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what-shitfuckery-is-this-ew · 5 months

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BOYCOTTING FOR PALESTINE

The Official BDS Boycott Targets

Events:

EUROVISION. IT IS IN OUR TOP PRIORITY TO BOYCOTT EUROVISION

Giro d’Italia and Tour de France

Consumer Boycotts - a complete boycott of these brands

Disney (SPECIFICALLY MARVEL)

Intel

Axa

Puma

Carrefour

Cevron

Caltex

Israeli produce

Re/max

Ahava

Texaco

Siemens

Sodastream

Organic Boycott Targets - boycotts not initiated by BDS but still complete boycott of these brands

Macdonald's

Dominos

Papa Johns

Burger King

Pizza Hut

Wix

Divestments and exclusion - pressure governments, institutions, investment funds, city councils, etc. to exclude from procurement contracts and investments and to divest from these

Elbit Systems

CAF

Volvo

CAT

Barclays

JCB

HD Hyundai

TKH Security

HikVision

Pressure - boycotts when reasonable alternatives exist, as well as lobbying, peaceful disruptions, and social media pressure.

Google

Amazon

AirBnb

Booking.Com

Expedia

Teva

Here are some companies that strongly support Israel (but are not Boycott targets). There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and boycotting is a political strategy - not a moral one. If you did try to boycott every supporter of Israel you would struggle to survive because every major company supports Israel (as a result of attempting to keep the US economy afloat), that being said, the ones that are being boycotted by masses and not already on the organic boycott list are coloured red.

5 Star Chocolate

7Days

7Up

Apple

Arsenal FC

ALDO

Arket

Axe

Accenture

Ariel

Adidas

ActionIQ

Aquafina

Amika

AccuWeather

Activia

Adobe

Aesop

Azrieli Group

American Eagle

Amway Corp

Axel Springer

American Airlines

American Express

Atlassian

AdeS

Aquarius

Ayataka

Audi

Barqs

Bain & Company

Bayer

Bank Leumi

Bank Hapoalim

BCG (Boston Consulting Group)

Biotherm

Bershka

Bloomberg

BMW

Boeing

Booz Allen Hamilton

Burberry

Bath & Body Works

Bosch

Bristol Myers Squibb

Capri Holdings

Costa

Carita Paris

CareTrust REIT

Caterpillar

Coach

Cappy

Caudalie

CeraVe

Check Point Software Technologies

Cerelac

Chanel

Chapman and Cutler

Channel

Cheerios

Cheetos

Chevron

Chips Ahoy!

Christina Aguilera

Citi Bank

Carrefour

Codral

Cosco

Canada Dry

Citi

Clal Insurance Enterprises

Clean & Clear

Clearblue

Clinique

Champion

Club Social

Coca Cola

Coffee Mate

Colgate

Comcast

Compass

Caesars

Conde Nast

Cooley LLP

Costco

Côte d’Or

Crest

CV Starr

CyberArk Software

Cytokinetics

Crayola

Cra Z Art

Daimler

Dr Pepper

Del Valle

Daim

Doctor Pepper

Dasani

Doritos

Daz

Dior

Dell

Deloitte

Delta Air Lines

Deutsche Bank

Deutsche Telekom

DHL Group

David Off

Disney

DLA Piper

Domestos

Domino’s

Douglas Elliman

Downy

Duane Morris LLP

Dreft Baby Detergent & Laundry Products

Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream

eBay

Edelman

Eli Lilly

Evian

Empyrean

Ericsson

Endeavor

EPAM Systems

Estee Lauder

Elbit Systems

Expedia

Forbes

Facebook

Fairlife

Fanta

First International Bank of Israel

Fiverr

Funyuns

Fuze

Fox News

Fritos

Fox Corp

Gatorade

Gamida Cell

Glamglow

General Catalyst

General Motors

Georgia

Gold Peak

Genesys

Goldman Sachs

Grandma’s Cookies

Google

Garnier

Guess

Greenberg Traurig

Guerlain

Givenchy

H&M

Hadiklaim

Huggies

Hanes

HSBC

Head & Shoulders

Hersheys

Herbert Smith Freehills

Hewlett Packard

Hasbro

Hyundai

Henkel

Harel Insurance Investment & Financial Services

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

HubSpot

Huntsman Corp

IBM

Innocent

Insight Partners

Inditex Group

IT Cosmetics

Instacart

Intel

Intermedia

Interpublic Group

Instagram

ICL Group

Intuit

Jazwares

Jefferies

John Lewis

JP Morgan Chase

Jaguar

Johnson & Johnson

JPMorgan

Kenon Holdings

Kate Spade

Kirks’

Kinley Water

KKR

KFC

KKW Cosmetics

Kurkure

Keebler

Kolynos

Kaufland

Kevita

Knorr

KPMG

Lemonade

Lidl

Loblaws

Levi Strauss

Louis Vuitton

Life Water

Levi’s

Levi’s Strauss

Land Rover

L’Oréal

Lego

Levissima

Live Nation Entertainment

Lufthansa

La Roche-Posay

Lipton

Major League Baseball

Manpower Group

Marriott

Marsh McLennan

Maison Francis Kurkdjian

Mastercard

Mattel

Minute Maid

Monster

Monki

Mainz FC

Mellow Yellow

Mountain Dew

Migdal Insurance

Marks & Spencer

Mirinda

McDermott Will & Emery

Motorola

McKinsey

Merck

Michael Kors

Mizrahi Tefahot Bank

Merck KGaA

Micheal Kors

Milkybar

Maybelline

Mount Franklin

Meta

MeUndies

Mattle

Microsoft

Munchies

Miranda

Morgan Lewis

Moroccanoil

Morgan Stanley

MRC

Nasdaq

Naughty Dog

Nivea

NOS

Nabisco

Nutter Butter

No Frills

National Basketball Association

National Geographic

Nintendo

New Balance

Nutella

Newtons

NVIDIA

Netflix

Nescafe

Nestle

Nesquick

Nike

Nussbeisser

Oreo

Oral B

Old spice

Oysho

Omeprazole

Oceanspray

Opodo

P&G (Procter and Gamble)

