All credits due to the Kiwiggers!

!comicshitters !nooticers

WESS LOST

CAPESHITTERS LOST

WOKEANDA LOST

GENDERBLOBS LOST

XITTER LOST

TUMBLRINAS LOST

MANGARYANS AND ARYANIME WON

!anime

/co/pe: https://boards.4chan.org/co/thread/144659440

idk some comicshitter site or something: https://comicbook.com/comics/news/marvel-x-men-bonus-scenes-qr-codes-explained-tom-brevoort/

Edit: Lol I am late https://rdrama.net/post/286941/marvel-adds-drm-to-physical-xmen

Seriouspost: They were actually okay. They weren't sublime but they weren't Tara White Girl. (Did you notice how I left the first letter in "Sublime" uncapitalized because if you've got a really active prefronetonl (sp???) cortex and you realize that's when Bradley Noell died of a heroin overdose. And you're really mad because you respect these people because you went through some of this shit together.

Having to remember all the rules: dress a certain way so people don’t comment about you, make chess content that is 100% serious, don’t talk about chess unless you’re a gm, always act as a representative for every woman in chess, don’t make jokes, is frankly exhausting and a lot… https://t.co/d99CQCpFw9

— Julesgambit (@julesgambit) July 26, 2024

!friendsofmimwee HELLLLLLP HEELLLLLP HEEEEELLLLLLLLLP HEEEEEEEEEEEEEELP

Robert Downey Jr will star as Doctor Doom in ‘AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY’

In theaters on May 2026. pic.twitter.com/qOBPSMlm0F

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) July 28, 2024

>Friday (yesterday) is garbage day where I live. My mom had also left to drop my sister off to school and run some errands, which made this the perfect opportunity to dispose of the 9 vomit bags that had accumulated in my room. What I do is transfer my vomit bags from my room to the potty, empty them into the potty, then put all of the emptied bags into another clean bag and tie it tight. All of the bags smelled pretty awful because they had been sitting for a few days. But one smelled particularly horrible. It didn't even smell like vomit, it smelled like a dead animal. I tied them all up in a garbage bag, then buried it within another full garbage bag from the kitchen, then put it all on the curb for the garbage man. The garbage bin was full of other garbage, so I had to put the bag with the vomit outside of the bin, on my driveway (our trash bags are black, no one could see the vomit residue). About an hour passed, and I was in my room when I hear my dog barking hysterically at something. My dog barks at everything that walks past the house, so I just ignored her. But then I noticed she wouldn't stop barking, for over 10 minutes straight. The only time she barks non-stop like that is when someone or something is on our property. So I decide to stop being lazy and look at what she's so riled up about. When I saw what she was barking at, my heart skipped a few beats...

VULTURES had ripped into the kitchen bag and dug out the vomit bags, and were eating whatever residue and chunks that were left on the bags. They had them and all of the other trash scattered all over my driveway. All I could think was "my mom is gonna get home any second". I never ran so fast in my life. It was starting to rain, but I didn't care. I shooed the vultures away and grabbed all of the wet vomit bags and put them back into the holes the vultures made. There was another vomit bag poking out of the kitchen bag, so clearly they were about to rip another bag out. The vomit is all they really wanted. To make things worse, a wasp was also hovering around the bags. I couldn't properly stuff the vomit bags back into the other bag without swatting at the wasp, which made it pretty angry. I kept looking down the road thinking my mom's gonna bust around the corner at any second. Between the threatening wasp, the vultures, and the possibility of being caught, I was in a panic. I eventually gathered the bag, removed one of the bags from the bin and replaced it with the torn bag, and shut the lid so the vultures couldn't get to it anymore. My mom got home less than 5 minutes later....

