Mangela Lansbury

This is why it's really fundamentally wrong that these things are allowed to happen.

Do you keep your C# reference book by your Saber and Asuka figurines on the shelf by your bed, home of your waifu anime dakimakura (also why do I keep reading programmer and progamer as the other word)

Chemical castration is legally mandated in some states for repeat offenders of child molestation, if I'm not mistaken. You take a pill and it changes your body chemistry in such a way that you have no desire (or sometimes capability, depending on the pill) to have sex. Now, having your reproductive organs mangled or removed is another story. It's a weird legal thing that's really intricate in when you can and when you can't do a thing, and a lot of it is really awful. Taking away someone's sex drive or permanently changing their body as a consequence of the penal system is really, really wrong. But the laws are there, so there's no legal right to sex in America!

It's generally meaningless since completely ethical consumption is an impossibility. I mean, we're all posting on the internet with technology that uses rare earth metals and mining those is basically destroying parts of China. But I like to try anyway!

Now that the Iran deal is basically handled, can we turn our attention back to Syria? It is still happening, and on a scale that's hard to comprehend. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/14/syrian-refugee-crisis-will-transform-middle-east-politics/

I don't really think it is disingenuous! Uber has awful labor practices. If they put in the effort of a business trying to service its customers instead of having them underpay sometimes and overpay others, they could provide more consistent service and their drivers would probably be better off! Instead, they focus solely on the consumer because the labor force will come anyway due to broader economic conditions. Employers like Uber only really gain power because they prey on job seekers who don't really have any other choice.

haha oh wow They had just put it on hold when I moved

We tolerate it in some things, like gas, because the people who force it on us have so much money and power that we can't really do anything about it. Gas prices are based on oil futures, and futures trading is pretty much the exclusive trade of the very wealthy, and it's one of the more complex financial markets. Prior with little money and power have no say on it whatsoever. In Atlanta, they had surge pricing for converted HOV lanes. You could use them for a few cents a mile at 3am or a few dollars a mile during rush hour. People have a say in that predatory practice because of politics, so it went away. The big problem with applying supply and demand to something like cabs is that the supply deficiency is artificial. They are a single service and could surge their staffing to meet demand instead of putting the onus on the consumer, but they don't because they treat their work force like shit and taking that kind of logistics on themselves would increase their overhead and probably mean them paying their workforce more. EDIT: Also, the latest series from Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything, Instaserfs, was about a guy in San Francisco trying to make things work by taking part in the sharing economy (Uber, Lyft, etc.). It was interesting and people should listen to it if that kind of thing interests them!

A scarier proposition is that Uber doesn't want to stop with cars. Uber wants to be the travel company. They want to do it all. Their surge pricing theory is predatory. They had an ad campaign that basically said, "Hey, if your driver is an attractive lady, maybe she's a hooker! Ask and find out!" They have no problem with people who say and do truly terrible things in the name of the company, often just suspending them for a brief period or moving them to a less public-facing role for a while. Uber is awful, and they want to get rid of the marginalized workforce they already prey/rely on, replacing them with robots and furthering their takeover of every kind of travel. (I don't think Uber will ever be the end-all, be-all of travel, but when digital archaeologists uncover this forum post in 400 years, they might be assassinated by Uber's History Reassessment Team before they can release their findings to the public)

Uber agrees, which is why they're heavily investing in replacing their entire workforce with self-driving cars! But it's worth noting that cab driving can still be a really interesting, kind of noble thing!

The heads of taxi companies do not threaten the livelihoods, careers, and maybe even lives of people who give them bad press. This makes them distinct from Uber.

I'm going to be a little particular here and say that some of those groups aren't opposed to the US as much as they're opposed to US policy, or who the US has chosen to help. If we started to seriously pressure Israel about ending the apartheid state, Hamas would support us; as of now, it's mostly ambivalence with, "Come on, guys. Don't be their pal. They're shitty. C'moooooooooon." If we actually put some thought into Yemeni policy (seriously, has anyone in the entire government ever sat down and said, "Wait, what are we doing in this country, again?"), the Houthis would probably be okay with us instead of, you know, massively resenting the US for supporting a horrible regime and committing horrific acts of murder and terrorism. The only regime I would worry about in that list is really Assad (maybe Hezbollah, but they're not so bad). The others are just massive diplomacy and policy failures, and they're right to feel the way they do about current US policy.