Pampers

Pull & Bear

Pepsi

Pfizer

Popeyes

Parker Pens

Philadelphia Cream Cheese

Pizza Hut

Powerade

Purina

Phoenix Holdings

Propel

Ponds

Pure Leaf Green Tea

Power Action Wipes

PwC

Prada

Perry Ellis

Prada Eyewear

Pringles

Payoneer

Procter & Gamble

Purelife

Pureology

Quaker Oats

Royal Bank of Canada

Ruffles

Revlon

Ralph Lauren

Ritz

Rolls Royce

Royal

S.Pellegrino

Sabra Hummus

Sabre

Sony

SAP

Simply

Smart Water

Sprite

Schwabe

Shell

Soda Stream

Siemens

StreamElements

Schweppes

Sunsilk

Signal

Skittles

Smart Food

Sobe

Smarties

Sephora

Sam’s Club

Superbus

Samsung

Sodastream

Sunkist

Scotiabank

Sour Patch Kids

Starbucks

Sadaf

Stride

Subway

Tang

Tate’s Bake Shop

The Body Shop

TEVA

Tesco

Twitch

The Ordinary

Tim Hortons

Tostitos

Timberland

Topo Chico

Tapestry

Tropicana

Tommy Hilfiger

Tommy Hilfiger Toiletries

Turbos

Tom Ford

Taco Bell

Triscuit

TUC

Twix

Tottenham Hotspurs

Twisties

Tripadvisor

Uber

Uber Eats

Urban Decay

Upfield

Unilever

Vicks

Victoria’s Secret

Vaseline

Vitaminwater

Volkswagen

Volvo

Walmart

Wegmans

Waitrose

Woolworths

Wheat Thins

Walkers

Warner Brothers

Warner Chilcot

Warner Music

Wells Fargo

Winston & Strawn

WingStreet

Wissotzky Tea

WWE

Wheel Washing Powder

Wrigley Company

YouTube

Yvel

Yum Brands

Ziyad

Zara

Zim Shipping

Ziff Davis

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probablyasocialecologist · 4 months

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Electricity consumption at US data centers alone is poised to triple from 2022 levels, to as much as 390 terawatt hours by the end of the decade, according to Boston Consulting Group. That’s equal to about 7.5% of the nation’s projected electricity demand. “We do need way more energy in the world than we thought we needed before,” Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, whose ChatGPT tool has become a global phenomenon, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week. “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology.” For decades, US electricity demand rose by less than 1% annually. But utilities and grid operators have doubled their annual forecasts for the next five years to about 1.5%, according to Grid Strategies, a consulting firm that based its analysis on regulatory filings. That’s the highest since the 1990s, before the US stepped up efforts to make homes and businesses more energy efficient. It’s not just the explosion in data centers that has power companies scrambling to revise their projections. The Biden administration’s drive to seed the country with new factories that make electric cars, batteries and semiconductors is straining the nation’s already stressed electricity grid. What’s often referred to as the biggest machine in the world is in reality a patchwork of regional networks with not enough transmission lines in places, complicating the job of bringing in new power from wind and solar farms. To cope with the surge, some power companies are reconsidering plans to mothball plants that burn fossil fuels, while a few have petitioned regulators for permission to build new gas-powered ones. That means President Joe Biden’s push to bolster environmentally friendly industries could end up contributing to an increase in emissions, at least in the near term. Unless utilities start to boost generation and make it easier for independent wind and solar farms to connect to their transmission lines, the situation could get dire, says Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. “New loads are delayed, factories can’t come online, our economic growth potential is diminished,” he says. “The worst-case scenario is utilities don’t adapt and keep old fossil-fuel capacity online and they don’t evolve past that.”

archive.today article link

#ai #artificial intelligence #openai #chatgpt #big data #energy #fossil fuels

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hottpinkpenguin · 1 year

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Joel Miller X Fem!Reader - Last of Us - Part 4

A/N: read part 1 ! read part 2 ! read part 3 ! Taglist: @midgetpottermills @casssiopeia @flyingmushroomss @amethystwonders11 @hiphopdancer101universe @kiszkawagnerwhore @littleshadow17 @rh1nestonecowg1rl @alm0501 @ch4rcuterie @lodeddiperrodrick @amandalove1355

Warnings: dark themes; post-apocalyptic dystopia; death of reader's minor child; probably a lot of non-canon details since I've never played the game; not proofread; spoilers if you haven't seen the show/played the game Word Count: 3011 Abbreviations: QZ = quarantine zone; FDRA "Fedra" = Federal Disaster Response Agency

---

You arrived at the checkpoint well before midnight, thanks to a bright moon and no interruptions. The group had moved easily through the overgrown, bombed out streets of Boston. You didn’t know Boston, had only visited once before the outbreak, but Marlene and Damian had a map they consulted frequently. The checkpoint you were headed to wasn’t their usual rendezvous spot, and the route they used was clearly less traveled. After heading east for a few miles, they’d swung to the south, moving into what had been a working class neighborhood, when there had been such a thing. The houses were small, close together, and more battered than some of the other areas you passed through.

You and the Fireflies plunged deep into the maze-like neighborhood until you were dizzy. You were glad that neither Damian nor Marlene had trouble with directions.

After about the third hour of shuffling through the leaf-littered streets in silence, Marlene held up a fist. In unison, your group stopped where you were and dropped to your knees, flicking off your flashlights, eyes glued on the dark shape that was Marlene. You waited, your breath suddenly sounding as loud as a gong. You noticed a soft light flickering up ahead. A mirror, you realized, flicking back and forth in front of a flashlight to bend the beam in your direction. A code.

