illness mention

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

hip-shop:

hot new tumblr discourse

put in the tags your opinions on wearing shoes in the house and why

Tags:

#in my own house: nothing against it unless the shoes are in quarantine‚ but I normally don’t #in other people’s houses: I’m not willing to die on this hill so I go along with the taking-your-shoes-off norm #but I would rather keep them on #taking off one’s shoes is an expression of vulnerability #(partly Touching Their Floor and partly Making It More Difficult to Leave Abruptly) #and it’s frankly presumptuous that everybody and their brother demands it of me #this is *your* space‚ not mine‚ and the fact is that I will not be as comfortable here as I would at home #what next? #are you going to expect me to eat your finger foods without hand sanitiser? #groom my face?? #take off my utility belt??? #we play this game of pretending to trust each other #but I don’t trust your house and I don’t trust you #you want my trust‚ fucking earn it #tag rambles #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #illness mention

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hedgehog-moss:

korean-disaster:

jackmanhugh:

open a new window somewhere in the world. 

i love this because it’s such a simple concept but it answers things i didn’t even know how to ask

Looking out of people’s windows is such a peaceful way of travelling… I got a snowfall in Argentina, a nice sea view in Ukraine, a clothes line in the fog in Bangalore. Antonella from Tavernaro, I like your wooden bird.

Tags:

#interesting #(note: these are not live feeds) #(they’re recordings on ten-minute loops) #illness mention #covid19 #the wondrous variety of sapient life

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

maryellencarter:

so like. there’s this budgeting thing called the 50/30/20 method. apparently it is popularized by elizabeth warren? the idea is you spend only 50% of your budget on needs, 30% on wants, and 20% on savings or debt reduction (after counting all minimum payments on your current debt as part of Needs).

So I know my bills take up more than one of my 2 paychecks a month. (I ignore the occasional third one for budgeting purposes till it rolls around, so I don’t overbudget for months that don’t have one.) So for curiosity’s sake, I broke down my entire budget into Needs, Wants, and Savings, then did percentage math at it.

For this purpose, you count your non-tax payroll deductions, like healthcare and 401(k) contributions, as part of your income and expenses, but you don’t count money that goes away as taxes. So the budget starts off with putting 401(k) contributions in Savings and healthcare deductions in Needs. Then you start listing off shit like rent, utilities, car expenses…

Right now, while I’m still catching up on a bunch of my COVID-deferred bills and loans, my Needs come out to about 74% of my income. However, my Wants are very minimal: I have my massage subscription and tip, I’ve budgeted for fast food or takeout maybe 2-3x a month, and I pledge to one Patreon at the $1 level. All together, my Wants are about 6% of my income, leaving the requisite 20% to go toward reducing COVID debt for now.

However, once my COVID deferrals are all paid off, my Needs go down to about 67% of my income – and this is with generous projections, like at least one specialist copay every single month and gasoline if we ever start driving again. My Wants stay at about 6%. So I could either use the other 27% for savings and debt reduction, or I could stick with the recommended 20% and have 13% of my budget for Wants.

And I’m like… this is so much money. This is $150 just unallocated *after* going out to eat at least once a month and keeping my massage subscription. That’s… I do not know what else I would want. I could buy my entire wardrobe at LL Bean. I could have a massage every single week. I could eat at a sit-down restaurant every week. I could buy the newest and most expensive iPhone every single year. I could buy a brand new American Girl doll every month with money to spare. Like I couldn’t do all of those at *once* obviously, but that’s with just 7% of my income by this method of reckoning.

Like, if I somehow did make twice my Needs expenses after tax. That’s not impossible; I’d have to make a little under $33k a year, or a little over $2700 a month, which would be about $17 an hour excluding taxes. I don’t expect to get there at my current job in the near future, but it’s not astronomical.

But like, at that point I’d be saving about $545 a month, covering all my Needs expenses, and I would have *over eight hundred dollars a fucking month* to spend on Wants! Like… jesus fuckwaffles. How would I… I could buy a new one of my current phone every single month and have money left over. I could go to one of those black-tie restaurants that are like $100 a plate *twice a week*. I could not only move into a bigger apartment but hire a maid service to clean it. I could buy every single book I’ve ever read in short order and pay to store them all. I could live on like… caviar and avocado toast.

Hell, even if my living expenses were somehow miraculously reduced and my Needs were only half of my tax-excluded pay *now*, I’d be living on a little over $1000 a month, saving about $400 a month, and trying to figure out how to spend $600 a month on Wants. How… I don’t fucking know what else I could want. I’m not used to having money to spare. It’s weirder than winning the lottery, even, because it’s just like… it’s not enough to go “I will pay off all my friends’ student loans and buy a condo!” but it’s enough that I’m like “Do I just… put all 27% of my income in savings? Do I save for a car? Pay off my student loans? Invest for retirement? Am I fundamentally missing something I should be wanting?”