I guess this is more about style than anything else, and I think I may have complained about it before, but! It really bothers me when someone feels the need to use an abbreviation or initialism or anything like that, then define it parenthetically, and proceed to not use it again in whatever they're typing up. There's no point to saying RoI (Return on Investment) or VTE (Venous Thromboembolism) or whatever if you're only going to say it once. You put in the short version so that when you use that term or phrase again, you can save some time. You don't put it in there to just say, "Look how smart I am, I only use three letters instead of all those other ones, but I suppose I can elucidate the meaning of my enigmatic initialism for you ignorant peasants." Either fuckin say NASA or say the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. No one is going to see you say something about Lambda CDM (Cold Dark Matter) and think you know anything but some trivia. This does not apply to adorable things like LABRADOR (Large Analog Bandwidth Recorder And Digitizer with Ordered Readout). They are too cute to be annoying.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3159344/There-s-no-jail-big-midget-Mexico-s-billion-dollar-drugs-lord-gloats-Twitter-escaping-prison-shower-block-tunnel.html It is so weird to live in a world where one of the biggest Mexican drug lords, nicknamed the midget, escapes prison via tunnels equipped with a special-purpose motorcycle and then threatens Donald Trump on Twitter.

It's hard to recommend therapists because so much of therapy depends on you. The best thing to do is just find someone who makes you comfortable and who you can trust. Also because LA is fuckin huge

Subtweeting is talking about someone, usually in a mocking or negative way, without @ing them so they can see what you're saying and respond. It's like vaguebooking, where you say "Guess you can't trust anyone" without saying who did what to upset you, but the Twitter version.

For one, that only works for countries that are on the left side of a stability J-curve, and that doesn't apply to any European country. For two, spy agencies have changed drastically. For sophisticated governments, information is more likely to be collected and stored somewhere in the intricate national and global intelligence data complex. When you have such a data driven complex that is as notoriously bad at managing their data as the various intelligence agencies, it's harder to act. For three, there's no need to wage a covert physical war when you're already waging an overt economic war.

Oh wow, that's only a 5% chance and it could happen at any time holy shit you are so impressive!!!!! AppleCider, I keep seeing you tweet about that ass and his crew and GG and I just want to offer my support, even if I don't know how to express it/if it's even possible for me to help in any way

After looking over the agreement... I mean, at least no one can really kid themselves about the fact that capitalism is a system of violence and a modern tool of war, right?

http://www.thepressproject.gr/details_en.php?aid=79155 So is Germany basically the devil

Medication is often portrayed as this great panacea, like you're going to take your Prozac and the world will be unicorns and rainbows, but that's not how it works. Medication is just to get you in a headspace where you can do the work you need to do -- your brain is kinda scrambled when you're depressed, and medication just helps you see where everything is so that you can start putting things in order. Being afraid is okay, but don't let that fear stand in the way of you getting better. No medication works for everyone and no treatment works for everyone, so it absolutely is important to talk about these things and keep trying. As long as you keep talking and keep trying to get help, you're doing good. Even if you just come make a post here, you're still doing good. (That's more directed at Cestus, I'm just piggybacking on this comment)

I learned the other day that messing with tiles in Windows 8 is called, by even the process that handles it, tickling. This is adorable and if it's not carried over, Windows 10 is dead to me.

The guy I've been seeing was teasing me tonight about being nervous about being his parents -- it's not gonna be anything big, just an orchestrated, "Oh, fancy meeting you here!" but I'm still being weird about it because his parents only speak French, and I don't really speak any French. In his teasing, he pointed out that even when I'm talking to him, I change the way I talk to use more words that have roots in vulgar Latin, and therefore are more likely to be French cognates? Or something? (We have different first languages and both do our best, but communicating complex ideas about things that neither of us are experts in can be tricky.) That was a weird thing to be told since I didn't realize it/don't think it's true, but he thinks it's sweet of me so ???????? I studied linguistics for a hot minute, but I don't think I know language well enough to do something like that subconsciously. Also, I went to a drag show tonight. One of the visiting drag queens runs his own show not that far away from me, and was really supportive of my weird drag ideas, so I might actually get a chance to do drag some time!

It's not exactly D&D, but I'll reiterate here that Campaign from the One Shot podcast folks (and One Shot, for that matter, which explores smaller tabletop games) is great. It's a Star Wars tabletop campaign run in the Edge of Empire system, and it's both funny and dramatic, in turns. Like it should be, I think!

But also, Persona exists and is just littered with trash mobs and grinding, but is a critical success and, unless my viewpoint is skewed, a popular success.