You were close to Marlene, immediately behind her right shoulder. You watched her eyes drink in the flicks of the mirrored light, piecing together the coded message. She was smart and shrewd, cold and ruthless. You liked her.

She rose quickly from her crouch, her posture relaxed. The rest of you followed suit, albeit a bit less eagerly without having received whatever message she’d seen. A whistle broke the dark quiet up ahead.

“Let’s go.” You followed Marlene and Damian forward towards a building you vaguely recognized as an old gas station at the end of the cross street you were on. A dead traffic light hung low on its wire a few feet off the cracked pavement in the center of the intersection directly in front of the gas station.

As your group crossed into the parking lot of the gas station, figures started to appear, materializing from the darkness. The Fireflies had a network of smugglers and couriers spread out in the open territories between the major QZ’s. You’d met some of them before. They were strange in a way you could only imagine living in a hostile wasteland would make someone. Jumpy, paranoid, and brutal. Whether they’d chosen to live outside the QZ’s or that’s simply where fate had put them after the outbreak, it was clear that the window of opportunity to integrate them into a QZ society had long passed.

You didn’t recognize any of the faces in this crew. That didn’t seem unusual. Marlene told you that most of the open map crews she had contact with were too mobile to run into twice in a row. They didn’t stay in once place long enough to have repeat visits.

A huge man with a ghastly scar slashed across his face approached you, thrusting a full tankard of water into your hands. You nodded in thanks, avoiding looking at his disfigured face as you took a greedy sip. The harsh glow of the flashlights made him look like something out of a nightmare.

Some of the crew greeted your group by name. The leader - an older, wiry-thin man with a faded baseball cap - exchanged a few curt words with Marlene before gesturing all of you to follow them into the gas station. Your instincts rattled in protest, causing you to hesitate a half beat. Something about that gas station set your teeth on edge.

You fell in with the others, shuffling through the jammed open doors of the station. The shelves that had once been lined with bags of nuts, chewing gum, travel-size hygiene products, and road maps had been shoved to one side of the station. The walk-in freezer door was open towards the back corner, and you could see the warm glow of electric lights. You thought you could hear the low rumble of a small generator back there.

“Wait here.” Marlene’s orders were final. Everyone - even Damian - came to an uneasy loitering stop in the cleared out station. Marlene followed the pipe-cleaner thin man with the baseball cap towards the walk-in freezer, their voices low and inaudible.

“Who is this person we’re meeting?” Steve asked, to no one in particular once Marlene was out of earshot.

“Some kid.” The man with the scar bisecting his face spat rancid tobacco juice on the pavement just outside the station door. He leaned against the door frame, his eyes sweeping back and forth over the empty, dark street. His posture looked casual, but you could see his finger hovering a hair’s breadth off his rifle’s trigger.

“What do you mean, a kid?” You were surprised to hear your own voice asking the question.

“She’s a kid. Maybe sixteen, I dunno.”

“Why’s she so fucking special?” Even Damian sounded uptight. A prickle of unease raked its fingers down your spine.

“I don’t know man, I don’t make the rules around here.” Scar Face sounded less on edge than the rest of you, but it wasn’t much reassurance. A tense quiet settled over the two groups as you all waited.

You weren’t sure how long you waited, but it was long enough that by the time you heard Marlene’s boots on the concrete floor, you’d been sitting long enough for your ass to go numb.

“Everyone, this is Ellie. She’s traveling back with us.” Marlene gestured to a short, pale-faced girl who’d walked out of the freezer at Marlene’s side. She wore an expression like she’d just been forced to drink sour milk.

The wait proved anticlimactic, and you could feel a grumble of resentment begin to collect in your traveling companions as they all sized up the remarkably ordinary-looking girl you’d just traveled a dozen miles into the open city to retrieve. Even you were beginning to resent the lack of information around this girl.

“Same drill going back. No bullshit, no delays.” Marlene shook hands briefly with Baseball Cap before striding out of the gas station and back into the moonlit street. Baseball Cap’s crew followed you out. You saw something like relief in their haggard faces as Ellie fell in step right behind Marlene.

Marlene led the group out the way you came without a backwards glance. You were farther back from her and Damian this time. The mysteriously important teenaged girl with the piss-for-brains expression kept close behind the two leaders; the rest of you followed in loosely organized pairs. Steve was next to you, his eyes boring holes in the back of Ellie’s head.

“I wonder what I’d need to do to get a goddamned armed escort through the open city,” he mumbled to you at one point. You didn’t reply, although it wasn’t out of disagreement. Your first few runs with Marlene had been to pick up incredibly valuable contraband: rare medicines and first aid supplies, cartridges of ammo, and propane tanks. But even then, with thousands of food credits on the line, you’d never seen Marlene and Damian act so cautiously. Every few blocks or so, they stopped to consult their map, mumbling in low tones as Damian pinched a flashlight between his shoulder and his cheek, tracing a finger over what you assumed could only be a number of alternative routes from your location back to the QZ. Occasionally their conference was brief, but at times it seemed more contentious. Whatever Ellie had - or whoever she was - her value had to be astronomical to warrant such hypervigilance.

Even as you traced your way back towards the QZ, that gnawing sense of disquiet kept buzzing in the back of your head like a cloud of gnats. You knew the others felt it too. The silence was different this trip. It had a scent of fear to it that hadn’t been there on the first leg. All around you, the moon cast a spectral glow over the decaying city. You didn’t let yourself look too long into the shadows.

You were halfway back to the QZ, balanced in a crouch on the balls of your feet, when Steve tried to talk to you again.

“What the fuck is taking so long?”

