people seem to have trouble understanding why i’m an anti-capitalist, so i’m going to try and put it into simple, real-life terms.

i work at a restaurant. i make $12 an hour, plus tips. minimum wage where i live is relatively high for my country - the national minimum wage is $7.25/hr, and has not been raised since 2009. before taxes, working full time, my yearly income is about $22,000 a year. ($25,000 if you count tips)

at my job, we sell various dishes, with an average price of about $10-$15. we get printouts every week detailing how much money we made that week; in one week, our restaurant makes about $30,000. (one of our other locations actually makes this much on a daily basis!)

i’m not going to go into details, but after the costs of production (payroll for employees, rent for the building, maintenance, and wholesale food purchasing) are accounted for, the restaurant makes an estimated profit of $20,000 per week.

this profit goes directly to the owner, who does not work at this location. the owner of my restaurant has actually been on vacation for a few months, but still profits from the restaurant, because they own it. i have met the owner exactly twice in my year of working here.

to put this into perspective, the owner of this restaurant earns in 2 days what they pay me in one year. and that’s just from this single location - the owner has several other restaurants, all of which make more money than the one i work at. this ends up resulting in the owner having an estimated net worth of tens of millions of dollars, even after accounting for the payroll for every single worker in their employ.

now, i have to ask you: does the owner of my restaurant deserve this income? did they earn it? did their labor result in this value being created?

the naive answer would be “yes”; the owner purchased the location and arranged for the raw ingredients to be delivered, did they not?

the actual answer is “no”. the owner may have used their initial capital to start the location, but the profit is a result of my labor, and the labor of my co-workers.

the owner purchases rice at a very low bulk price of about 25 cents a pound. i cook the rice, and within a few minutes, that pound of rice is suddenly worth about $30. the owner did not create this value, i did. the owner simply provided the initial capital investment required to start the process.

what needs to be understood here is that capitalists do not create value. they use the labor of their employees to create value, and then take the excess profit and keep it.

what needs to be understood is that capitalists accrue income by already HAVING money. the owner of my restaurant was only able to get this far because they started off, from the very beginning, with enough money to purchase a building, purchase food in bulk, and hire hundreds of employees.

that is to say: the rich get richer, and they do so by exploiting the labor of the poor.

the owner of my restaurant could afford to triple the income of every single person in their employee if they felt like it, but this would mean that they were generating less profit for themselves, so they do not.

the owner of my restaurant pays me the current minimum wage of my area, because to them, i am not a person. i am an investment. i am an asset. i am a means to create more money. 

when you are paid minimum wage, the message your boss is sending you is this: “legally, if i could pay you less, i would.”

every capitalist on the planet exploits their workers for their own gain. every capitalist, even the small business owners, forces people to stay in poverty so that the capitalist can profit.

This is a really good post

...

Sometimes the obsession with shipping, whether for fictional characters or actual people, is just another way to undermine platonic love

And also a way of upholding toxic masculinity and homophobia. I feel like if you see two men being nice to each and automatically think the only explanation is that they’re fucking and it cant possibly be that they’re just friends, you got more problems than shipping

choking on water is the worst because how do you stop choking? drink something? well ive got some bad news for you

Lean your head forward, preferably to knee level, and let the water kind of drain out of your mouth. When your are able to, take deep slow breaths. No heimlich maneuver or physical assists from somebody else should be used beyond this, otherwise you could vomit and escalate the issue. Its about keeping the larynx open. Hopefully this helps.

Reblog to fucking save a life.

A white person learning another language in the United States is a person looking to build a résumé.

A person of color learning English in the United States is a person looking to be treated like a human being.

It is not the same thing.

Keep reblogging this white people are getting mad because they don’t know the difference between learning a language because it’s fun or to put it on applications and learning a language so you won’t get treated like garbage by everyone

Make dem white mans suffer for the sins of a few generations of linguistic and cultural erasure for their own damned convenience

x

[Image Description of screenshots of text: And then she told me this.

Every Friday afternoon, she asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four children with whom they'd like to sit the following week. The children know that these requests may or may not be honoured. She also asks the students to nominate one student who they believe has been an exceptional classroom citizen that week. All ballots are privately submitted to her.

And every single Friday afternoon, after the students go home, she takes out those slips of paper, places them in front of her, and studies them. She looks for patterns.

Who is not getting requested by anyone else?

Who can't think of anyone to request?

Who never gets noticed enough to be nominated?

Who had a million friends last week and none this week?

You see, Chase's teacher is not looking for a new seating chart or "exceptional citizens." Chase's teacher is looking for lonely children. She's looking for children who are struggling to connect with other children. She's identifying the little ones who are falling through the cracks of the class's social life. She is discovering who's gifts are going unnoticed by their peers. And she's pinning down--right away--who's being bullied and who's doing the bullying.

As Chase's teacher explained this simple, ingenious idea, I stared at her with my mouth hanging open. "How long have you been using this system?" I said.

Ever since Columbine, she said. Every single Friday afternoon since Columbine. Good Lord.

And what this mathematician has learned while using this system is something she really already knew: that everything--even love, even belonging--has a pattern to it. She find the patterns, and through those lists she breaks the codes of disconnection. Then she gets lonely kids the help they need. It's math to her. It's math.

All is love--even math. Amazing.

What a way to spend a life: looking for patterns of love and loneliness. Stepping in, every single day, and altering the trajectory of our world. End ID]

Portraits of Moroccans by Spanish artist José Tapiro y Baro (1830-1913) 

Katerina Marchenko on Etsy

Can gifmakers please stop referring to the language Ayo speaks as ‘Wakandan?’ That’s not a language. They’re speaking Xhosa.

