come home and fight with me

"Hey. What did you do?"

Antechamber in the Pyramid of Unas

some estimates are that it would cost $20 billion to end homelessness in the United States which naturally raises questions of why a billionaire hasn't just done it, like maybe it's harder than that in practice, maybe they're just greedy and don't want to, etc. etc.

however MacKenzie Scott has donated over $19 billion to various charities so far (legit charities I believe, not the "name a museum wing after me" kind of charities) across the fields of "Education, Equity & Justice, Economic Security & Opportunity, and Health" so maybe take it up with her?

because it seems like there are two possible stories here:

or:

Homelessness is one of those problems I don't think you can fix by throwing money at it, no matter how much. The way to end homelessness is (he said with a weary and exhausted sigh) by building homes, and even billionaires cannot just do that: they run into the same land use regulations and community pushback as everybody else. Actually, probably more community pushback: can you imagine the shrieking which would occur if a billionaire announced they were going to muscle past zoning regs to plop down 10,000 units of low-income housing in a major metropolitan area? People would throw a shitfit.

Note that in a lot of cases, especially in the case of tech billionaires who employ expensive software engineers, it would be in a billionaire's pure self-interest to build a lot of cheap housing in expensive cities. Imagine how much money Jeff Bezos would save if Seattle rents suddenly decreased by $1000/month, and so he could pay all his programmers $500/month less and they'd still come out ahead on net. The fact that this doesn't happen suggests billionaires have only limited ability to move real estate markets on their own.

*nodding* building more homes does seem like a good way of making more homes

In this particular case, the people keeping you down are not 10 billionaires but 10 million millionaires, who want their property values to stay high

Endorsed; I'm gonna self-plagiarize here and just link to my "Who is to blame for high urban rents? Homeowners." post instead of typing it all out again.

(This reblog by @mentalwires was a good addition about the political economy which got us here)

We're stunned by this beautifully bound anthology of Persian poetry, created in the 16th century!

Attributed to present-day Turkey or Iran, the manuscript features ornate gold detailing and pages painted with watercolor and ink. It contains poetry by Amir Shahi of Sabzavar (Iranian, born in Sabzavar–died 1453), Maulana Nur al-Din `Abd al-Rahman Jami (Iranian, born 1414 in Jam–died 1492 in Herat), and Nasir Khusrau (Iranian, born 1003–died circa 1066).

The pages are composed using qita’i, a découpage technique in which letters are cut from colored paper and carefully arranged on contrasting folios.

The full anthology is part of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's open access collection and available to view on JSTOR.

(1, 2, 3, 4)

GET GRUFFALO'D, BITCH

If you haven't heard of Julia Donaldson, she's primarily a picture book author, who we can thank for extremely popular Halloween classic Room on the Broom as well as the Gruffalo.

Let this be a testament to the power of picture books.

I'm living for these jokes.

Also I need "GET GRUFFALO'D, BITCH" on a T-shirt.

Ceremonial dagger, Turkey, Ottoman Empire, 16th century,

Given to Gábor Bethlen, Prince of Transylvania.

Ebony, emerald, ruby, silver, steel, turquoise,

length: 38,5 cm, width: 6,8 cm.

Courtesy: Iparművészeti Múzeum (Museum of Applied Arts) Budapest

I haven’t seen this little guy posted yet today for #LunarNewYear #YearOfTheSnake 🌕🐍 so I guess I’ll be the one to do it…

Snake (Naga) Figure

U Thong District, Suphan Buri Province, Thailand, 6th - 11th c. CE

Baked clay with incised details

National Museum Bangkok

America is absolutely disconnected to meat

I think I realized this when I had went to see my dad and stepmom one day and asked if I could place my hawk’s food. (A rabbit leg) in the freezer. My step mom was disgusted by the idea that a leg from an animal was in the freezer meanwhile an entire chicken was sitting in the fridge.

Your rotisserie chicken is an entire chicken.

Your pork chop is a hunk of pig.

Your rack of ribs are from a cow’s rib cage.

It’s like Americans view meat as colorful red and pink hued shapes that just exist and come into the world packaged.