He’d been steadily losing what little patience he possessed at each stoppage on the route back.

“Keep it together, Steve,” you urged him, your voice low and placating.

“Nah, this is bullshit. The sun’s gonna be up by the time we get back to QZ. And I ain’t spending another day out here for some big wig’s spoiled brat.”

The running hypothesis that Steve had landed on regarding Ellie’s value was that she was related to someone high up in the QZ, and they’d hired Marlene to fetch and deliver her. It wasn’t a half-bad idea. Something about the girl’s surly attitude made you think otherwise, and you couldn’t begin to fathom how she’d ended up in the Firefly network to begin with, but that information was above your paygrade.

Steve was practically vibrating out of his boots with anger next to you. The darkness felt claustrophobic around you, the moon drifting in and out of cloud cover.

After a few moments of tension, you heard Steve spring up next to you.

“Marlene, Damian, can we get the show on the fucking road here?”

His voice was louder than it should have been. You saw the rest of the group wince at the disruption.

Marlene ignored him, instead signaling down a narrow alley to the northwest between two ramshackle office buildings, one with a faded awning that read DRUG MART.

“No fucking way. That’s the opposite goddamn direction of the QZ!”

Steve’s temper was beginning to wear off the edges of his caution. His voice, while still not at normal volume, was burgeoning on a shout whisper. Silence was important in the open city as the infected were drawn to it. His recklessness only increased the group’s collective unease.

Damian and Marlene approached him, trying to diffuse his mounting anger. Damian held his hand out, palm down in a conciliatory gesture.

“This is the route we’re taking. Shortcut.”

For all your resentment at Steve for threatening detection from the infected, you didn’t buy Damian’s lie for a minute.

“Bullshit. I’m not going that way.”

Steve was digging his heels in. You saw the surly teenager shoot him a dark glare. The rest of the group shifted restlessly, casting worried glances over your shoulders as the pressure mounted between Steve and Damian.

“This is the way we’re all going,” Damian insisted, his voice dropping so low it was almost a growl.

“Fuck that. The rest of you can waffle around out here, risk your necks for a goddamned pimple-faced brat, but not me. I’m heading back. I didn’t sign up for this.”

You heard the unmistakable metallic click of Steve cocking his gun as he lifted the rifle, aiming it squarely at Ellie’s chest. She was a few paces away from him, Merlene and Damian flanking her and a half step ahead.

Time seemed to slow as the escalating argument slipped sideways into chaos.

You heard the shot rip open the silence before your brain registered that Damian had unholstered the handgun at his hip. Steve wavered on his feet before his knees buckled under him. He fell first to his knees, the rifle in his hand clanking loudly to the pavement as blood trickled from his lips. Steve’s face went white as he slumped forward and went still.

You breathed through a half second of pure, terrified silence before you heard it. Softly, so quiet at first you didn’t believe it. But then, a few seconds later, there it was again, louder this time.

Click. Click click clickclickclick.

You felt your muscles seize up with adrenaline as your mind launched into hyperspeed.

The infected.

They burst out of the buildings behind you like a swarm of bees. It was a horde, the largest you’d ever seen. At the front were the clickers, the oldest of the infected, their faces blasted open from the top of their skulls to reveal large, repulsive fungal growths where their brains had once been. They ran on two legs, their distinctive clicking sounds resonating in their rotted-out mouths as they launched towards your group with a speed you could never hope to match. Behind the clickers were the rest of the infected, some of them resembling their human hosts more than others, some running on all fours while others tottered unsteadily on half-rotted legs. You’d never seen so many. Pure, blinding panic rendered you immobile as you gaped at the swarm.

“RUN!”

Marlene’s scream was enough to break the spell. You scrambled to your legs, unable to make them move fast enough as they slipped on the slightly damp pavement. You careened towards the alley next to the Drug Mart, leaping over Steve’s crumpled body. Damian, Marlene, and Ellie were ahead of you, a few of your group mates behind you. From over your shoulder, you heard a bone-chilling shriek of someone overtaken by the horde. You willed yourself forward, your backpack pounding against your shoulders.

“SPLIT UP!”

You burst out of the narrow alley into another suburban street. Instinct pulled you to the right. You let your feet carry you that way, the sounds of the infected roaring in your ears as the horde squeezed through the alley behind you.

Damian and Ellie were in front of you. Damian was dragging the girl by the neck of her hoodie, her legs struggling to keep up with the adult man’s full-out sprint. The sound of footfalls behind you signaled that there were two, maybe three others, running in the same direction. A smattering of gunshots pierced the night.

You risked a backwards glance over your shoulder. The infected were gaining on you, only a few dozen paces behind you now. They seemed to swallow the street behind you like locusts, climbing over the abandoned vehicles scattered through the neighborhood with ease.

The street banked upward, the incline causing your lungs to burn like fire. You drove your knees harder, your hands splayed out in front of you as you came perilously close to losing your footing on a sunken manhole cover. You caught your fall on the side of an upended propane truck, the skin on your palm ripping open against the metal of the truck chassis. Gritting through the bolt of pain that shot up through your arm, you used whatever you could grab from the truck to propel yourself back into a sprint, shedding the deadweight of your backpack as you did. Damian and Ellie remained in front of you, the girl sobbing as Damian hauled her forward, but you were gaining on them. The footfalls of the other group members had dwindled now to one. You heard more gunshots from further in the opposite direction.

“Y/N, take her!” Damian swung around, firing into the oncoming mob of infected. He thrust the teenager towards you like a sack of potatoes. She lost her footing as you reached her, grabbing her hoodie roughly and doing your best to pick her up.

Your mind struggled to understand Damian’s instructions. You could see from the wan moonlight that the street ahead of you was rising in a steeper incline. You couldn’t possibly outrun the clickers with that kind of a hill.

