Chetzemoka

Birds. I guess it doesn’t feel that niche because I know lots of people are into bird watching, but it’s my thing.

There’s this app called Merlin that I swear to god is magic. You can just open your mic and it’ll listen to and identify all of the birds you’re hearing.

And it really works! For the longest time, it kept identifying a Carolina Wren in my yard, and I thought it was just wrong. I’ll be damned if I didn’t eventually see that wren, and now it frequents the bird feeder I set up on my deck. It’s just my shyest bird. But the app knew it was out there.

I’ve learned so much about birds and identifying them from using the app. And I’ve gotten really into how, when, and what to feed birds because I want to find more different kinds, and I just love watching them on the deck interacting. I call it my cat TV haha

I’m also learning a ton about owls specifically over on the [email protected] community. Did you know there are owls in the desert and owls in Jamaica? Come over to the community where @[email protected] makes the most amazing educational posts. It’s a lot of fun.

Oh, you think I only steal hoodies from people I boned. Joke’s on you, no hoodie is safe in my presence.

The onshore tax havens Delaware, Wyoming, and Nevada are vastly worse in scope than any offshore country. They push the narrative about those “terrible foreign countries” to distract us from this fact.

The problem is US tax code, not offshore financial centers.

Damn, what a great reference. I really wish I had this during our 3.5 month unionizing drive because those motherfuckers tried ALL OF THIS.

I’m proud to report that three weeks ago we won our union vote by a margin of 5:1. Our union organizers all said they’ve never seen a success ratio like that in their careers. We’re a very spirited community hospital.

Bullshit

I’m born and raised in Appalachia, my daddy worked in the coal mines and drove an 18 wheeler. Certified redneck enough that I confuse the shit out of my New England neighbors.

I went out and marched with striking nurses when Bernie put out the call, and I’ve never voted Republican in my entire fucking life.

OP, you need to learn what a redneck is.

What a gorgeous creature

I’m in the middle of book 7 and holy what a shift. I’m in the part where it’s so overwhelming, you can’t even begin to imagine how this will get resolved. Very excited to read the last two books.

Ah yes, that notorious occupation where Denmark systematically raped and murdered all those Norwegians, installed a corporate kleptocracy to ransack their natural resources for the profit of people half a globe away, and then spent the next 400 years funding coups and dictators to maintain that corporate control.

I don’t understand the level of ignorance required to even begin to pretend like these were equivalent situations.

Which is a problem that pre-employment drug testing does not correct in any way, shape or form.

Yeah, working on yourself makes you resilient, but it definitely doesn’t make you unstoppable. Like Picard said, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.”

Injecting medications into necks.

Medical things are rarely accurate, but Jesus this one is absolutely infuriating. There’s no anatomy in a neck that you could even inject anything INTO. You’re not aiming for a jugular vein on the fly and there’s not enough tissue in a neck to receive an intramuscular or subcutaneous injection. If your needle is too long, you’re definitely hitting something critical. It’s feasible that you could squirt medication into someone’s trachea or esophagus or - god forbid - spine if you actually tried this nonsense.

Arms, people, ARMS. This is where we inject things into people who are not interested in receiving an injection. Arms or butts, right through the clothes. You’re aiming for the deltoid muscle or the glutes. I’m even willing to concede the inaccuracy of a medication affecting someone instantly (they don’t), if Hollywood would just stop having characters inject things into people’s necks.

On our next episode of medical things that make me crazy: People getting shot through the shoulder with zero consequences.

I’ll just copy my comment from another post of this article:

History lesson time: This wasn’t done on purpose. It’s an artifact of decisions made by Congress during World War II to support war production.

So many young men were away at war that it created a labor shortage, even with some women entering the work force. This led to spiraling increases in wages that were threatening the viability of critical war manufacturers.

In an effort to protect this manufacturing sector, Congress capped wage increases. But those corporations were still competing for workers and now they were no longer able to offer them higher and higher wages. So instead, they started offering them “perks” like health insurance, pensions, and paid time off.

THEN:

“In 1943 the War Labor Board, which had one year earlier introduced wage and price controls, ruled that contributions to insurance and pension funds did not count as wages. In a war economy with labor shortages, employer contributions for employee health benefits became a means of maneuvering around wage controls.”

Emphasis mine. And guess what? When those young men returned from war and re-entered the work force, they wanted those perks too. So which company was going to be the first to deescalate the arms race and NOT offer health insurance?

And those perks being so ubiquitous meant the government never had an incentive to provide health coverage directly to anyone of working age, so we only have Medicare for retirees.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235989/#:~:text=In 1943 the War Labor,of maneuvering around wage controls.

The rail strike would have had major economy-wide side effects, including people in other industries being laid off and inflation being exacerbated by shortages in basic food, water, gas.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/looming-rail-strike-would-take-a-major-toll-on-u-s-economy

After averting the strike, the Biden administration continued to pressure and negotiate with rail companies to get the paid sick days that were the sticking point. But there’s been almost no news coverage about that fact.

"Negotiations with the other labor coalition unions continued toward a Sept. 15 deadline, but when it became obvious that the bargaining parties would not reach consensus by then, Biden asked then-Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh to assemble the sides and reach an acceptable agreement that would head off a national freight rail strike.

On deadline day, the parties reached an agreement on an updated contract that included the biggest wage increases in 47 years. Over the next several weeks, while acknowledging that the agreement was less than perfect, the IBEW and several of its fellow coalition unions voted to ratify the agreement. A handful of others, however, did not, instead threatening a December freight rail strike.

Biden, citing the potential economic impact of a national freight rail strike during the winter holidays, on Nov. 28 called on Congress to impose the emergency board’s agreement.

Since then, several other railroad-related unions have also seen success in negotiating for similar sick-day benefits. These 12 unions represent more than 105,000 railroad workers. (emphasis mine)

“Biden deserves a lot of the credit for achieving this goal for us,” Russo said. “He and his team continued to work behind the scenes to get all of rail labor a fair agreement for paid sick leave.”

https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid

A much, much larger question is this: If that rail infrastructure is THIS critical to the basic functioning of our economy, why are we allowing it to be held hostage by private for-profit corporations? This shit should be nationalized and those should be government jobs.