You see so many people getting harassed or even having their content flagged for showing how to process or field dress meat when it’s at it’s freshest. Right after culling. For some reason this is considered “gore” by many folks when in reality it’s no more different from plucking a processed chicken after cull.

You also notice that Americans have an idea of what’s normal meat and what isn’t normal meat and there’s racist undertones that I’ve noticed in a lot of these comments left on foreign cooking videos

You have people that claim a video of a man in a different country preparing something like this is “eating a dog.” Meanwhile this is roasted goat.

You have people who’s only perception of an edible fish is in fillet or fish stick form and they call something like this nasty because “Eww there’s a head!” Yeah.. most animals have heads..

Some of ya’ll need to realize what your meat looks like prior to processing and that it’s prepared in different ways. We also need to erase the stigma behind non traditional meats.

Truly, genuinely, as an indigenous person I talk about this exact thing a LOT! Like, don't get me wrong I get a bit squicked when dressing a chicken or gutting and cleaning a fish, lord knows I had really mixed feelings the first time I saw a deers throat slit (I thought it was cruel, until my elder asked me if I would have preferred to let it suffer instead) The truth of the matter is that animals and humans are intertwined. We are food to one another, that's the way of the world and I think people forget that when we champion for humane treatment of animals and when we rail against factory farming we need to remember that removing death is not the goal, removing undue suffering it.

I think, in the same way we don't really give leeway about (white) people's fear of being around black people, I also don't think we need to give leeway about whether women should be afraid of men when out in public. I think maybe the fears around this are more based on True Crime and leftover Fearmongering about sexual purity than actual danger

it's sexism. parents often use the 'sexual threat' of men/boys to terrorize their daughters, and it does a number on you psychosexually. it's just depressing when other women buy into it and don't even realize how shitty they're being to the rest of us

— The Stones of Florence, Mary McCarthy

Why did they erase the first 5? Did they take their loads back?

Honestly I’d be more inclined to play Stardew Valley if it was about a depressed cop trying to solve a murder whilst navigating the politics of a mass strike and the fallout of counter revolution

*trips over our red string of fate*

Stanisław Bagieński (1876–1948) - Cemetery on the night of the Dziady: Spirits rush to families

illustration from the Polish magazine ‘Tygodnik Ilustrowany’, 1904

source

People hate paper and reusable straws because they're such a ridiculous hill on which to stake claims of sustainability. are plastic straws bad for the environment? Yes. But are they bad enough to make abolishing plastic straws a meaningful or even worthwhile intervention? Almost certainly not.

Reusable and paper straws give the aesthetics of being environmentally friendly through a minor and inconvenient intervention of unclear effectiveness. Think about it. Metal straws weigh over 15x more than plastic (~7g vs ~0.4 g), meaning it requires 15x more energy to ship them, so you're underwater pollution-wise until you've used the straw at least fifteen times. Paper straws are even worse, since they also weigh more (~1.5 g, over 3x more than plastic), and they're single use.

And that's just shipping costs. Before it can be made into consumer products, metal has to be mined and smelted, both notoriously energy intensive processes (though admittedly, requiring less energy per kg than many plastics) leading to widespread environmental devastation. Paper making involves many nasty chemicals and produces massive volumes of toxic waste, and, because of the processing and additives required to make paper straws viable, they may be even worse for your health than plastic. (Of course the environmental devastation of industry is usually restricted to areas populated by poor or marginalized people, while single use plastic straws can be found littering the gas station parking lot of any well-off suburb.) Producing tons of single-use plastic tubes may be significantly less damaging than producing lots of metal or plastic straws that will be used twice and then forgotten in the drawer when you realize they're actually hard to clean.

So once again, are drinking straws really the environmental battle we should be fighting? Moves away from plastic straws are great examples of vibes based policy making. They're not driven by an accounting of the environmental, health, or climate implications, but just by the feeling that plastic=bad.

Luckily, people are doing the work to figure out the environmental costs of replacing plastics. A recent paper in the journal Environmental Science and Technology put it bluntly in their title: "Replacing Plastics with Alternatives Is Worse for Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Most Cases." This paper focused solely on the climate impacts, which of course must be weighed against other environmental and health impacts, but their conclusions are clear: