Thank you for letting me know this was a thing!! Total game-changer.

Can’t quote the lyrics without sharing the awesome lyric video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbQSzs11euk

Used to sing this song to my kid at bedtime but he hasn’t asked for it lately. Maybe I’ll try to work it back into the rotation.

I have a child and I’d be the first to recommend not having one. It’s expensive, it wrecked me emotionally and physically, and I worry every day about what kind of world my kid will grow up into.

But all those things are worth it in the end to me because I really wanted to be a parent. My kid is an absolute treasure to me and I put up with the suffering because I do genuinely love parenting and love seeing him grow up. If I was any less enthusiastic about the process going in, I would have either run away or killed myself by now. That’s how demoralizing and traumatic parenting can be. Granted I have a special needs kid but so do probably 10% of parents so do you want to roll those dice?

All that aside, the fact is that parenting these days is filled with societal obstacles. With both parents working, you’re rationing sick days and constantly running out, leaving no time for vacation or personal days off. This leaves the option of either taking unpaid days off or reducing one’s working hours. Since no one is home doing housework all day, working parents spend their evenings and nights doing housework. If you need to run an errand or take the kid to a doctor’s appointment, that comes out of either your paid work time or your free time. Childcare is both expensive and hard to get, with wait-lists for daycares in some cities of several months. And once your kid is in public school, you have to find after school care, which is not guaranteed for every kid at every school.

And don’t even get me started about summer. Three months of cobbled-together summer camps and asking/begging family members and friends to watch your kid when their busy schedules permit. If your kid has special needs or requires trained caregivers, you are out of luck.

These are fixable problems, but they require massive government-subsidized investment in childcare and parental leave structures and the government is not doing that. Childcare salaries are so low that the supply of daycare teachers is basically dried up. Same with public school teachers and afterschool caregivers. Why work as an afterschool teacher when you can be an independent nanny and make twice as much per hour? As for parental leave, there is no requirement that parental leave cover anything beyond the bare bones of the time needed to give birth, leaving most new parents to burn through their entire year’s worth of sick time during their babies first month of life when there is a doctor’s appointment just about every week. Then blow through it again next year when the kid gets sick twice a month in daycare. My kid is six years old and this is the first year I haven’t run out of sick days before June.

Our society was designed for families with at least one full-time caregiver, and now that is basically impossible but the system has not been updated. This game is not designed for us. So why would anyone choose to play?

Sparse on details but she was with an older man who was not her relative so I’m not hopeful it’s a good reason. 😣

Found safe and alive! I wish they’d put that in the title of the article but of course they want you to click on it.

What could possibly be in your browser history that you don’t want people to see?

I’m sorry, do you live in the same world as the rest of us? Seems like half the country wants to murder gay people and thinks porn should be illegal and you can’t fathom why someone might want to hide perfectly acceptable parts of their identity?

This would basically disallow any closeted gay/trans person from ever running for office, for example. People deserve their privacy.

This is actually the main policy stance of the Liberal Gun Club. That we’re spending all this time regulating guns and ignoring/underaddressing the root causes like mental health issues, domestic violence, toxic masculinity, income inequality, poverty, etc.

Not to say that guns shouldn’t be regulated to some extent, but with the way mental health is in America I’m pretty sure we’d just see a spike in knife and baseball bat crime and suicide by hanging if we somehow magically got rid of guns.

https://theliberalgunclub.com/about-us/root-cause-mitigation-2/

You would need a pretty big solar array to power a construction site with it. But you’re headed in the right direction. Not only is it an option to use renewables to power battery-powered vehicles, but also pretty much any form of electricity generation increases in efficiency and decreases in emissions (per kilowatt generated) as it scales up. Even if you are burning the same fuel at the power plant, the emissions are going to be lower overall than the equivalent number of individual internal combustion engines because the efficiency of the power plant is much higher than an ICE. Vehicle engines are ridiculously inefficient overall and when you use a more efficient fuel like natural gas it is even more drastic of a difference.

It’s also much easier to put stack controls on a power plant to capture or reduce emissions than it is to put emissions controls on all construction equipment individually. This has implications for carbon capture, which could happen right at the stack. However, there’s a non-climate change benefit here as well which is that the local air quality would be greatly increased around construction sites. Currently most construction equipment does not have much in the way of emissions controls for other things like sulfur and nitrogen oxides or particulate emissions. Power plants have to meet emissions standards for all of these.

I get what you’re trying to say but Stephen Farrea is a member of NSC-131, an actual honest-to-goodness neo -Nazi street gang. Like sig-heiling, swastikas, sonnenrads, the whole nine yards.

Now these jokers get plenty of support and encouragement from the local Republicans and that’s a huge issue but it’s important to make it clear that when we call this guy a neo-Nazi we mean that literally.

And if a municipality underprotects against heat? What happens?

People die of heat stroke, that’s what happens. And the municipality maybe changes the law, but only after someone dies.

Protections in this situation are at the federal and state level because the consequences of doing them wrong are much more than just “suffering economically.”

And because worker deaths aren’t always a strong enough motivator at the local level. Frankly, not every town cares about their migrant workers and other working class folks, especially if labor is divided along racial and/or class lines.