‘relationships are work’ means ‘you have to put effort into loving each other intentionally & learning how to love each other and communicating properly’ not ‘your relationship makes you feel stressed and sad most of the time & the other person disrespects you and treats you bad but you stay anyway’
Remember when Jeff Bezos, who is worth 181 billion USD donated 690k to stopping Australian fires? Yeah, me too.
McKenzie Scott is literally proof that these fuckers can donate HUGE sums of money to EVERYTHING and still live a comfortable life.... But nooO someone HAS to justify the pitifully small donations the richest men on earth make every year for their tax write-off
Some also important context (this is June 2021, after her second round of grants was announced), as well:
[image description: tweet from Dan Price, the Seattle business owner who doesn’t take a massive salary and pays everybody at his company really well: “Two years ago, she had $36 billion. Since then, she has donated $8 billion - more than anyone in the world. She is now worth $60 billion. I think people struggle to understand just how fast wealth accumulates for the super-rich. She literally can't give it away fast enough.”.]
She’s trying to singlehandedly redistribute the wealth she took back from Jeff Bezos and is failing at it because the economy is built so that wealth travels from the bottom, accumulates at the top, and then stays there. She literally cannot give her money away fast enough.
Think about this. This is our current capitalist economy at work. It is working as intended and designed by those who benefit from it.
Her story is incredibly revealing of how and where the system is failing.
Over the past few months I have asked a male architect for ideas & drafts for the renovation of the farmhouse, and at every turn I am stunned by his utter disregard for any cleaning-related concerns. For example, he is very into the idea of having in the living-room a big, non-openable window near the ceiling—which, granted, looks pretty, like having a piece of blue sky when you raise your eyes, but immediately I’m like, with a high ceiling, how will I clean this? You can’t open it so you have to clean both sides separately, and you can’t easily reach either side. I’ll need a tool with an absurdly long telescopic handle. He says, a stepladder. I’m like, but I’ll need to carry it by myself to the living-room and the front of the house every time. “So?” So a very tall stepladder is heavy? And it will be hard not to get dirty water dripping down the wall. He reacts like he can’t believe he is being asked to bring the concept of dirty soap water into his grand designs, like these are base, trifling considerations, when to me it’s a crucial factor in the decision to add this decorative window.
Similarly we both agree on leaving most of the wood beams exposed because they’re old and beautiful, but when I ask if we ought to insulate in such a way as to cover every other one, so the remaining ones are farther apart and it’s harder for spiders to use them as ready-made anchors for their webs, he just looks disgusted, like “I am talking about Architecture and you bring up spiderwebs.” At this point I start to entertain the idea that men make horrible architects. You design someone’s house to give them a nice, convenient space to live in, not to make their life more difficult. A man who has never used a sponge in his life should not be allowed to graduate from architect school and that’s the end of it.
My mom is an architect and I can confirm . Male architects are overwhelmingly pretentious douches that half ass their projects
Im currently studying interior design and have been involved in the field in and off for a long time. I can’t even begin to tell you how many people live in ‘architecturally designed’ houses where the male architect was more interested in winning awards so he could upgrade his Maserati than designing something humans can actually live in.
Whenever I see fancy architecture, my first thought is nearly always “this is gonna be a bitch to heat”, closely followed by “that staircase looks terribly unsafe”.
I don’t understand why so many fancy architects don’t seem to consider, that people would have to live in that house. If you are an architect and people don’t actually want to live and spend time in your house, aren’t you a failed architect?
I live in a country where it rains 265 days of the year, and it irritates me immensely how many modern buildings locally have clearly been designed by architects who either don’t know this, or don’t care. Why would you ever design a flat-roofed building in this climate? There are so many new buildings here that look fine when it’s sunny, but are grey and depressing when it rains. And so many slightly less new buildings which are streaked with rust and mold because they’ve been rained on constantly for the last ten years, and the architect never considered what that would do to them.
Architects need to look to traditional building techniques. Houses in England have steep roofs for a reason. Houses in Israel have flat roofs for a reason.
I’ve seen what English weather does to a flat roof!
Best architectural disaster remains the French Library Bibliothèque nationale François Mitterrand
The building is slowly sinking into the ground
My high school was an all glass cube wall place designed by a famous architect but the custom ordered and shaped glass was from a defunct company and less than 5 years later there were wooden planks replacing the glass floor tiles and wall panels in several places from normal ware and tear as well as a hurricane. The school was expensive to clean and teachers had to put up curtains in all the rooms or everyone in the hallways could just see into the classroom and people in the hallway would stare in like classrooms were fish aquariums.
If architecture doesn’t consider the consequences of a space being used and maintained over time it is ultimately more hubris than art.
My college has some acceptable 1950’s architecture, but the town around it is more fascinating
I disagree with the article wanting to abolish the skyscraper entirely, though, as there are many good art deco skyscrapers
Oh, thank God, a post where I can bitch about brutalism. Because fuck that shit. Where’s the joy? Where’s the adaptation to climate? Where’s the fucking comfort?
