VoxAdActa

I was a Teamster when I worked for Sygma, and out of all the unions I’ve been a member of (four, now), the Teamsters were the motherfucking worst. If they were actively trying to take a revolving door of 18- and 19-year-olds just getting their first big-boy jobs and turn them into all into die-hard anti-union voters for life, they couldn’t do a better job than they’re doing right now, and I told my steward that before I quit.

They designed the whole contract specifically to offload all the real work onto the new guys, protect the older guys when they decided to throw hands on the loading dock, and give as much overtime as possible to the ancient, divorced boomers with no family to go home to, that they could spend pretending to sweep the floors while the trainees finished the actual loading. Guys would bid order picking, then use seniority to bump bid loads/receivers off their jobs and wouldn’t pick a single case for the whole contract, while getting paid picker bonuses and shift differentials.

And just to rub salt into the wound, those perks (bumping lower guys off their bid jobs and “sweeping the floor” during overtime) were specifically written out of the latest contract, so only the guys hired under the previous contract would ever get to do them. They straight robbed those kids of even anything to look forward to if they toughed out the low-seniority years. They also negotiated a different pay scale for under 5 years, 5-10 years, and 10 years in, and you can guess which end of that they weighted the raises toward. It was a complete shitshow, and when kids would quit, the Teamsters would keep their initiation fee (taken out of the first three paychecks). You could call to try to get it back, but the best they’d do would be to put it towards your initiation fee for your next Teamster job, as if any of those kids would ever willingly subject themselves to that shit ever again.

AND THERE’S MORE. I just don’t feel like typing up a fucking novel on it. Don’t even get me started on the shady shit they did during the contract negotiations I was actually present for. It was worse than maddening; it felt like it was specifically crafted by the senior guys to make sure that ladder was pulled up as high as they could behind them, while not actually making any waves for the company. And the safety issues they ignored and covered up, and the fancy fucking “union meetings” they never told anyone about so that they were only attended by the office reps, because they were being held at the most expensive restaurants in the city, on the union’s dime, and the number of stewards who were literally fucking floor supervisors, and on, and on, and on…

UIW was kind of spineless and milquetoast, but they took care of us. The Teamsters are fucking old-school mob racket motherfuckers who are single-handedly responsible for an entire generation of workers who think all unions are a scam.

Old Reddit is Reddit. If they get rid of it, I’m sure as fuck not sticking around for this new site. It looks like Bing and Youtube had a deformed little monster-child.

More like r/bots.

Like, ok, there were bots in the previous r/place events, but this one is fucking stuffed with bots. Every piece of art on that page has been entirely botted, except maybe for the sad Turkish flag that keeps trying to get the star right.

I was planning a long road trip that I could have done all at once, but decided to break into two days with a hotel stay somewhere near the middle. I was on a bit of a budget, so when I found a room for ~$60, I was thrilled.

When I got there, the shower handle was plumbed backwards (so the “Cold” direction was hot), the first towel on the rack had brown splatters that were very clearly old blood stains, and while I was showering a big roach wandered up onto the lip of the shower like “S’up, bro,” then meandered off like he did this sort of thing every day.

The bed was about as cushy as a gym floor mat, the pillows were bricks, and when I sat down on the desk chair to put on my shoes, the whole thing just about collapsed under me.

The review I left said: “The best $10 hotel room that $60 can buy,” and since then I just make all my road trips in one go if I can’t afford to spend at least $100 for a hotel room.

The way you’ve phrased the question, it sounds like you’re asking if we do it on the regular, like stepping on the scale or trying on old pants. Like it’s something we keep track off as a part of our routine.

In which case, no. I do not measure my penis.

I have measured my penis, once or maybe twice, back during the period of time I could reasonably expect it to still be working on attaining its final dimensions. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be perfectly average.

The question “Have you ever measured your penis?” will get you entirely different results than the question “Do you [‘do’ as in currently, in a continuing manner] measure your penis?”

Glass is half full!

…because the top half boiled off…

I dunno. I’m an autistic anxiety-sufferer who scours subreddit rules before I ever try to post anything, specifically to avoid the embarrassment and shame of doing it “wrong”, and some of those subs are still impossible. Have you ever tried to post anything in r/Showerthoughts? The rules absolutely don’t cover all the things the automod will instantly remove. It uses some kind of keyword tagging system that is never explained in any of the sidebars or wikis. I tried maybe a dozen different thoughts over the course of a couple months and not one of them got past the automod (well, except for the one that a mod reposted as their own 24 hours after mine got deleted, but that’s gotta be a coincidence).

Or, my second-favorite, the one where your post gets autoremoved for “Rule 4”, but there’s no list of numbered rules anywhere on or linked to the subreddit. I think that’s a “feature” of New Reddit, where Old Reddit users can’t see the sidebars anymore under certain conditions, but I’m not sure.

And then, third favorite, are the ones OP is probably talking about, where the rules amount to a college textbook’s worth of pages that have been through no developmental editing or copyediting, so they’re more vague than 5e’s description of the Magic Jar spell, but whatever interpretation the mods are using, it’s not the obvious one… or the second-obvious… or the third-obvious…

What I wish for is an open platform where left and right can speak freely to each other in polite discourse

Oh, I see. You’re delusional. You honestly think I should be having “polite discourse” with people who either want me dead, or are ok with voting for people who want me dead.