In the MCU the language is referred to as Xhosa. Even in the subtitles of Black Panther. The director, actors ESPECIALLY John Kani who played King T'Chaka and Xhosa being his native language worked too damn hard for the closed caption team of future MCU projects and fans to call that very real language ‘Wakandan’. John Kani speaks fluent Xhosa and the cast felt it was right to make that the native language of Wakanda. So to REITERATE OP’s point AGAIN: STOP calling the very REAL Xhosa language “Wakandan language”.

here’s an article in Inverse (that came out when Black Panther was released) that talks about how and why Xhosa was used in the film. 

What abusers believe.

If you’ve ever had to deal with an abusive person in your life - like an abusive parent or partner - you’ve probably wondered what made them treat you that way. If you understand why abuse is happening, the thinking goes, you might be able to figure out how to make it stop. 

So why do abusers do what they do? Do they have anger issues? Drinking problems? Past trauma? Personality disorders? Do they just need to get in touch with their feelings and learn how to communicate better?

Nope. 

Abusive behaviours come from abusive beliefs. Abusers - whether consciously or unconsciously - hold specific beliefs about relationships that drive their behaviour and allow them to justify the horrible things they do. Even if your abuser has never put their beliefs into words, you’ll probably recognize a lot of these abusive beliefs:

Abusers and victims alike often buy into the narrative that abuse is rooted in anger issues - after all, abusers are frequently angry, and anger is an issue that can be treated. But this narrative just isn’t true. Abusers aren’t abusive because they are angry. Abusers are angry because they are abusive. 

A non-abusive partner is not someone who has learned how to control their rage whenever you spend time with your friends or get home 15 minutes late from work. A non-abusive partner just doesn’t feel any rage in those situations. An abuser’s rage is firmly rooted in their beliefs about relationships - they feel entitled to a relationship that meets their impossible expectations, and when they inevitably don’t get it, they bubble over with fury. Whether they know it or not, they have firmly entrenched beliefs about how relationships should be, and those beliefs are at the heart of their abuse. 

Can abusers stop believing these things? Maybe. If they can acknowledge that they have these beliefs, accept that these beliefs are dangerous and unreasonable and let go of these beliefs, maybe it’s possible for them to no longer be abusive in the future. Maybe. But it’s not your job to hang around and find out. If you’re in an abusive relationship of any kind, you deserve better. There are many people in this world who don’t hold abusive views of relationships, and you deserve to find happiness with them. 

I reblogged this before w/o adding any comments because it is just so good. But in the back of my mind I had wanted to highlight that if you, like me, were raised by an emotional abuser, you were probably taught a lot of these things are “normal.” They’re not.

That’s not your fault that happened. God, I really wish it never happened, alas being taught this stuff is sooooo commonplace. But, it very much our responsibilities as adults now to unlearn the toxic narratives that we did not consent to inheriting.

We can do it, too.

Read the list again. Read it any time you need it. The steer away from these beliefs. This stuff isn’t just about romantic relationships. We can be so much better than where we came from. I promise. ❤️❤️

so I think that there is a lot of useful stuff in this post, but I want to point out that there isn’t an either-or of being an “abuser” vs. not.

and people can act highly abusively even if they only hold some, but not all of the beliefs above. the beliefs above paint an extreme or black-and-white view of abuse, and it is often relatively easy to identify people who are behaving this way towards others in a relationship.

it’s often hardest to recognize abuse when it’s in relationships where the person committing the abuse is actually pretty nice to you much of the time.

i also have seen people (including partners of mine) who were not acting abusively towards me overall, develop a complex about being an “abuser” and beating themselves up with guilt, because they struggled occasionally with one or more beliefs like the ones above.

for example, holding other people responsible for your own feelings is a common and widespread problem, especially in a society that raises kids teaching them “not to hurt people’s feelings”.

also, abuse isn’t always about rage at all. abusive behaviors can have all sorts of motivating feelings behind them, or they can also be carried out less because of emotions and more because of thoughts and beliefs. for example, a lot of people enforce authoritarian rules on others because they believe that is the “right” way for the relationship to work, and it might have a sort of cold, detached, emotionless dynamic behind it.

i think it’s important to see and talk about the shades of gray in abuse if you’re really going to protect as many people as possible from being abused in relationships. i ended up in two relationships where i was abused, and I had heard a lot of rhetoric like the stuff above and it didn’t protect me.

I just want to billboard this for anyone who also needed to hear it:

my baba sent me this on whatsapp

bye

Everything we’ve done as a species to create a global communications network has just been justified

truly

the laugh at the end is precious

Why this man on Tatooine?😬He looks so happy!

w…what

#KEEP THIS ALIVE

i dont think its a joke people on twitter have already said they cant access it anymore in some countries, and columbia records posted this:

Conservatives will talk about “cancel culture” and be okay with this

audio on

Why is it that Brits monopolize all the mockery for shitty cooking when Americans are doing shit like this

yankee imperialism is eternal

>when Americans are doing shit like this >yankee imperialism

>Chefclub is a French group >the Lay’s bags are literally in French

this is by far the funniest addition to this post and all the other ones can go home

They seen lays and thought it was american.... LoL

Does anyone know what this instrument is called? Its like a Marimba but it is very large and made out of huge stones. Listen to that tone! haha Love it!

It’s a type of Vietnamese lithophone (literally rock sound instrument) called a đàn đá. Some ethnomusicologists think that these are likely the oldest type of man made instrument.

this is some good rock music right here.

pirating movies by seeing them in tumblr gifs and basing my own story around them

that’s how medieval peasants were supposed to use the stained glass windows to teach themselves bible stories when church was exclusively in latin

This exchange forced me to sit and contemplate some things for a while.

everyday we stray further from god

any вody can вe eтнereal. any вody can вe delιcaтe.

IG: iridessence