If it's not legally protected it doesn't matter, unless someone's willing to run interference with the bureaucracy for you. But then you're benefiting from someone playing favorites, which is a whole other can of worms when coworkers start resenting their own "sorry no can do, rules are rules~!" experience with funerals, etc.

Damn, that's tighter than I'd expect. My work asks for two week's(10 work days) notice minimum for requesting leave, and even then you're prioritized below people who requested months earlier. 😬 If they like you they might make an exception for a "good reason" but I've seen people with a grudge stick to the letter of the rules, damn the reason, gotta be fair to everyone.

And this is a lesson to all about how we can't, can not, cut corners. Everything must be done to a standard that is without reproach, because any crack left will be clawed at until our work is undone.

I think that's a bit of a paranoid reading. It lands closer to a classic NIMBY situation, to me. There's no real fear of Ohioans at play, more so a desperate clutching to preserve what belongs to "us". They just want someone else to be the ones to deal with the situation.

> It’s more and more common on the beltway: you put on your blinker and the person next to you speeds up to close the gap.

That's why I don't signal if there's drivers being aggressive around me, if I can help it. Obviously if there's no safe gap then I have to resort to asking(a request that's often denied, especially in traffic that's already behaving aggressively), but otherwise I'm gonna find that safe gap and take it, thankya. It's legal in MD as long as your merge is safe(large enough gap, no speed differential, etc). 🤷‍♀️

I was reading Anne Rice.

Outside websites(discord, etc) are used to coordinate brigading now, since the admin crackdowns.

I have also received sustained harassment over time from comments made on reddit. It's happened twice. I forget what I did to offend the one time, but the other was that I said someone should consider adding a content warning to their post because of something very unpleasant dropped out of nowhere near the end of it. Both times they followed me to other subs and would reply to my posts there, with stuff that was clearly off but not rule breaking. The reason I remember the one so well is that person was replying with the thing I'd said bothered me, no context just the words copy-pasted from their post. The reason I didn't block them was because it's not my first rodeo and I wanted to make sure it wasn't escalating without my knowledge(at the time the block tool only made their posts invisible to me, and allowed them to continue interacting with posts I'd made, so I wouldn't know if for example they doxed me).

I don't tiktok or twitter, but I've never had to deal with things like that on tumblr. 🤷‍♀️

The other platforms make dissent visible. Even if 30 people are screaming at me in the tumblr notes, I can see that 20 people clicked the little heart to like my post. But on reddit, I'm sitting at a -10 and I don't know if that's because ten people disagree with me or because 30 people disagree and 20 people agree. The little controversial dagger can be helpful with this, but only if the values are very close.

Add in the downvoting issue, and it's very easy to bury people with the feedback threat of "shut your mouth if you don't want to wind up muted" which...is what downvotes are. Subreddit karma is used in the crowd control official mod tool to auto-collapse your posts and send them to the bottom of the thread to die. A new user who comes to a subreddit and, say, wants to discuss ableism in RPGs(because they are themselves disabled and are interested in the subject) only to be met with heavy downvotes because reddit hates the word ableism is going to just walk away from that subreddit. And so views continue uncontested.

That's all I could come up with, either. Thank you for finally answering the question instead of dodging it.

What concrete thing against racism and oppression did this action of vandalism accomplish?

But what concrete thing does this action accomplish?

But what does it accomplish? Name one positive thing that happens as a result of that, one concrete change in the world that makes it a better place to people walking around on the street. Put that in the "good things" column.

Now in the "bad things" column we have conservatives and some moderates racing to the polls, reacting to what they see as hooliganism. And this does excite their base. It works astoundingly well, especially targeted to white conservatives in the county(who have more statewide power than before with the recent redistricting).

Now, to morally evaluate the act, we compare the two columns. Is it worth it? I can't come up with anything to put in the first column at all, given that the statues had already been permanently removed from where they'd been displayed, so my math is coming up "absolutely not." Tell me what your math is that makes it come up differently.