That sounds like a sign that 50/30/20 isn’t for you.

A lot of budgeting methods have this…maybe not “problem” exactly, but this thing where they’re clearly aimed at people who start with an entertainment budget of “everything after necessities” (or in many cases even higher) and negotiate *downwards*, which makes the methods a bad fit for people who start with an entertainment budget of zero and negotiate *upwards*. I guess the people spending money they don’t have on things they could do without are the ones most in need of frameworks, so the frameworks are designed for them. Getting *down* to 30% is a good start for people who were previously spending *more*.

—

Personally, I do struggle to wrap my head around things that draw a bright line between “wants” and “investments”. Sure, there are *occasional* items–like restaurant food–that are just wants and not also investments, but by far the most common reason for me to want to buy something is because I think it will leave me better off in the long run. I have a long list of things to save up for, and it’s all stuff like “house repairs” and “things that give you a leg up on Vimes Boot Theory” and “retirement funds” and “hedging against the future being wildly different from the present, such that normal retirement funds don’t cut it [link]”.

—

I think it’s important to bear in mind: given how weird your life is in general, and in particular the fact that your ability to work has a history of fluctuating erratically, saving is even more important for you than for most people.

There’s a concept called “self-insurance”. (…actually it turns out that there are at least *two* similar-but-not-identical concepts called self-insurance, and the Wikipedia article is about the wrong one. Investopedia [link] has the right idea.) You, in particular, *really* should get disability insurance if you can possibly manage it, and while third-party disability-insurance companies *exist*, you’d have to file claims (during the periods of time when you are least capable of filing claims!), and take the risk that whatever shit happens to you next won’t technically be disability by their standards, and operate under rules designed to let the insurance company turn a profit. (The house always wins.) Ideally, then, what you’d want is to instead save up enough in the good times that you can cover the bad times yourself.

(For example: you mention you’re digging your way out of COVID-related debt. My brother was temporarily laid off in the spring, and because of [glitches in the hastily-expanded Canadian welfare system] was unable to receive any kind of unemployment payments in time to actually help him with it. But he had lots of money in his savings account, and he used some of *that* to cover his bills until the restaurant re-opened. Now that he’s working again, he’s replenishing it; in the long run, he plans to save up enough for a condo.

(We not-quite-joked that if the glitch had to happen to *someone* at his workplace, it’s good that it happened to him: his co-workers spend all their money on booze and weed and wouldn’t have been able to handle it. His co-workers, meanwhile, not-quite-joke that they should get him hooked on something so they can drag him back into the crab bucket.))

Tags:

#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #covid19 #illness mention #drugs cw #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

wafflesrisa:

Here’s something cute

When lockdown happened in the UK it happened very suddenly. At the law firm I work at, our office building emptied overnight when everyone was told to work from home. No time to clear our desks, no time to bring office plants home.

Fast forward three and a half months – everyone assumes that their plants are dead.

But then! An email goes round! It’s turns out that one of our security guards is a florist, and –

–the security team has moved EVERY SINGLE PLANT from all 12 FLOORS of our office building into the cafeteria. It’s been turned into a temporary greenhouse. Cacti and succulents and spider plants and terrariums and potted ferns

AND! Each plant has been INDIVIDUALLY LABELLED by hand with post-it notes with name and desk location so the plants can go home after lockdown ends

To give some indication of the scale of the endeavour:

6e2264b88377624ac47c6aa2a94c0747ebffcfdd

If you zoom into the centre right photo you can see one of our security team happily waving

The plants are being taken care of tenderly. They get sun and water and are spending happy times with other plant friends

Tags:

#plants #adorable #covid19 #illness mention

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

comparativelysuperlative:

Believing the mailman is a serial killer is 100% reasonable if you are a dog and your entire species has been bred to believe that showing up unannounced and leaving right away is, like, the scariest thing.

Thanks to COVID, any boxes that get dropped off actually are a threat to the lives of everyone in the house. My dog does not know this, but he does have a justified true belief that all those containers are dangerous.

Any time there’s a knock on the door, it has one simple meaning: Gett yer case.

Tags:

#oh my god #puns #covid19 #philosophy #illness mention

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

argumate:

it’s not even subtle, as 2020 approaches my blog is full of these incredibly smug foreshadowing comments, real Pratchettarian bullshit like “don’t worry, a horrifying death is the last thing that will happen to you haha”

 

mitigatedchaos:

This is a misunderstanding, Mr. Argumate. You didn’t cause 2020 by posting, rather, you posted because 2020 would happen – it primed your brain for it.

