Stop telling yourself that the grass is greener on the other side, because it’s not. It is greener where you water it. So take control of your life and start watering your own pastures and grow your own greener grasses.
Fuck grass, clover is a nitrogen fixing legume and dandelions are super useful. Be the weeds. Grow on concrete in defiance of those who would thwart you.
It’s not just Amazon and Apple
that expect massive taxpayer subsidies in exchange for locating
physical plant in your town: when Google builds a new data-center, it
does so on condition of multimillion-dollar “incentives” from local
governments – but Google also demands extraordinary secrecy
from local officials regarding these deals, secrecy so complete that
city attorneys have instructed town councillors to refuse to answer
questions about it during public meetings.
Data-centers consume massive amounts of electricity and water, and so
companies are always on the hunt for low costs for these necessities.
Sometimes, those savings come from geography – siting a data-center by a
river or lake, or in a cooler climate – but they can also come from
sweetheart deals from local power and water companies.
The Partnership for Working Families has been fighting for transparency
on these deals since Google’s first wave of data-center buildouts in San
Jose in 2006. They recently filed public records requests in eight
cities where Google has built or is building data-center and seven
cities with Google offices.
The records reveal a pattern of extreme secrecy: Google uses
special-purpose, anonymous LLCs to do its deals, sometimes using
multiple LLCs for different parts of the deal (for example, one LLC
might acquire the land, and another might develop it).
Google binds the cities it deals with to vows of silence, through
extensive nondisclosure agreements. The agreements prohibit cities from
revealing Google’s power and water usage, payroll data, and investment
level. Google argues that these are trade secrets that might reveal
sensitive competitive data, but this is also the information that voters
need in order to assess whether they are getting value for money when
they hand over millions to one of the world’s largest, most profitable
companies.
What’s more, the NDAs also prohibit disclosure of the existence of the
NDAs themselves – a kafkaesque American version of the UK’s notorious “super-injunctions” – further shielding these deals from democratic scrutiny and debate.
For example, if it wasn’t for the Partnership for Working Families’
records requests, the people of Council Bluffs, Iowa would not know that
the city government sold Google 850 acres of land for one dollar; the
people of Midlothian, Texas would not know that Google got a ten-year
tax-holiday from the city in exchange for creating a mere 40 jobs; and
so on.
The secrecy doesn’t end after Google opens its data-centers, either. In
Berkeley County, South Carolina, Google formed a new LLC to apply for
additional water usage permits, years after it had opened its
data-center. The people of Berkeley County are not allowed to know how
much water Google is already drawing from their local aquifers, but the
new LLC was applying for permission to be the county’s third-largest
water user, and its link with Google was only discovered because the
company made the mistake of listing it as sharing an address with the
other anonymous LLC it had formed to build and operate its data-center.
Long-serving local officials defended the secrecy and the subsidies,
saying that corporate America expects democratically elected governments
to negotiate in secret to pay companies to operate in their
jurisdictions.
“And remember: the sky is the limit! You can be anything you want to be!”
“Thank you. I want to be a secretary.”
That stopped them short. “What?”
“A secretary,” she repeated.
“But…” they trailed off, dumbfounded. “Why? You could be a CEO, a scientist, a law–”
“I don’t want to be a CEO,” she said. “I want to be a secretary.”
They scoffed. “You want to answer phones all day?”
She smiled. “Yes.”
“Schedule appointments?”
“I like organizing.”
“Be a second banana?”
An affirmative nod. “I’m skilled at helping.”
“I just don’t understand,” they said. “HOW could you be okay with all of this?!”
“I enjoy the work.”
“BUT YOU CAN BE WHATEVER YOU WANT TO BE!”
“I know.”
“Then WHY?!”
She shrugged.
“Because I want to be a secretary.”
Honestly though, this is very similar to my mom’s experience. She’s always been super bright, but has realized as she’s gotten older that intellectual pursuits just aren’t her jam. She dropped out of her PhD program to have kids, and although she has her master’s and was a pretty good school psychologist, she hated having to make huge decisions. She’s a church secretary now and loves it, and she’s GOOD at it; she’s letting her school psych certification permanently expire this year with zero regrets. If you can be anything you want, that includes the things we don’t tend to value as highly as a society. Not everybody is built for or wants the “respectable” careers.
My grandma did this to me, saying that i didn’t want to get stuck on the outside, making coffee and filing papers. The thing is, that’s exactly what I’ve always enjoyed the most, making and organizing things. That would be enough for me.
Nobody seems to realize that if you tell people they can be anything they want to be they will. And not everyone WANTS to be doctors or lawyers or CEOs or scientists. Sometimes, they just want to be a secretary.
it took me a LOT of therapy before i was able to shrug off the effects of the Gifted Child Upbringing enough to realize that what i really wanted to be was a house husband and Local Queerdad who writes novels sometimes. god, i’m so much happier now.
ain’t nothing wrong with an ordinary life. don’t let anybody tell you you have to be the top dog to be worth anything.
There’s nothing wrong with a simple life. Be whatever you want to be,
If you’re happy, you’ve made it. That’s the real definition of success.
Honestly the positions on the top are being so idealized while people don’t tell you about long hours and kills-you-before-50 levels of stress. Some people just want a more comfortable job that leaves them time for family and actual LIFE.
Throwback to all these Jesus comics I drew in 2012…
Good post OP
People forget that to Jesus, love was more important than the sins you commit
okay @danceswithunworldly but i’m pretty sure op’s point with this comic is that being LGBT+ is not a sin. and that homophobia, islamophobia, bigotry and hatred are sins – ones that Jesus is not pumped about ( “I didn’t die on a cross for this BS”).
the sins you commit are important to Jesus because they cause harm – and homophobia, rather than being gay, is one of those sins.
Not religious, but I fucking LOVE canon Jesus (and fandom Jesus sucks.)
sometimes, people don’t understand that we are hated for being autistic. “But I don’t hate autistic people!”.
That’s right! Because you don’t know how autistic people are.
You know, people never bullied me for being autistic. Because neither me nor they had the terminology. Nah, they punished me for being weird. And what made me weird to their eyes? I spoke weird and often stumbled, and I spoke like a grownup anyway, and I wouldn’t shut up about Ancient Greece. I moved weird too, because I was (am) really clumsy, and I didn’t have any friends. I was boring and didn’t catch jokes (made at my expense) and I didn’t look them in the eye, and so on and on.
If you asked any of the people who bullied me for years whether they hate autistic people, they’d say “no!”. Because they don’t hate autistic people, but oh boy do they hate weird people. Perhaps they don’t hate autistic people, but surely they hated me for being obviously autistic.
I’ve been trying to explain this concept to a lot of people. You did a really good job summing it up.