“Take cover! Get out of the street!” Damian was waving you away, off to the side of the road. You followed his instructions, herding Ellie towards an abandoned house. You turned back just in time to see the explosion of the propane tank from the overturned truck shred the darkness. The force of the blast hit you in the back, sending you flying up the rotten steps of the house you were aiming for. You felt a sickening crunch from your ribs as your side connected with the wooden banister at the top of the stairs. Ellie scrambled up the stairs beside you. The door to the house was open, mercifully, and she disappeared inside. Your hands clawed at the splintering wood as you fought to stay conscious. You felt a few fingernails rip off as you dragged your body upright, lurching through the doorway. You grabbed at the door leaning off its bottom hinge, using your weight to close the door as Ellie threw the deadbolt beside you.

Your breath came hard and jagged as you doubled over in pain, your back still braced on the door of the house. The air inside smelled musty and foul; the windows were boarded over, and the sounds of the street outside were muffled somewhat. You hoped against hope that none of the infected were tracking you; you knew you didn’t have any strength left to run or fight. For a few rapsing breaths, you listened and waited. All you could hear were the crackling sounds of flames and the cacophony of screeching as the infected burned up like kindling.

You let yourself sink down to your haunches against the door. Ellie was still standing, bracing her hands on her knees against the door.

Minutes dragged on as the sounds of the street died down outside. You could see orange shadows dancing across the mold-ridden walls in the room to your left, so you knew that the other side of the street was burning. You registered idly that you and Ellie should keep moving and not risk a stray spark catching the wind in an unfavorable direction. But you couldn’t bring yourself to move, exhaustion and terror and pain keeping you grounded to the floor. You weren’t sure how long you waited and listened, but just before you gave in to a mix of sleep and unconsciousness, you saw the faint light of daybreak slant through the boarded up window…

read part 5 **let me know if you want to be tagged in future chapters! ty to everyone showing this series so much love!

#joel miller #joel miller x reader #joel miller x y/n #joel miller imagine #the last of us hbo #the last of us #the last of us imagine #the last of us fanfiction #pedro pascal #pedro pascal x reader #pedro pascal x y/n #pedro pascal imagine

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heathers-letters · 6 days

Text

May 13, 2024

Key Quotes:

"The White House today announced that it has awarded nearly $454 billion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, including more than 56,000 projects across more than 4,500 communities across the nation."

"On Thursday, May 9, Senators Katie Britt (R-AL), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Kevin Cramer (R-ND) introduced the More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed (MOMS) act...The measure is clear that it enlists the government in opposition to abortion, but more than that, it establishes that the government will create a database of the names and contact information of pregnant women"

"Louisiana lawmakers also rejected a bill that would have allowed anyone under age 17, the age of consent in Louisiana, to have an abortion if they became pregnant after rape or incest. Passionate testimony from those who suffered such attacks or who treated pregnant girls as young as 8 failed to convince the Republican lawmakers to support the measure."

Full letter below the cut.

Today illustrated that the Democrats have become America’s cheerleaders, emphasizing how investment in the nation’s infrastructure has created jobs and rebuilt the country. This week, the Biden-Harris administration is touting its investments in rebuilding roads and bridges, making sure Americans have clean water, getting rid of pollution, expanding access to high-speed internet, and building a clean energy economy, contrasting that success with Trump’s eternal announcements of an “Infrastructure Week” that never came.

The White House today announced that it has awarded nearly $454 billion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, including more than 56,000 projects across more than 4,500 communities across the nation. Those include fixing more than 165,000 miles of roads and more than 9,400 bridges and improving more than 450 ports and 300 airport terminals. It has funded more than 1,400 drinking water and wastewater projects and projects to replace up to 1.7 million toxic lead pipes, as well as more than 8,000 low- and zero-emission buses. It has funded 95 previously unfunded Superfund projects to clean up contaminated sites. It has improved the electrical grid and funded 12,000 miles of high-speed internet infrastructure, and exposed internet junk fees.

The White House explained that this investment is making it cheaper to install clean energy technology and lowering families’ monthly energy bills, and highlighted today the available rebates to enable people to take advantage of the new technologies.

On Wednesday, May 8, a report from the Semiconductor Industry Association and the Boston Consulting Group explored the “breathtaking speed,” as the president of the semiconductor organization put it, at which the industry is growing. In the Financial Times on May 9, John Thornhill reported that the CHIPS and Science Act, which provided a $39 billion investment in the semiconductor industry, has “primed a torrent of private sector investment.” With the influx of both federal money and an additional $447 billion of private investment in 83 projects in 25 states, the report forecasts that the U.S. will increase its share of global manufacturing capacity for leading-edge chips from today’s rate of 0% to 28% by 2032. Thornhill compared this investment to that spurred by Russia’s 1957 launch of the Sputnik satellite.

The Economist yesterday announced that the U.S. “is in the midst of an extraordinary startup boom,” and explored “[h]ow the country revived its “go-getting spirit.”

In contrast to the Democrats’ confidence in America, the Republicans are all-in on the idea that the country is an apocalyptic wasteland. At a rally in New Jersey Saturday, Trump announced: “On day one we will throw out Bidenomics and reinstate MAGAnomics.” He promised to extend his 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

But the gist of his speech was an angry, vitriolic picture of a failing nation full of “enemies” that are “more dangerous” than China and Russia and who are “going to destroy our country.” In his telling, the criminal case against him in Manhattan is “bullsh*t,” and President Biden has done more damage than the “ten worst presidents in the history of our country” combined: “[h]e’s a fool; he’s not a smart man…[h]e’s a bad guy…the worst president ever, of any country. The whole world is laughing at him.”