That was my first reaction too, but apparently it happened while they were in storage(according to commenters further down, the article is paywalled for me so I can't confirm). That's a bit more of a complex thing, like it wasn't some activist defacement of something in an attempt to get change. I'm all for vandalizing displayed monuments of oppression. Throw that shit in the harbor where it belongs, let's have a statue party. But when you've already won, when it's already been taken down and put into storage, at that point you're just defacing something that doesn't belong to you, to...make yourself feel good? Like you accomplished something? But what did you accomplish, if the monument had already been taken down? That energy would be better directed to something that matters, because if it's going to be used as ammunition against us(and this will) you might as well have accomplished something while you were at it.

29 does see congestion in that area during prime commute times. Typically I get snarled in the afternoon going north, so if /u/jasonpaulhowie is going south(70->29->100) at a time that isn't morning rush hour it should be okay. Just be advised, 29->100 is gonna be one of our lovely left side exits. We don't have a "keep right" law in MD, so it's 100% legal for you to make your way over and stay left to ensure you make the exit.

> Personally, I find most books more enjoyable on subsequent readings when I know the plot and I can be impressed with how it unravels and the author has layers the groundwork.

This is the premise behind the pro-spoiler movement, backed up by an actual study. Apparently, science has concluded that, on average, it very much is a thing. However. It is not true for every single person. I personally find it differently enjoyable. There's a joy in the discovery, and a joy in the re-treading, and they're not the same thing. I can get the latter any time I want by doing a re-read or re-watch, but being robbed of the former means I can never experience it.

It's all about giving people agency. Tag the spoilers so people can decide for themselves what they want their experience to be, you know? Don't make choices on behalf of other people based on what "science says" is best for them.

Consider the case where the motivations or plot would have been obvious to a reader at the time of publication, but are lost on modern readers. Or the situation where the novel is in translation, relying on cultural knowledge/references that simply don't exist to the average reader in the translated language. A well-done preface or introduction can assist with that, though more extreme cases will need footnotes/endnotes.

I never read the two sequels, but I read Little Women(both books, generally they're in the same volume these days) both as a child and as an adult. As a child, I believe I had an adapted version, but a few years ago I re-read the original text on project gutenberg. There was a lot that I'd overlooked as a kid, and some lessons that maybe aren't so great to emulate in the 21st century. But I loved the feminine empowerment, how it showed several different ways to be a woman and demonstrated that they were all good.

Jo's ending is a little questionable these days, I will admit. It really has to be read in the context of the time it was written, as well as considering how it was essentially the 19th century version of a fic author going "haha fuck you your OTP will never be a thing!" I didn't know this as a kid, but as an adult it makes me laugh. You go, Louisa May! Tell them how it is!

I'm actually a huge Amy fan. Anyone who hates on Amy stopped paying attention at the point where she burned Jo's manuscript, but she has so much development after that. She was the one who stayed with Aunt March, and her development abroad was incredible. Yes she's a bit of a prude, but remember the historic context at the time of original publication. She was a prude in the same way that women who supported prohibition were prudes, which is to say, she had a reason to be wary. She was also the perfect match for Laurie. Jo would have been a disaster. Hot take, I know.

I wasn't talking about the genre. In the context of my comment and this entire post, it's referring to romantic content outside of the romance genre.

People who are okay with romance(or sex scenes - they're different concepts, and this thread is kind of conflating them together when it shouldn't!) never come on the internet to say how much they're okay. You only hear from the people who've got beef. It's just like how people who've had bad customer service experiences are much more likely to submit an evaluation than those who had amazing service.

