#utilizers

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

i will never understand why more people in their 80s don't commit felonies. you reach that age and surely there's something illegal you always wanted to do but didn't bc Consequences

dammit, GO FORTH GRANNIES!!! rob an armored car! hold up that bank! tunnel your way into fort knox! what are they gonna do, sentence you to 20 years? good fuckin luck with that

#mine would be a coordinated museum heist utilizing the lifetimes of experience and diverse expertise of my fellow nursing home residents #also there's Karl the orderly. his skill is he drives the shuttle van #technically he shouldn't be enabling us but he thinks it's a good enrichment activity #heck debra hasn't been this excited since her son flew in from australia. #plus Karl figures formulating an elaborate heist is better brain exercise than the puzzle books they keep in the resident lounge #all the sudokus are half finished anyway #update: upon consideration my second choice is just. MASSIVE credit card fraud.

[canisalbus]

barracuda face

#midnight doodles #own art #own characters #CanisAlbus #art #artists on tumblr #Machete #anthro #sighthound #dogs #canine #animals #sketches #wip #long snouts enable really wide grins and I feel like I haven't been utilizing them enough lately

[kartsie]

I’m sick and miserable so it’s time to read all the baby batkids with their batdad I can get my hands on

#my art #batman #bruce wayne #yes Bruce has a Fanny pack it’s his dad utility belt for sunscreen and snacks #dick grayson #Robin #cassandra cain #batgirl #black bat #young Dick Grayson #young Cassandra Cain #batfam #batfamily #cass cain

[outsidewolves]

#luxury #consumer goods #public utility

[newttxt]

pls read the zosan fic “utilities included” and enjoy sanji making his own life as miserable as possible in plain view of his new roommate

#one piece #zoro #sanji #zosan #yes i proudly drew this for my friends fic. i think its genuinely charming and funny and well characterized #mind the tags and rating of course skfkdkfkkd #bree if ur out there… 🥰 #im gonna reply to this with the link once it posts (im scheduling this for tomorrow) but also u can find her on ao3 at strawhattery #utilities included

[bigfatbreak]

dad villain au: did emilie just. not consider at all that adrien was literally dying at the time. wow

she's in the habit of deciding when Adrien's suffering is acceptable, and if it is, she'll just fix it later.

#my art #adrien agreste #emelie agreste #gabriel agreste #dad villain au #mayura #as emelie faces zero consequences using the peacock she's more likely to utilize it in a way she didn't in the last timeline #last timeline she faced real problems. had to come to terms with her own eventual death. got to see action and reaction in process #in this timeline there was no consequences. so why shouldn't she make this as 'perfect' as possible? #before gabriel got his memories of the last timeline back he was actually pretty against her being weird abt adrien but eventually just #let her do whatever lmao. he was like. alright fine if it makes you happy dear #sure you can rearrange his genome so he cant catch chicken pox again whatver #as a result when things dont fit her delusions she gets upset moody or aggressive

[nmfonsek-art]

peace of mind.

#illustration #art #digital art #digital illustration #artists on tumblr #drawing #nicolas moreno #sun flare #tags #graffiti #de la soul #a tribe called quest #power pole #utility pole #b #flowers #magnolia #aestethic #chill #ball #basketball #sports #nba #chill vibes #chillout #vibing #summer #sunshine #sun

[spicyraeman]

more lae'zel doodles. I am nothing if not predictable

#bg3 #lae'zel #as much as I love fuckboi laezel #I don't actually think she'd dress like that on her own #she'd wear some utility core shit or whatever #very military very practical lots of pockets

[solphases]

small scenery practices

I blend my colors on the canvas itself so I hope ya'll don't find the palettes there too distracting

#original #my art #scenery #landscapes #nature #I guess??? #will never understand how to tag my scenery art aaa #btw if you're wondering about my brushes it's literally just basic hard round brush and hard square (flat/block) brush #I exclusively utilize pen pressure opacity to blend colors

[shitpostingkats]

The bad kids are a great group dynamic, but also the individual team ups? Never miss.

