[-] VoxAdActa@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago

I was a Teamster when I worked for Sygma, and out of all the unions I've been a member of (four, now), the Teamsters were the motherfucking worst. If they were actively trying to take a revolving door of 18- and 19-year-olds just getting their first big-boy jobs and turn them into all into die-hard anti-union voters for life, they couldn't do a better job than they're doing right now, and I told my steward that before I quit.

They designed the whole contract specifically to offload all the real work onto the new guys, protect the older guys when they decided to throw hands on the loading dock, and give as much overtime as possible to the ancient, divorced boomers with no family to go home to, that they could spend pretending to sweep the floors while the trainees finished the actual loading. Guys would bid order picking, then use seniority to bump bid loads/receivers off their jobs and wouldn't pick a single case for the whole contract, while getting paid picker bonuses and shift differentials.

And just to rub salt into the wound, those perks (bumping lower guys off their bid jobs and "sweeping the floor" during overtime) were specifically written out of the latest contract, so only the guys hired under the previous contract would ever get to do them. They straight robbed those kids of even anything to look forward to if they toughed out the low-seniority years. They also negotiated a different pay scale for under 5 years, 5-10 years, and 10 years in, and you can guess which end of that they weighted the raises toward. It was a complete shitshow, and when kids would quit, the Teamsters would keep their initiation fee (taken out of the first three paychecks). You could call to try to get it back, but the best they'd do would be to put it towards your initiation fee for your next Teamster job, as if any of those kids would ever willingly subject themselves to that shit ever again.

AND THERE'S MORE. I just don't feel like typing up a fucking novel on it. Don't even get me started on the shady shit they did during the contract negotiations I was actually present for. It was worse than maddening; it felt like it was specifically crafted by the senior guys to make sure that ladder was pulled up as high as they could behind them, while not actually making any waves for the company. And the safety issues they ignored and covered up, and the fancy fucking "union meetings" they never told anyone about so that they were only attended by the office reps, because they were being held at the most expensive restaurants in the city, on the union's dime, and the number of stewards who were literally fucking floor supervisors, and on, and on, and on....

UIW was kind of spineless and milquetoast, but they took care of us. The Teamsters are fucking old-school mob racket motherfuckers who are single-handedly responsible for an entire generation of workers who think all unions are a scam.

[-] VoxAdActa@kbin.social 39 points 1 year ago

Old Reddit is Reddit. If they get rid of it, I'm sure as fuck not sticking around for this new site. It looks like Bing and Youtube had a deformed little monster-child.

[-] VoxAdActa@kbin.social 30 points 1 year ago

What's the metric unit for depression?

[-] VoxAdActa@kbin.social 51 points 1 year ago

I'm 6'5". I'd love to hear your suggestions for what I should do with my legs when you recline your seat. Do you think I can just take them off? Am I supposed to sit sideways with my legs in the lap of the person next to me? Am I supposed to do Yoga for a year before I get on a plane, so I can spread my knees out 180 degrees from each other and you can lay your head on my dick?

I'm not "slamming my knees into the back of your seat". They simply exist where you're trying to be, and the fundamental properties of matter are causing them to collide. You can be as pissed about your comfort as you want to be, but it's not going to change my knees into ethereal ghost knees so your seat can lean back.

[-] VoxAdActa@kbin.social 17 points 1 year ago

The "far right" is growing because the left keeps moving further left, and normal people realize they're now considered conservative.

I guess there really is no floor for how simple an idea can be when it's not beholden to reality. Thanks for the example.

[-] VoxAdActa@kbin.social 33 points 1 year ago

Probably has its roots from way back in the day so that women couldnt effectively run away from the men and get very far.

Can't speak to Muslim culture, but European culture way back in the day didn't want women riding horses because of sex.

There are a lot of branches on that tree, but the biggest one is that since horseback was believed to be capable of rupturing the hymen (hymen science has progressed quite a bit since I last looked into it, so I don't know if that's actually a thing), it was the same thing as having sex for women. They believed that women got sexual pleasure from it (which, I guess, was a bad thing), that they'd start craving horses as lovers instead of humans, and all sorts of weird shit that only twisted, perpetually horny dudes would think of.

So the sidesaddle was invented. It allowed women to ride horses while, literally and figuratively, keeping their legs closed.

Unfortunately, riding sidesaddle is a massive pain in the ass, so that fad didn't last long. Maybe about fifty years or so of general popularity (because, obviously, you can still get a sidesaddle and learn to ride in it today, if you want, for whatever reason) over the course of all horse-domestication history.

Of course, like so many things from European history, this primarily applied to rich/noble people. The poor didn't have the luxury of giving a fuck about most of it.

[-] VoxAdActa@kbin.social 28 points 1 year ago

Jesus, is this what we're doing with Lemmy? Posting memes older than my kids?

[-] VoxAdActa@kbin.social 26 points 1 year ago

It's not a story a perfectly spherical Jedi in a vacuum would tell you.