Trump lied that other countries are “emptying out their mental institutions into the United States, our beautiful country. And now the prison populations all over the world are down. They don’t want to report that the mental-institution population is down because they’re taking people from insane asylums and from mental institutions.” Then he riffed into “the late great Hannibal Lecter,” the fictional murderer and cannibal in the film The Silence of the Lambs, apparently to suggest that similar individuals are migrating to the U.S.

House Republicans this week are working to pass a nonbinding resolution to condemn Biden’s immigration policies, although it was Republicans, under orders from Trump, who killed a strong bipartisan immigration bill earlier this year.

The only way to turn back this apocalypse, Trump and his supporters insist, is to put Trump and his team back into the White House. From there, Republicans will return those they consider “real” Americans to power.

The last few days have added new information about what that means. On Thursday, May 9, Senators Katie Britt (R-AL), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Kevin Cramer (R-ND) introduced the More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed (MOMS) act. Britt—who is best known for her disastrous response to Biden’s State of the Union speech from her kitchen—said the measure would provide a federal database of resources for pregnant women and women parenting young children, but that information excludes anything that touches on abortion.

The measure is clear that it enlists the government in opposition to abortion, but more than that, it establishes that the government will create a database of the names and contact information of pregnant women, which the government can then use “to follow up with users on additional resources that would be helpful for the users to review.”

A government database of pregnant women would give the federal government unprecedented control over individuals, and it is especially chilling after the story Caroline Kitchener broke in the Washington Post on May 3, that a Texas man, Collin Davis, filed a petition to stop his ex-partner from traveling to Colorado, where abortion is legal, to obtain an abortion. Should she do so, his lawyer wrote, he would “pursue wrongful-death claims against anyone involved in the killing of his unborn child.” Now Davis wants to be able to depose his former partner along with others he says are “complicit” in the abortion.

Antiabortion activists are also seeking to make mifepristone and misoprostol, drugs used in many abortions, hard to obtain. In Louisiana, state lawmakers are considering classifying the drugs as “controlled dangerous substances,” which would make possessing them carry penalties of up to ten years in prison and fines of up to $75,000.

More than 240 Louisiana doctors wrote to lawmakers saying that the drugs have none of the addictive characteristics associated with dangerous controlled substances and warning that the drugs are crucial for inducing routine labor and preventing catastrophic hemorrhage after delivery, in addition to their use in abortions. “Given its historically poor maternal health outcomes, Louisiana should prioritize safe and evidence-based care for pregnant women,” the doctors wrote.

Louisiana lawmakers also rejected a bill that would have allowed anyone under age 17, the age of consent in Louisiana, to have an abortion if they became pregnant after rape or incest. Passionate testimony from those who suffered such attacks or who treated pregnant girls as young as 8 failed to convince the Republican lawmakers to support the measure. “That baby [in the womb] is innocent.… We have to hang on to that,” said Republican state representative Dodie Horton.

Today, at the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization promoting Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander participation and representation at all levels of the political process, Vice President Kamala Harris encouraged young people to innovate and to move into spaces from which they have been traditionally excluded.

“So here’s the thing about breaking barriers,” she said. “Breaking barriers does not mean you start on one side of the barrier and you end up on the other side. There’s breaking involved. And when you break things you get cut. And you may bleed. And it is worth it every time…. We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open. Sometimes they won’t. And then you need to kick that f*cking door down.”

Harris’s advice reflects the history that happened on this date in 1862, when the enslaved mariners on board the shallow-draft C.S.S. Planter gathered up their families, fired up the ship’s boilers, and sailed out of the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor. The three white officers of the ship had gone ashore, leaving enslaved 23-year-old pilot Robert Smalls to take control. Smalls knew how to steer the ship and give the proper signals to the Confederates at Fort Sumter, Fort Moultrie, and three other checkpoints.

Smalls piloted the Planter, the sixteen formerly enslaved people on it, and a head full of intelligence about the Confederate fortifications at Charleston to the U.S. Navy. In Confederate hands, the Planter had surveyed waterways and laid mines; now that information was in U.S. hands. Smalls went on to pilot naval vessels during the war, and in 1864 he bought the house formerly owned by the man who had enslaved him.

A natural leader, Smalls went on to become a businessman, politician, and strong advocate for education. After serving in the 1868 South Carolina Constitutional Convention that made school attendance compulsory and provided for universal male suffrage, he went on to serve in the South Carolina legislature from 1868 to 1874, when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served until 1887. When President Barack Obama signed an executive order establishing the nation’s first national monument concerning Reconstruction, he cited the life of Robert Smalls.

—

Notes and Citations available by subscribing to Letters from an American: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/

#activism #joe biden #donald trump #democracy #republicans #vote #us politics #abortion #Bipartisan Infrastructure Law #pregnancy

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roysexton · 4 months

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“What will brand podcasts look like in 2024?” … plus I *may* offer a musical homage to “The Little Mermaid” … inaugural Brand Podcast Virtual Summit organized by Lower Street

Such an honor to have participated in this panel yesterday. Truly a robust and fun conversation about podcasting for brands. You can catch the replay here. What will brand podcasts look like in 2024? Find out with the industry’s finest. Roy Sexton – director of marketing at Clark Hill, Lynn Teo – CMO at Northwestern Mutual, Nick Howard – podcast architect and senior manager at Boston Consulting…

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acti-veg · 2 years

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#vegan #food #environment #sustainability #articles

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raffaellopalandri · 1 year

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Book of the Day - Your Strategy Needs a Strategy

Today’s Book of the Day is Your Strategy Needs a Strategy, written by Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha in 2015 and published by Harvard Business Review Press. Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha are three renowned experts in Stragey working for the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Martin Reeves is the Director of the BCG Bruce Henderson Institute, BCG’s think tank…

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#Book #Book Of The Day #book recommendation #book review #Business #Business strategy #Harshness #Janmejaya Sinha #Knut Haanæs #Malleability #Martin Reeves #Raffaello Palandri #Strategy #Unpredictability #Unpredictability Malleability and Harshness #Your Strategy Needs a Strategy