It still blows my mind how close I was to getting caught. AAHHHHHH I ALMOST GOT CAUGHT!!!! I would freaking die if my mom would have been the one to find the bags in the driveway. She is already suspicious of my rapid weight loss, and has asked me if I'm anorexic or bulimic. Of course I lied and said "I just work out a lot now". If she saw those bags, it would be game over for me. I'm just imagining how awful it would be if I had looked out of the window and saw my mom picking up the bags, and having her confront me about it, and her saying "I KNEW IT!!!". I think I'd just go hang myself tbh. I did end up telling her vultures got into the trash (AFTER the garbage men took the trash, just in case she decided to go see what the vultures were attracted to). She said "yuck, something must've been rotten in there." And I'm like "uh, yeah, maybe egg shells? Or the bleu cheese?" LOL.

Just wanted to share, and let everyone know vultures like vomit, especially vomit that smells like a dead possum. So be careful where you leave your trash.

“I was sexually assaulted by Ava [ Kris ] Tyson”

Ava Kris Tyson is now being ACCUSED of SEXUAL ASSAULT by new alleged victim. ‼️ pic.twitter.com/ZYd4ORlcK2

— DramaAlert (@DramaAlert) July 27, 2024

Link to thread.

Can a even r*pe another ? Doesnt it just cancel out.

Yikes found the r*pe apologist:

But wait.

https://t.co/4H7VfX04rY

— _its_not_real_ (@_its_not_real_) July 24, 2024

like bro I get it the bureaucratic machine of state is an enormous terrifying apparatus that forces you to go to school and facilitates the capitalistic exploitation of human resources

but they will turn the ovens on and that's just objectively bad.

The number is not allowed to go up while we're together. Only rule.

ummm that's polyphobia sweatie

That's the only sane option. Back when I was dating, I honestly didn't care about how many people someone has been with because it says absolutely nothing about them. Being afraid of someone with more or less partners says much more about the person who cares about that kind of thing. They're probably deeply insecure because they don't want someone to be able to compare them to other people.

>the only sane option

>it says absolutely nothing about them

Body count isn't a big deal. When it becomes a problem is if it is still increasing while we are together.

100+ by 22 like all those onlyfans whores? Even if she wasn't a prostitute I wouldn't want to touch that with a stick. But like a 100 by 40, still good looking and not married I can understand because she's older and supposed to know/understand the consequences of her actions while a 22 yo does not.

'Onlyfan whores" I assume you've never watched porn

watching porn is the same thing as making porn

I was trying to think of a number and kept waffling about if thirty would be too many, if that itself was too high, or if maybe it would have to reach the triple digits, but then I realized all of my concerns were related to possible diseases. And since you can get those from even a single sexual partner, it's dumb to assign a specific number just for that. Then I realized that another reason why a particular number might bother me was related to being insecure about my own performance in bed compared to some guy who rocked her world 10+ partners ago

So I'm throwing out the concept of any number being too high, and saying that as long as they're disease free and they're willing to tell me how best to please them, then I just don't care about their body count

A very good look. A body count being the deciding factor is just a way to look down on someone else. The big things that matter like disease free, ability to have a long term relationship, ability to communicate are all more important. 0 or 100 doesn't really matter when they are with you.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting a body count to be low in a partner. It's not shaming someone to want more exclusivity in your experience.

Its only shaming if you shame them over it. Not proceeding to have a relationship with someone isn't shaming them.

Why though? What does having a larger body count mean? "You've slept with more people so we can't be together"? Someone's past sexual experience doesn't matter if you're compatible. And then, what is the cut off? Why isn't it one number higher or one number lower? How does that equate to the tangible stat you've created. What are you measuring with body counts?

Why does it matter why it matters to someone?

Some people like the idea of exclusivity, some people it goes against their morals, some people just don't like it, some people are intimidated by it. There are thousands of reasons and all are valid reasons not to continue a relationship with someone. Nobody is forced to have a relationship. Saying, I'm sorry but I do not want to continue to build a relationship with you is not shaming you.

"Whats the number?" It varies by individual.

"Past sexual experience doesn't matter if you are compatible." Past sexual experience is a factor of compatibility for some people.

"How does it equate to the tangible stat" mathematically

"What are you measuring with body counts?" The number of times someone has had s*x with other people. There is no mystery here.