Unfortunately this phenomenon tends only to happen in a way that can’t be used to act on the information effectively – partly because there are multiple possible futures, and the very effect of the information travelling backwards alters the future, even very minutely.

Ultimately the ability can be cultivated, but it’s really only useful for writing science fiction.

 

shieldfoss:

listen have you been committing chronofelonies again?

it’s cool you can tell me i’m not a time cop (:

 

shacklesburst:

that’s what you told us the last four loops and in each one you turned out to be a time cop :/

(see also)

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #time travel #unreality cw #covid19

It Should Be Legal To Have Sex In Public

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

danksy-lives:

brin-bellway:

danksy-lives:

By what right does a government, entrusted with the preservation of liberty, see fit to prohibit consensual acts? This question, which was the catalyst of the Sexual Revolution, has led this author to reconsider all manner of social taboos.

While considering the rise of PDAs on campus, I considered how the right to show affection had superseded the expectation of those around them to feel comfortable. This is a positive change, primarily because the taboo against this act is rooted in the belief that people have the right to control the expression of their peers. This value has no place in a free society. From this position, I considered more extreme examples of the same principle. If society has no right to prohibit public signs of love, why should it prohibit its members from the literal act of love? It is this question that led me to my thesis, that it should be legal to have sex in public.

The first objection that will be raised against this is that the other people do not consent to seeing this. This response misrepresents the nature of consent. Many of you have seen a video in which consent is explained using the metaphor of giving someone tea. In this video, consent is understood to be a state in which the two people involved in sex agree to the act. Nowhere in that explanation does the opinion of those around them come into consideration. Because of this, saying that public sex violates the rights of passersby, or that they should just “get a room”, holds no weight.

The second point is that public sex does no harm to those who witness it. As with PDAs, there is no injustice that one can point to in order to justify its prohibition. The most likely grievance one could have is that people having sex on the ground would cause people to move around them. This is certainly an inconvenience, but not one that warrants government intervention. The worst-case scenario is that the coitus occurs in an exit or other narrow location. In this scenario, the appropriate action would be to use applicable fire codes to identify this as a safety violation. They could then be punished accordingly, public sex not being relevant to the matter. In neither case can the public claim harm that comes directly from the act of making love, but from factors that would be relevant whether or not sex was involved.

As I end this, I should address the reader’s assumption that the author is a crazed sex maniac. On the contrary, I am only interested in freedom for its own sake. I have no desire to partake in the act, nor would I gain sexual pleasure from seeing this in my daily life. I am content to know that the government will not interfere with those who chose to do so. Being free does not require that you partake in an act, it only requires that you reserve the right to do so, should the desire come. That is why I write this, so that we may all be a little more free.

People should not have sex in public because–given the fluids involved–it is unsanitary and against the interests of public health. They also should not talk in public for the same reason.

would you then support the idea that those having sex should be responsible for the cleanup of their own fluids?

I highly doubt that would be enforceable in practice. Our current public-health measures are unreliable and generally inadequate: we can’t even prevent restaurants from serving rotting food!

(while you could argue the *later* instances were a natural punishment for forcing service workers into proximity with them during a plague, those poor bastards who simply ordered the least popular variant of chicken during Christmas break absolutely did not deserve what they got)

By requiring people who have sex to do so in (ideally) their own space or (at minimum) a space owned by people in a good position to trace the sex back to them, we both increase the probability that they will have disinfectant available and ensure that, if they fail to use it (or fail to use it thoroughly enough), it will either harm *themselves* or harm someone with the capacity to figure it out and seek restitution. One of many situations where we eliminate the tragedy of the commons by eliminating the commons.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #discourse cw #unsanitary cw #nsfw text #in which Brin has a job #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #illness mention

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90377:

Memories of April 2020 by 90377
Instagram | Etsy Shop

Tags:

#…so uh I’m *strongly* legally discouraged from going outside more than the absolute minimum #(legally I have to treat every allergy attack like it might be COVID-19 and go into full lockdown for two weeks) #(surgical masks aren’t always enough even when you can get them and cloth masks are untested and presumably even less perfect) #I think I’m starting to go a bit astronaut #plants #covid19 #allergies #(every year it gets worse‚ my ability to just go enjoy the outdoors ever more restricted) #(I’d wondered what the escalation would be this year‚ hoped that #perhaps the allergist I would visit in January would help me *de*-escalate instead) #(but there was nothing she could do for me and I guess now I fucking know what this year’s escalation is) #tag rambles #(P.S. over dinner today Mom told me the forsythia in the backyard is blooming) #(and I should go appreciate it seeing as how it was my idea in the first place) #(so after posting this I went and opened up the back door to look at it) #(I held my breath) #(and when my lungs began to burn I shut the door again and quickly walked away)