adventures in human capitalism

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

gasmaskaesthetic:

Why does anger feel good? Most of my undesirable emotions are painful in addution to themselves, so I actively want them to stop. Anger is the one I hesitate to soothe. When I’m angry, it makes me angrier to try to talk myself down instead of letting the rage play out. I can still do it, but it takes a very different kind of effort compared to sadness, or anxiety, fear, or irritation.

Sadness is something I impulsively indulge in, sometimes, but my natural tendency is to do so by seeking comfort, so it’s self-regulating.

When I’m anxious or afraid, I want to get out of that state immediately. This doesn’t always generate *effective* behavior but I’m not resisting the attempt to feel better out of an active desire to stay that way.

Irritation isn’t the same thing as anger. It’s excessive sensitivity. It can turn into anger, but I never want to remain irritable.

Anger moves me to take action. It’s satisfying to direct anger at a target. It feels *good* to rail against some real or imagined wrong. Some of the clearest thinking I’ve ever experienced has been at the peak of justified anger. The risk of indulgence here is pretty obvious. Given how much satisfaction I get from anger, I think I do a pretty good job of staying away from rage-bait. I’m also lucky in that I’m not easily driven to anger in the first place. Most of my anger-management is preventative. I’m not sure what I’d do if that got, say, 40% harder.

I’m curious about other people. Answer all or just some of these, if you want:

Do you work yourself up over things, intentionally or otherwise?

Do you seek out material that triggers anger but does little else for you?

When you are angry, do you ever want to stay angry?

Does that ever change depending on why you’re angry?

Do you find it difficult to notice that being angry is making you less effective?

*Does* anger make you less effective, and how do you tell either way?

Do you ever want to stay angry even after acknowledging that it would be better (for whatever reason) to stop being angry?

>>It’s satisfying to direct anger at a target.<<

Personally, I find anger the *exact opposite* of satisfying.

Anger, for me, is very much about violence. Anger is a desire to hurt the entity that wronged me; if the entity that wronged me is not capable of experiencing pain (like if a rock fell on my foot) or I don’t expect I will be able to successfully hurt them (so, always; violence is far too risky for me to seriously attempt it), this will often spread out into a more generalised longing to cause pain. Getting angry tends to wind up as a period of feeling intensely unfulfilled regarding the utter lack of beating-people-up in my life.

When angry, I tend to feel conflicted about ceasing to be angry in much the same way that I feel conflicted about any other attempt to deal with unfulfilled desires by ceasing to want the thing.

—

>>Do you seek out material that triggers anger but does little else for you?<<

Only under orders. Eventually I learned to treat “pressures you to experience anger” as a major red flag.

—

I can also be conflicted about ceasing to be afraid: yes, I want to be unafraid, but I specifically want to be unafraid *because the scary thing is gone*. Deep-breathing exercises and other such techniques, things about trying to trick your brain into feeling safe independently of whether it actually *is* safe, are repulsive. The closest I get is fear also increasing my desire to defend against *other* bad things than the one I’m actively being menaced with: to use the most recent example, I tend to be more interested in making my smartphone resilient against loss of Internet if I’m experiencing a lot of financial anxiety, even though my level of Internet access is effectively unrelated to how much money I have (I don’t expect to ever be poor enough to lack home Internet (it’s profitable on net!), nor rich enough to be comfortable buying [a personal mobile data connection with plenty of buffer]).

However, I usually *do* endorse ceasing to be sad even if nothing about the thing that was making me sad improves.

Tags:

#in related news if you have smartphone self-sufficiency tips I’m interested in hearing them #(there’s a reason the prepping tag is:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog #violence cw #and more tangentially related: #adventures in human capitalism #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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tilthat:

TIL the average worker in the US today would only have to work 11 hours per week to be as productive as his fellow worker in 1950.

via reddit.com

 

nultemp:

hey fuck capitalism

 

reguess1997:

@argumate relevant to our discussion

 

argumate:

I mean we could go back to 1950 levels of production, if we wanted to live like that?

 

reguess1997:

That doesn’t seem that bad, though. Maybe we don’t have to scale back that far – maybe just have 20-hour weeks. Or better yet, just let the workers decide how much they need to work.

 

argumate:

I mean, they can? who needs expensive health insurance if you’re only going to get 1950s level of care anyway; forget iPhones, plenty of people were using kerosene lamps instead of electricity back then.

 

disexplications:

Obvious problems include:

  • Network effects; you can’t be a full participant in society these days without a cell phone and some sort of Internet access
  • People who work more will bid up the price of positional goods, most importantly land
  • In some cases the old goods are no longer available. A 1950 Chevrolet Deluxe would be dirt cheap today if Chevrolet made them, but they don’t make them and it would be illegal to sell them if they did.
  • Lump of labor fallacy? It seems like there’s some debate as to how much this matters and in which cases.

 

argumate:

cars won’t kill you as easily now, but it takes a lot of work to get a society where air bags and stability control and laser welding are standard features.

 

1nsomnizac:

several things:

  1. why would producing less cause us to regress to the 1950s? what the fuck? show me the carfax.

  2. the thing to take away from this factoid is that the amount of time that a worker has to spend to survive has stayed more or less the same, even as the amount that people produce in that time has increased.