This is somewhat off topic - but not all are valid reasons and tons of people are forced to be in relationships, one way or another.

The 'body count' term has connotations to it that certainly imply a few things in English, at least. I'm not sure if it's gained popularity referring to sexual partners after it's popularity in vgames for kills, but it seems to be dehumanizing and judgemental and/or that ure in a competition (which is dehumanizing, too)

>but not all are valid reasons

For me it's not as much about body count as much as time length. Man or woman, if you had a year or two of sleeping around to explore and live, I get it and can deal. If you had 10 years of fricking anything with a pulse and now want to settle down, ehhh that's a bit much for me.

That being said I don't necessarily judge, one of my best friends is a woman and she's a proud hoe, her words not mine, and as her friend I support her choice, we would just never be compatible in a relationship, but we're great friends.

That was the opposite for me. I slept with anyone and everyone for like 11 years before settling down so my number is in the 100s 🤷🏻‍♀️

All that matters is no one got hurt and you and your partner are ok with it.

We never discussed body count. We talked about exes in the past and that's it.

Lol there's a reason you've never bothered to tell him and it's not because it's unimportant

Nope. We just never had the conversation. It literally never came up. But we also dated for about a month before we got engaged and then a little over a year later we were married 🤷🏻‍♀️

humongous moid L

it gets worse though:

My husband knew about my group s*x before and again, didn't care. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Why are we still talking about this shit

Because people who bring this up are incels who listen to misogynistic podcasts.

That's the era we are in.

no one thought about the body count topic before "mysoginistic podcasts"

fight card: https://www.tapology.com/fightcenter/events/112936-ufc-304

legal streams: https://buffstreams.app/title-game/ufc/ufc-304-edwards-vs-muhammad-2-live-streams-links

https://givemeredditstreams.xyz/mma/600045073/ufc-304-edwards-vs-muhammad-2

UFC 300 was so stacked the rest of the year has to suffer. There are so many fights on this card and most of them I couldn't care less about.

https://twitter.com/rohithchivukula/status/1817247549298016749

!khive Don't we just love science

!ringbearers

!khive Take the pill

I remember the moment I knew that Kamala Harris was not the candidate for me in the 2020 presidential race. It was just a few days before the second Democratic primary debate, and college student debt had become an issue on the campaign trail. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were promising large-scale, no-strings-attached relief to borrowers.

On July 26, 2019, Harris announced her student loan forgiveness program. I rolled my eyes when I saw the details. It was the kind of overworked, technocratic, means-tested policy I associated with milquetoast Democratic triangulators: $20,000 in relief if you were poor enough in college to be eligible for a Pell Grant and then went on to start a business in an economically disadvantaged community and kept it afloat for at least three years. Hardly anyone would qualify. These kinds of small-ball policies were never going to defeat the faux-populist juggernaut of Donald Trump.

My skepticism about Harris surprised me at the time, because her background is a lot like mine: an ambitious biracial, bicultural Black woman of a certain age in a highly competitive line of work that historically hasn't been welcoming to people who look like us. I admired her accomplishments. I had no doubt I would enjoy having a cocktail with her. But as a candidate, she just didn't impress me, and if I had strong feelings about Joe Biden choosing her as his running mate, I have long since forgotten them.

And so it has taken me quite by surprise to find that I have become coconut-pilled. That's the new nomenclature for converts to the Harris 2024 fold — a phrase that comes from her mother, and that I'll dig into later. But I want to be candid about something first: I'm a little embarrassed to be rooting for any politician.

I have always voted, but like most journ*lists, I have tried to keep my political views mostly to myself. I'm not a joiner of causes. I'm a reporter, for most of my career a foreign correspondent, and my orientation toward those in power (as much from personal inclination as professional habit) has always been skeptical if not outright antagonistic. And yet on the morning after the disastrous June debate between Biden and Trump, I wrote with enthusiasm that I believed Harris should take over at the top of the ticket and very much could beat Trump.

