Regardless of what they sell or their stated ethos, once a corporation becomes publicly traded its only purpose becomes maximizing profits for its shareholders. The prevailing attitude in that section of the business world is that, if you can save a million and one dollars by dumping toxic waste on a children's playground, and the fine from the EPA is going to be one million dollars even, then it is your holy and sacred duty to poison those children for the sake of delivering that one dollar to the shareholders. In fact, failing to prioritize shareholder profits is the only thing corporations ever get in real trouble for.
People who thrive in this type of environment, let alone rise to the top, tend not to be good or moral people who are bothered by things like a conscience or a sense of compassion. To run a publicly traded corporation you need a person who can cause enormous amounts of suffering and blight in the world, and then go home and sleep comfortably and unbothered, soothed by the belief that everything is permissable as long as they made a line on a graph go up slightly.
I don't want to sound like I'm defending Biden, but I don't know why people find this surprising. I've only been paying attention to politics for about 30 years, but he's been saying this loudly and proudly for as long as I can remember.
Maybe people are just now noticing because it suddenly matters more than it used to. It definitely hits different when Israel is actively attempting a genocide, and it feels to me to be in pretty fucking terrible taste to beat that particular drum right now, but people are acting like this just came out of left field. He has been absolutely consistent about calling himself a Zionist for decades. It really shouldn't have come as a shock.
I'm surprised it's never been made into a decent TV show. The entire thing has already been made into half-hour radio shows, so the scripts are there and road tested. It's basically halfway done already.
"Oh, your job isn't paying enough? Well, have you tried stealing from your family? Your grandma has a social security check coming, right? Oh, your family doesn't talk to you anymore, huh? Well have you tried selling your neighbor's car stereo? What about his propane grill? How about stealing tube socks from Walmart and trying to sell those on the street to anyone who walks by? Still not cutting it, huh? I don't know man, maybe it's time to try sucking some dicks."
These memes seem a lot less clever if you've ever been close to someone whose life got snowed under by addiction, or lived in a neighborhood that has a crack problem. Seeing real crackheads really hustling is pretty fucking bleak. They're not getting ahead. They're not winning. They're burning everything with even a shred of value to service their addiction, including family and personal relationships.
I don't know, maybe it's a very apt metaphor for capitalism, and what our capitalist system expects of us, but I have no desire to trade the people and things that make my life bearable just so I can brag about having a couple extra dollars in the bank.
It's definitely happened. I think the technical term is "vertebral artery dissection." I don't think it's like a daily occurrence or anything, but there is a very real risk of it happening whenever you get a chiropractic adjustment on your neck. Basically you have some delicate arteries running through your neck bones and the sharp sudden movement of certain chiropractic adjustments have the potential to rupture them. It can cause a stroke and some various other bad things that can happen when blood flow through the spine is interrupted.
It requires a bit of financial discipline, but having a credit card that you religiously pay off in full every month can be a really powerful budgeting tool when money is tight. It lets you combine paychecks or borrow from a future week's budget so you can take advantage of bulk prices or a really good sale price to stock up on things you use a lot of. And once you get stocked up on all your staple items, the money you would have spent on those things gets freed up for other things for weeks, or maybe even months at a time.
Speaking of stocking up on bulk items, my Costco membership has saved me a ton of money since I've had it. It might not make the best budgetary sense for everyone, but my membership fee more than pays for itself just with what I save on gasoline. Even when they don't have the best price on something, often the quality you get for the price still makes a lot of their stuff worth it for me. But even if I don't find a deal on something it's always nice to be able to grab a huge rotisserie chicken that I can make meals out of for most of a week for $4.99.
I've been boycotting Sony since even before their rootkit nonsense. It's because literally every single Sony product I've ever owned has broken within three months of taking them out of the box. Walkmans, Discmans, a DVD player, PlayStations 1 & 2. Thankfully most of them were things I received as a gift, so I wasn't always out of pocket, but I just don't see any point in spending money on some garbage product that's going to break if you stare at it too hard.
No, because active noise cancellation doesn't offer any hearing protection. It doesn't make the noise go away, it works by sending out an extra soundwave which is a mirror inversion of noise to be cancelled, sends out peaks where there were troughs and troughs where there were peaks, and they cancel each other out as far as your brain is concerned. But to work the destructive soundwave has to be as loud as the sound it's cancelling, and now you have two sound waves blasting away, still moving air and putting pressure on your eardrums, and it's that pressure causes the damage to your hearing.
Proper PPE has a passive barrier that physically blocks the bulk of the vibration from reaching your eardrums in the first place. Active noise cancellation does kind of the opposite of that.
Didn't Costco's pharmacy get in trouble for this exact thing a couple months ago? I have a feeling we're going to see a story about this for all the major pharmacy chains.
Well, you're in luck because we are living in basically the platinum age of women fronting cool rock bands.
Just off the top of my head:
Bones UK, Sniffany and the Nits, Cable Ties, Amyl and the Sniffers, Mod Con, Waax, Gutter Girls, Flagipanis, Panic Shack, Tiger Pussy, The Hellfreaks, The Darts, The Creepshow, The Spookshow, Zombina and the Skeletones, Bat Fangs, La Butcherettes, The Death Valley Girls, Sleater Kinney, The Veleteers, The Julie Ruin, The Bobby Lees, The Coathangers, The Regrettes, The Pink Slips, The Blushes, Bratmobile, LA Machina, Scrunchies, Skating Polly, and The Nova Twins.
I could dig up more if I start scrolling through my playlists, but there are tons of women out there right now making great music. Seems like every time I turn around there's some cool new thing.
The list of subreddits I really miss is actually pretty short, but one of them for sure is ThatsABooklight. Not the most active sub, but you could lose most of a weekend scrolling through all the weird stuff that got dressed up as a movie prop.
Yes. I love mine. I originally got some bone-conduction headphones to use at my job because I work in a high noise environment and they still work while you're wearing earplugs, but I use them pretty much constantly now. It's really nice to have my music or podcasts and still be able to hear when someone asks me a question, or to be able to hear traffic coming if I'm out walking or jogging.
I've had a couple pairs of them now and weirdly bone-conduction headphones seem to be the one electronic device that under promises on its battery life. I don't know if maybe I just got lucky, but the cheap no name set I got off Amazon promised 5 hours, but even after a year still regularly lasts 8 or 9. My Shokz Open Run Pros promise 10 hours, and I routinely get 15 or 16 hours. So that's nice.
Lucero is pretty legit. Really nice guys too. My buddy made friends with the singer way back when he was in his previous band and subsequently Lucero is one of the few bands I've been following since basically day one.
Some of these are more country than southern rock, but you might also like Jason Isbell, 16 Horsepower, Slim Cessna's Auto Club, Corb Lund, Wovenhand, Larkin Poe, Pink Williams (if you're not turned off by leftist politics), and Hank Williams III (if you don't mind a lot of drug references), and The Goddamn Gallows.
I want the H2G2 Krikkit robot teleportation noises: the sound of 100,000 people saying "WHOP!" when you appear, and 100,000 people saying "FOOP!" when you disappear.
Yup.