WHAT’S THE FUCKING POINT.
Read the second article lierdumoa posted above because it is the most delicious tea ever. I haven’t read such a good article in a while.
Oh, I did. The author gave ZERO fucks. The sarcasm, the burns. All very well-deserved. Also some awesome pictures of the Alhambra.
“Capitalism eats culture, and it makes ugly places. Money has no taste.”
Half of my architecture tag is about how much I want to fight Frank Gehry in a pit and this entire post is why.
Please, PLEASE read the second article lierdumoa posted. I have never read anything about art, design, or architecture I agree with more.
My building at work was recently completely gutted and redone with just the bones of the original building and while it has very grand public spaces it has some of the stupidest, most unusable things on the private spaces. The women in our office lobbied the design committee on four separate occasions to have a place to hang your bag in the small gender neutral restrooms (which are also the “family restrooms with the changing table) and they never did it. That panel of highly paid douche bag men just nodded and smiled and ignored us and now we have restrooms where you have to set your purse or diaper bag on the fucking floor…in a pandemic. Not like sanitation is important or anything. There were interior walls that fucking collapsed on people when they first moved in because they ran out of budget on these elaborate, expensive public spaces. There is a room that is supposed to be a work space that is just a fucking cement cave with painted walls. There is not even any sheetrock there. It’s a scandal. I was on the display committee and I can tell you that they just flat out lied about what they were going to deliver in terms of display cases (we share our building with geology and they have a massive fossil and rock collection to display) and that there were definitely kickbacks and dodgy things involved. The pricing for these things was insane and they don’t even work or look good. (Like they gave us one power outlet for the whole thing which is massive). They designed a kitchenette that can only be used by fucking GIANTS because all the shelving is very high over head, even though we specifically requested accessible storage. This is a public building and it’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. Architects can go fuck themselves.
Sorry to reblog such a long post again but @cinemaocd reminded me of something that happened at my former place of work. The original space where my department was had at some point been subdivided into separate offices, so you entered into a somewhat small cube-farm, then walked around a corner into a hallway that had small offices on either side. The offices on the outward side of the hall were original. The offices on the interior side were the new ones. I was lucky enough to get my own office! It was one of the interior ones with no window but what did I care?
Well. When the remodel went through, not one single person had considered the placement of HVAC vents, which had originally been placed for a single large room with no partitions. Two of these new offices, including mine, had two vents, which meant some offices got ALL the cold or hot air and the remaining open cube farm area got reduced hot or cold air. This led to massive thermostat wars among the staff.
Staffers in the cube farm were way too hot in summer, and turned the thermostat way down. Me and the person in the office next to me were so cold we had to wear coats, gloves, and scarves in our offices all day, even though it was 105 degrees outside. My fingers would turn blue and be so cold I literally could not type. I would turn the thermostat up, only for it to get too hot for the cube farm folks, who turned it back down again. I spent most of my time just trying to stay warm in summer. In winter, it didn’t get excessively hot, but it was quite stuffy.
Needless to say we complained to the building managers (men), who basically just shrugged and said, we can’t change it, just adjust the thermostat, which was what caused the problem in the first place.
Eventually there was some remodel being planned for elsewhere in the building. The campus head architect—a woman!—came in for a meeting about the remodel and froze her butt off. She asked why it was so cold. Within a matter or weeks she had ordered a redo of the HVAC and after a brief period of chaos where the ceiling was ripped apart and stuff was being banged on and moved around, our problem was solved.
Every single woman who worked in our office knew exactly what had just happened and we all commented on it often.
OH my GOD, yes! The whole Cold Office phenomenon is real. So often women are the ones in offices with no windows and no heating controls. It’s a real, measurable way in which misogyny happens in the workplace. I have a windowless office and spent all the pre-pandemic time with massive seasonal effective disorder, even in June and July I was depressed and exhausted, like it was December. I run a space heater year round and I got some lights to try to help with it, but only working from home where I sit under a blessed skylight am I actually able to function again. When we were in swing space, crowded into a tiny office with a big window, it had it’s drawbacks but at least I didn’t have SAD all the damn time.
In the previous iteration of our building, they had zones of temperature control for all the experimental labs so that they could actually control the temperature for science. This was an innovative thing they came up with in 1929. Every subsequent remodel has completely ignored this, while spending infinitely more money. Instead of looking at how the space is actually being used and by whom, they just design for a generic use case that doesn’t work for anyone.
My suggestion for anyone in this kind of institution is to complain to central services and actually force them to come out to witness the problem. Call them and call them and call them until you’re old friends. Give them a cup of tea and sit them down and say, “what the fuck, bro?” Ask them about their kids and their hobbies until they are ashamed to look you in the eye and then they will phone the person who can and will actually fix it. That has been what has worked for me in the past and seems to have worked for @fiftysevenacademics…
I’m never going to pass up a chance to drag Oklahoma design.