Why did I come around to Harris, and why so quickly? A lot of people are now asking themselves how they feel about Harris and whether she can do the job — all understandable questions after five years when many people were meh, at best, on her. The flash flood of endorsements, donations and support for Harris has been astonishing. Be it because of relief that Biden bowed out or fear of Trump's momentum after the assassination attempt and the Republican convention, there has been a consolidation around Harris that few expected.

I think you can trace the beginning of the vibe shift to Biden's terrible debate and Harris's interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper shortly afterward, when she crisply defended Biden and made an energetic case against Trump. No one interview or moment would win me over, but it did make a strong impression: that Harris had been significantly underrated, that the chatter about her flaws for the past four years maybe didn't tell her full story and that she had some unique talents and traits that made her a stronger candidate than her record might suggest.

Many political journ*lists were much more dubious about Harris's chances against Trump. Cable pundits were spinning elaborate fantasies of mini-primaries and bake-offs with celebrity judges to decide the Democratic nomination. I wondered if I had been too credulous after the debate to see the potential in Harris. But it didn't take long for my view to become the consensus among a lot of Americans.

With many of us evolving on Harris, I have wondered how Harris herself has evolved since she flopped in the 2020 Democratic primary contest. Has anything changed about her that has made Americans more open or enthusiastic about her, after years of bad headlines and disappointing public performances?

Americans have been through a lot since early 2020 — a pandemic, Jan. 6, a turbulent economy and high inflation, the invasion of Ukraine, the slaughter in Israel and Gaza and the never-ending 2024 presidential race. I also wondered if the Trump-Biden era changed what we want from a president. We are a frustrated, exhausted and divided nation. Most Americans believe we are on the wrong track, and we spent the past 20 months staring at a grim choice between Biden and Trump, the two men whose presidencies sent us down that track. Many of us are hungry for something new.

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

Looking anew at Harris, I see something different from what I once did: a person who stumbled as a candidate and vice president but who kept fighting anyway. I see a woman who struggled to compete for power against her peers, buried under an array of vague and unstated expectations about whether she gave the right answers, had the right ideas, was smart or specific enough. Like any woman of ambition, I deeply relate to these experiences. As strange as it might seem, I have come to think these experiences could make her the ideal candidate in a surreal campaign against a man who is so certain of himself, who admits to no mistakes, who has no humility and who, for many of us, is utterly unrelatable.

Having laid down a marker making an early case for Harris, I did what I always do when I have a hunch about something: I hit the road to report it out. I wanted to try to better see who she is.

After the disastrous debate but before Biden stepped aside, I went out on the campaign trail with Harris and saw up close how she campaigns with two absolutely crucial voting blocs: Black women and swing-state suburbanites.

My first stop was Dallas, where she spoke to the friendliest audience you could imagine, the annual gathering of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation's oldest Black sorority, which she joined as an undergraduate at Howard University. Lines of thousands of women decked out in the sorority's signature colors — salmon pink and apple green — snaked through the Dallas convention center hours before the event. These women radiated enthusiasm about the vice president; one wore a T-shirt that said, "I'm speaking," a reference to a viral moment from Harris's primary debates that became a meme, showcasing her steely insistence of standing her ground and being heard.

Every seat appeared to be taken; 20,000 women had packed the vast hall to hear Harris speak. They roared when she took the stage, looking every inch the A.K.A., dressed in a dusty-rose suit and a double string of pearls.

"Good morning, my sorors!" she said, grinning and laughing.

But she was not there to bask in their applause. One of Biden's biggest weaknesses was the lack of enthusiasm from his base. She challenged her audience, the flower of the Black elite that is so crucial to Democratic victory, to work hard to get out and keep Trump out of the White House.

"Once again, our nation is counting on the leaders in this room to guide us forward, to energize, organize and mobilize, to register folks to vote and to get them to the polls in November," she said, her voice swelling in the peroration. "Because we know when we organize, mountains move. When we mobilize, nations change, and when we vote, we make history."

