I haven’t seen this info floating around Tumblr, so I’m putting it up here.
Starting June 30th, 2017, Tumblr users will no longer be able to log in to Tumblr using AT&T-affiliated email addresses! If that’s you, go get a new email address! The Tumblr Help Center had a list of domains that will no longer work, and instructions on how to switch to a new email address.
This isnt blog related, but most of my followers are on here, and I’m sure a fair chunk of y’all would like to know this
I thought for sure this was some sort bogus scare-tactic BS, but nope, it’s real.
Viewing fluids through a macro lens makes for an incredible playground. In “Galaxy Gates”, Thomas Blanchard and the artists of Oilhack explore a colorful and dynamic landscape of paint, oil, and glitter. The nucleation of holes and the breakdown of sheets to filaments and droplets plays a major role in the visuals. The surface layer is constantly peeling away to reveal what’s going on underneath. In many cases this initial motion settles into a field of oil-rimmed droplets floating like planets against a colorful galactic backdrop. Watch carefully in the second half of the video, and you can even catch a few instances of a stretched ligament of fluid breaking into a string of satellite drops, like at 1:51. Check out some of Blanchard’s previous work here and here. (Video credit: Oilhack and T. Blanchard; GIFs and h/t to Colossal)
Disabled and chronically ill Americans protesting the repeal of the affordable care act today outside senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s office, June 22nd. The response? Capitol police violently moving and arresting them as always. Fuck McConnell the police the state and our president for their vicious ableism
As previously reported, Medicaid cuts in the form of per capita caps will disproportionately affect people with disabilities, and this problem remains unchanged from the House version of the bill. It would also allow states to enforce work requirements for Medicaid recipients who are not disabled or pregnant. That’s red meat for conservatives, but it assumes that poor people are somehow allergic to work, and there is no evidence that is true. America’s recovery from the recession has been uneven: Some communities still face high unemployment rates not because their residents are lazy but because there is simply not enough work. The Senate bill would penalize those communities for an economic crisis they did not create. That doesn’t matter to Republicans. This bill, if passed, benefits the party’s wealthy donors, and that is a deliberate choice. “Personal responsibility,” “common sense,” “small government”—this is scaffolding, erected to obscure a crumbling edifice. The Republican Party is committed to the maintenance of a grossly unequal social hierarchy that handicaps the poor for the circumstances of their lives. This bill is the starkest manifestation of that political project. And though there may be some opposition to this bill from within Republican ranks, it will not be opposition to the substance of the party’s worldview but rather to the details of its implementation.
I know that I’m just one of the millions of people who will lose their health care if the ACA is repealed and this becomes law, and I don’t have that many followers on tumblr and I’m not “important” in fandom. But I am a human being, and the ACA is all that stands between me and suicide.
The anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications I take are literally (and I am using this word correctly) keeping me alive at this point in my life. If Trumpcare goes through, it will mean my death, unless I can find a way to come up with $2250 a month to pay for my medications, because with Trump’s health care plan, even if I were able to get a full-time job with a health insurance package, my employer’s insurance could deny me benefits due to my pre-existing conditions.
I’ve been around a long time, and I’ve tried pretty much all of the meds (and combos) available for my illnesses, back when I had a job with insurance. Now I pay into the Marketplace and get my insurance there, and I’m finally at a steady place w/r/t my disease. I’m not going to go all caps-lock and bold and whatever, but “death” is the outcome if I lose my ACA coverage.
I hope you are all calling your senators. I have been.
My GOP Senator is one of the ones on the fence. He hears from me a lot.
But no matter who your Senator is, GOP or Dem, let them hear from you. A LOT.
Guys, this is it. Seriously. If this passes the Senate, any one in the US who isn’t independently wealthy is fucked. Like fucked.
And by some miracle, you’re not fucked, I guarantee you someone you love and care about is fucked.
USA Today undertook a year-long investigation into southern California truckers, so-called “independent contractors” who form a critical link from America’s busiest port to the rest of the country, and found that drivers are sunk into deep pits of debt due to predatory contracts they signed under duress, debts that are used to force them to work unsafe hours, falsify their work records, and sometimes bring home literal pennies a week after working 80+ hours (some drivers even finish the week in deeper debt, owing money to the companies they “contract” for).
When these workers take their grievances to California’s labor board – with the help of the Teamsters Union – they are generally vindicated and awarded compensation, but the majority of the drivers lack the wherewithal to undertake such a grievance.
The companies whose goods these truckers move include some of America’s biggest brands, like J Crew, Ralph Lauren, LG, Home Depot, and Target, and these companies wash their hands of any responsibility for ensuring that their shipping contractors are not engaged in criminal, exploitative, systematic theft of wages and unsafe working conditions.
The current situation stems from a California rule that banned out-of-date, polluting diesel trucks from its ports. Trucking companies bought all-new trucks with better emissions profiles, then forced their workers to sign contracts through which they assumed all debt for this new fleet, with payments to be taken from their paychecks. The workers were made to sign on pain of immediate termination, without access to a lawyer or advisor, and many didn’t speak or read English well enough to understand the contracts.
The contracts allow the company to terminate the truckers’ employment at will, or to deny them shifts. Workers who miss any work, or a single payment, lose all the payments they’ve put into their trucks, and many report watching years’ worth of wages disappear at the stroke of a pen because they refused to go out on the road for 20 hour shifts, or took a few days off work for a parent’s funeral.
Desperate drivers take out second mortgages on their homes and borrow from relatives to make payments on their trucks, but a driver who falls out of favor with a boss can be “starved” out of his rig if the boss just refuses to give him any shifts – eventually, the driver will simply run out of places to borrow money for payments on the truck (and the drivers are contractually forbidden from driving for other companies, even if the company they work for won’t give them any hours).
The owners of the companies that USA Today investigated denied all this, and when USA Today presented them with documentary evidence, they stopped answering USA Today’s calls.
All else being equal I’m strongly in favor of transitioning away from trucking as a major form of transportation infrastructure, but in the meantime and in the transition it’s extremely important to take care that the workers displaced by those changes are taken care of.
This is corporations using clumsy environmental efforts to increase their stranglehold on the lives of their employees, and we need to fight that. We need to be on the side of the folks who lose their jobs when flawed or destructive infrastructures are phased out. Not in the sense of not ending those destructive practices, but making sure that those workers’ lives and freedoms are protected.
A Middleground 