     

  3. in a capitalist business, the capitalists innovate to pay fewer wages to get X products. in a worker co-op, workers innovate to spend less labor hours to get X products. in a capitalist system, innovation increases products relative to worker pay, in a co op system, innovation increases products relative to workers hours

 

argumate:

the point was that if workers today are much more productive than workers in the 1950s due to technological and other improvements, they could work shorter hours and produce the same level of output (that we used to produce in the 1950s).

there’s a bit of question begging going on here though, how did productivity get so high since then anyway, and would it have improved similarly if everyone was working 11 hours a week.

then think about where we’ll be in 2050…

 

squareallworthy:

how did productivity get so high since then anyway

You know how communists are always saying that everything will be great after the revolution because the machines will do most of the work?

Yeah, we already did that. 

We had already done that by 1850, and then we built more machines to do most of the remaining work by 1900, then built more machines to do most of the remaining work by 1950, and so on. That’s what improving productivity is. Well, that and education.

So sure, we could all be working 11 hours a week, if we wanted to get by on a 1950s standard of living. Some do, and maybe more people would if they had heard of the idea, but most people want more than that.

would it have improved similarly if everyone was working 11 hours a week

No, because if we had only been working 11 hours a week, we couldn’t have built so many machines and educated so many people.

 

morlock-holmes:

1) We have iPhones now

2) We work as hard or harder than similarly situated people in the 1950s (no need to describe what we might mean by “similarly situated”)

3) Therefore, all that extra work must go directly into, and be completely necessary for, produce iPhones.

This is a remarkably rickety chain of logic to come from otherwise intelligent people.

“You could work 11 hours a week if you were satisfied with 1950s living!”

You guys know a lot of people who make rent on 44 hours of work per month, do you? And they get doctors who make house calls too???

Honestly it sounds like a great deal, surprised more people don’t do it!

 

squareallworthy:

Well, fair point. You’re going to have a hard time finding 1950-style housing in the United States today. Not only would you have to give up a lot of square footage and things like air conditioning and decent wiring, but you’d also have to find somewhere without modern supermarkets and hospitals. Even if you chose not to buy food that wasn’t available in 1950, even if you forego medical treatments that didn’t exist then, just having the choice to do so is part of the value of housing. So to find someplace comparable, you’d have to move someplace where things like cable TV, internet service, UPS deliveries, CAT scans, and Thai restaurants aren’t even available. That’s going to be difficult to do unless you can organize a whole community to do it, because these sorts of options permeate the country and form a part of our wealth.

 

theopjones:

The fair comparison probably isn’t 1:1 with 1950s U.S because of technology improvements. 

A more apt comparison would be 21st century countries with similar per capita rGDP as 1950s U.S.

But still having the same standard of living as the typical South African probably isn’t much more aspirational.   

 

brin-bellway:

As someone who, a few months ago, calculated how much money it takes to run her household for a week where nothing goes wrong and found it to be *almost exactly* 11 minimum-wage-hours per person, I feel obligated to speak up.

Yes, I have a lot of luck and financially-convenient preferences going for me [link] (not to mention the government assistance, though I’ve known plenty of people who found living on full-time or near-full-time work a struggle even with government assistance; also, these hour figures *don’t* factor in tax benefits), and I absolutely acknowledge that many people are not in positions where they can pull this off. And 11 hours/week is merely the figure for a week *where nothing goes wrong*: I’d need about 16.5 hours† for a week where the average amount of stuff goes wrong, and preferably more like ~20 to get a bit of buffer going. (and more buffer would be nice, of course)

But I *do* exist, so it’s probably a bad idea to base any arguments on the premise that that’s impossible, or impossible without enduring a lot more in the way of acute hardship than I do.

—

(For me, the main problem is not expenses but *underemployment*: being able to live on 16.5 hours isn’t good enough if you can only get hold of 10.)

—

†I know the linked post says 17, but that was back when we had a dog.

 

theopjones:

Imho I don’t think that is too good a model.

Namely, the budget in your link uses a lot on things like subsidies and cross border arbatrage (ie. buying food in New York, and driving to Canada).

These things work out for individuals, but do not work on the scale of large chunks of society.

Under conditions where things are bought at market rate cost, that would not work.

11-20 hrs on the average wage is probably realistic (I currently spend a little over about ½ of income, and I earn close to the us median household income) But not on the min wage.

Let’s see:

Electricity subsidy: 0.23 hours/person/week

Medication subsidy: I don’t have the exact figures on hand, but judging from the way overall medication expenses dropped when we got into the program, maybe 0.3 hours/person/week

Cross-border arbitrage: an optimistic estimate gives 0.8 hours/person/week, it’s probably much less

Tax ineligibility (has health insurance as sub-component): I’m not sure what the appropriate measure would be here. A bit of googling suggests the income tax burden on a household making the median income is slightly under 24 minimum-wage-hours/*household*/week, but I’m not sure how to apply this information properly, and this might not even be the right approach for the question.

—

Anyway, and more importantly, I already said I don’t expect it to scale. (I’m actually surprised that the things you latched onto are the subsidies and arbitrage rather than the lack of children, something I expect has a much larger effect and *also* doesn’t work at all if you try to apply it across a large chunk of society.) I’m mostly reacting here to the idea that *nobody* could pull it off, that it’s laughable to think that anyone could get close. (”You guys know a lot of people who make rent on 44 hours of work per month, do you? And they get doctors who make house calls too???” I think there were others in other branches, but I’m not sure where.)