This time it’s the freaking State Capitol building dome. This thing:
Yeah, that dome. See, the building was designed in 1910 when OKC became the state capital. There was a modest and fitting dome designed by the architect but.. they realized that the budget was going over and had to cut some corners. They slapped a roof over the rotunda and off they went. Until the 1990’s.
Woe, said state folk. Our building is the ONLY state capitol building without a dome. Four petitions and finally they got enough signatures to move forward to figure out funding to put the dome on.
They dusted off the original plans and went oh. Oh no. This is too SMALL. So they ‘improved’ it.
The top actual rounded part is what the original design was. The barrel in the middle was added, as was the thousand pound statue on top.
The damn thing is so heavy that it’s sinking. It was finished in 2002 and has undergone major repairs twice that I know of. It’s gone from the most unique state capitol building to one that’s slowly destroying itself.
The architects who signed off on this design never had a clue.
What gives you the right to tax him 50%?
Here’s a legit answer:
Because HE DOESN’T FUCKING PAY TAXES, AND HASN’T IN FUCKING YEARS. MOST BILLIONAIRES DON’T. AND THE IRS DOESN’T CARE BECAUSE IT’S ‘TOO COMPLICATED’ (Their words) TO AUDIT THE WEALTHY.
OUR RIGHT TO TAX HIM AT 50 FUCKING PERCENT IS BECAUSE TAXES WERE MEANT TO BE FROM EACH ACCORDING TO THEIR MEANS.
OUR RIGHT TO TAX HIM AND ALL THE OTHER BILLIONAIRES AND THEIR TRILLION DOLLAR COMPANIES IS BECAUSE NONE OF THEM HAVE PAID THEIR FUCKING DUES TO SOCIETY IN A FUCKING GODDAMNED DECADE, WHILE THEIR COMPANIES ARE THE ONES KILLING THE FUCKING PLANET. THEY FUCKING OWE US AT THIS POINT, YES. OWE. US. THEY OWE SOCIETY BECAUSE WE’RE THE REASON THEY MADE THAT FUCKING MONEY, AND THEY ARE THE REASON WE’RE DEALING WITH THESE PROBLEMS TO BEGIN WITH SO THEY GET TO PAY THEIR FUCKING SHARE. AMAZON DOESN’T PAY TAXES. IT’S A TRILLION FUCKING DOLLAR COMPANY. I CAN BARELY COMPREHEND HOW BIG A BILLION IS. A TRILLION IS A LOT FUCKING BIGGER.
FUCK BEZO
FUCK AMAZON
FUCK BILLIONAIRES
FUCK THEIR COMPANIES
IF WE, THE POOR, HAVE TO PAY FUCKING TAXES, THEN THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS SURE AS SHIT CAN.
Said it before and I’ll say it again: if the government has the right to tax ANYONE, then it has the right to tax the rich. It has more right to tax the rich than to tax anyone else, because it can very easily harm the poor by levying taxes and would have a very difficult time harming the rich. Tax a billionaire at 99%, and he is still obscenely wealthy. Tax a poor person at 10% and they may die. OBVIOUSLY we should tax the rich.
The corporate tax rate under Eisenhower was 90%! You know what happened the middle class was born, our interstate highway system was created, corporations were incentivized to pay good wages and keep jobs here because that lowered their tax burden.
Because Jeff Bezos is paid in shares and shares aren’t considered income until they are sold. So he and the vile rich like him borrow against the worth of their shares. Until they die. It’s a legal loophole.
This is why we don’t get anywhere. Because people have such intense brain rot that they’re convinced individual freedom to accrue wealth > the continued existence and wellbeing of literally all of mankind.
you don’t get good at doing something by not doing it
you get good at doing something by doing it badly and learning how to do it better
You don’t learn from success, you learn from failure how to achieve success.
you see, the thing is, i hate failure.
in order to find success, you must first submit yourself to the mortifying ordeal of being kinda crap at something
Also, reality check with yourself to make sure failures are actual failures. Did you produce something kinda ok? That’s not a failure, that’s a kinda ok success. Was your goal just to keep yourself entertained? Then as long as you were entertained your good. Not everything has to be high quality.
These ten ducklings were found orphaned and they were brought to a pet duck called Stella who had just hatched nine of her own two weeks prior. She immediately claimed the ten as her own.
via @thesassyducks instagram
she released those babies like a ramen flavour packet
love how stella swims over like “oh shit i must’ve misplaced these ten whole babies!”
Love how the li’l ramen flavor packets swim over like ‘oh shit that must be mom, she’s mom-shaped’
found-family speedrun
New offspring just dropped.
Everybody, try laughing. Then whatever scares you will go away!
STUDIO GHIBLI + RAINBOW COLOURS
[ disney version ]