I have found the way some white liberals talk about and even fetishize the political power of Black women condescending, and I suspect a lot of the women in that room have, too. Harris spoke not as a patron but as a peer, part of a long lineage of powerful Black women leaders. This crowd clearly heard the call, cheering and whooping as Harris left the stage.

Building excitement among Black women and other solid-blue voters is table stakes for any Democrat. But Harris will need more than that to win. I was curious to see how she would fare before a more varied audience in a swing state, so I flew to Kalamazoo, Mich., where she was scheduled to appear at a campaign event to talk about abortion rights.

On one level, it was a predictable piece of political theater: a Democrat getting softball questions about a key issue she knew well, in front of an audience of about 450 people. The twist was that she would appear onstage with two women who had been Republicans with a history of opposing abortion but began speaking out in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade and the onslaught of cruel laws it unleashed. The three women sat up on a dais in comfortable armchairs, the setup for an Oprah-style kaffeeklatsch.

"We grew up in a conservative Catholic household in Texas, very Republican family," Olivia Troye, a former Trump administration official, told Harris. "But we've evolved."

Harris jumped in: "Most people believe that one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do with her body, right? If she chooses, she will talk with her priest or her pastor or her rabbi or her imam. But it shouldn't be the government telling her what to do," she said. "If we, in this year of our Lord 2024, have a state of being where the government can tell you what to do with your body — I mean, the most basic of things you should have control over — everybody better watch out about what other freedoms you're taking for granted."

The room exploded into applause. Yes, it was a Biden-Harris campaign event with an audience generally behind the ticket. But Harris spoke with a passion and specificity about abortion, bodily autonomy, control and freedom in ways that Biden never did, that Trump never would and that a lot of women in this country never could count on a president doing. It was the right message, at the right time, delivered as a deft, common-sense homily. She did not pander to conservatives with the kind of obfuscating language that pro-choice activists despise — "safe, legal and rare." But she also didn't feel the need to make a maximalist case for abortion, either, instead embracing a moderate stance built on the core theme of her campaign: freedom.

Inasmuch as canned political events can be described in these terms, she gave masterly performances in Dallas and Kalamazoo. By building her campaign around freedom, she has found what she lacked in the 2020 race: a clear, simple message that stands in stark contrast to the strange and unpopular plans laid out in Project 2025.

If she could handle every sensitive issue in every swing state as well as she did in Kalamazoo, I thought, she could win this thing. I had fallen out of the coconut tree.

Even if Harris was not my candidate in 2020, I had followed her career with interest, in part because I sensed that her multihyphenate blend of identities — Black, Indian, Jamaican, female, American — was a source of unusual strength, even as they sometimes seemed to complicate her political path. In politics as in much of life, identity is a powerful currency, creating bonds of belonging or sending unmistakable signals of exclusion. Harris has shown an unusual ability to inhabit all these identities, emphasizing parts of her heritage, depending on the context, while somehow remaining inescapably constant as herself.

Nothing illustrates this quality quite like what is now known as the coconut video. It captures a snippet from remarks she made at a 2023 White House event about economic opportunities for Latinx Americans. In it, she quotes her mother, a fiercely independent matriarch who came from India to study at the University of California, Berkeley, where she met and married Harris's father, an immigrant from Jamaica.

"You think you just fell out of a coconut tree," she says in the video, putting on a faint version of her mother's South Indian accent, adding an awkward, high-pitched cackle. Then suddenly, she is solemn, speaking in a serene, almost Zen-like voice at a slightly deeper register. "You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you."

The video started circulating in 2023 when a Republican National Committee Twitter account shared a clip, apparently intending to mock Harris. Look at this weirdo, the tweet seems to suggest. Instead, millions of people have embraced the video and turned it into countless memes and TikTok videos. The coconut and palm tree emojis have become emblems of enthusiasm for Harris's candidacy.

When I saw the video for the first time, I felt an instant jolt of recognition. My mother is from Ethiopia, and her repertoire was filled with little phrases and endearments that I would try out on my friends, only to encounter blank stares or even mockery. I quickly learned to blend in by mimicking the speech of those around me.

