yeah guys its looking like he got runned over and beated up and belly flopped in a pool and tore his acl his achilles tendons are gone anvil fell on his head air got sucked out of his lungs run over by a steamroller till he was flat dragged behind a horse piano crushed him set on fire bear mauled him for his picnic basket drank poison crashed a car into a wall that looked like a tunnel blowed up by tnt shot out of a cannon fell off a cliff for a long time and hit the ground with a big puff of dust and electrocuted and theres no remains
right now it’s almost halfway through 2023, and 2024 is an election year in the US. I have started to see a growing proliferation of posts suggesting that there is no difference between the republican and democratic parties–the exact same kind of posts I saw an awful lot of before the last major election here. I am unfollowing folks who post or reblog these sort of posts, as I consider these posts to be fascist propaganda framed as leftist discourse, designed to suppress anti-fascist votes and voters.
Prepare yourself to vote for Biden now, because the only other option is someone who will make 2016-2020 look like a picnic.
You work with what you’ve got, not what you wish you had.
I detest Biden more with every passing day (and he was not in my top 10 candidates in 2020). 2024 will be an election between:
Biden/The Former Guy
Biden/DeSantis
Biden/Republican Fascist to be Named Later
No Labels is an op. It’s being funded by unknown parties to defeat Biden and the Democrats. Their election scenarios are fantasy football for political junkies.
No Third Party has a road anywhere outside statewide offices (Bernie is the exception that proves the rule, and he’s a Democrat for all intents and purposes).
Arguably the rosiest scenario is that TFG breaks with the Republicans to form his own party and tanks any chance the Republicans have, but that’s not looking as likely as it did two years ago.
If you’re pissed, get involved in your local elections. Ensure that no position is running unopposed (and that includes if you’ve got a conserva-Dem somewhere now–primary them).
Get the House back in the Democratic hands (unless you’re up for two more years of this only with MTG as Speaker this time). Increase the margin in the Senate (and send Selema to her post-senate career). Make sure your school board isn’t full of flat-earthers. Wake sure your county counsel isn’t going to shut down your libraries if they have a book someone doesn’t like.
As Stonekettle says, if you want a better country, but a better citizen.
There’s a reason we call it a civic DUTY, not a civic privilege.
Starting mid-April I’ll be posting to-do lists and action items for people who’ve never gotten involved before. One party wants you dead. FIGHT.
Speaking as a Michigan resident: Look at the laws being passed in Michigan. Now look at the laws being passed in Florida. Spot the difference? That’s because Michigan is being governed by the Democratic Party, and Florida is being governed by the Republican Party. That’s the difference. They’re different parties. It is not the same.
You want what we’ve got? Vote for it.
(And you want Michigan to stay the way it is and not slide backwards into the shit we had to deal with with Rick Snyder, or even just the way it was when the House and Senate were Republican-controlled? Keep fucking voting.)
D are not our friends or even allies but R is a staunch enemy
look the main thing is that our first-past-the-poll voting style automatically and always devolves into a two party system where the majority of people dislike both parties. This is now a known phenomenon, a feature of our voting method as inevitable as water running downhill.
But that isn’t going to change until we get some sweeping voting reform that revises our voting system into some kind of ranked or run-off voting
Meanwhile one of our destined-to-be-disliked parties is actually trying to do things we want (health care, living wages, social services, public transportation, civil rights, education, support for gay and trans people, religious tolerance, etc) and one of our parties is banning books and undoing women’s rights and supporting corrupt racist police and endangering gay and trans lives while paying people to make posts about how both parties are equally bad so that people don’t vote democrat.
Like, we are going to not like a lot of how the Democrats operate, that is a feature of the current design, but they are trying to protect women’s rights, they are trying to help the homeless, they are trying to raise minimum wage they have agendas that include important things. And republicans? are at this point a literal cult that want to create a religious fascist state.
Even my father, now 80 years old, a man whose politics i have often despised, a man who voted for Reagan for fucks sake! even he (unhappily) votes Democrat now, because he’s not an insane person, and the republican party has become SO BLATANTLY EVIL AND STUPID that he can’t ignore it.
Democrats pass legislation we want that republicans then find ways to block. Democrats have passed bills that:
close gender pay gaps raise federal minimum wage make becoming a US citizen easier for immigrants protect civil/public water sources from pollution cut greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change increase gun regulation lower and control prescription drug prices improve healthcare access for those with pre-existing conditions protect net neutrality protect gay marriage rights
these are all the subjects of specific real bills that democrats have either passed into law or tried hard to pass in the last few years.
