askchapo

I'm planning to conspire with maybe a couple of other volunteers at my local mutual aid org to put together some end-of-year present hampers aimed towards kids.

This will be intended for children who are homeless or facing serious poverty so they can have some nice things like other kids get to have at Christmas time (I'm in a culturally Christian country so it's the big annual gift-giving celebration here.)

Do you have any suggestions for what could be good to include?

Obviously I'm looking for lower cost items so that we can stretch our money as far as we can and I'm looking for ideas for things that are more oriented towards enjoyable gifts over giving a kid more mundane items like socks and writing pads.

My plan at the moment is to do two age brackets, with one set of hampers being aimed at a <10yo bracket and another that is >10yo, approximately.

Any hot ideas for stocking filler/secret santa style gifts for kids?

I consistently have this issue where I legit cannot tell if someone is being snarky or mean it just bounces right off. Then i spend ages wondering if a certain phrase was meant to be an underhanded insult or not or what the subtext was supposed to be.

For me, my comfort channels right now are all of Jimothy Cool's channels, and Shortcat. Jimothy makes Pokemon videos, Shortcat makes Mario Kart videos.

Or: Shouldn't immigration be good for capital?

I know they'd prefer for migrants to stay somewhere where their labor time is cheaper to make better use of unequal exchange, but how is it better to spend so many resources on turning away refugees and immigrants that are desperate to work for cheap, than to simply let them get exploited? What are the forces at play that make capitalists invest in border security so much? Is it simply to keep an implicit threat on the existing undocumented immigrant population to make them more precarious and more exploitable?

a girl ive been talking to says some guy has been messaging her the last few days saying "fresh vulva"

I dont remember how to block

any boomers here'?

John: I'm in your area tonight, get ready and we'll chill

me: bet, you live pretty close, be ready in 15

50-90 mins later

John: leaving now

It's the John syndrome in my circle.

And I'm taking Poison Ivy off the table. Too easy. I think I'd go with The Penguin, mostly cause that just seems like normal crimes.

The AI bubble is popping, it seems, and the shit i was doing for a while earlier this summer has dried up. Honestly, i just need to make a grand a month for rent (not the exact number but i don't wanna discuss the real amount in public), and my other material needs are met through friends and family, aside from the occasional bill.

I've found what seems to be a number of places that hire support agents for large companies, so im gonna get the ball rolling on a few of those tonight - a lot aren't able to hire in Illinois, so ill do what I can there.

I basically have as much time as needed for whatever is out there. I just really like remote stuff because 1) ive got two dogs, and 2) im a homebody.

And just to get ahead of the question since it'll probably come up - yes, I've gone around the neighborhood in person recently looking for whatever, and can't even get a call back about being a dishwasher or barista. Shit fuckin sucks out there.

not necessarily about the great uncle, I’m just bored.

It feels kinda wrong how quickly some people say they wouldn't kill hitler if they were sent back in time and given the opportunity.

I'm using that scenario because it seems like a common example, but I'm curious about how materialist theory would approach this.

Barring the sci-fi theories around time travel and whether a new timeline is created, where I believe it's fair game to change the past (since it's a new timeline) would it be morally right to improve the world if flung into a version of the past?

My thought is that it would be a moral obligation to help with things and not just be a witness to atrocity.

Edit: I think my question was more - Is it wrong to do nothing if flung into the past when you know what is likely to happen, or is it more wrong to try to prevent or change it?

I ask because it's almost a given in media and general discussion that you don't mess with things on the chance you make things worse by interfering. That argument feels flawed and lib- brained and I don't think I would be okay with a bad thing happening in front of me just because that's how it happened in my history book. Like the idea of standing by and doing nothing in the face of suffering feels wrong especially with something as nebulous as 'affecting the timeline'

toss up between "I got big hairy legs that turn blonde in the sun.", and "I worsked on the Paris Accord, with Deng Xiaoping, and the others!"

The only thing you can find online is usually catering to rich western tourists or "expats" and usually boils down to "Which place is the most western/ High GDP and McDonalds!" so I'd rather get an opinion from someone that's been there that isn't a business tourist.

I think I'll always enjoy shenanigans, even the utterance of the in-game slang, long after that game fades from public awareness. I can't even fully explain it, it presses fun buttons for me.

I feel the same way about though it may be because the concept is so strange and so specific yet is also so applicable.

Showing my age, I still remember this one fondly, even if it's older than a lot of people posting on this site, right now.

Anyone else grow up with alcoholic parent or parents?

shit was and still is tough

yes or no?

it always embarassed me growing up that our house was kind of dirty.

like i avoided bringing women over and shit because of the clutter.

i cant be the only one who grew up like this.

To me, Silicon Valley is a confusing beast. I'm not sure if this is remaining liberalism but there are some things about it (on the surface level) that I find admirable: it's generally science-positive and is a beacon of intellectualism in the US, even if tech is not your cup of tea I like the idea of some people being in the "problem solving business", and if I must participate in capitalism then working for a company that helps with sustainability in SV doesn't sound too bad. Not ideal, but leagues more tolerable than working on an oil field.

However, this facade crumbles at even the quickest glance and it sometimes almost becomes just as nakedly reactionary as the oil and gas industry. Elon Musk is practically the poster child of Silicon Valley and was a lib that just needed one scratch to give up the ghost and go full fash. Silicon Valley is literally acting like an Ayn Rand villain. Silicon Valley has also practically soured my attitudes towards technology and some of that can be blamed on pretty much all new "innovations" just being inventing a new form of landlordism. Even many of the people in the supposed blue city are complete and utter fash, the whole thing feels like it's permanently an 80s Wall Street movie but with tech.