(Well, let’s be real, I’m *mostly* reacting to the many, many other arguments I’ve encountered over the years that rely on an assumption that People Like Me do not exist, for a variety of aspects of Like Me. I am very tired of this sort of thing.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #discourse cw #long post

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

tilthat:

TIL the average worker in the US today would only have to work 11 hours per week to be as productive as his fellow worker in 1950.

via reddit.com

 

nultemp:

hey fuck capitalism

 

reguess1997:

@argumate relevant to our discussion

 

argumate:

I mean we could go back to 1950 levels of production, if we wanted to live like that?

 

reguess1997:

That doesn’t seem that bad, though. Maybe we don’t have to scale back that far – maybe just have 20-hour weeks. Or better yet, just let the workers decide how much they need to work.

 

argumate:

I mean, they can? who needs expensive health insurance if you’re only going to get 1950s level of care anyway; forget iPhones, plenty of people were using kerosene lamps instead of electricity back then.

 

disexplications:

Obvious problems include:

  • Network effects; you can’t be a full participant in society these days without a cell phone and some sort of Internet access
  • People who work more will bid up the price of positional goods, most importantly land
  • In some cases the old goods are no longer available. A 1950 Chevrolet Deluxe would be dirt cheap today if Chevrolet made them, but they don’t make them and it would be illegal to sell them if they did.
  • Lump of labor fallacy? It seems like there’s some debate as to how much this matters and in which cases.

 

argumate:

cars won’t kill you as easily now, but it takes a lot of work to get a society where air bags and stability control and laser welding are standard features.

 

1nsomnizac:

several things:

  1. why would producing less cause us to regress to the 1950s? what the fuck? show me the carfax.

  2. the thing to take away from this factoid is that the amount of time that a worker has to spend to survive has stayed more or less the same, even as the amount that people produce in that time has increased.

     

  3. in a capitalist business, the capitalists innovate to pay fewer wages to get X products. in a worker co-op, workers innovate to spend less labor hours to get X products. in a capitalist system, innovation increases products relative to worker pay, in a co op system, innovation increases products relative to workers hours

 

argumate:

the point was that if workers today are much more productive than workers in the 1950s due to technological and other improvements, they could work shorter hours and produce the same level of output (that we used to produce in the 1950s).

there’s a bit of question begging going on here though, how did productivity get so high since then anyway, and would it have improved similarly if everyone was working 11 hours a week.

then think about where we’ll be in 2050…

 

squareallworthy:

how did productivity get so high since then anyway

You know how communists are always saying that everything will be great after the revolution because the machines will do most of the work?

Yeah, we already did that. 

We had already done that by 1850, and then we built more machines to do most of the remaining work by 1900, then built more machines to do most of the remaining work by 1950, and so on. That’s what improving productivity is. Well, that and education.

So sure, we could all be working 11 hours a week, if we wanted to get by on a 1950s standard of living. Some do, and maybe more people would if they had heard of the idea, but most people want more than that.

would it have improved similarly if everyone was working 11 hours a week

No, because if we had only been working 11 hours a week, we couldn’t have built so many machines and educated so many people.

 

morlock-holmes:

1) We have iPhones now

2) We work as hard or harder than similarly situated people in the 1950s (no need to describe what we might mean by “similarly situated”)

3) Therefore, all that extra work must go directly into, and be completely necessary for, produce iPhones.

This is a remarkably rickety chain of logic to come from otherwise intelligent people.

“You could work 11 hours a week if you were satisfied with 1950s living!”

You guys know a lot of people who make rent on 44 hours of work per month, do you? And they get doctors who make house calls too???

Honestly it sounds like a great deal, surprised more people don’t do it!

 

squareallworthy:

Well, fair point. You’re going to have a hard time finding 1950-style housing in the United States today. Not only would you have to give up a lot of square footage and things like air conditioning and decent wiring, but you’d also have to find somewhere without modern supermarkets and hospitals. Even if you chose not to buy food that wasn’t available in 1950, even if you forego medical treatments that didn’t exist then, just having the choice to do so is part of the value of housing. So to find someplace comparable, you’d have to move someplace where things like cable TV, internet service, UPS deliveries, CAT scans, and Thai restaurants aren’t even available. That’s going to be difficult to do unless you can organize a whole community to do it, because these sorts of options permeate the country and form a part of our wealth.

 

theopjones:

The fair comparison probably isn’t 1:1 with 1950s U.S because of technology improvements. 

A more apt comparison would be 21st century countries with similar per capita rGDP as 1950s U.S.

But still having the same standard of living as the typical South African probably isn’t much more aspirational.   

As someone who, a few months ago, calculated how much money it takes to run her household for a week where nothing goes wrong and found it to be *almost exactly* 11 minimum-wage-hours per person, I feel obligated to speak up.

Yes, I have a lot of luck and financially-convenient preferences going for me [link] (not to mention the government assistance, though I’ve known plenty of people who found living on full-time or near-full-time work a struggle even with government assistance; also, these hour figures *don’t* factor in tax benefits), and I absolutely acknowledge that many people are not in positions where they can pull this off. And 11 hours/week is merely the figure for a week *where nothing goes wrong*: I’d need about 16.5 hours† for a week where the average amount of stuff goes wrong, and preferably more like ~20 to get a bit of buffer going. (and more buffer would be nice, of course)

But I *do* exist, so it’s probably a bad idea to base any arguments on the premise that that’s impossible, or impossible without enduring a lot more in the way of acute hardship than I do.

