Attention fanfic writers: If you use Google Docs to write/store/back-up your fics, you might want to download anything you don’t already have backed up elsewhere. Google is apparently invading and deleting people’s personal drive content thanks to the FOSTA/SESTA bill that recently passed through Congress. Essentially, it criminalizes ANY platform where sexual content could be placed.
It may also be worth making sure you have offline back-ups of any and all fics you have posted here on Tumblr and on AO3, in case Yahoo get antsy (they’ve been cracking down on the porn bot tumblrs already) and OTW face a legal challenge to take down AO3. I’m hoping that’s not the case – but I was on LiveJournal during Strikethrough in 2007 and I remember the way that whole communities as well as individual LJ accounts were deleted and purged; it was instrumental in the founding of AO3 in the first place. That was a widespread purge of fanfic writers and communities, LGBT+ communities and writers and more, all due to legal threats that SixApart, the company that owned and hosted LiveJournal, received due to allegedly hosting paedophile content. After Strikethrough was over and LJ admitted they’d gone OTT, there were a number of communities and accounts that didn’t get reinstated. I’ve always been quite careful not to have my Tumblr flagged up as NSFW in part because of that. Given the number of Facebook accounts that get temporary or permanent suspensions thanks to malicious false reports, I have very little confidence that Tumblr’s staff won’t make mistakes.
I’m not sure what this means for collaborative fics; but Google Docs probably aren’t a safe platform for that anymore.
If you thought the end of net neutrality in the US wouldn’t affect you, guess again.
Democracy is being dumped all over, and there’s hardly a conversation about it on this site or anywhere.
You all do realise when those new rules go into effect this will see the end of free speech and freedom of expression? It might not happen all at once, but it will happen. It will happen when no one takes to the streets over it. It will happen when the first person to pay their new internet bill doesn’t bother to question it.
You think it won’t happen, it can’t happen, someone will do something.
When @sarahshahi drops by your stall to buy a Golden Girls tea towel….. #Dead #LifeGoalAchieved #NiylahsNikNaks #ClexaCon2018 (at Tropicana Las Vegas)
To think, only a year or two ago you three started making us wet ourselves over dubious Clexa crack and now look at ya. Making a Shaw sandwich in Vegas. Famous.
Imagine Jurassic World but Chris Pratt’s character is a woman. The whole film is exactly the same, but instead of Owen we have Olivia. It makes more sense that Olivia is the alpha of Raptor Squad, because all the raptors are female as well. Olivia and Claire argue about shoes (”They’re actually pretty comfortable for heels.” “I have a spare pair of boots in the truck for the LOVE OF GOD please borrow them.” “I’m fine! I can walk miles in these!” “You’re weird.”) They save each other’s lives. They make out. They walk into the sunset together. Gal pals who defeated the dinosaurs. The End.
God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs. Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth.
for all of those reading this who are not Americans/Canadians, here is what you can do!
signal boost and read below!
now, while net neutrality would only have an effect on Americans whose ISPs decide to no longer abide by net neutrality laws, it will impact people of other countries.
the ending of net neutrality would mean that ISPs can charge more for access to websites, like Tumblr. ISPs can also filter what can and cannot be seen. essentially, the web would no longer be open. this would not happen all at once, but slowly. you would, in some situations, have limited communication with American mutuals. the fandoms, communities, and so on that have developed on social media with American users would be stunted. Help protect your friends and their internet! Signal boost! Spread the word to everyone to encourage American friends to take action!
but here’s the thing, Americans.
we only need one more vote! the congressional review act (CRA) would allow congress to reverse the FCC’s decision to repeal net neutrality. it only requires 83% support to reverse this decision, and we lack one vote. get off your asses, folks. if your senators have not yet pledged, call them! google scripts!
we are the generation we have been waiting for. take a stand. the vote is on April 23rd. fight like we are running out of time, because we are.