What that exuberant coconut video showed me is that Harris has found a way to hold on to and inhabit her multitude of identities, comfortable in her own skin. In politics there is tremendous power in being a screen onto which voters can project their hopes, and for most of our history, that screen has been the face and story of a white man. But that has never been the full story of America. Maybe, her candidacy suggests, in 2024 we are ready to see who we actually are — a not-always harmonious but nevertheless dazzling mosaic of color, creed, origin and way of life that has, for all its faults, created the most powerful nation the world has ever known.

So how should we think about Harris's flameout in her last run for president, and should we hold it against her now? It's one of the reservations that some Harris skeptics have, and it's an understandable concern, given the stakes in this election, in which Trump could return to office.

But failure to win a presidential nomination on the first try is not usually a permanent stain on a politician's record. Bernie Sanders ran for the Democratic nomination twice and lost, but his failure is seen differently, as the result of his heroic refusal to compromise his deeply held beliefs even in the face of the longest odds. John McCain and Mitt Romney failed in their first attempts to win their party's presidential nominations, only to clinch it the second time. Biden won it on his third try, with a big assist from Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, who all but anointed him as the candidate of Black America and rescued his faltering candidacy.

For Harris, failure has been interpreted by many pundits as proof that she isn't very good at politics. Postmortems of her 2020 campaign ran the gamut. Most agreed that she had some bad luck; it was not an easy year to run on her record as a prosecutor. Plus, having lost in 2016 with a female candidate, many Democratic voters were wary of gambling on another woman, and a Black one, to boot. Harder to answer are the compelling criticism of her work as a prosecutor and troubling accounts of the dysfunction of her office in her early days as vice president. She rightly deserves scrutiny on both fronts and should answer tough questions.

But the most frequent criticism I hear is that her 2020 primary campaign had no clear rationale. What was her vision for the country? What did she believe in? Those are fair questions. But when we look back, slogans or platforms devised in anticipation of wielding power have far less weight than the concrete choices and judgment calls presidents make in the face of events beyond their control. George W. Bush ran on a promise of "compassionate conservatism," but the choices he made after Sept. 11 meant his legacy would be the seemingly permanent diminishment of American moral authority in the world. Man plans, and God laughs, the old saying goes. Or to use a bowdlerized version of the unofficial slogan of my generation: Stuff happens.

To believe that Harris is without political talent, you would have to accept that she somehow won statewide elected office as attorney general and then senator in the most populous state of the nation, California, through some mechanism detached from achievement. Yes, it is a reliably blue state. But that only makes the competition among its very talented and ambitious Democrats to reach the top all the more fierce. It is a state that has produced some of the most legendary political figures of my lifetime, from Ronald Reagan to Nancy Pelosi. If California were a country, it would be the fifth-largest economy in the world. Winning statewide elections there, something Harris has done three times, is no small thing.

I watched videos of Harris on the campaign trail and debate stage from 2019, and it is pretty clear that she has gotten better. This is hardly a shock; doing something hard repeatedly is a time-tested recipe for rapid improvement. I think about my life over the past five years, which astonishingly amounts to more than a tenth of my time living on this planet. So much happened in the world and in my life, too. I lost my father and upended my career as a media executive to try my hand at being a columnist, the hardest but most rewarding job I've ever had and one in which I've drawn both praise and hostility for my ideas and my position of power. Both those experiences taught me a powerful lesson: Make peace with uncertainty and imperfection and simply try your best with an open mind and honest heart.

Maybe this explains the rapturous response to Harris's ascent. The record-shattering fund-raising haul, the avalanche of endorsements, the small but significant shift in the polls — all signs that many Americans aren't searching for perfection. They just want a leader who can help us all turn the page on these terrible years.

Trump's vision has always been a backward-looking project of restoration: "Make America great again." Harris's retort makes the choice before the country clear: "We are not going back." To win that fight, Harris doesn't need to be Ms. Right. There are 100 or so days left to go, and countless potential pitfalls lie ahead. But so far, she seems to be doing a pretty good job of being Ms. Right Now.

