A Little Big Adventure!

Something that seems to baffle much of the SPOP fandom is why Catra can’t just admit her mistakes and try to do better instead of continuing to dig herself a deeper and deeper hole. To be fair, the situation is very baffling. It’s complex. There are a ton of psychological issues in play, and when they interact things can get very messy. I’m going to do my best to explain Catra’s thought processes and hang ups and hopefully not write a fucking novel in the process. (But if you do want a novel that analyzes these concepts in a lot of depth, go check out my fanfic Demons. Shameless self-promotion, whaaaaat?)

I have already gone into how Catra’s external locus of control comes into play, so I’m not going to break it down in as much detail here. To sum it up, though, Catra has an internalized belief that she can’t really control anything and isn’t responsible for her behavior since it’s not her fault she was put in a shitty situation in the first place. She doesn’t believe she had any choice but to be the villain. This is deeply rooted in her fearful and abusive upbringing where she had little to no control over what happened to her. A large part of that is how consequences didn’t match behavior, i.e. she wasn’t rewarded for being good and her punishments were overly harsh as well as inconsistent, affected by external factors.

There’s also the sunk cost fallacy to consider. That’s the idea that you have to get something out of your investments (of time, money, effort, etc.), even if the costs keep piling up. (In terms of money, think of people who gamble larger and larger sums of money out of determination to win back their initial bet.) For Catra, this fallacy has convinced her that if she changes course and gives up on her goals, then everything she suffered in the Horde and all the effort she put into moving up in the ranks would be for nothing. She thinks getting to the top and proving her worth/winning respect would be the ulitmate triumph. Of course, we see her struggle with disillusionment over this in season 4, which helps set the table for what we hope will be a redemption arc.

These are only two examples of the ways Catra’s abusive upbringing affected her ability to admit her mistakes. The effects of abuse (especially in one’s childhood) are pervasive, affecting your thought processes and perception of the world in a million little ways that are hard to undo. I’m going to dig deeper now into some of the other reasons Catra struggles with this. They include an authoritarian environment, scapegoating, toxic leadership, poor behavioral modelling, an exaggerated fear of punishment, and the resentment of injustice.

(Please note: in this meta I’m not trying to make excuses for Catra and say she should not have to accept responsibility for her mistakes because she was abused. My aim here is to explain why it’s so difficult for her to shoulder blame in hopes that people will better understand her.)

Also under the cut, I’m going to finish this meta by examining how Angella and Glimmer are foils to Shadow Weaver and Catra, how Glimmer had a better example set for her and has now set an example for Catra.

Someone made a tiny window into Rivendell that you can put on your bookshelf!

And the tiny book inside it is written in tengwar… I’m dying

I mean look at this!

After the bruising crises we’re now going through, it would be wonderful if we could somehow emerge a fairer nation. One possibility is to revive an old idea: sharing the profits.

The original idea for businesses to share profits with workers emerged from the tumultuous period when America shifted from farm to factory. In December 1916, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a report on profit-sharing, suggesting it as a way to reduce the “frequent and often violent disputes” between employers and workers, thereby “fostering the development of a larger spirit of harmony and cooperation, and resulting, incidentally, in greater efficiency and larger gains.”

That same year, Sears, Roebuck and Co., one of America’s largest corporations, with 30,000 to 40,000 employees, announced a major experiment in profit-sharing. The company would contribute 5 percent of net earnings, without deduction of dividends to shareholders, into a profit-sharing fund. (Eventually the company earmarked 10 percent of pretax earnings for the plan.) Employees who wished to participate would contribute 5 percent of their salaries. All would be invested in shares of Sears stock. The plan’s purpose, according to The New York Times, was to “to engender loyalty and harmony between employer and employee.” In reviewing its first three years, The Times noted that 92 percent of Sears’s employees had joined up and that “the participating employee not only found an ever-increasing sum of money to his credit, but eventually discovered he was a shareholder in the corporation, with a steadily growing amount of stock to his name.”

Sears’s plan was admirably egalitarian. Distributions of shares were based on years of service, not rank, and the longest-serving workers received nearly $3 for every dollar they contributed. By the 1950s, Sears workers owned a quarter of the company. By 1968, the typical Sears salesman could retire with a nest egg worth well over $1 million in today’s dollars. Other companies that joined the profit-sharing movement included Procter & Gamble, Pillsbury, Kodak, S.C. Johnson, Hallmark Cards and U.S. Steel — some because it seemed morally right, others because it seemed a means to higher productivity.

Profit-sharing did give workers an incentive to be more productive. It also reduced the need for layoffs during recessions, because payroll costs dropped as profits did. But it subjected workers to the risk that when profits were down, their paychecks would shrink. And if a company went bankrupt, they’d lose all their investments in it. (Sears phased out its profit-sharing plan in the 1970s and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2018.) The best profit-sharing plans came in the form of cash bonuses that employees could invest however they wished, on top of predictable base wages.

