Monument

joined 1 year ago
[–] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This is morbid but one of my favorite “butterfly” effect news stories in the last year was around the death of Angela Chao after she backed her car into a pond while intoxicated.

Okay, so - here’s the setup:
The Chao family is a very wealthy family. In the 1960’s the family patriarch got into the shipping business and has done very well, garnering money and power. Wealth and power beget wealth and power. Mitch McConnell is even married to one of the daughters - Elaine Chao.
Well, Bush appointed E. Chao to Labor Secretary during his presidency. Mind you, she’s not just Mitch’s wife - she has been in government since the late 80’s. One of the talking points in republican circles during the Bush years was that there was a massive decrease in worker safety complaints. They attributed this to businesses behaving themselves and say that this is evidence that self-regulation can work. What was learned later is that OSHA simply didn’t enforce many regulations or follow up on many complaints, instead choosing to focus on trying to find fraud within unions.
Cut to Trump. He appoints Elaine - still Mitch McConnell’s wife, and daughter of a transportation magnate - to be the Department of Transportation’s Secretary. The ethics concerns notwithstanding, the department hand waved many things through, such as the tesla doors mentioned in the article above, as well as the Tesla Model X’s confusing forward/reverse system, which is cited as being a reason for the death of Angela Chao, her sister.

[–] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 21 points 3 days ago

was

is

She will live inside you forever. She won’t be gone. She will live on in memory.

[–] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 5 days ago

About time!


The kind of funny thing is that if this happened for real, the next big plastic product would just be pesticide impregnated plastics. And then we’d have pesticide microplastics everywhere!

[–] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 5 days ago

You’re one of the founding members of the greater Seattle area polycule, aren’t you?

[–] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 1 week ago

Today I’ve been hearing they’re hanging around polling places all day, so if you missed out on going early, there’s still never a bad time to go.

[–] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 1 week ago

What I’m seeing through your comments here is that your kid trusts you enough to get you into the weeds with them on this problem, has a good enough sense of judgement not to want to just fudge their name to follow the path of least resistance (don’t want to do election fraud in a technical, though not real, sense), and you all have thought through it all and realized it’s a battle not worth having, given your local and statewide political makeup as well as the stress it would cause your kid. It seems like your kid is comfortable with you, self-aware, and capable of making the sorts of pragmatic decisions that many adults cannot make.
Damn. Do you mind asking your kid what it feels like to have good parents that are preparing them to tackle life’s challenges?

Presented kind of as a joke, but good job. Seriously.

[–] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 week ago

”Soory for robbing your sporting goods store, bud, but there’s a hockey stick shortage in Thunder Bay.”

[–] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Wisconsin city

CANADIANS?

[–] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 week ago

In retrospect I think my comment sounds like I’m just excusing being sort of crappy if you’re humble about it.
I wish I’d included the sentiment that we’re all trying the best we can — because being a good partner should be the goal for any relationship.

Even though I’m currently only with my wife, I’m right there with you. I don’t want to add anyone to the mix unless their addition is very carefully considered.
I speak better in metaphor sometimes: It’s kind of like physics, almost. Imagine that we’re touching everyone in our life. If we allow someone to connect to us, they are going to impart their own momentum and direction. That is going to ripple through every connection we have, even if we aren’t able to measure or observe it. So we better make sure they don’t hit us so hard that pieces break apart or get damaged in the process.

[–] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That sucks, man.

I’ve been some stripe or other of non-monogamous for most of my adult life, and those types of relationships are often the ones that people experience first when they dip their toes in.
It’s honestly kind of maddening, because beyond making it seem like everyone who is poly/nm/whatever are all horny sociopaths (because almost everyone has something like that as a first story), it’s harmful. It’s physically and emotionally unsafe for the person who gets shafted. It treats people like they’re disposable and frankly, it’s selfish, insecure, and sometimes malevolent bullshit dressed up as a hippy-dippy love-fest.

It’s really fucking hard to be ethically nonmonogamous, and I wish people would stop pretending they knew what they were doing. No one knows, and it’s the faked confidence that gets so many people in trouble. People just trust someone to take care of them, and then the other person fails because they’re human, and humans fail. And yet… I can’t imagine not being this way, for some dumb fucking reason.

[–] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 42 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

Toxic polyamory situation. A partner I lived with and was once very in love with fell away when she got interested in someone new. It was messy and shitty. I wound up dating someone new, who I had a great relationship with, and it was very physical. But I still lived in a 2 bedroom apartment with my ex.

My ex was a bit weird. She sort of viewed relationships as whatever things with no boundaries. Folks just do whatever they want in the moment and there’s no fidelity according to her. (Things I learned after I fell in love with her. Woof.) She also had intoned a few times that my new partner was a slut, which was sort of funny, given that my new partner had a pretty strong moral code.

My ex got a little less interested in her new guy, and tried to seduce me one night. And I rejected her. We had officially ended things, and I did not want to revisit that.
My ex sneered at me. “Fine. I hope you’re happy with [New Partner], and I hope [NP] is happy with you and your… magical penis!

She practically spat that out at me, and… yeah. It was as funny then as it is now.

And for the record, it’s not magical. I just like to put top hats and little capes on it sometimes.

[–] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 31 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Heh. Asstronomers.

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