If I post once per hour around the clock, assume it's queue. If I post thrice per minute, assume I'm in pain. For anything inbetween, I'm enjoying a space where I don't have to pass as a human. @sugarelemental.bsky.social
I see a lot of Tumblr users who don't know their feminist history attributing the fact that women* are "allowed" to be masculine under the patriarchy as some sort of facet of the patriarchy universally accepting masculinity over femininity and that shit pisses me off so bad.
The reason why women* are "allowed" to be masculine when men* "aren't" allowed to be feminine under patriarchy is because DYKES and BUTCHES and other masculine women* SPENT DECADES FIGHTING FOR THEIR RIGHTS TO EXIST PUBLICLY.
The fact that women* can wear pants and suits etc. and are not constantly forced to be hyper feminine/in adherence with strict gendered dress codes without punishment (AND ONLY IN SOME COUNTRIES!) is a win on behalf of feminist political action NOT because of some baseline acceptance of masculinity in everybody by the patriarchy.
(*and people forcibly socially classed as women and men)
Like oh my lord some of you need to shut the fuck up and learn what it was like to be socially classed as a woman before the sexual revolution and what it continues to be like outside of the imperial core.
You are reaping the benefits of the activists who have come before you but because you do not know your history you are treating it like the boons of the oppressor classes and you are blind for it.
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βnever kill yourselfβ is such a funny phrase to me that i think itβs accidently started working. its like an affrimation. say βnever kill yourselfβ enough times as a joke and maybe you wonβt try to kill yourself over minor inconviences anymore
In all seriousness though hard cider was invented first.
Fruit ferments spontaneously whereas grain usually requires some amount of processing to become fermentable so humans have been drinking hard cider since long before beer was invented. After the agricultural revolution, grain was far more plentiful and easier to store than fruit, so people started fermenting that instead out of convenience, and then somebody figured out that adding hops (which makes beer taste even worse) increased the shelf-life of beer.
So actually, beer was invented because someone decided that it was more important for alcohol to be able to produced in bulk and stored for long periods than for it to taste good.
One of the many reasons why so many orgin myths across various cultures equate the agricultural revolution to "being banished from the garden of Eden" or something similar, like having to farm to survive sucked so so so bad, people liked being hunter gatherers so much better, the food was so much better, the booze was so much better, it was so much less work, but it wasn't productive enough to keep pace with the consumption needs of the exploding human population.
bitter flavors are good and I will not be changing my mind.
Yes yes I get it, some things are too bitter for some people and absolutely that applies to me too. But beer is a mix of bitter and sweet and I'm so glad they make non-alcoholic beer because I like that mix
Also W history lesson on the awfulness of the switch from hunter gatherer to the bullshit we're doing now. Legit I think a lot of the "solutions" I've heard over the years have equated to "can't we just live off the land? There's literally food growing out of the ground for free" and a lot of other "freeing humanity from corporate bonds" talk really just boils down to Let's Just Be Hunter-Gatherers Again
And like
To be completely fair on an individual or family or small group level that CAN still be viable
Girl, there's nothing enjoyable about eurolager and I am forever lost as to how it is a default beer here. Sweet? Maybe in the sense of degrees Brix. Bitter? Not really and not in any interesting way. Complexity of flavor? Comparable to distilled white vinegar. Acidity? Also comparable to distilled white vinegar. All in all, eurolager is majorly miserable experience and the only way I can make sense of that is that I might be more sensitive to acidity than most.
But then, now, Baltic porter? This is a poetry of complex subtle bitterness underpinning six different types of sweet. If it was available in non-alcoholic version I'd be happy beyond measure. Alas, kvass and podpiwek must suffice
Speaking of Ojibwe! Thereβs a new point and click game to help teach the language! Itβs called Reclaim! Azhe-giiwewining, and is currently on sale on Steam!
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This is the only known photo of the first trans woman to have her gender legally recognized in Switzerland.
In 1914, Adine T. sent a letter to her local police to grant her a pass to dress as she pleased. She petitioned that "I be granted permission to live as a woman, to wear female clothing and to pursue female occupations, and to be considered a woman before the world in all and every respect, since my emotional feelings are totally feminine and I feel unspeakably unhappy in male clothing."
Her gender was so clear that even the conservative Swiss government had to recognize it. Obtaining permission to live as a woman "is a matter of life and death for me," Adine added.
111 years ago, it was the first pass of its kind in her nation (although not the first in Europe). When interviewed, Adine described herself similarly to other trans lesbians in the 20th century: "a homosexual woman in a male body.β Source: Matthias Ruoss, "Arnold, Arnoldine, Adine."
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TODAY (Jul 11), Iβll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.
Here's an irony: the "gig economy" is a statistical black hole. Workers, customers and regulators know very little about the most basic aspects of it: how much workers get paid, for example, or much unpaid time on the clock a worker puts in before they get a job from the app.