—

(For me, the main problem is not expenses but *underemployment*: being able to live on 16.5 hours isn’t good enough if you can only get hold of 10.)

—

†I know the linked post says 17, but that was back when we had a dog.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #discourse cw #long post

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Anonymous asked: i feel like this is a dumb question but is it possible that you just don’t have the clothing you’d need to be warm enough? my exposed skin is reasonably comfortable near 0C if i’m wearing ski gear, so you might just need a thick coat and warm leggings to enjoy being outside when it’s cold.

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

sinesalvatorem:

My objection is: But where does it END? I’m already wearing my ex’s DC winter coat basically at all times. I can’t just keep getting more clothes to put on top of other clothes; that’ll get way too expensive and too bulky to deal with.

There are already some clothes I just can’t get around to unpacking, because too much ugh, because too many clothes. Ideally, I would like to have a small number of clothing items that are really cool, and just wash my whole wardrobe each week. Owning clothes that I won’t wear until a whole ‘nother season is /insane/. How am I supposed to /transport/ that? (If the answer is “live in the same place for a whole year” I’m screwed.)

Plus all clothing necessarily impedes the things I want to be outside for in the first place, and more clothing makes it worse. It blocks sunlight from reaching my skin, impedes motion to make dancing more taxing, and – by making the heat-trapping potential of my body inconsistent – it makes me sweat.

Maximum physical comfort would be being completely naked while the ambient temperature is comfortable on my skin. Any alternative where I make up for below-ideal temperatures by putting on layers of clothing can never compare, due to the inherent drawbacks of clothing and the fact that they scale with moar clothe.

So while getting warmer clothes as the weather gets worse may somewhat slow down the quality of life decline, it wouldn’t prevent it from happening. Given that clothes are also expensive and bulky and often sensory evil, I’m not sure how much it’s worth to go getting extra clothes I only wear for part of the year. (Plus I have at least one heavy part-of-the-year coat if needed – which has by itself been a nightmare to transport for the past three years.)

Thank you for the suggestion, though. I just don’t think it’s quite enough to deal with my particular seasonal issues. But if clothing-ownership constraints relax (ie: I can ever expect to stay in one place long enough to make owning bulky items not be prohibitively expensive), I may try this as part of a broad harm-reduction approach.

*

I once saw a list of tips for homeless people that suggested buying a set of winter clothes from a thrift store when the cold sets in, then dumping it back on the thrift store when it warms up, so that you’ve effectively “rented” the clothes for the winter.

It was aimed at people living on the street, therefore limited to what they can carry but *not* routinely having to ship their belongings long distances, so it might not be useful to you. (And there are the cost issues, of course.) But there *do* exist situations in which thrift-store clothes “rentals” are the least-bad option, so I thought I’d mention it in case (now or in the future) you end up in such a situation.

(My favourite level of clothing (controlling for weather) is turtleneck + hoodie + sweatpants, and I’ve lived in the same house for over a decade and would not be surprised if I continue living here (or otherwise retain access to its long-term storage) for decades more, so I can’t offer any advice based on actually knowing these feels. But at least I can pass along advice I’ve heard from others.)

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Saw an ask meme where one of the questions was “How well do you think you’d do in a zombie apocalypse scenario?”, and wondered how I would answer it.

I would probably do fairly badly, actually, despite what you might think given some of the stuff I’ve been talking about lately. Most of my apocalypse-proofing efforts assume few to no hostiles. I don’t think I even actually want to change this: the best forms of apocalypse-proofing are the ones that make regular life better too (even if there are never food shortages, keeping a supply of your favourite nonperishables on hand means you can buy during one 20%-off sale and live off of it until the next 20%-off sale, so that it’s effectively 20% off all the time), the next best are the kind that start being useful when even a minor, common disaster strikes (let’s gather round the solar-powered computer and listen to some locally-stored music while we wait for them to fix the downed power line), followed by the ones that have never done anything concretely beneficial but at least you feel safer having them around (I sometimes look at the cases of water sitting in the parental bedroom and smile). But being good at violence would just make me more tempted to use it where it isn’t warranted, and that would make regular life *harder* and *more* likely to go disastrously.

The best-case scenario is probably the one where I become the pet librarian/techie of some group, coaxing as much function and comfort as possible out of off-grid computers. Wikipedia is handy in almost any situation, and I bet there are times as a post-zombie nomad when a video game is *exactly* what you need for morale, a reminder that not *everything* about the old world is gone.

Tags:

#can’t shoot and I suck at running but I’m damn good at   #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers   #(<– when I thought of that tag something in my brain went ”that. that’s the prepping tag.”)   #(which is the main reason I’m posting this)   #((will use it on non-computer-related prepping too though))   #mind you skill at running is probably in the Makes Regular Life Better Too category   #perhaps I’ll try and acquire some   #oh look an original post   #food mention   #apocalypse cw   #zombie apocalypse   #adventures in human capitalism

Music Reviews: Ramping Shop (Vybz Kartel ft. Spice)

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

sinesalvatorem:

Lyrics and Review:

Ah di teacha
And ah spice
Every man grab a gyal
And every gyal grab a man

Compulsory sexuality right out the gate? Oh, well. I guess this is Dancehall, after all.

