Eyes of a Devil

There were even "No Smoking" seats on planes, and you can imagine how well THAT worked.

@dduane and I can both remember the way long flights always ended with us needing a shower, a complete change of clothes and a laundry trip, just one of several details which put a very different complexion on nostalgic yearning for "The Golden Age of Air Travel".

Until 2004, when Ireland's indoor-smoking ban came in, we had to do the same shower / change / washing-machine routine after any visit to a pub.

Our local in particular is an old building with low ceilings which kept the fug of smoke down where it could really cling, and the landlord, though a non-smoker himself, must have inhaled an obscene amount of it.

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.

Even if they weren't organized as such the settlers still would continue their genocidal campaign, but it also further shows that at its core the United States, and the west as a whole, does not care about the sovereignty of *any nation* that isn't white, no matter their organization or level of wealth or literacy, or even if the United States Constitution was directly ripped from their own.

Scientist bakes sourdough bread with yeast derived from 4500 year old Egyptian pottery

is a sourdough boule

Teenagers are rarely taught the reason why they can't consent to sex with adults.

And that's because teaching them that would completely unravel our coercion-based society.

It can be difficult to explain in detail the exact reason and all the specifics in a way that they will understand. But the simplest way to phrase it is that in some cases, even when someone agrees to something and even when they appear enthusiastic about it, there's too much of a power imbalance that it's no different than forcing them. Also, having power and being abusive doesn't require a conscious expectation to be obeyed.

Imagine a world in which every teenager understood that and was easily able to call out anyone who tried to convince them otherwise.

They'd know that there's no such thing as an employee consenting to working for a poverty wage, working in unsafe conditions, working long hours, or working without taking breaks. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to paying a bank overdraft fee. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to student loan debt. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to medical bills. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to generating profit for banks or landlords in order to have a place to live and being evicted or foreclosed when you lose your source of income. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to a police search. They'd know that there's no such thing as a child who's okay with their parents spanking them. They'd know that being dependent on someone does not mean that you can never criticize them. They'd know that if it's considered abusive to simply play along when someone obeys, then it has to be much more abusive to actively expect to be obeyed, which many adults do to them.

And people who benefit from a society based on coercion masquerading as freedom wouldn't like that.

The alternative isn't to police teens. It's to educate, and teach, and then give them choice! (Like OP mentions).

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

I'm thinking of jockeys. Jockeys get an advantage from being smaller and lighter, and while obviously you need sufficient strength to stay on the horse, a well-trained horse does enough of the work that you don't need upper body strength to do the job. Given this and that the majority of children obsessed with horses are female, you'd think most jockeys would be women. Yet somehow they are not.

NASCAR at one point threatened to handicap Danica Patrick by putting extra weight in her car to compensate for the fact that she is smaller and lighter than other racecar drivers. If she gets an advantage as a driver, why is she like practically the only female racecar driver, or at least the only one anyone knows about?

Women, apparently, have an advantage in long distance swimming. Higher body fat percentage and higher endurance means that women can go greater distances in the water. Is long distance swimming even a competitive sport?

Women have actually been excluded from competitive Olympic skiing on the grounds that the jumps required could damage their uterus. The people who actually have unsupported reproductive organs hanging outside their body are considered to have better support than the people whose reproductive organs are nestled in alongside unisex organs like the small intestine and stomach. How does this make any goddamn sense at all? If a uterus could dislodge from the force of a skiing jump, so could intestines and the sport wouldn't be safe for anyone.

Theoretically, any sport where you get an advantage from low center of gravity, better balance, higher flexibility, or being closer to the ground, women should have an advantage. This should include soccer (football in non-US places), and might include hockey if the hockey players hadn't introduced unnecessary viciousness to the sport.

if your most authentic self is goth, and the way you sourced the clothes is more faithful to goth values, then it's going to be a super comfy goth outfit.

Quickest and easiest way to make a pair of sweatpants look goth is to bleach them. You could either dilute it and spray it on the pants or put a bit of bleach in a container, take a brush and just splash it on the pants. Leave them outside in the sun for a bit and wash them (do not put them with other clothes just to be sure you are not ruining anything). I'll say one hour and you have your personal pair of goth sweatpants.

Another thing you could do is to put holes in them. Take a pair of scissor, cut a small hole and then bush a razor on it to give it a more ripped look.

If you have more time, a bit of money and you want to try something more complicated, you can sew patches, paint them, add some metal eyelets (idk if that's how they are called in english. The metal things in the shoe where you put your laces in), chains, etc.

As for the top, band shirts!! Black shirts!! Black tank tops!! Halloween themed stuff!! You can also find them already goth enough or add patches, pins, laces, etc etc. Same goes for sweatshirts! Be creative! And also accessories!! Spike bracelets, necklaces, etc can change the look and make it more goth even if you are just wearing a pajamas.

When I said "I don't want to look like I'm wearing sweatpants", I did not mean "if only there was a way for me to wear sweatpants", I meant "I do not want to be a person who wears sweatpants in public".

You said there's no way to make something comfy and look good, but people don't innately know "what looking good" to you means, and it can't be sweatpants at all and you would not want to even be seen in public in them. If you want to find tips to feel comfortable in dressy clothing you have to say that from the beginning as well.

It's like you're setting invisible tripwires for people by assuming there's more meaning to your words than you're actually communicating with them. Of course people are gonna trip.