Is there like any books that can better explain Silicon Valley and what it actually stands for?

scenario: you know a chud at your workplace. he shows you a 'funny' meme on his phone and you peep his twitter handle. it's LoliHitler88. you hate this guy so much. can you put his real name and face on a billboard next to his greatest twitter hits if you don't call him any names on it. is that considered harassment or free promotion. this is a hypothetical

It's rant time because depression and racing thoughts are fun.

I've been thinking about all of the more blatant Dem actions lately to push the "left" away from the party as far as possible. Part of me is confused. Why push away a potential voting block? After all, aren't you calling yourselves the "big tent" party?

Part of me wants to think that there is an ideological push from the centrist and Conservative Dems to get us out of their way. That they honestly did a 180 on the border and suddenly love cops, etc.

Maybe part of it is fear? Are Democrats getting enough credible death threats behind the scenes that they are running to the right out of fear?

A material analysis might come up with this: Democrats know how their bread is buttered and want to keep the money flowing. There is a large "industry" or NGOs, 501c3/4 orgs, party organizations, vendors, and other groups that make their money from donations or grants to push for this or that reform. If abortion becomes legal, Planned Parenthood Action Fund doesn't need to exist. If elections stop being close Priorities USA PAC can go away.

Money comes from all of the bullshit PACs like the Lincoln Project getting funded by bazinga-brained dipshits from Silicon Valley that believe in "both sides"/"unity" crap. They have all of the money, so those are the PACs we get. Black Lives Matter doesn't have money, so there are no orgs to sponsor it, which means no staffers needing to cover their asses.

Of course AIPAC is a huge part of this as well.

All the shitty Dem behavior kind of makes sense when you see it as a bunch of career staffers trying to protect their paychecks. They may not even be thinking about things this way, but they sure are acting like it.

What do you think?

I'm mostly thinking about video, but things like blogs as well, anything is good. It just feels like kind of a gap, that of all the Deaf content creators I know, their talk of audism and intersectionality never seems to progress into a more holistic critique of capitalism.

But I guess this is the same algorithms and self-selection and other factors they're subject to that make the big trans creators a bunch of liberals, too; most of the less-viewed Deaf content I've found is content from universities, or content funded by this or that charity named after this or that capitalist... And otherwise the small Deaf creators seem rather like myself as a teenager, who saw anti-autistic sentiment as a "problem of NTs" rather than a problem of capitalism, that they might see audism as a "problem of hearies".

But I'm sure there are Deaf and Coda creators who make the exact sort of content I'm interested in. I mean, there just has to be! It's just that search engines are absolutely useless at finding that type of content. Like my attempts at Internet searches only really told me that there was a textile artist in the Bauhaus called Otti Berger who was a deaf communist Jew who was killed in the Holocaust; and that there's a book called Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity and an article called Building an Organization According to Our Own Wishes: Deaf Agency in East Germany, 1945 to 1960, which might be interesting with the right expectations set. Otherwise I can confirm that Deaf communists, like, exist in the present day, which yeah, obviously, and there was a mention of "another deaf communist manifesto" on some odd Japanese and Korean language website about Deaf culture, which I don't know what that's about.

But in any case, you'd think that for such a large, clear form of marginalization with a strong cultural identity, that there would be more than three pages of search results, right? So what's causing there to be no results?

yo i am probably going to need a surgery and I noticed I was referred to a religious hospital by default and am not sure what to do about it. I haven't gone there yet. I don't know if I should just ignore that religiousness of it. I was kind of shocked to get a letter in the mail addressed to me with a big ol cross on the envelope.

how do you feel about hospitals (and other health care organizations) that have some tie to religion? I guess a lot of them used to be totally run by churches or whatever but have become somewhat secularized over time. now they get funding from taxes, non profits, insurance companies or whatever.

In my experience it is usually catholic with other christian denominations showing up and many major cities having at least one jewish hospital.

In terms of the anglosphere are there any other religions that have hospitals? I have never heard of a muslim, hindu or buddhist hospital in "the west" though these of course exist elsewhere. do they exist in the US? has anyone ever tried to start one?

In terms of your own (or your family's care)

• do you judge them on their own merits?

• Prefer/boycott them compared to others?

• LGBTQ+++ people: do you trust them?

• women: do you trust them? if you were choosing to carry a pregnancy would you have doubts about going to such a place when the time came?

• religious people: do you trust the ones of other religions? or your own?

• atheists: do you trust them?

• indigenous people: do you trust them?

What kind of hiring practices do these places have? I remember hearing about Salvation Army being anti-queer in hiring. Are they generally allowed to discriminate in accordance of their religious bigotries?

Any other general political ideas too.

Is there any reason these places should be allowed to exist?

Is it still an ongoing failure, post by post, to actually be just writing prompts instead of "here's my le epic predictable plot twist. I need someone to be my personal ChatGPT and write this out for me because I'm just le Ideas Guy" bazinga behavior?

Is it still "dae le number over your head" "dae le multiverse" "you wake up as Hitler, but with a TWIST" and " does something le clever and epic, now write it out for me" as its most common repetitive more-than-prompts?

I don't lurk there anymore. That's a dead dove I've kept in the fridge for a long time.