Best Olympic ever

Some dude LARPing as a schitzo foid to scam donations is really going in the tank this time.

Be sure to go through the post history for previous episodes.

I decided on a whim to watch:

Target audience: Young children

Tree: Mother figure

Child: Self-insert / mirror to the reader'

The story is clearly about being grateful to your mother/parents, we are meant to be uncomfortable about the attitude of the child who takes these acts of giving for granted, and ultimately remember that it has been a while since we told our parents that we love them.

The line: "but not really" is obviously about the tree being sad the child is leaving. Happy she could help him, sad that the child is leaving for an undetermined amount of time. Silverstein didn't include this line in the animated version because he realized that it introduced ambiguity that a lot of people were evidently too retarded to resolve, and it didn't really impact the intended meaning (though it makes it less sad).

People seem to miss the fact that it is a children's book and that this must be taken into account when trying to analyze the meaning of the work. Can a child identify with a one sided romantic relationship? No, because it is a child. But mommy buying them an ice cream when they ask for one? Yes, every child has pestered their parents about getting something at some point. Even if they didn't, parents make countless small acts of self-sacrifice for their children without expecting thanks.

Am I missing something? !bookworms

The book that should really be controversial, is "The Rainbow fish". That one just has a straight up terrible message.

I asked a Chinese Diaspora neighbor what to watch, and this was her 3rd most tame suggestion.

(Prisma I'll love you forever.)

bonus almost bóbr:

ChatGPT summary:

Three big companies are taking advantage of poor families when they pay for school lunches. They charge huge fees—up to 60 cents out of every dollar—when parents put money into their kids' lunch accounts. This means that a lot of the money meant for meals ends up being stolen by these companies, which is pretty disgusting, don't you think?

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) found that these companies are making a lot of money by charging unfair fees, especially to families who can least afford it. Schools are moving towards cashless systems, and parents often can't pick different payment processors. Even though there are rules saying schools should let families pay with cash without extra fees, many schools ignore these rules. The CFPB could step in to fix this mess and help protect poor families, but it's uncertain whether they will continue to fight this under new political pressures.

——

Three companies control the market for school lunch payments. They take as much as 60 cents out of every dollar poor kids' parents put into the system to the tune of $100m/year. They're literally stealing poor kids' lunch money.

In its latest report, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau describes this scam in eye-watering, blood-boiling detail:

https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_costs-of-electronic-payment-in-k-12-schools-issue-spotlight_2024-07.pdf

The report samples 16.7m K-12 students in 25k schools. It finds that schools are racing to go cashless, with 87% contracting with payment processors to handle cafeteria transactions. Three processors dominate the sector: Myschoolbucks, Schoolcafé, and Linq Connect.

These aren't credit card processors (most students don't have credit cards). Instead, they let kids set up an account, like a prison commissary account, that their families load up with cash. And, as with prison commissary accounts, every time a loved one adds cash to the account, the processor takes a giant whack out of them with junk fees:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

If you're the parent of a kid who is eligible for a reduced-price lunch (that is, if you are poor), then about 60% of the money you put into your kid's account is gobbled up by these payment processors in service charges.

It's expensive to be poor, and this is no exception. If your kid doesn't qualify for the lunch subsidy, you're only paying about 8% in service charges (which is still triple the rate charged by credit card companies for payment processing).

The disparity is down to how these charges are calculated. The payment processors charge a flat fee for every top-up, and poor families can't afford to minimize these fees by making a single payment at the start of the year or semester. Instead, they pay small sums every payday, meaning they pay the fee twice per month (or even more frequently).

Not only is the sector concentrated into three companies, neither school districts nor parents have any meaningful way to shop around. For school districts, payment processing is usually bundled in with other school services, like student data management and HR data handling. For parents, there's no way to choose a different payment processor - you have to go with the one the school district has chosen.

