Reminds me of a particularly powerful passage from the Grapes of Wrath.
One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and I am bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the things you fear. This is the zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate - "We lost our land". The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first "we" there grows a still more dangerous thing: "I have a little food" plus "I have none". If from this problem the sum is "We have a little food," the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the sidemeat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's blanket - take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning - from "I" to "we".
I have always been very negative of Tiktok, but maybe the format of people talking face to face makes it possible for it to facilitate the transition from "I" to "we" even in an online platform, which is what traditional social media has failed so miserably at.
Maybe, by trying to play the game of surveillance capitalism, the Chinese finally - accidentally - helped the workers of the world unite.
It's really noticeable, especially in the HCOL areas. People are just at their wit's end and all out of fucks to give. And it stacks, because as others care less everyone's life gets harder. Deliveries don't get delivered, food isn't made with care, entertainment is less entertaining. And it's hard to blame anyone in these roles, because I feel the same way.
It's a powderkeg and no one with the power to do something seems to have noticed, but I wonder how much worse it gets before something has to change.
The is no level of “worse” that will make the people responsible willingly change.
The “Inflation” that is crushing people is almost entirely down to executive greed. They’re bringing in record profits, giving themselves giant bonuses and not letting even a crumb escape their snout. COVID showed them they could take even more from people so now that the supply issues have settled, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
And they’ll never feel bad about it. They’re the people who told the radium girls to make a point on their brush by sucking it. They’re the people who put formaldehyde in milk and shrugged when it killed children. They’re the people who don’t even try to hide the foreign and domestic slaves in their supply lines. They’re the people who told us that cigarettes were good for our lungs as they buried research saying the opposite. They’re the ones who astro-turfed and bribed people into doing nothing about climate change.
They’re not going to start suddenly feeling guilty, because if that was an emotion they were capable of, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
The only way to stop this is to put limits on how much they can line their own pockets. No more tax loopholes for the rich, no more insane wages and bonuses, no more brutal exploitation of foreign workers.
Because if there’s a dollar they think they can get their hands on, they’ll do reprehensible things to make it happen.
I love Townsends. I love the channel even more after seeing this video. Pioneer times are synonymous with the “rugged individual”, but here is someone who studies the time period and even simulates it who says it’s more about the strength of human bonds we make with our community rather than any individual effort Then he brings it back to modern times and reminds us that it’s the same strength of human bonds that will get us through the difficult environments we face today. That’s an important lesson!
I wonder how widely they are distributed to space/science/tech museums, hobby shops and toy vendors. Lego seems to have a lock on that distribution chain.
We don’t get to those places as much as we did as when our kids were tweens, but those are the places that we picked up some of the less widely available models and Lego kits. Somehow being in the shops and seeing the offerings was more motivating than looking at online catalogues for them.
Anyway, I really wish these had been available 5 years or so ago when our kids were at their peak Lego building stage. My spouse and I would have loved to build these with them. It’s good to see other families will have something to offer their kids other than SW or the very few NASA Lego sets. (The Lego techno construction machine sets just didn’t hold their attention, and only one was up for the birds and flower advanced sets.)
Now, we need to see the Protostar and the new Voyager-A kits soon please!
The video above is a long essay on the experiences and research the guy in the video has put into understanding the modern dating situation men have to deal with when it comes to dealing with conflicting ideals on what a proper approach looks like all the way to how consent works in the modern dating world but from a man's POV. I'm curious about the guys in this community, does what he describe in the video mirror your experience? even if it doesn't I'd be curious to hear why and how.
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