Eartha Kitt speaking truth to power at a 1968 luncheon at the White House hosted by Lady Bird Johnson which resulted in Kitt being blacklisted in the US for nearly a decade.
let it be known that on January 18th, 1968, Eartha Kitt stood in a room full of white women at The Women Doers Luncheon, GOT IN LADYBIRD JOHNSON’S FACE, and told her that the government was sending the best of the youth off to be shot and killed and, in not so many words, that THAT was the reason the youth were rebelling. She ALSO stopped President Johnson after he made a statement claiming that mothers should be responsible for stopping their kids from becoming criminals and asked about “the parents who have to go to work, for instance, who can’t spend time with their children as they should”. It was brushed off by LBJ who only mentioned the funding for day care centers put in place by the recently passed Social Security bill, and then more or less said that the women at that luncheon should figure it out for themselves.
She was blacklisted, but she defended every word she said that day.
From a macroeconomics standpoint, Bridges is completely accurate.
The problem with most Tories (and many Republicans in the US) is that they either have big business interests at heart or have bought the lie that government is like a business. Government is not a business! Microeconomic principles, even ones that apply to entire industries, don’t apply to governments!
Here’s the fundamental macroecomic model of an economy:
(image from tutor2u)
Notice that the system is circular. The model shows that the economy inherently needs to be balanced. If some households are making hundreds of times the income of other households, they will put the vast majority of that money into savings and investment.
This is bad for the economy.
Some savings and investment is necessary. But too much means the little green arrows are siphoning off vast portions of the peach demand arrow (”purchases of goods and services”). This means that companies are fighting over a smaller and smaller pie. Even if you heavily fund those companies, many will collapse due to lack of demand for their products, unless they become monopolies and the sole practical source of their product. Monopolies are technically illegal in the US, but we have them anyway because of this problem (and a lack of enforcement).
The other way you can damage the demand arrow is by shifting the proportions of the purple income arrow. Most people make money from wages, so if you significantly decrease those relative to dividends, interest, profits, and rent, you’ll harm the majority of households. In turn, this again decreases the peach arrow because many households only need a set amount of a given product in a year. The fewer households that can afford the products, the lower overall demand, because the remaining households won’t buy up the difference.
Households with average levels of income spend far more money than they save, of necessity, and they do so at a relatively steady rate. This is good for the economy.
Households with incredibly high levels of income – millionaires, etc. – save far more than they spend. They tend to make their money off of dividends, interest, profits, and rents – not wages. Therefore, to improve the economy, including increasing tax revenues for the government, two basic steps are urged by almost all macroeconomists:
1. Increase wages, especially at the lowest end. This expands the tax base and drives up demand for basic goods and services, stabilizing the industries necessary to a decent quality of life: agriculture and food production, clothing, housing, education, transportation, etc.
2. Use progressive taxes, in which those who make the most money, particularly off of dividends, interest, profits, and rents, pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes. This allows that money to be spent directly on goods and services or to be redistributed to poor households, who will in turn spend it on goods and services. In both cases, money that would have gone into savings and investment instead goes into demand. This makes businesses more successful and a large number of households more prosperous. Society as a whole benefits from decreased crime, lower health problems, and improved public goods like education, roads, emergency response, infrastructure, etc.
Macroeconomics is the opposite of an individual business. Individual businesses study how to take the most pie for themselves and keep it. Macroeconomists – and governments – study how to make the pie bigger and distribute it in such a way that society as a whole benefits from the growth.
Conservatives: doing economics wrong for the past several decades by deliberately pretending that knowing how to run a business is anything like knowing how to run a government. Being fiscally cautious and being uneducated do not have to go hand in hand. (I’m both, for example.) But the rhetoric for slashing budgets has been laden with errors and ideology since at least the 1930s, and I’m tired of it.
ONE MORE TIME FOR THE MORONS AT THE BACK IN OUR GOVERNMENTS
The Doctor Is Out 