Meanwhile republicans act to block these bills while championing book bans and attacking trans folk and giving more power to corporations to ruin our planet and taking away women’s rights.
when you see posts attacking Democrats from the left or whatever, the talking points and quotes can often be traced back to right wing sources
So all posts trying to keep non-republicans arguing amongst ourselves and calling for us to not vote democrat (or not vote at all) ? I will be assuming they are bad-faith posts and i won’t be spreading them or engaging with them or anything.
Honest critique of the party is necessary, but like it or not our system currently is a two party system, and i’ll be voting for the better of the two until we can change our voting style to make additional political parties viable.
I live in Pennsylvania.
Neither of my children is cisgender.
The last gubernatorial election was, literally, do we elect this guy who is overly fond of cops but is generally a normal human being, or do we elect this other guy who believes frightening conspiracy theories and wants my children removed from my care and forcibly detransitioned and honestly would prefer them to be dead?
That’s it. That’s the kind of choice we get in first-past-the-post voting. If that second guy won, we needed to move. There was no safe way to stay here. The votes of my fellow citizens were all that was standing between my kids and serious fucking danger.
And my fellow citizens DID turn out. Lots of them came out and voted to reject the scary death cultist. I am grateful to all those who went, ugh, I don’t really like this guy, but the other guy is worse, and hauled themselves down to the polling place to get it done.
You, too, can vote to reject scary death cultists, in your hometown and your home state and in the country as a whole.
Getting rid of the scary death cultists is a prequisite for getting political representation you actually want.
Hey guys, so I agree with the core ideas of this post but I also want to point out that it is important to both vote for the best candidate in a two-party system AND to challenge the two-party system itself.
Right now the biggest challenge to the two-party system is ranked choice voting (RCV) which solve the “lesser of two evils” problems. It also has other benefits like rewarding candidates who are respectful and consensus-builders and punishing ones who focus on only a few hot-button issues.
It’s already been implemented in Maine, Alaska, and a number of local municipalities. There are movements to get RCV happening in many other states, including both “red states” and “blue states”. One such movement is called FairVote. Search for ranked choice voting and your state and join any movements or organizations that exist if you care about this stuff too.
When your political system is broken, it is important to tackle it from as many different angles as possible.
If you want Tumblr to lift the porn ban, you have to call your elected officials and loudly complain about the FOSTA/SESTA acts that are the reason the ban exists.
And you also need to be ready to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the sex workers who have been fighting the ban for years.
If you want porn back on tumblr but don’t want to stand with sex workers having the right to run their business, then you don’t fucking deserve porn on tumblr.
Ah, guys, just to be clear, I realize most of you probably know this but I’m seeing it framed….weirdly, so –
Tumblr is not $30M in debt. You can’t get Tumblr out of the red by giving them $30M. I mean you can, for a bit, but Tumblr is operating at a $30M deficit. That means yearly, Tumblr is spending $30M more than it earns.
None of this is to say we can’t have a Crab Day and try to get that $30M covered, sounds like fun! But that just means Tumblr breaks even for the current fiscal year. Tumblr has investors that want profits (or, well, I guess it’s Automattic’s investors, but regardless they want profit), so in order for it to continue operation, it has to either become Genuinely Profitable Very Quickly, or it has to do a fundraising round of some kind and get even more investors on board, which is really just kicking the problem down the road a year or two.
And either way, the extremely slick and semi-alarming pitch Tumblr is making about all the changes it’s going to make to increase engagement and such is still going to be necessary, because that’s where the money is, unfortunately. I don’t like it either (my favorite bullet point from that pitch is that they will email people who have their notifications turned off, because sure, that sounds like it won’t annoy anyone who like me was already overly inclined to be annoyed) but like. Baby needs a new pair of shoelaces.
None of this is to be alarmist or anything, I just got a bit worried about all this talk of $30M in debt, because this is not a one-time deal.
What’s the feasibility of creating a nonprofit group to obtain Tumblr and operate it as a nonprofit?
I mean, I guess it depends on how many startups you’ve formed or how many high net worth philanthropists who are into microblogging you do lunch with, but realistically, nil.
The rest of this post is going to sound like I’m being kind of sarcastic to you but I’m not, I genuinely think it’s a) an interesting question and b) a really, really interesting answer that people may find enlightening.