I've got a list of books that don't contain annoying romantic sideplots! Sometimes romance is mentioned, or side characters are involved in things, but the main character isn't allosexualy exploding all over everything like in most books. 😂 It's compiled from personal experience(occasionally I completely mentally melt down and demand suggestions for books that contain no romance from my friends/colleagues), and this is what I've got from my reading tracker and TBR(starred books are ones that were suggested but I haven't read, so I can't vouch for them personally):

Elatsoe, by Darcy Little Badger
Comfort Me With Apples, by Catherynne Valente
The Girl from the Well, by Rin Chupeco
Remote Control, by Nnedi Okorafor
From Below, by Darcy Coates
The Many Deaths of Laila Starr, by Ram V
And Then I Woke Up, by Malcolm Devlin
What Moves the Dead, by T. Kingfisher
Nuclear Family, by Joseph Han (I recall sex/romance is mentioned with regard to PoV characters, but they're not interested)
Gideon the Ninth, by Tasmin Muir*
Madam, by Phoebe Wynne*

My apologies if I've somehow forgotten a romantic subplot in one of these. To the best of my recollection, they're safe! Also, the fact that my tracker contains 68 books(not to mention the TBR list, which is unnumbered) and I still only have 11 items on this list, despite actively seeking out this type of material, just goes to show how uncommon these books actually are.

EDIT: Just finished Rust in the Root by Justina Ireland, and I can also add that to this list! The main character has a very slight crush on a secondary character, but it doesn't amount to anything and barely even exists.

I feel the same way about romance in all books where the focus of the main plot isn't, well, romance. If your plot is about falling in love(whether it's in the romance genre or not), sure, go for it. But if the plot is you're saving the world from terrorists(with a side of romance), or solving the mysteries of the universe(with a side of romance), or figuring out who killed Mrs Jones(with a side of romance), or journeying to destroy the macguffin in the fires of hell(with a side of romance), or protesting police brutality(with a side of romance)...it's just ugh. Hot take, but 95% of side-plot romances are unnecessary. I'm not even talking about sex scenes. I just think that characters are falling in love all over the place, and most of the time it serves to distract from rather than enhance the plot.

Are we talking about the PF off rt 40? That area's not sketchy at all. It's just a couple lights down from the Sam's Club. In terms of environment, it looks about the same to me as the Ellicott City PF, not to mention the drivers are way less likely to be utter lunatics(it's something about the 40/29 interchange, everyone puts on their maniac pants to drive through that stretch of 40). Of course, you're gonna see a few more Black people, but that's not the problem...right? 🤨

"Do the needful" is such a useful phrase. I don't use it because I don't want to be mistaken for mocking(which I've definitely seen happen, with that phrase specifically...there's unfortunately a lot of animosity toward Indian outsourcing in the tech industry), but it's such a concise way to communicate "do whatever thing has to be done to make this work right."

> Why aren't cars speed limited to 80 mph? There is no road in the US where cars can go faster than that.

Unfortunately the cat's out of the bag on this one. Whoever limits first will be a massive safety hazard, not just to themselves but also to others. You must be able to match the speed of the other cars on the road, even if they're driving an illegal speed. Most deaths by speeding are more accurately described as deaths by speed differential, because they're a result of the speeding car encountering(and crashing into or losing control while avoiding) slower-moving obstacles. If all the cars on the road are going 70 in a 55, it's actually safest for everybody if you also match that speed, because then traffic is moving freely at a steady rate instead of lanes moving at different rates based on their slowest cars(and lots of slow-moving cars moving out of the slower lane into the faster lane).

To safely make your change, you'd need to shut down driving 100%, upgrade at least a critical mass of cars with this safety feature(you'd probably need to hit 90%+, to account for the statistical bias from people who don't normally go that fast suddenly driving their un-upgraded cars fast on the highway while they still can), and only then make it legal to drive again. That's...not going to happen. Not to mention the fact that speeders gonna speed, so you'd see people modding their cars to remove the limit immediately, and then we're right back to the status quo of there being a few cars out there that insist on driving 20+ faster than everybody else.

OP, this isn't just you but I've seen a trend lately, and I'm going to take this moment to call it out. This could have been a text post. All it is is words in a plain font with an emoji. For some reason, you(and many others, lately) chose to make it an image instead. This makes it so that people who browse with screen readers can't appreciate your post. Please consider not doing this, or at least posting a transcript as a comment(I'm not supplying one myself because it's your words, so you should have control over deletion etc which you don't have when I repost them in my own comment without permission).