Man to man, gyal to gyal – dat’s wrong

A WILD HOMOPHOBIA APPEARS

Seriously, this has nothing to do with the focus of the song. This song isn’t about gays at all. Kartel just felt the need to throw that in there. Why? The world may never know…

To quote @loki-zen​: “I really like cake, here’s a song about cake, let me describe the cake, also by the way FUCK THE FRENCH AM I RIGHT so anyway, this cake…”

SCORN DEM

…And, with that line alone, this song becomes my Problematic Fave. It is a work of art.

All when ah night
Yuh pussy feel like sun hot

Spice’s Vagina: Approximately 5,500C at the surface.

When yuh come inna mi ramping shop
Mek sure yuh know how fi wuk
And nah chat yah ah chat

Ah, right, because singing a song about your sexual prowess is totally showing instead of telling.

Hey, mi cocky longa dan mi knife

Kartel, wah di bloodclat mi jus ask you fi do? Didn’t the song just say not to make ridiculous boasts? YOU HAD ONE JOB

In case anyone is unsure of why this is so silly, by “knife” he means what most Caribbean people would call a “cutlass” and what most Americans would call a “machete”. SUCH HONESTY.

Tell mi wah yuh like
Yuh wah mi drive
or yuh wah fi ride it like a bike

tumblr_inline_o0ndgb0qbb1tn6v4y_540

Figure 1.1: Spice And Kartel Having Sex

Well, yuh haffi ram it hard
Di cocky nuh fi lie
Damage it fi spite

…Well this just got surprisingly kinky. Not sure if it’s SSC, but I’ll let it pass.

Not becah mi pussy tight
Suppose mi put it pon di left
Can yuh tek it pon di right
Mi nipple dem a ripe

tumblr_inline_o0ndohjumn1tn6v4y_540

Figure 1.2: Spice’s Breasts

Sen it up inna mi tribe
What? titty appetite
Every nipple get a bite
Mi man haffi go see it
Mi and him haffi go fight

Oh, great. Just when I thought this couldn’t get better: She has a boyfriend/husband who doesn’t know they’re fucking and is going to be pissed when he sees the hickies on her breasts. Spice & Kartel: Perfect Role-Models.

Cah me haffi wine pon di cocky like dis
Kartel spin mi like a satellite dish

…I don’t think you’re supposed to do that to your satellite dishes…

Deal wid yuh breast like mi crushin Irish

Wait, what? Kartel, I get it, we all know that you’re a wannabe Englishman – but what the fuck do you have against the Irish?

@inquisitivefeminist​ and @sinesalvatorem​: United by the fact that Kartel hates our guts for no apparent reason.

Spice I neva love a pussy like dis
You ah my mista
You ah my miss
Kill me wid di cocky
Kill me wid di tightness

You two clearly enjoy having a bit too much murder in your sex lives. Maybe you and @inquisitivefeminist​ would get along after all?

And when you ah come
Whispa someting like dis:
“I can’t stop fuckin you”

… … …

Is this really the most romantic pillow talk you could come up with? You aren’t even singing it in a vaguely romantic manner!

Hey, cocky nuh play
Me will bruk yuh back

Kartel Confirms: Cocks don’t break backs, people with cocks break backs, and people with granite cocks break their backs lifting Moloch to the sky.

When yuh come inna mi ramping shop
Me will quint it up two time and pop yuh cock
When yuh come inna mi ramping shop
Me will mek yuh run out a mi house
Inna half ah frock

The Walk of Shame: A Perk of Fucking Kartel.

When yuh come inna mi ramping shop
A gyal eva ride pon it and gi yuh heart attack
When yuh come inna mi ramping shop

tumblr_inline_o0nef39k691tn6v4y_540

Figure 1.3: Spice’s Vagina

Spice ah you mi love
Yuh know how fi do yuh stuff
Yuh pussy buff
Plus it squeeze like handcuff

Let’s be real: I have seen a lot, but I’m not even sure what kink they’re going for here.

I’m only sure of one thing, really: Kartel could write a pretty interesting Fifty Shades of Grey fan fic.

Kartel ah you mi love
See it deh, mi cock it up
Fuh yuh ramp ruff
Til mi belly cramp up

Stomach Cramps: So Sexeh

Sshhh di climax begun
Bear sweat a run
Hold mi tight spice
Mi feel like mi ah cum

“So, I know that I’m climaxing right now. I also feel like I’m coming, but I’m not so sure. How can you tell?”

“If you’re coming, then you’re probably coming.”

Mi nah let yuh go
So don’t let me done
Me two phone a ring
and me nah ansa none

In case you’re not sure why she explicitly mentions two phones, it’s the third world equivalent of a rap brag. She is so filthy rich that she can afford not just one but two cellular phones. Two of them! Mobile phones! Bow before her fat stacks, pleb.

And, like, this is a legitimately impressive brag for the target audience. As someone who can see this from both the third world (”Wow, that’s amazing!”) and first world (”…Is that it?”) perspectives, lines like this give me a weird sense of vertigo.

Cah me haffi wine pon di cocky like dis
Kartel spin me like a satellite dish
Deal wid yuh breast like mi crushing Irish
Spice I neva love a pussy like dis
You ah my mista
You ah my miss
Kill me wid di cocky
Kill me wid di tightness
And when you a come
Whispa someting like dis
I can’t stop fuckin you

In all seriousness, all of these lines sound more ridiculous on the second run through.