The reason this is ironic is that the "gig economy" is dominated by a handful of massive, data-driven firms that know the precise, up-to-the-second answer to these questions. The problem is that they won't share the data. Of course, workers and customers have the data, too, but our data is widely diffused, with each worker and each customer only representing a single, infinitesimal pixel in this massive picture.
Most of our industry-wide figures about the sector come from painstaking, expensive survey work. The expense and effort involved in conducting this analysis means that the public's understanding of the gig companies' business is fragmentary and thin.
But every now and again, we get a flashbulb glimpse of the full picture. One of those glimpses was captured by David Weil, the former labor standards boss at the US Department of Labor. In 2024, the Massachusetts Attorney General sued Uber over worker misclassification, with Weil serving as an expert witness, who was able to access the raw data on Uber's business operations.
In a new American Prospect longread called "The Dangerous Myth of Flexibility," Weil builds on the public record developed in the case to demolish the central myth of the gigwork companies: that they enter into a mutually beneficial arrangement with their workers by offering "flexibility" that lets workers "choose work that fits the rhythms of their lives, not the other way around":
This quote comes from Tony West, the Uber executive who has led the company's efforts to formalize its worker misclassification program, notably California's Prop 22, a $225m statewide campaign that overturned the state's landmark gig work standards. West is also Kamala Harris's brother-in-law, and he served as her campaign's corporate liaison, senior strategist and economic policy advisor.
On its face, West's statement sounds reasonable, and most of us have heard a version of it, possibly even from an Uber driver. But what Uber calls "flexibility" is really a way for the company to offload its operational risks onto its drivers.
Anyone who runs a business has to manage a key operational risk: staffing levels. A restaurateur who doesn't schedule enough cooks, bussers and servers might have to turn away business at the door if there's a rush. But if the restaurateur schedules too many people for a shift, they'll end up paying for those workers to stand around scrolling Tiktok.
In America, Congress and state legislatures have created a system that allows restaurateurs to transfer this risk onto their employees: the "tipped minimum wage." Federally, the minimum wage for tipped employees is only $2.13/hour, with the caveat that employees are obliged to "top up" their workers' pay if the tips from their shift don't add up to $7.25/hour. So if you work five hours and don't wait on a single table, your boss has to pay you $36.25 ($7.25/hour * 5 hours). But if you have a busy shift and you make $40 in tips, your boss only has to pay you $10.65 ($2.13 * 5 β the tipped minimum).
This is a transfer of risk from bosses to workers. The boss can schedule extra servers and offload most of their wages to diners who come through the doors. If your boss overestimates the amount of business, much of the cost of that miscalculation comes out of your paycheck.
This is quite a sweet deal for bosses. After all, servers have virtually no control over the amount of business a restaurant attracts. It's the boss, not the server, who decides where the restaurant will be, which hours it will keep, which food it will serve, how much the food costs, what advertisements to run, and where and when to run them. The boss controls the decor, staff attire and the music. They make the decisions, and workers pay the price if they decide poorly.
For most businesses, workers are less exposed to risks from their boss's strategic errors. If your boss screws up, you might see a lower annual bonus, or take a career hit thanks to the bad company's presence on your CV. Of course, if your boss really messes up they might lay you off or go out of business altogether, but it's a rare business that gets to externalize its risks onto its workers on a shift-by-shift basis the way restaurants get to.
But as sweet as restaurateurs have it, that's nothing compared to the incredible deal that gig platforms get. Companies like Uber and Lyft get to shift nearly all their risk to their workers, and then insist that they're doing workers a favor by offering them "flexibility." Like a restaurateur, Uber and Lyft control all the mechanisms by which the number of riders is set. They decide how to advertise and how to price their rides. When a driver signs on and makes themselves available β at no charge β to Uber, it is the company's actions, not the driver's, that determine whether that driver gets a job, and how much they'll get paid.
Uber and Lyft claim that drivers have control, too β when (if) they're offered a job, they get to decide whether to take it. This is true, but it's more complicated than that. Drivers get about 15 seconds (!) to decide whether to accept a job, which means they have 15 seconds to calculate the mileage and time-based rate on offer, all while operating a vehicle in traffic. Drivers who accept lowball offers risk having their base pay permanently eroded through "algorithmic wage discrimination," which is when the gig platforms infer that workers who accept very low wages are economically desperate and can be offered even lower wages in the future:
But workers can't simply refuse offers and wait for the wage on offer to increase. That increase may happen, but if a driver is too picky, the platform will punish them for turning down too many offers by excluding them from future opportunities. If this happens often enough, the driver may end up broke enough to start accepting those lowballs, triggering the inexorable downward trajectory of their expected earnings.