Fig and Fabian going in to talk to Garthy O’Brien completely confident despite the fact that neither of them remember what they’re supposed to ask for. Adaine and Riz sweating profusely through making small talk but being overjoyed when they get past it and get to investigate a bloody ritual site. Fig and the Cig Figs. Fabian and Gorgug being jocks together (bonus points if there's Ragh). The Bardy Boys. Spring Break I Believe In You. Every combination of these characters is some entirely new nonsense dynamic and I am so here for it

#Fig and Riz teaming up to perform the most chaotic life saving surgery on some random guy #Kristen and Adaine properly utilizing girl power to go investigate the av club and leave their houses to burn down #all flawless #dimension 20 #d20 #fantasy high #fig faeth #fabian seacaster #adaine abernant #riz gukgak #gorgug thistlespring #kristen applebees

[alienturnipp]

Fire Starter for @magspy 🔥

(Image Description in ALT)

#dnd #dnd art #dnd character #dnd commission #druid #wildfire druid #tiefling #alien turnip's art #alien turnip's commission #magspy #thank you so much again!!! must be my favorite cozy boy #also 🫶 that my crocheting & knitting knowledge is being utilized here sldkfjlskdjf it was such a thrill

[thebirdsandthebats]

Dick in Gotham handling a hostage situation at a local university. Some villain crashed a party in the student apartments and has the whole building locked down. Dick is in there with Damian, and they finally make it to the floor where the bad guy is and they’re having this big tense stand off before the final fight…

and then one of the college students who this guy had huddled in the corner grabs a chair and just fucking clocks this guy. He hits him over the head so hard that the chair breaks and the guy COLLAPSES. Dick is like . Oh??

And then the student turns around (with a truly unhinged glint in his eye) and Dick recognizes him and realizes OH . Oh this is Tim’s boyfriend. That’s the crazy guy who recruited us to go beat up cultists with him. Yeah we didn’t even need to come he had that handled actually

#nobody utilizes feral bf Bernard Dowd enough #you don’t get it he’s got enough pent up rage and he’s crazy enough to use it #batfamily #dc comics #tim drake #bernard dowd #timbern #timber #tim drake: robin #dick grayson

[1980s-slasher-film]

Accommodations are not special, they’re not a leg up, they’re not a benefit. They’re not putting anyone ahead in the race, nor are they taking anything away from others.

They exist to put us on a level playing ground to everyone else, and nothing more.

#ngl this is half directed at the autistics using acess passes at theme parks #specially the ones that don’t actually need it #obviously you can utilize them if you actually need them #but I mean the people that say skipping lines is a ‘benefit of autism’ or whatever #I’m seeing it pop up again #and it’s pissing me offff #disabled #actually disabled #chronic illness #actually chronically ill #autism #actually autistic #adhd #actually adhd #arthritis #pots #pots syndrome #heds #hypermobile ehlers danlos #ehlers danlos syndrome

[nerdpoe]

Duke can see ghosts, but he keeps it quiet.

Martha and Thomas Wayne? He's met them, personally. Shook their hands.

Duke has known since his powers manifested that he can see ghosts and interact with them. The ones on both the visible spectrum for the living and those that are not, like Martha and Thomas.

He hasn't told Bruce, though.

Martha and Thomas don't want him to feel like he's being watched all the time in his own house, they know how their son gets.

Point is, Duke knows a ghost when he sees one.

So when he goes to school and sees a new kid on the campus, he knows this kid is both on the visible spectrum for the living, and also is very, very dead.

Poor kid just doesn't realize it yet.

Duke sets out to make the dead kid feel at peace so he can move on or at least accept what happened to him.

Danny's just startled that this random guy decided to not only befriend him on his first day of school, but in ghost terms, is declaring his undying love for him.

#dcxdp #dpxdc #dp x dc #dc x dp #story prompt #phanfic #this is an underutilized ship #i will utilize it

[mostlysignssomeportents]

SoCal Gas spent millions on astroturf ops to fight climate rules

Today (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

It's a breathtaking fraud: SoCal Gas, the largest gas company in America, spent millions secretly paying people to oppose California environmental regulations, then illegally stuck its customers with the bill. We Californians were forced to pay to lobby against our own survival:

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article277266828.html

The criminal scheme is spelled out in eye-watering detail in a superb investigative report by Joe Rubin and Ari Plachta for the Sacramento Bee, which names the law firms and individual lawyers involved in the scam.

Here's the situation: SoCal Gas is California's private, regulated gas monopoly. They are allowed to lobby, but are legally required to charge their lobbying activities to their shareholders, and are prohibited from raising customer rates to pay for lobbying.

The company spent years secretly violating this rule, in the sleaziest way possible: working with corporate cartels like the California Restaurant Association and BizFed, the monopoly paid BigLaw white-shoe firms to procure people who posed as concerned citizens in order to oppose climate regulations that are essential to the state's very survival.

The bill topped $36 million – and it was illegally charged to its customers, the Californians whose immediate health and long-term survival these efforts opposed. SoCal Gas refuses to disclose the full extent of the spending, as do its lawyer-procurers, who cite legal confidentiality and a First Amendment right to secretly seek to influence policy in their refusal to disclose their profits from this illegal conduct.

