So what can we learn from this study? On the data side, we see that everything is proceeding as planned. Nobody’s paying $50 for a burger at McDonald’s, or $16 for a can of tuna at Safeway. Employers wish their profits were higher, and workers are glad they got a raise, but they wish they made more money. Three years after Seattle started down the road to $15, everything is as it should be. Those apocalyptic claims of destruction and business closures haven’t been proven true.
One thing the study didn’t explain was why the sky didn’t fall as promised. Why weren’t workers laid off in droves, or replaced with robots? Why didn’t prices skyrocket? Why does Seattle have more restaurants now than at any point in its history?
It’s because those workers who saw a raise now have more money to spend in the city around them. Those restaurant workers are eating in more restaurants. They’re buying more groceries. They’re buying more clothes and cars. That increased consumer demand is creating jobs, and more than paying for the increased minimum wage. The $15 minimum wage established a positive feedback loop that created growth in Seattle by including more people in the economy. In other words, it worked exactly as intended.
In this video from the Washington Post on the horrific situation in Charlottesville, white nationalist Sean Patrick Nielsen said that in addition to “standing up for local white identity” and “the free market,” his top value as a Republican was killing Jews:
This is how accepted anti-Semitism is. These monsters are so comfortable in support for their Judenhasse that they are literally unafraid to give their names to a major news outlet or to show their faces to an international audience and declare that they want to murder Jewish people. And I worry one day the rest of the world will let them—again.
I cosplayed Edna Mode from The Incredibles at Holiday Matsuri and needless to say I spent the day hunting down characters with capes and getting irrationally angry at them
I want a high fantasy movie where everyone talks with Southern US accents instead of British ones.
The Dwarves though, they can get Minnesotan accents.
ok but picture this: elves with brooklyn accents
“Hey HEY I’m castin’ here, what’d’you – listen, my pop and I serve the Great Tree goin’ back six hundred fuckin’ years so if you got a problem with our fuckin’ magic you don’t fuckin’ come down here into our fuckin’ grove to gimme shit about it.
“Right? You don’t see me fuckin’ goin’ into your shitty man-stables and tellin’ you how to milk horses, do ya? So instead you come down here, disrespect me, disrespect my pa, and how ‘bout you stop fuckin’ disrespectin’ the Great Fuckin’ Tree that grew whens’t the world was young and carries all our fates ‘n its boughs, okay?
“I said, ‘okay?’
“Okay, now fuck off.”
I just came up from Orzammar, dontcha know, and brought that there jello salad and hotdish. Can you believe the snow we are having this time of year in Ferelden? I hear the roads are just terrible, uff da.
“You fools! This isn’t even my final form!”
“Aw, honey, bless yer heart. Yer tellin’ me that little thing there is yer final form? Why, it ain’t no bigger than that dragon we fought that time in Abracamden! You remember that, Harlan?”
a good thing to do for your friends with anxiety disorders: if you have a question you need to ask them or something you need to tell them, explain the subject of the question/the statement in the same message as your opening one!
so basically: instead of saying “can i ask you a question?” and sending just that (which, as a person with an anxiety disorder, makes my anxiety go into hyperdrive) go “can i ask you a question about ___?”
it’s a little thing but honestly few things make me anxious like “i have a question for you” or “there’s something i need to tell you” without immediate explanation. thanks!
“call me, nothing is wrong, just wanna talk on the phone” would be so much better than “Call me.”
Actually please to all of this please.
YES PLEASE.
YES THIS OK????? Like I have trained my husband to say “nothing bad, I just need to call you because it’s too much to type.” It helps SO MUCH. Just let me prepare myself, because I guarantee my imagination will take me to much much darker places.
Might I add, if someone with anxiety has just said something to you that’s a lot to process, and you need some time to think about what to say in response, please consider a quick “I’m not ignoring you, I need to think about what to say and I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”
Because that definitely saves your friend with anxiety a lot of strife and assuming they’ve ruined your friendship forever. Nothing is crueler than a “Seen 2:25pm” when it’s 10am the next day and you’re waiting on a reply to a huge confession.
Normally I don’t acknowledge my anxiety very much but to any of my friends this would genuinely be helpful. Thanks
Bonus: even if you don’t struggle with anxiety, this can really help cut down on miscommunication caused by text-monotone! My roommate and I use these a lot to keep from accidentally getting into arguments.
Would you advise someone to flap towels in a burning house? To bring a flyswatter to a gunfight? Yet the counsel we hear on climate change could scarcely be more out of sync with the nature of the crisis.
The email in my inbox last week offered thirty suggestions to green my office space: use reusable pens, redecorate with light colours, stop using the elevator.
Back at home, done huffing stairs, I could get on with other options: change my lightbulbs, buy local veggies, purchase eco-appliances, put a solar panel on my roof.
And a study released on Thursday claimed it had figured out the single best way to fight climate change: I could swear off ever having a child.
These pervasive exhortations to individual action — in corporate ads, school textbooks, and the campaigns of mainstream environmental groups, especially in the west — seem as natural as the air we breath. But we could hardly be worse-served.
While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71 percent. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet.
you kids these days with your rapidly growing concern for the state of the world and your knowledge of important issues at increasingly younger ages despite having been told your opinions don’t matter by the adults who put you in these situations
Terry Pratchett was made an honorary Brownie and this pleases me to no end.
“
Not many men can say this,’ Terry says, proudly, ‘but as a result of The Wee Free Men I was made an honorary Brownie for writing a proper girl in a book. I’ve got a woggle and everything. No kidding.
‘Anyway, the Brownies wanted to kidnap someone famous and they decided on me because they liked Tiffany Aching. But they didn’t know how to go about it. And I thought, “All we need is a signing queue, two little girls and a yellow rubber chicken.” (I don’t know why it hasn’t been established before, but a yellow rubber chicken is the secret of all humour.)’
‘So, it’s all set up and I tell the two little Brownies, “You stand on one side of me and you on the other and just look at the camera, all sweet and innocent. Then without looking at me, one of you must raise my hat and the other has to hit me over the head with the rubber chicken. Then the first Brownie should place my hat back on my head as I slump down in the chair.”
‘The only problem was that people saw me apparently doing a signing and a massive queue built up. So then we had to explain to everyone that I wasn’t in fact doing a signing, but I would sign their books if they wouldn’t mind waiting until these two little girls had knocked me out. It was one of those surreal moments that you just treasure.’
“ (x)