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mamouvictor · 2 years

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Vous souhaitez devenir consultant indépendant et vous ne savez pas par où commencer ? . Je vous explique en cinq étapes simples ce que vous devez faire avant de vous lancer . . . . . . ======== Si vous souhaitez démarrer votre entreprise en consulting ou intégrer un grand cabinet, n’hésitez pas à vous abonner au compte @victormamou, je partage mon parcours, des conseils et informations qui peuvent vous aider à concrétiser votre projet. ======== 🔸 🔸 @victormamou @victormamou 🔸 🔸 #entrepreneurfrancais #entreprendre #autoentrepreneur #businessenligne #motivation #conseilbusiness #entrepreneuse #entrepreneure #conseil #conseils #france🇫🇷 #développementpersonnel #coachbusiness #devpersonnel #devperso #amitié #consultant #consultants #consultantlife

#consulting #consultant #Mckinsey #deloitte #accenture #boston consulting group

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fredseibertdotcom · 5 days

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Next New Networks, Part 3

I’m going to try, in as few posts as possible, to create a coherent timeline of the short, eventful life of Next New Networks, an early, consequential moment in streaming video history.

From Part 1: Emil Rensing and I, with a huge assist from future Tumblr creator David Karp, stumbled into the brave new world of online video without much of a plan.

From Part 2: Our friend –my former partner at Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, and our future Next New Networks partner– Jed Simmons introduced us to Spark Capital in Boston, who wanted to partner and fund Next New.

Part 3: Late 2006

What do we do now?

Once Spark signaled their interest, we needed to get serious. I still had Frederator Studios, my successful and increasingly busy independent cartoon production company, but the excitement of this opportunity was overwhelming. Even if I was significantly older than the typical internet entrepreneur, I felt that my background in media and production could be meaningful. The first phase of the consumer internet required deep engineering skills because the infrastructure was still somewhat nascent. Web 2.0 had developed enough tools that even someone with my limited skills could participate. Besides, I had Emil on my side, someone who had a unique understanding of the state of the tech world.

By summertime, after a variety of conversations and meetings, Emil and I settled on a co-founding team. Jed Simmons, of course. Emil had a start up friend –Tim Shey– who’d sold his DC based, interactive agency and moved to New York where he was consulting with some early stage video companies. I was stretched to thin to have an operating role in the joint, so we all agreed that my childhood friend and adult colleague Herb Scannell –former Vice Chairman of MTV Networks and CEO of Nickelodeon– would be a perfect CEO. Luckily, he agreed, and our management line up was in place. (David Karp would be our founding developer, until he launched Tumblr several months later, of course).

We can leave the machinations of filling out the A-round of investment aside. Suffice to say, many venture capitalists were uninterested in any idea that didn’t have unique software attached –we didn’t– but we put together an investor group and board of directors that were excited with our vision.

Next New Networks posters designed and illustrated by Frank Olinsky

Our vision? ah. yes. By the time we were on the road pitching our wares, we had taken the basics of VOD Cars and Channel Frederator and put together a plan that was based on “communities of interest,” which we felt would be the engines of viewership and growth. As Tim Shey later wrote:

Next New Networks popularized the ideas of videoblogging and advertiser-supported online video, and pioneered the multi-channel network (MCN) business model and the concept of audience development, assembling a diverse and successful portfolio of original programming including hit channels Barely Political, VSauce, and ThreadBanger, and a network of independent creators such as The Gregory Brothers—racking up over 2 billion video views and thirteen Webby Awards, more than any online media company at the time.

Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times was probably the writer that caught onto what we had accomplished better than most.

By March 2007, we were fully funded with our first round, expanded past the Frederator/NY office into a larger space in the same building on Park Avenue South, and started to put together an amazing start up staff that could actually execute. At least, what we’d morphed our vision into. Super distribution!

(More to come.)

#Next New Networks #2006 #2007 #Spark Capital #Fred Seibert #Emil Rensing #Jed Simmons #Tim Shey #Herb Scannell #David Karp

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 7 days

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Jesse Duquette

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 13, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 14, 2024

The Economist yesterday announced that the U.S. “is in the midst of an extraordinary startup boom,” and explored “[h]ow the country revived its “go-getting spirit.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#history #Heather Cox Richardson #Jesse Duquette #election 2024 #Biden Administration accomplishment #TFG hate speech #reconstruction #women #women's health concerns #reproductive rights #national database on pregnant women

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anthrofreshtodeath · 1 year

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Ooh 4 and 10, a forced return and kisses??? Angst central 🥳🥳

I enjoy some angst, especially in bite-sized chunks. @kerfuffle-puffin also asked for 4, so we'll start with that one.

___

4 Kisses where it hurts

Maura’s thoughts are so disorganized that it chokes her. She is used to order, used to the gestalt cognition her autism had previously blessed her with, that her brain injury has taken away. She’s never gotten a diagnosis for the former, no need with her expertise, and the latter had been obvious as soon as her head hit the bar of The Dirty Robber those weeks prior.

Her brain had been so… so good before. So beautiful.

Now, she pulls up BCU’s medical dictionary of health terms just so, you know, she can double check that her pathology reports say what she wants them to. She consults the lowly thesaurus.com so that she can confirm her previously plentiful bank of synonyms without sounding repetitive.

She never sounded repetitive. Oversharing? Sure. Unnecessary reiteration? A lot. But sounding repetitive? Never. Not since she used to repeat things as a little girl just because she liked the way they sounded, how the cadence and the prosody lilted out of her tiny mouth and changed the airwaves around her. Constance had rid her of that, and quickly.