This is all illegal. The USDA - which provides and regulates - the reduced cost lunch program, bans schools from charging fees to receive its meals. Under USDA regs, schools must allow kids to pay cash, or to top up their accounts with cash at the school, without any fees. The USDA has repeatedly (2014, 2017) published these rules.

Despite this, many schools refuse to handle cash, citing safety and security, and even when schools do accept cash or checks, they often fail to advertise this fact.

The USDA also requires schools to publish the fees charged by processors, but most of the districts in the study violate this requirement. Where schools do publish fees, we see a per-transaction charge of up to $3.25 for an ACH transfer that costs $0.26-0.50, or 4.58% for a debit/credit-card transaction that costs 1.5%. On top of this, many payment processors charge a one-time fee to enroll a student in the program and "convenience fees" to transfer funds between siblings' accounts. They also set maximum fees that make it hard to avoid paying multiple charges through the year.

These are classic junk fees. As Matt Stoller puts it: "'Convenience fees' that aren't convenient and 'service fees' without any service." Another way in which these fit the definition of junk fees: they are calculated at the end of the transaction, and not advertised up front.

Like all junk fee companies, school payment processors make it extremely hard to cancel an automatic recurring payment, and have innumerable hurdles to getting a refund, which takes an age to arrive.

Now, there are many agencies that could have compiled this report (the USDA, for one), and it could just as easily have come from an academic or a journ*list. But it didn't - it came from the CFPB, and that matters, because the CFPB has the means, motive and opportunity to do something about this.

The CFPB has emerged as a powerhouse of a regulator, doing things that materially and profoundly benefit average Americans. During the lockdowns, they were the ones who took on scumbag landlords who violated the ban on evictions:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cfpb

They went after "Earned Wage Access" programs where your boss colludes with payday lenders to trap you in debt at 300% APR:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

They are forcing the banks to let you move your account (along with all your payment history, stored payees, automatic payments, etc) with one click - and they're standing up a site that will analyze your account data and tell you which bank will give you the best deal:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

They're going after "buy now, pay later" companies that flout borrower protection rules, making a rogues' gallery of repeat corporate criminals, banning fine-print gotcha clauses, and they're doing it all in the wake of a 7-2 Supreme Court decision that affirmed their power to do so:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

The CFPB can - and will - do something to protect America's poorest parents from having $100m of their kids' lunch money stolen by three giant fintech companies. But whether they'll continue to do so under a Kamala Harris administration is an open question. While Harris has repeatedlly talked up the ways that Biden's CFPB, the DOJ Antitrust Division, and FTC have gone after corporate abuses, some of her largest donors are demanding that her administration fire the heads of these agencies and crush their agenda:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-07-26-corporate-wishcasting-attack-lina-khan/

Tens of millions of dollars have been donated to Harris' campaign and PACs that support her by billionaires like Reid Hoffman, who says that FTC Chair Lina Khan is "waging war on American business":

https://prospect.org/power/2024-07-26-corporate-wishcasting-attack-lina-khan/

Some of the richest Democrat donors told the Financial Times that their donations were contingent on Harris firing Khan and that they'd been assured this would happen:

https://archive.is/k7tUY

This would be a disaster - for America, and for Harris's election prospects - and one hopes that Harris and her advisors know it. Writing in his "How Things Work" newsletter today, Hamilton Nolan makes the case that labor unions should publicly declare that they support the FTC, the CFPB and the DOJ's antitrust efforts:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/unions-and-antitrust-are-peanut-butter

Don't want huge companies and their idiot billionaire bosses to run the world? Break them up, and unionize them. It's the best program we have.

Perhaps you've heard that antitrust is anti-worker. It's true that antitrust law has been used to attack labor organizing, but that has always been in spite of the letter of the law. Indeed, the legislative history of US antitrust law is Congress repeatedly passing law after law explaining that antitrust "aims at dollars, not men":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

The Democrats need to be more than The Party of Not Trump. To succeed - as a party and as a force for a future for Americans - they have to be the party that defends us - workers, parents, kids and retirees alike - from corporate predation.

——

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