Hey, cocky nuh play
Me will bruk yuh back
When yuh come inna mi ramping shop
Me will quint it up two time and pop yuh cock
When yuh come inna mi ramping shop
Me will mek yuh run out a mi house
Inna half ah frock
When yuh come inna mi ramping shop
A gyal eva ride pon it and gi yuh heart attack
When yuh come inna mi ramping shop

There are so many ways that this is hella dysfunctional, but I’m just gonna leave that there.

Ah di teacha
And ah spice
Every man grab a gyal
And every gyal grab a man
Man to man, gyal to gyal – dats wrong
SCORN DEM

Fuck the French! SCORN THEM

All when a night
Yuh pussy feel like sun hot
When yuh come inna mi ramping shop
Mek sure yuh know how fi wuk
And nah chat yah ah chat

Ooh, maybe he’ll listen to this advice on the second run through?

Cocky nuh play
Mi will bruk yuh back

Ha. Ha. Ha.

When yuh come inna mi ramping shop
Mi will quint it up two time and pop yuh cock
When yuh come inna mi ramping shop
Mi will mek yuh run out a mi house
Inna half ah frock
When yuh come inna mi ramping shop
A gyal eva ride pon it and gi yuh heart attack
When yuh come inna mi ramping shop

Thank you, Kartel, for clearly and persuasively presenting all the reasons why I don’t want to visit your “ramping shop”.
>lesbianism increases

This is a fairly old post, but I still think about this bit a lot:

>>In case you’re not sure why she explicitly mentions two phones, it’s the third world equivalent of a rap brag. She is so filthy rich that she can afford not just one but *two* cellular phones. Two of them! *Mobile* phones! Bow before her fat stacks, pleb.

And, like, this is a legitimately impressive brag for the target audience. As someone who can see this from both the third world (”Wow, that’s amazing!”) and first world (”…Is that it?”) perspectives, lines like this give me a weird sense of vertigo.<<

I thought about this a lot last summer, when I was routinely running a mobile hotspot on one phone and playing Pokemon Go on a second, and I think about it a lot now that I’m routinely using two smartphones both of which *I personally* own (the hotspot one was borrowed from Mom).

Because the thing is, I use multiple phones *because I’m poor*. Richer people can afford a single device good enough to do everything they want it to do, rather than having to network multiple inadequate phones into one functioning system. (the first phone was too low-spec to run Pokemon Go itself, and the second had no cell plan of any kind, let alone data) Richer people don’t care that owning a second device, if used properly, grants an additional ~$0.50 – $1/day income stream, because $1/day is immaterial to them.

And yes, I understand that at the level of poverty the song assumes, the alternative to multiple inadequate phones is a *single* inadequate phone, and just not doing the things it can’t do. (or *zero* phones, though I gather that’s increasingly less common these days) But I still think it’s interesting that “has a single mobile device” can indicate either “poor” or “rich” depending on context. (And I suspect even richer people wrap around another time and start using multiple mobile devices again: at least, *somebody* has to be buying Kindles or they wouldn’t make them. God knows what the *very* rich people are up to.)

(possibly relevant?)

Tags:

#music #nsfw text #death mention #reply via reblog #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #(close enough) #adventures in human capitalism #this post brought to you by helping a semi-homeless friend research cheap high-data-limit plans to stick into their old hand-me-down iPhone #because they’re not putting down enough roots in any location to get home Internet set up #so mobile data and the occasional public Wi-Fi is all they have #(they too have been learning the joys of mobile hotspots) #the relationship between financial position and phone usage can be very complicated indeed #homophobia

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

@acemindbreaker​, I didn’t want to directly reblog this thread (there were some pretty pressuring bits in previous parts of the reblog chain, and I follow a no-guilt-trips policy), but I did want to try and answer your question.

You live in Saskatchewan, right? It looks like this is Saskatchewan’s version of the medication assistance program my family’s on.

IIRC, the Ontarian program specifies that to qualify for it your household must spend more than 4% of its collective income on prescription meds†, and the program acts to cap your spending at 4% of income (each quarter you only pay up to that figure, and then the program kicks in and pays for the rest of your meds that quarter). The Saskatchewan page seems rather more vague about what its qualifiers and effects are, but the information might be buried in there somewhere, and presumably it has *some* effect for *some* people.

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I was not involved in the decision to make No Frills our primary pharmacy (it was a while ago), but I assume my parents had their reasons to switch over from Pharmasave, and they were probably financial reasons. The No Frills website says there are only three of them in all of SK, so you might very well not live near one, but the general idea might hold. I don’t know what websites might help you in determining which pharmacies are cheaper than others, though: search listings seem to be clogged with places trying to smuggle(?) Canadian meds into the United States.

—

(And the smuggling brings up something that may be worth noting, that in some cases the efforts of Americans to get cheaper meds are just trying to bring prices down to a level Canadians would consider full price, and to some extent the reason there is less Canadians can do is because there is less to be done. I still remember, shortly after we moved, how horrified our new friends were when they heard what my parents had been paying for their medications. But I don’t want to put too much emphasis on that: even when things are better than they *could* be, it’s often important to try to make them better still.)

—

†so I suspect we’re going to get kicked out at the next assessment now that we’re making more, but anyway

Tags:

#this post technically qualifies as: #oh look an original post #but is closer to the spirit of: #reply via reblog #our home and cherished land #adventures in human capitalism

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Quarterly report’s done!

(sorry about the tininess of the picture: Tumblr is not very good at images significantly wider than they are tall. you may need to click on it to see it clearly.)