This is "flexibility," but mostly it's flexibility for Uber, not for drivers. Uber controls when a driver gets paid, and they control the data about that payment. This allows Uber to claim to be paying well north of minimum wage, while drivers average less than $2.50/hour. Uber exploits its information asymmetry to publish only the numerator (the amount a driver makes when a passenger is in the car) while hiding the denominator (how many hours it takes for Uber to put a passenger in that car):
Uber has perfected a system of algorithmic pricing that allows it to dangle just enough money in front of drivers to maximize their number on the road, irrespective of how many riders are looking for cars. The fact that they have all the information (while drivers have none) allows them to extract vast amounts of totally unpaid labor from those drivers. And then, once a passenger gets in the car, Uber's informational systems let it pay that driver the absolute minimum they will accept for the ride.
Of course, it works the same way for passengers, each of whom is offered a different price for the same rides, based on the company's surveillance data and its realtime calculations about how much the rider is willing to pay. When Uber launched, driver pay and passenger fares were linked (the same way a server's tips and the cost of a meal are linked). Today, these are fully decoupled. Uber runs a kind of cod-Marxist operation where workers are paid according to their desperation, and passengers are gouged according to their ability to pay:
This works so well (for Uber) that Uber has launched a side hustle selling algorithmic pricing and algorithmic wage discrimination systems to companies in other sectors, so expect this arrangement to infect ever-wider swathes of the economy:
(And this is neither here nor there, but holy shit, is Uber's investor relations site seriously serving ASPX pages in 2026?! Hey Khosrowshahi, the DOJ called and it wants its Clinton-era antitrust evidence back!)
Back to algorithmic pricing: this opaque, take-it-or-leave-it algorithmic pricing arrangement sets Uber apart from other platforms where sellers offer temporary use of their property to buyers. As Weil writes, at least Airbnb hosts get to override the nightly rate suggested by the platform (though I'd add that the platforms will downrank and bury people who resist their suggestions).
As Weil points out, even if Uber had to pay the minimum wage and assume other operational risks associated with running a business, they'd still have access to these algorithmic tools, albeit with different parameters. Rather than setting the wage floor for drivers at $0/hour, they'd have to pay $7.25/hour (the federal minimum wage, or more, depending on the state). This would force the company to refuse shifts to drivers when there were enough workers on the road to handle demand, but drivers would benefit from this arrangement β rather than driving around for a shift, burning gas and putting wear on your car without getting paid, Uber would just tell you to stay home.
Uber could try to offload those risks onto passengers, but remember, Uber is already charging riders a personalized price based on massive troves of surveillance data that is continuously re-analyzed to guess the largest sum you're willing to pay for any given ride. You're already paying the highest price Uber can set for you, in other words.
Weil has been in many forums β including that Massachusetts courtroom β where Uber touted its "flexibility" as a benefit to drivers. But as he shows, Uber could offer all the same flexibility to drivers without the downside risk of driving around for hours without earning a dime. Sure, forcing Uber and Lyft to extend rights and protections that every employee gets would raise their costs β but "the same is true for any company having to comply with employment law and work protections."
Outside of the US, these companies are being forced to shift the risk from their workers' backs to their own balance sheets. As Weil writes, the UN's International Labor Organization has set binding labor standards for gig companies, called Convention 193, "Decent Work in the Platform Economy":
The US government is pulling out all the stops to prevent these standards from being applied to US gig companies, even abroad. Trump's labor boss Keith Sonderling told the world that the US government "will not sit on the sidelines while some foreign governments push to hamper American innovation in the gig economy worldwide":
But, as Weil says, this isn't about innovation, flexibility or AI. It's about gig companies changing the distributional outcome of whole sectors, to shift money from workers to investors.
The rest of the world has its own ideas. In Switzerland, the Supreme Court found that gig companies' businesses were illegal and ordered them to extend normal labor protections to gig workers. Naturally, the gig companies just ignored the law and continued to screw those workers. Gig workers, as noted, are diffused. They don't work in the same place. They have no way to find out who else works for the same boss as they do. The same factors that keep us from gathering stats on gig work also keeps gig workers from comparing notes on how they're getting shafted.
What's a labor organizer to do? The Swiss labor union Syndicom came up with an ingenious solution. They partnered with a popular, pro-union pizza restaurant, listed it on the delivery platforms, and then placed orders for tons of pizzas through the scofflaw food-delivery platforms. They transformed the pizzeria into a pop-up union labor hub, and had an organizing conversation with every rider the company dispatched to the restaurant:
https://vimeo.com/1203473793
This is deliciously ingenious, and the labor organizing need not stop there. Companies like Para have shown how, by jailbreaking the apps used by gig workers, they can allow those workers to comparison shop for the best wage. Rather than getting 15 seconds while navigating traffic to decide whether a job is worth taking, drivers and riders could use a "counter-app" that evaluates all the offers on all the platforms and coordinates with other workers to mass-reject lowball offers:
The only problem is the "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize this kind of reverse-engineering and modifications of apps. These laws make it a literal crime to change how an app running on your own phone works. These laws were invented in America, with 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but in the ensuing years, the US Trade Rep has used the threat of tariffs to force every country in the world to adopt their own anticircumvention laws. By caving into US bullying, all of America's trading partners have left their workers and consumers vulnerable to technological surveillance, manipulation and price-gouging, to the great benefit of the US tech companies that have fused with the Trump regime.