[-] VoxAdActa@kbin.social 22 points 1 year ago

want a place free of authoritarian policies that don't limit actual human discourse.

You've already been given a suggestion for just that kind of instance. If you want to see that kind of content, there's a spot for that.

Or are you just upset that there are places who don't welcome those kinds of dumbfuck takes? Is it that you want to see the content for yourself, or that you want to make the content and force everyone to see it?

Either way, this instance isn't the place for you. Exploding heads is. Go there, be happy.

0

Hey, just wanted to mention this thing I noticed. So I blocked a user after a few rounds in a thread, but when they responded to me, I still got the notification and could still see the first line of their post from that screen. But the entire comment thread, including my own replies, was invisible from the article page until I unblocked him.

Right now, it seems like the "block" function doesn't keep people from talking trash directly to me, it just keeps me from responding to them or seeing any part of the thread from anyone under their highest post.

That really kind of takes all the teeth out of the "block, don't defederate" argument, but I'm also sure it's just some kind of bug.

5

A friend asked me earlier tonight if I had "processed" some stuff that happened to me a while back, and I jokingly told her "My philosophy on emotional processing is: I ain't got time to bleed."

Several hours later, which is just now, I thought about it again and I realized that was way too accurate. Mentally and emotionally, I'm living my entire life as if I was being stalked by the Predator.

I went through so much shit for fifteen straight years, where I was always running or hiding or fighting or outwitting dangerous people (my ex), financial disasters, and housing catastrophes, with a horde of other issues of varying sizes flowing in to fill up all the gaps. I've been out of that life for almost five years now, and the serious crises have slowed down to what I suppose is a more normal pace of about one or two a year (instead of before, when I was squaring my shoulders and taking a deep breath every time I walked in my front door, preparing to find out what emergency was waiting for me).

Even though I'm not constantly running or hiding from a Predator now, I'm still... there. I'm still in that jungle. It's not that he's gone, it's that I don't know where he is or how much time I have before he finds me. I'm spending all my emotional energy on carving wooden stakes and digging tiger pits and preparing for the fight that, in my heart of hearts, I know is coming.

Of course, life is life, and sometimes shit just hits the fan, and I'm always glad for my tiger pits when it does, so my brain doesn't really see this as a problem. "Yeah, it's exhausting, but aren't you glad you had the deep-deep-super-emergency savings account when X happened? Aren't you glad knew and had practiced three alternative routes to get to that client's office when the highway flooded? Aren't you glad you left for that meeting an hour and a half early? Aren't you glad.... aren't you glad... aren't you glad?"

And yeah, I kind of am. I'm generally in an ok position for the one-in-a-hundred or one-in-a-thousand bad random event to happen. So what if I'm spending an equal amount of money and time and worry on the other 999 things that don't happen? Even though I'm kind of disturbed by this realization right now, I'm still having a hard time convincing myself that this is a problem. It's not normal, obviously, but is it really so bad? Especially since sometimes my friends get into some shit and I can say "Hey, here's five bundles of field-made leg-spike-traps to help you out with that Predator that's on your ass. Don't worry, I have ten more in my hidden stash, and thirty more in my extra-hidden stash, I'll be fine."

So no, I ain't got time to bleed. I have to rig up these snare traps and swinging-log-traps for a monster I've seen neither hide nor hair of in five years. If I stop to think about what I've been through, much less take the time to cry about it, it might catch me unawares. I'm still not prepared enough.

But when I ask my brain, "When will I be prepared enough?", my brain replies: "Shut up, it'll hear you. Whittle another spear."

[-] VoxAdActa@kbin.social 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A lot of small, shitty subs are popping up on r/all lately, I've noticed. I used to doomscroll and only notice I'd been too far when I started seeing stuff from subs I'd never seen before, like r/artefactporn, r/justguysbeingdudes, or that weird Talylor Swift circlejerk sub. That was usually around pages 7-9, somewhere in there. That was the sign that I'd been scrolling for too long, and probably ought to either touch grass, or at least refresh the page.

Right now, for me, all three of those subs are on the first page of r/all, along with other subs I've never seen (or rarely seen) before the bottom of the barrel, like r/newsofthestupid and r/rabbits. The one from r/rabbits is on the bottom of the front page with less than 1500 upvotes.

[-] VoxAdActa@kbin.social 18 points 1 year ago

Like, ok, at first? Sure, I can go with "it's not a lie if you actually believe it," in 1985 or even 1995. But by 2010? Come on. And then in 2020, to be like "Well, I mean, I never specifically said I believed in it, just that, you know, it was a thing..." is so gross. It's like some shit my ex-wife would have said after a three-day-long running argument about some basic fact of the universe.

[-] VoxAdActa@kbin.social 17 points 1 year ago

I mean, it's not the rest of the world's fault that Japan produced enough Final Fantasy clones to create a whole genre. But I guess we can try to call them something else. FFRPG? Linear RPG? Grindy-RPG? Not-Really-RP-RPG? Semi-Open-World Turn-Based Narrative? What would be preferable?

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VoxAdActa

joined 1 year ago