Tags:

#notice how the number on the right is bigger than the number on the left #what a lovely novelty #(fun fact: removing any one person’s effect on the income would be enough to drop it below expenses) #(this is very much a group effort) #(while Brother is by far the highest earner we are *all* of vital importance) #((ftr ”outstanding” deposits here mean paycheques sitting in people’s wallets at June 30th)) #((if we were living paycheque-to-paycheque or otherwise needed that money available ASAP we *could* easily)) #((have gotten it into the bank by the end of the quarter)) #((and I’m not going to make our income appear artificially low just because we hadn’t gotten around to visiting the bank that fortnight)) #(((don’t worry I remembered to remove the outstanding deposits from *last* quarter from the calculations so as not to double-count them))) #adventures in human capitalism #oh look an update #tag rambles #oh look an original post #\o/

agapi42 asked: Pass the happy! When you get this, reply with 5 things that make you happy and send this to the last 10 people in your notifications✨

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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brin-bellway:

*

1. Cuddling my mom.

2. Returning severely underpriced items (the kind where someone left out a digit when putting in the price, stuff like that) on the Flight Rising player marketplace to their sellers, and seeing the seller gush with gratitude.

3. Finding new ways for my household to save money or otherwise run better. (A couple days ago I went looking through some more of those free-birthday-food aggregator websites I was talking about earlier, and I found a frozen-yogurt chain to add to my list of nearby restaurants with outright-free birthday gifts. It was like finding buried treasure, but with more dessert.)

4. Giving little kids stickers at work.

5. Exploring towns (or parts of towns) that I had previously only passed through, looking around inside all the little shops and taking pictures of the waterfalls and mapping the public Wi-Fi.

tumblr_inline_pc73t1fvlx1qmjdbw_540

Tags:

#also I forgot to mention in that earlier post that the Mary Brown’s fried-chicken chain offers a free chicken sandwich for your birthday #I found out too late to do it last year myself but early enough that Mom could do it #and she gave me hers because she’s diabetic and breading + hamburger bun would mess up her blood sugar #it was pretty good #food #adventures in human capitalism #and for that matter #adventures in dragon capitalism #meme #tales from the askbox #Flight Rising

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

@sinesalvatorem, I was going to reblog your post [link], but I figure giving poverty advice in a reblog when the OP is about how one shouldn’t give poverty advice is asking for trouble (especially when OP has relatively few notes), so I’m pinging you on a fresh post instead.

—

>>On that note, if anyone who reads this has any life hacks wrt saving money or earning extra income, or knows online resources that have compiled a bunch of them, please tell me! I already know of quite a few, but I’m always looking for more.<<

Hey, look, a special interest!

(or, well, part special interest, part coping mechanism)

—

(Disclaimers: I acknowledge that for any or all of these things, you [may already do them]/[may not find them worthwhile]/[may not be able to do them at all]. If anything in the rest of this post sounds like I don’t, that’s just because it’s sometimes easier to get the words out that way.

A more specific version that I feel is particularly worth pointing out: while I have had plenty of financial difficulties and qualify as “poor” by many definitions, I have never (quite) been *broke*. Some of these tips will be stuff like “how to spend $800 in one day in order to avoid spending $1,400 over four months”, and if you never have $800 on hand at any given time feel free to ignore that (though maybe file them away for if/when you reach a point in your life where you can afford to tie up some money for a while in order to spend less in the long run).)

—

This has been kind of a recurring theme on my blog lately, but: housemates are so important. Finances are best played as a team sport: going it alone is sadly necessary in some situations, but it’s definitely Hard Mode, and being poor is hard enough as it is without adding more difficulty modifiers on top of it.

(It *is* painful to have to watch people you share finances with spend money in ways you don’t approve of, but–I remind myself at such times–it’s still completely worth it for all the bulk discounts and such you can get. (Although I’m sure there are *some* people out there somewhere who are careless enough with money that this would not be true, and obviously you don’t want to share finances with such people.))

—

People hate on Uber-type things a lot, but honestly, they really can be a lifesaver. Delivery gigs are what tipped us over into being in the black for March†. (Up ~CAD$230 over the course of that month! God, it’d been *so* long since our money had been on any kind of upward trend for any significant length of time.) Some companies in some places will also hire bicyclist or even pedestrian delivery freelancers.

—

People also hate on advice to avoid bank-related fees because sometimes when you’re poor they’re unavoidable, but it’s still worth checking that each fee really *is* unavoidable before resorting to it.

(You know why I switched from annual statements to quarterly? Because I found out while preparing the 2017 statement that my parents had gone below their minimum chequing-account balance (which incurs a CAD$11 fee for each month it happens) *eleven months* out of the year, and had been quietly shouldering it *even though the household as a whole had enough money to cover everyone’s minimum balances*: it was just disproportionately in the kids’ accounts because at the time only the kids were employed. I immediately insisted on providing my parents with an informal, indefinite loan to help them cover their balance††, and started doing more frequent statements so we can catch shit like that sooner.

(Apparently Dad was embarrassed and Mom didn’t want to ~burden~ her children when she was ~supposed~ to be providing for them. And I was like “You can use the money you’re saving in bank fees towards buying me food.”))

—

You make a remark about the restaurants in San Francisco being expensive, and of course in this part of Tumblr I hear plenty about how high the rents are. To what extent does the Bay have generally high prices across the board (or for groceries in particular: grocery prices are about to be important), and how far away do you have to get from the Bay for things to stop having that markup?