This is the hidden silver lining to Trump's lunatic tariffs: they take away the threat that kept all those US-protecting foreign IP laws in force. When someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as you're told, and then they burn your house down anyway, you really don't have to keep complying:
The possibilities for counterapps in gig work are endless. In Indonesia, gig rider co-ops commission "Tuyul" apps that mod their dispatch apps in ways small (upsizing the font) and large (spoofing the GPS):
In his article, Weil cites a study showing that customers for gig apps tend not to comparison shop β once you choose your default taxi-hailing app, that becomes your go-to. But with counter-apps, your default could be a price-comparison app that bids out your job to all the platforms and chooses the cheapest one, forcing the gig companies to compete with each other:
The platforms like to pitch themselves as "frictionless," but the reality is that they don't reduce friction so much as reallocate it. Because they control the technology, because the law makes it a literal crime to wrestle that control away, they can shift all the friction from their side of the ledger to yours, whether you're a worker or a customer:
Tony West isn't lying when he says Uber values flexibility β they value their flexibility, which arises out of the constraints (technical, legal) they impose on us: the drivers and passengers.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I've seen a lot of terrible analysis of this photo.
People are either shoving it through an AI detector, asking Grok, or they are peeping pixels with expertise they don't have.
Like, you can't go drawing straight lines on something with a highly skewed perspective that also has a distorted shape.
Let's ask Mecha-Hitler!
Or upload it to a sketchy AI detection website!
They often have the accuracy of a coin flip. Even lab-grade tools are only 70 to 80% accurate in controlled conditions. And yet people are trusting a free website with an ad for boner pills in the corner to tell them if something is authentic.
I have been doing high level photo manipulation for two decades. I'm as close to an expert as you will get on Tumblr dot com.
So let's properly peep at the pixels and do actual forensic analysis.
First, I think this is mostly a real photo. Probably taken at some other point in time.
And I don't think this is fully AI generated. I actually think it is a traditional composite. I think the hand and newspaper are separate assets that were blended. It's possible the hand was AI-generated and then composited. And I think they may have taken a real photo of someone holding a newspaper and replaced the hand.
The first oddity is the fingers.
Typically when you touch an object it creates a contact shadow. One finger has a contact shadow and the other does not.
It should probably look more like this.
The next sign of a composite is the edge of the finger.
There is a sign of a feathered edge.
This is a lazy compositing technique to help edges blend without making a super precise selection. If you look at all of the other edges in the photo, this is the only one that has a feathered edge. You can see how clean all the other edges are by the top arrow and how fuzzy the finger edge is by the bottom arrow.
If I were cutting out his other hand and taking the time to do it properly, I would clean up the edge to make sure it was consistent with everything else in the photo.
If I were in a hurry, I would just feather the edge and hope no one actually zooms in.
And then there is the edge of the newspaper.
This is called a matte line. The newspaper was most likely against a dark background when they cut it out, and they did not clean up the edge.
Again, it's lazy. Because Photoshop has a tool dedicated to fixing this exact issue.
In my expert opinion, I think they generated an AI hand, took a photo of someone holding a newspaper in similar lighting, and then manually blended them into an existing photo.
But I don't think this was 100% AI-generated. You typically don't see compositing errors in generated images. They probably couldn't get the AI to generate the newspaper without garbled text.
What's curious is that the pixel resolution is just barely bad enough that you cannot tell if the text is authentic. But it's not blurred or distorted. It is just low enough in resolution to give a sense of text without being legible. And I think that made people suspicious due to AI's reputation when text is involved.
But from what I can tell, the print size and letter spacing does seem to match.
So I don't think that is the clue people are making it out to be.
Last thing, image analysis like this is not 100% conclusive. I'm pretty sure there are shenanigans, but anyone who tells you with absolute confidence that an image is fake... is probably bullshitting or ignorant.
The missing contact shadow could be explained by the angle of the light filling it in.
The feathered edge could be motion blur.
The edge of the newspaper could be a sharpening artifact.
But the fact that the hand and the newspaper were vital aspects of the photo for proof of life, those three variables make this really damned suspicious.
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My last post got flagged as mature. It has a mature person in it, but it is safe for work. I hate when I put effort into something and Tumblr gives it a false flag. Then I ask for a review and nothing ever happens.
In any case, if you want to know if that Mitch McConnell photo is fake, I do my best analysis of the pixels.