Profit-sharing fit perfectly with the evolution of the American corporation. By the 1950s, most employees of large companies had spent their entire working lives with the company. Companies and their employees were rooted in the same communities. C.E.O.s typically worked their way up, and once at the top rarely earned more than 20 times the average wage of their employees (now they’re often paid more than 300 times more). Over a third of private-sector workers were unionized. In 1958 the United Auto Workers demanded that the nation’s automakers share their profits with their workers.

Some remnants of profit-sharing remain today. Both Steelcase Inc., an office-furniture maker in Grand Rapids, Mich., and the Lincoln Electric Company, a Cleveland-based manufacturer of welding equipment, tie major portions of annual wages to profits. Publix Super Markets, which operates in the Southeast, and W.L. Gore, the maker of Gore-Tex, are owned by employee stock ownership plans. America still harbors small worker cooperatives owned and operated by their employees, such as the Cheese Board Collective in my hometown Berkeley, Calif.

But since the 1980s, profit-sharing has almost disappeared from large corporations. That’s largely because of a change in the American corporation that began with a wave of hostile takeovers and corporate restructurings in the 1980s. Raiders like Carl Icahn, Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken targeted companies they thought could deliver higher returns if their costs were cut. Since payrolls were the highest cost, raiders set about firing workers, cutting pay, automating as many jobs as possible, fighting unions, moving jobs to states with lower labor costs and outsourcing jobs abroad. To prevent being taken over, C.E.O.s began doing the same.

This marked the end of most profit-sharing with workers. Paradoxically, it was the beginning of profit-sharing with top executives and “talent.” Big Wall Street banks, hedge funds and private-equity funds began doling out bonuses, stock and stock options to lure and keep the people they wanted. They were soon followed by high-tech companies, movie studios and start-ups of all kinds.

Even before tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs and incomes in the current pandemic, the pay of the typical worker had barely risen since the mid-1970s, adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, ever-greater wealth continues to concentrate at the very top.

Since 2000, the portion of total national income going to American workers has dropped farther than in other rich nations. A steadily larger portion has gone into corporate profits, which have been reflected in higher share prices. But a buoyant stock market doesn’t help most Americans. The richest 1 percent now own half the value of all shares of stock; the richest 10 percent, 92 percent.

Those higher share prices have come out of the pockets of workers. Daniel Greenwald at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, Martin Lettau at the University of California’s Haas School of Business and Sydney Ludvigson at N.Y.U. found that from 1952 to 1988, economic growth accounted for all the rise in stock values, but from 1989 to 2017, growth accounted for just 24 percent. Most came from “reallocated rents to shareholders and away from labor compensation” — that is, from workers.

Jeff Bezos, who now owns 11.1 percent of Amazon’s shares of stock, is worth $165 billion overall. Other top Amazon executives hold hundreds of millions of dollars of Amazon shares. But most of Amazon’s employees, including warehouse workers, don’t share in the same bounty.

If Amazon’s 840,000 employees owned the same proportion of their employer’s stock as Sears workers did in the 1950s — a quarter of the company — each would now own shares worth an average of about $386,904.

There are many ways to encourage profit-sharing. During this pandemic, for example, Congress should prohibit the Treasury or the Federal Reserve from bailing out any corporation that doesn’t share its profits with its employees.

Hordak is learn to baking tiny foods for the Entrapta (becuase her cookings are terrible… ̆̈ )

※ The translation isn’t perfect

He doesn’t well either. But she must glad with huge laugh to his trying

I drew hard on this parts particularly. Wrong hordak in my imagenation would cook anythings brilliant.

※Sorry if my English is weird. This is about those my fan arts. I thought about the costumes of the Prime’s clones. I was wondering why the Wrong Hordak’s costume had a shorter hem compared to the other clones. and I wondered if perhaps the other brothers would set up the hood and the rest of the clothing parts if they were originally born from the capsule. like this.

But may be I was wrong, Because their clothing is one top and bottom piece. finally, I thought, perhaps clothes would be made in the capsule as well. this fanart of that process.（Sigh, I’m tired）

So basically how the three horse base colors work is that there are two pigments, red and black, and two genes that work together control those pigments, extension and agouti. Extension gives the ability to produce black and red pigment, and Agouti tells pigment where to go on the body. A horse can either be chestnut/red-based, black-based or bay-based and then add modifiers, patterns, etc on top of that.

Spirit’s mother is palomino, meaning she’s a chestnut/red horse with one cream gene. Palomino horses are genetically ee aka recessive red, meaning she has only red pigment, no black. She can still carry a dominant agouti gene (A) so could produce bay foals, it just wouldn’t express because she has no black pigment to direct.

Spirit is buckskin, meaning he’s a bay-based horse with one cream gene. Genetically he would be Ee A-. If his mother had a dominant agouti gene (A), she could have passed that on to make a bay base, but his father would have had to have black factor (E) vs. his mother’s red factor (e) in order to have the black pigment that Spirit has.

So the father would have to be black or bay-based with any number of modifiers like dun, roan, etc. I did google though and apparently the father, though he’s never pictured in the movie, is supposedly a solid black. Which makes sense! To create Spirit’s color, the stallion would have had to pass his dominant extension/black factor (E) and the palomino would have had to pass her dominant agouti (A) and her cream gene to make a horse that is buckskin (Ee Aa).