The New York trick (travel to an area with a lower cost of living, stock up on cheap groceries to bring back) is harder in a place with no nearby-ish country borders or similar clear markers of “you are now entering the Cheap Zone”, but it might still be doable there.

(I think the trick used by people who *live* in Cheap Zones is to use coupons *intended* for places with higher costs of living (with discounts sized accordingly), but which are technically valid there. Occasionally these can even be stacked: Mom almost always brings some coupons (from American websites) to New York.)

—

Target does ad-matching: if you show them that another store’s flyer has a sale on a certain food, they will sell you that food at the other store’s sale price, letting you avoid the hassle and transportation costs of running all over town chasing deals. (note that Target does not match produce) The Flipp app [link] will give you the flyers for a (U.S. or Canada) postal code of your choice.

Walmart does not do ad-matching as such (in America; Canadian Walmarts still do it), but if you scan your Walmart receipt into their app, they will issue you an e-gift card for the amount you *would* have saved if they allowed it.

There might be other stores in your particular area that do matching, but these are the only ones I found when I was looking this up in an Arizonan context recently. It seems to be less common in America than it is in Canada.

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Running ad videos and occasionally doing other stuff through Swagbucks is a nice way to get a bit of supplemental income. I recently helped Mom write a guide to using it [link], so I will direct you there. (please use the referral links, I’d very much appreciate it)

—

If you have anything that gives you a discount on Amazon purchases and/or generates income in the form of Amazon credit (like, say, Swagbucks), bear in mind that Amazon has an ever-expanding selection of other stores’ gift cards [link] (including, notably, Safeway [link]), almost all of which can be purchased using Amazon credit.

—

There’s this one program of incentives to encourage lower electricity use during peak periods [link] that I keep getting ads for from advertisers who don’t realise I’m not Torontonian, which is only available in Toronto and parts of California (weird list, I know). Is that applicable to you, or likely to become so?

—

I haven’t done any freelance audio transcription for Rev [link] in a while, but you might be better suited to it than I am. (Maybe your picking-out-what-people-are-saying-at-crowded-parties ability would help you here?)

—

>>At one point, I even had a list of which staple items are cheaper at which stores, but homelessness means I keep moving too much for that to ever stay relevant.<<

Some grocery stores let you look up their prices online, making it easier to collect data for such lists and less painful (relatively) to keep making new ones for new places.

—

I recently systematically went through the websites of every cell company available in this area and determined the single best phone plan for getting our house phone to do everything we currently need it to do while paying as little as possible, and I am very glad I did. If we hadn’t been careful, we could easily have ended up paying twice as much or more.

Unfortunately, there is essentially zero overlap between my available cell companies and yours, so I can’t just skip you to the end result of “Public Mobile is great; Freedom Mobile *might* be even better *if* you’re planning to only use your phone in cities”: you’d have to either do the comparisons yourself or find somebody more local who’s done it.

—

Some restaurants and the occasional grocery store will give you free food on your birthday. The selection is heavily location-dependant; there are various websites listing the available things for a given place (example: https://www.favoritecandle.com/free-birthday-meals/San-Francisco/CA), though their information is often out of date and you’ll need to check with each restaurant’s own website. Most require newsletter signups (I have a dedicated email address specifically for newsletters from people who might give me free stuff); many require you to buy something else in order to receive the freebie with it, but there are a few that are outright free (except transportation costs, of course: plan your route carefully, and ideally have them be on the way to somewhere you were going anyway). Last year I got a muffin (Starbucks) and a large fruit slushie (Booster Juice): this year Starbucks has unfortunately stopped offering freebies unless you buy at least one thing from them per year (any time during the year, though, not specifically your birthday! still suitable for lots of people!), but I’ve found a couple more newsletters and am set up to get a bag of chocolate-covered almonds (Giant Tiger) and a hamburger (Harvey’s), plus another slushie. (And who knows, maybe I’ll end up at Starbucks at some point between now and November and regain muffin eligibility for this year.)

(maryellencarter, if you’re reading this, note that I’m planning to give you a pre-sifted list of these for your birthday: you don’t need to go figuring this out yourself. I’ll probably compile and send it in October sometime, so that there’ll be less time for circumstances to change while still leaving room for the restaurants to consider you to have been on their newsletter for a sufficient length of time beforehand.)

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My finances tag, “adventures in human capitalism”, might have some other stuff that I missed or covered in less detail here.

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†I don’t have a good picture of our finances after March yet: I’ve switched to preparing quarterly financial statements (formerly annual), but I haven’t finished collecting and processing the data from Q2, so right now it’s scattered around various bank accounts and credit-card records of four different people and I can’t see what it’s like overall.

††Honestly, I don’t really care whether they pay it back or not. Money used for things beneficial to me is mine for all practical purposes, and I’m not too concerned with whose bank account it happens to be in. (Mom expressed her gratitude at my “selflessness” recently, but I’m *really* not selfless: I’m just very aware that working together is in my own best interest. I don’t make anywhere near enough to survive alone: hell, often I can’t even contribute an equal share towards the group’s expenses, and have to find non-income ways to contribute like accounting and pest control. (I’ve gotten pretty good at killing houseflies. As long as they’re up against a window they’re easy.))

Tags:

#this post technically qualifies as: #oh look an original post #but is closer to the spirit of: #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #long post #death mention #food #home of the brave #our home and cherished land

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