So, to start, you can’t just “obtain” Tumblr; Automattic has to be willing to sell. Automattic isn’t a publicly traded company so if they don’t want to they just kinda don’t have to. Presume Automattic is willing to sell; they bought Tumblr for what, three million? They are unlikely to want to sell at a loss, but whatever price they want to fix, you are going to need to have that money up front. So the question then is, can one fundraise three million dollars to buy a site that has traditionally only declined in value and is running at a deficit? You are unlikely to get a loan for it. Most nonprofit grants can’t be used to purchase a for-profit even if you’re planning to convert it. If you want professional fundraisers to help, you’re going to need to have payroll for them. A good nonprofit fundraiser brings in $5 for every $1 you spend on them, so you’re going to need probably around a million dollars for fundraising up front.
But presume you do have three to four mil lying around and Automattic is willing to sell; you are now responsible for the operating costs of Tumblr including employee compensation including health and retirement benefits, rent on whatever buildings they’re housed in, fees for whatever servers Tumblr is housed on, and probably half a dozen other things I’m not thinking of. I don’t know what the operating cost of Tumblr is but it’s running at a thirty million dollar a year deficit, so the second you buy it you’re on the hook for at least $2.5M a month – you will have to provide that $2.5M for the foreseeable future on top of whatever costs Tumblr has that its income-producing activities (advertising, ad-free subscriptions, etc) are actually covering.
And here’s the problem: taking it nonprofit doesn’t reduce that deficit. The point of a nonprofit isn’t that It Costs Less, it’s that it doesn’t pay dividends to stakeholders once it’s profitable. So unless your very first act as owner of Tumblr is to institute Elon Musk At Twitter level “cost cutting” measures, it being a nonprofit won’t really matter.
This is all on top of the legal wrangle to take a for-profit company and turn it into a nonprofit; I don’t even know where one begins with that, because you almost never see it happen. There may be c-suite management who have been promised stock options as part of a future IPO who now need to be paid out for those options they’ll never get; you may be looking at a long exodus of staff who were also in it for the stock options, and aren’t interested in working for a nonprofit, especially since nonprofit salaries are notoriously low.
And now you’re also dealing with every donor who wants to know why one dollar of their three dollar donation is paying someone who is under a six-figure contract from when it was a for-profit. You could let them go and hire cheaper labor but uh, you do get what you pay for.
And the thing is, nonprofits don’t just….exist. The vast majority of all nonprofits are constantly actively fundraising. So on top of the $3M to buy and the $2.5M/mo deficit, you’re going to need to hire a development staff to continue to raise funds. A good development staff capable of sustaining a nonprofit the size and activity of Tumblr is going to be probably a dozen people minimum; for scale, I’m on a development staff of ten for our nonprofit, which has 35 employees total. Tumblr has around 200 staff total.
So you’re looking at an upfront investment of $1M-$4M for the purchase, probably another million or so to hire development staff, lord knows how much in legal fees and contract severances to take it nonprofit, and $2.5M a month – because of development staff, let’s bump that to $3M – to cover the ongoing deficit until a combination of Whatever Changes You Wish To Make and the fundraisers can cover the deficit.
So…those are the initial barriers to purchasing Tumblr and turning it nonprofit. It’s not insurmountable in theory, but in practice it’s not super likely.
someone tell the tumblerinas that you can raise an issue without deliberately guilt-tripping everyone about it
okay, I take it back. I don’t think everyone is doing this deliberately. some of it is so deeply entrenched in tumblr culture that you probably don’t always notice you’re doing it
“nobody’s talking about this” -> you can just delete this phrase
“if you can’t reblog this, unfollow me” -> you can also delete this one
“x group can, and should, reblog this” -> remove the “should”. or you know. delete the entire sentence
your post will still spread all the important information without the guilt-tripping parts, I promise
It will probably increase how much your post will spread but I and others I know deliberately will not reblog something with guilt tripping bs in it no matter how important it is
17th July 2023
Reblogged From sn0wbats
Notes: 375
#Rise and Thoren as they are now are sentimental enough to want to hug well#though I imagine Rise has more experience since Thoren basically used a program called nicehugs.exe when they used Thorenbot#in most cases Dylan would not willingly hug anyone he doesn't like most close contact#however in the rare case when he wants to hug he would likely do so with intent to crush#though its hard to tell how much crushing strength he has as a waif-y spellcaster#so its more likely that it will just be awkward
