Hey, amidst the chaos of... everything on the internet, pay attention to Hawaii/Hawai'i!

There have been plans from a non Hawaiian organisation to build a 5 acre parking lot, 13 lot subdivision and a comfort station for tourists on the ridge of the sacred Pololū Valley!

This project doesn't acknowledge Pololū Valley as a wahi pāna (a celebrated and storied place in the cultural traditions of Hawaii/Hawai'i) and instead treats it as just plain land that can be sold to a highest bidder.

Pololū Valley is anything but that.

So please sign the petition to stop this project! As of writing this, 883,470 people have, but we need more!

Petition to protect Pololū Valley

Reblog to reach more people, please! Don't just like and move on, sign the petition and make sure more people see this!

blue & orange. 💧🔥 oil on wood panel, 2021 and 2022

On February 7, 2024, an indigenous nonbinary teenager named Nex Benedict was beaten to death in a US high school bathroom.

The news has been spreading across social media over the past few days, with several news outlets misgendering and deadnaming the victim. I have seen a small handful of posts about the entire thing, but only a couple with any sources about what happened.

I spent the morning combing through articles. This is a list of publications reporting on the story that don't deadname Nex:

Edward Wadsworth (British, 1889-1949), Composition 1930, 1930. Tempera on linen laid on panel, 35 x 25 in.

This is a huge reason housing is unaffordable. Make this illegal.

Just this morning there was a news article speaking on why corporations shouldn't own housing. A group of investors bought a huge swath of housing all over northern Ontario. Including in my town. They bought the properties on speculation due to an insane real estate bubble here in Canada. Well now the bubble is bursting, houses are selling for sometimes $100K less than they were purchased for, and the trajectory is that this trend will continue and that houses that are genuinely worth $300K but were bought for $1.1 Million could be selling for very close to their actual value. But back the the corporation. They were so greedy and so cold and uncaring and lacked so much as a tiny shred of community and social responsibility, that they bought all these houses entirely on speculation. So they evicted the residents, boarded them up or left the residents and became absentee landlords because they were not in the landlord business, they were in the speculation business. And so...POP!!!!

These clowns are now filing bankruptcy in the amounts of $124 Million. And the housing that they bought (look at the map of Sault Ste. Marie in the article) will now enter receivership and will revert to creditors. Meaning they will remain off the market for years possibly. Even less attainable than before.

As we as a nation are in the worse housing crisis we have ever experienced. This is EXACTLY the reason corporations should not own residentials properties.

Well one of them. There are other reasons including exclusivity - In my town we have one corporation that owns or manages about 65% of the rental housing. This means if you apply to rent one place and are not accepted, you are automatically not accepted to 65% of the properties in town. And one of the other is that turning a human right (housing) into a commodity never, ever works out well for the little guy. Never! I can think of a hundred more reasons. But anyway here is the article.

You’re right and you should say it

If I Had Four Dromedaries (Chris Marker, 1966)

We should really not go along with the corporate lingo on these shifts to automation and AI. Always remember this: They don't want to pay people to do the work.

Companies aren't replacing cashiers with self-scan machines for the customer's convenience. They don't want to pay people to do the work.

Companies aren't using AI to produce a better product. The product produced by AI is notably inferior - they just don't want to pay people to do the work.

Corporate America is not hurting for money. It's not that they can't afford employees -- profits are soaring! They just don't want to pay people to do the work.

The local diner near my old house, which as a disabled person I had long relied on for days when I wasn't able to cook or go grocery shopping, replaced all of their waiters with tablets that take your order and a robot that brings out your dishes on a tray. You have to pick them off of the tray and set them on the table yourself.

The restaurant franchise made the robot look like a stupid cutesy cat, and most people loved it. Not the waitstaff who all lost their jobs, of course. Not elderly people with osteoarthritis, I imagine. And not me, a disabled person who cannot safely and painlessly pick up a heavy, food-filled plate.

So I just had to...stop going to that restaurant.

Here's a video of the robot.

Note that everything the woman in the video says about the robot giving actual human staff time to "engage in conversation" with guests and "clean the restaurant" is a blatant lie. The waiters were fired. There was a skeleton crew that rarely ventured out of the kitchen. The restaurants felt oddly ghostly; no one would talk to you the entire meal, from your tablet order to your robot encounter to the self-checkout machine. It was ableist and isolating and it sucked. It saved the franchise money.

2024

this is still the ultimate popeye comic panel

✨ happy new year ✨