What… what would Mother say now? Now that Maura stares at a computer screen unable to remember the thought she’d started just a few seconds ago. Her fingers had been sure, they’d begun the sentence so quickly, and now she can’t decide if she wanted to talk about the bullet deep to the victim’s left lung or the deep vein thrombosis that would have killed him hours after the bullet entered his chest anyway.

Either way, her head wants to hang and she wants to cry.

“Hey,” a voice she’d never forget even with the most devastating of traumatic brain injuries, all but whispers, dragging her out of her head.

When had Jane stopped in the doorway? Before the concussion and the inflammation and the chiari malformation diagnosis, Maura would have spotted Jane’s march from the elevator to the threshold.

Jane doesn’t give her much time to contemplate though, because as soon as Maura looks up and as soon as Jane sees that Maura’s been weepy, she goes over to Maura’s desk.

She takes Maura’s head in her hands, cradling the thing that has given Maura’s life so much meaning and, recently, so much consternation. Jane looks down, Maura looks up, and then Jane places her lips right in the center of Maura’s forehead. Three kisses. “Looked a little sad,” Jane reasons when she pulls away and Maura’s confusion registers across her face. “Thought I might know what was botherin’ ya. Wanna run through this thing together? I’m a good spell check.”

10 forced reunion

Maura’s heels clap through Boston Regional’s polished halls, and even though it’s not the ICU, her heart hammers just the same. She weaves through residents, nurses, and doctors as rooms blur by her. Gómez, O’Rourke, Mwangi, Jackson… Rizzoli.

She’s made it. From Korsak’s breathless call to her desk phone, to the hurried change out of scrubs and into the outfit she wears now, from the agonizing ascent of the elevator to the driver’s side of her car, she’s thundered across the city to Room 308.

Jane is not supposed to be here.

Jane glowers at the edge of the hospital bed, arm in a sling and face scraped, because she is not supposed to be here.

She is supposed to be deep in the webbing of an extortionist group that had already killed three people. She is supposed to be undercover, with no contact, for the remainder of the week at least. But, on this Monday, she is attempting to leave against medical advice. She was made and she was hustled out of the job gone wrong and she is mad.

Maura pauses in the doorway. Jane’s hair is more wild than usual and someone had been holding ice up to her eye because the gash over it is angry burgundy, but not swollen. It’s still weeping. Its first opening, probably at the hands of a large knife, had stained the front of her shirt. There’s still blood on her neck. It’ll scar, even if someone had bothered to suture it. Maura looks over to the side of the bed, the suture tray still there, with instruments dropped in a hurried mess on it, and realizes someone probably had bothered and been chased away for their trouble.

“I’m glad you’re ok,” Maura chances, dropping her purse on the chair just to the right of the door. For all her bluster outside, she radiates calm now, like she knows no other way to be.

“Oh fuck off,” Jane groans. Maura had expected as much. She doesn’t even flinch. In all their years in each other’s orbit, she’s finally learned that this means to come closer.

Most of the time.

“Is that what you told the physician?” Maura purrs with a little bit of teasing. She purses her lips, but one corner goes up and her eyes dance.

Jane scoffs and turns away. “I’m goin’ home,” she says.

Presumably to lick the proverbial wounds, Maura surmises. She can’t reach that large one with her tongue. “Not before you let me close that. Here. In a hospital. With antiseptic.”

The doctor had even been kind enough to leave his stool, the padded one with the wheels so common to hospitals, and Maura brings it over, along with the tray. She goes to the wall, pulls a few nitrile gloves from the station next to the charting board, and then takes her seat.

“I’d rather not,” Jane finally grumbles.

“I don’t care,” Maura tells her. “I care that you’re safe, and mostly intact. I care that your job spared your life - again. Though I know at any moment it could tear it away,” The frenetic heartbeat of the hallway returns, and this time her voice shakes. She won’t cry, though.

“This isn’t how I wanted to see you again. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I was supposed to come back a winner,” Jane argues. Maura hears her voice shake, too, but not with tears. She holds the collection tray up, looks Jane in the eye, then nods to it.

Jane knows what to do. She spits the amalgam of phlegm and blood into it. Maura doesn’t flinch, doesn’t grimace, doesn’t gag. She just puts it down and hands Jane some gauze. “That is irrational of you,” she says to Jane. When Jane glares, she smiles. “It is. You have the best closing rate in the state. You are always a winner and one case isn’t going to alter that. You are mad because you are obsessive and you are filled with such… oh. Such vengeance. Try to stay still. I’m going to flush the wound,” Maura pauses her speech to squeeze the cold saline solution into Jane’s wound.

“Agh fuck,” Jane snarls, but to her credit, she stays put.

“You’re mad because you haven’t released the valve in awhile,” Maura continues. She rubs antiseptic around the cut before she pulls out the needle and thread. Jane won’t want the anesthetic because Jane needs to feel something. “And I keep telling you that there are safer, healthier, more enjoyable ways to do that, but you don’t listen.”

Jane says nothing. She lets Maura sew her up.

“Jane?” Maura calls with a small smile, because it’s been a few seconds and Jane is blushing.

“Not ready yet,” Jane rushes out in one quick breath.

“Well, I am,” Maura says. Her next tug is particularly forceful and it jerks Jane’s head closer to Maura’s chest. “And so I don’t mind waiting for you to be. But what I have planned is a lot better than a through-and-through and a forced reunion, so you may want to hurry up.”

Jane responds with a chuckle and white knuckles against her own knees. “Oh, fuck off.”

#ask anthrofreshtodeath #otp prompts april 2023 #rizzoli and isles #lauren writes rizzoli and isles fanfiction #also hey self-diagnosis is valid but if you suspect you have a disability its always a good idea to confirm that medically #so that you can have access to some resources that are out there #I headcanon maura as having way too much internalized ableism and stubbornness to do so however 💀

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