemming, buddy.
What the actual fuck?! When I read this story a month ago I was furious because they claimed he was out of the car and lunging at them with a knife when they shot him through a closed car window. Mistaking someone for being out of the car and lunging at you when they are inside the car with the window rolled up is not the same as (claiming to) think a knife is a gun. So, you get to lie about what you were scared about and then revise your lie to something more plausible later on? So much fucking bullshit.
Also, it should be noted that the police only “walked back” the statement about him being out of the car when the family went door to door and found ring cam footage that he was in the car. And they had to do this because the police wouldn’t share body camera footage with the family.
Why would the cops get to decide how quickly people have to leave the stadium? Do you think there is a law that the stadium must be empty exactly 23 minutes after the game? Do you think the cops are experts that were trained on the amount of time that people can safely linger in a stadium after a game? The cops wanted to go home so they abused their authority and then violently assaulted a school band director in front of a bunch of kids.
The only thing I care about is: Will this be enough to pull critical mass from Twitter? I don’t think I’ll ever join, because twitter life made me very unhappy, but the sooner journalists and high-volume celebs move off twitter, the sooner it can be relegated to Truth Social 2 and that, I think, will make the world a slightly better place.