Because, see, what’s left? What makes a Republican want to claim to be a Republican other than the culture war bullshit? What do they stand for? They haven’t stood for “fiscal responsibility” or “small government” since W was in office. The straight-up write things like “We stand against teaching critical thinking in schools” (see: Texas GOP party platform) into their guiding documents. And you think they’re going to have a civil conversation? You think I owe them a civil conversation?

Every server we allow those people on freely will become exploding heads or 4 chan. Go look at r/politicalcompassmemes if you need an example. I don’t know how many times we have to watch it happen before you get the picture, or maybe this is your first ever internet community experience. But you’re wrong. Their bad-faith rhetoric, carefully-stated death threats, and direct personal attacks will drive everyone who isn’t one of them away, leaving only Nazis. If the admins call them out and ban them for that stuff, they’ll end up banning all of them and we’ll be having this same conversation. If the admins allow their speech, but don’t allow us to say “Fuck off, weeb, nobody likes you” without censure, then guess who gets to control the “discourse”? And if the admins don’t ban anyone for it, we’ll become Voat. Since only the slimiest members of humanity can tolerate that vibe for long, guess who ends up owning the server by default?

You wanna see that shit, you enjoy being called slurs and told to go kys, you are free to seek out the communities who will do that for you. But fuck all the way off with telling me I must put up with it, too.

Oh, I can block them? No I fucking can’t. I blocked you days ago, and your shit still shows up in my notifications. So, again, fuck off. If I have to listen to whatever dumb shit spills out of your brain, against my will, then you get to listen to my toxicity.

Are you suggesting that I should have an account on each fediverse instance, just to get all of the content? If so, then what the actual fuck is the point of federation in the first place?

…you… honestly thought… the fediverse… was supposed to be a centralized content aggregator…?

What… uh, so, what… what do you think the fediverse is?

When did I say that? I’m very toxic towards people who are cool with the view that I should be either “sentenced to death” or “hunted with dogs”.

Oh, you’re not cool with it, you just want to force me to listen to it anyway. That’s so different.

Go back to 4 chan, otaku.

That’s not the same and you know it.

Oh, is 4chan too much freedom for you? What happened to your whole “no rules, just right” attitude?

It’s sounding more and more like you don’t give a single fuck about seeing this kind of content; you want to force us to see this content. All the places you could go to get it, and you’re still arguing that we should have to see it too or we’re not free.

You’re right. We’re not free. We’re sad, pathetic, chained little sheep beholden to a “central authority” that doesn’t allow hate speech. Run while you can! Flee, quickly! Or you, too, might get consumed by the woke mind virus and start thinking that maybe the Jews are ok people!

My issue is I don’t like having content blocked FOR me

Oh, I see. You want 4chan.

Well, good news! 4chan exists! Go there.

Do you prefer having a centralized authority dictating your exposure to content?

Like, you mean, a website? That’s what you mean by “centralized authority”, right? A website? With its Terms and Conditions, following the applicable copyright and IP laws, following the relevant laws of the jurisdiction it operates in? Yeah, I’m fine with that.

If you’re not, go to Exploding Heads. They welcome you. They want you.

We don’t.

Yeah, it’s weird.

Why do people think that?

It’s such a mystery.

One of those enduring conundrums of the universe.

Will ever figure out why Republicans keep getting called facists?

It really is one of life’s unsolvable riddles.

How could anyone come to such a conclusion?

I guess we’ll never know.

Yeah, me too.

We won’t get any examples, though. At least not any examples of things real, relevant people actually said. The best they’ll do is drop a dumptruck’s worth of strawmen before flouncing off in a huff.

want a place free of authoritarian policies that don’t limit actual human discourse.

You’ve already been given a suggestion for just that kind of instance. If you want to see that kind of content, there’s a spot for that.

Or are you just upset that there are places who don’t welcome those kinds of dumbfuck takes? Is it that you want to see the content for yourself, or that you want to make the content and force everyone to see it?

Either way, this instance isn’t the place for you. Exploding heads is. Go there, be happy.

I don’t think the quality of the front page changed all that much in the last month.

I don’t know. I don’t think I agree. I’ve been seeing a lot more truly garbage-tier content on the first few pages of r/all lately, from some really weird, never-before-seen, garbage-tier subs. Half of them I don’t even know what they’re supposed to be about. What the fuck is a Honk Star Rail? Where the fuck did Pop Culture Chat come from? Who the fuck is Peter, and why is he explaining jokes? I used to doomscroll down to page 8 or 9 before I started seeing weird stuff like this, and now it’s right there on page 1. In the past, when I started seeing that weird Taylor Swift Simp Cult sub, I knew I’d been on reddit too long. Now they regularly show up, if not on page 1, then high on page 2.

Along with the r/AmITheAsshole scab copy sub, r/AITAH, which somehow managed to make it to the front page in record time after it’s creation, even though it has about 9% as many subscribers as the original did.

Hell, some of these posts on page 1 of r/all only have 1500 upvotes. That’s insane.

But this article is from 2021, along with all the other ones I found about the vaccine causing “shaking”.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/jan/20/shaking-covid-vaccine-side-effect-videos-and-what-/

My general philosophy is that anything advertised on YouTube or podcasts is automatically a scam. So I’d avoid NordVPN in favor of literally any other service just on principle. Outside of that, though all I’ve heard is the same general grumblings about price and deceptive advertising.

Yes, my pfp is also absolutely me.

I guess. I’m watching YouTube to learn stuff, either documentary stuff or DIY stuff. But I’ll be honest, other than funny skits that stopped being funny to me years ago, I can’t imagine what kind of content would be interesting in a 2-3 minute burst.