The law firms involved are a who's-who of California's most prominent corporate fixers, including Reichman Jorgensen and Holland & Knight. The partners involved have a long rap sheet for anti-climate dirty tricking, most notably Jennifer Hernandez, notorious in climate justice history for an incident where activists claim she posed as one of them, infiltrating a campaign to force corporate despoilers to clean up their pollution in order to sabotage it, while secretly on a wealthy, prominent landowner's payroll.

Hernandez claims to care about the environment and says that her longstanding, corporate-funded, extensive campaigns and lawsuits against state environmental regulations are motivated by concern over their impact on working people. Her firm, Holland & Knight, denies serving SoCal Gas in opposing gas regulations, but it received $594k in ratepayer dollars, and submitted comments opposing the rules on its own behalf. Those comments were nearly identical to the comments submitted by SoCal Gas.

Hernandez also represents an obscure organization called The Two Hundred for Home Ownership in "a flurry of lawsuits" over California Air Resources Board rules on pollution, seeking to overturn the state's landmark climate change regulations.

Two Hundred for Home Ownership was founded by Robert Apodaca, who told the Bee that Hernandez's work for him is pro bono and not funded by SoCal Gas, but his entry into the fray occurred just as SoCalGas was founding an astroturf group called Californians for Fair and Balanced Energy (C4BES), which pretended to be an independent organization, disguising its relationship with SoCal Gas.

Apodaca is also founder of United Latinos Vote, an organization that had been largely dormant for seven years, not receiving any donations, until 2018, when the California Building Industry Association gave it $99k. The CBIA is a large-dollar recipient of donations from SoCal Gas, and its CEO insists that it was not acting on SoCal Gas's behalf when it made its unpredented donation to Apodaca.

The CBIA donation to United Latinos Vote was forerunner to a flood of corporate donations from the likes of Chevron, Marathon and Phillips 66. Shortly after receiving this cash, United Latinos Vote ran a full page ad in the LA Times, accusing the Sierra Club of pushing for anti-gas appliance rules that would harm working class Latino families.

This ad, in turn, featured prominently in advocacy by the SoCal Gas front group C4BES, funded with $29.1m in ratepayer money, which it then spent seeking to link clean appliance rules with anti-Latino racism. A quarter of California's carbon emissions come from home gas use.

SoCal Gas is regulated by the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC), which tolerated this mounting illegal conduct for many years, even as the company circulated internal memos as early as 2015 discussing its plans to oppose electrification in the state on the basis that it constituted "a significant risk to our business."

But last year, CPUC fined SoCal Gas $10m. Now, CPUC's Public Advocate office has filed a damning, extensive report on SoCal Gas's unlawful conduct, seeking $80m in rate cuts to compensate Californians for the funds misappropriated to protect the company's shareholder interests:

https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M517/K407/517407314.PDF

Additionally, the Public Advocate is demanding $233m in fines for the company's refusal to allow investigators to audit its books and discover the full extent of the fraud.

SoCal Gas is the nation's largest utility, but (incredibly), it's not the dirtiest. That prize goes to Ohio's FirstEnergy, which handed $60m in ratepayer dollars to state politicians in illegal bribes in exchange for coal and nuclear subsidies and cancellation of state climate rules. That scandal led to GOP speaker of the Ohio House Larry Householder being sentenced to 20 years in prison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal

There is something extraordinarily sleazy about using ratepayers' own money to lobby against their interests. SoCal Gas and its Big Law enablers have funneled millions in Californian's money into campaigns to poison us and boil us alive, and they did it while using workers and racialized people as human shields.

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/19/cooking-the-books-with-gas/#reichman-jorgensen

Image: Maryland GovPics (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/mdgovpics/6635539089/

Jackie (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/79874304@N00/197532792

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #socal gas #california #climate emergency #climate denial #Reichman Jorgensen #california restaurant association #astroturf #Holland and Knight #puc #cpuc #california public utility company #fraud #Alice Walton #bribery #ohio #bizfed #Jennifer Hernandez #American Gas Association #The Two Hundred for Home Ownership #Robert Apodaca #Californians for Fair and Balanced Energy #C4BES #United Latinos Vote #Chevron #Marathon #Phillips 66 #sacramento bee #sacbee #Joe Rubin

[newttxt]

he’s here!!

from ch 7 of utilities included

#one piece #sanji #zoro #luffy #zosan #nami #usopp #vivi #weh… i had so much fun drawing luffy here!!! hes just a guy! #i had something i was going to say here but now i forget. probably for the best. anyway. good chapter. please read if ur interested! #utilities included