This feels like one of those right wing memes that could go either way, but let’s break it down like this Uncle Ben and Aunt Jamima are both domestic servants, do you think that’s an appropriate mascot for a company? Do you think black folks want them as some of their oldest icons?
Land of lakes also has a stereotypically dressed native woman who probably wouldn’t dress like that at all even back in the day.
I get that most people couldn’t give a shit either way but when you use your brain to think about how messed up presumably white owned companies are for using slaves and genocided people as their logos or mascots is pretty fucked.
But hey you’re not here for an insightful discussion, you’re here to get those hate clicks.
Well, the Sun-Maid girl is clearly working a job that’s mostly done by immigrants from the south these days, so using a white woman instead of a brown one denies them representation. But using a brown woman would also be racist because it would perpetuate harmful stereotypes… hm, what to do?
Little Debbie is clearly a child. Do you want children to be exploited for marketing purposes?
At least a Quakers are historically against war and slavery, so I guess he can stay.
As a European (we had slavery, made more wars than you can imagine and have probably the worst history you can’t even imagine) nice try locking people up in “black” vs “white”.
I hope you’re willing to learn because that is historically incorrect. The first nation to abolish slavery was Hati around a decade before the first European country (Denmark). That is if we are talking abolish and keep abolished in all territories controlled. Persia is possibly the first country recorded to have used slaves but they would have periods of “abolishment” which were probably good for causing slave revolts in new areas they were thinking of conquering. Arguably the first country to have and to abolish slavery.
I suppose that once again depends on definitions. There’s likely a reason people often use the term “wage slavery” these days even though on paper, salaried workers are by no means slaves, since they can quit whenever they want to, but that doesn’t mean that in practice, people don’t end up in situations that feel like slavery anyways.
Debt slavery is another one that gets thrown around, even though the possibility of declaring bankruptcy and thus getting off the hook for only a fraction of what you owe is technically available. It almost seems as if slavery is part of the human condition, and if not externally imposed, people will find a way to self-impose it in one way or another.
Either way, it seems silly to suggest that only the slavery imposed by one particular group of people on one particular group of other people is morally objectionable, and I’m also not entirely convinced that erasing any reminders of it does anything at all to right that wrong. At some point, it must be possible to look back at the past and say “well, that was awful, but at least we’re over it now”, but that isn’t possible if you erase any and all traces of it, is it?
No, I’m just pointing out that “they practiced slavery” isn’t an argument you can just throw at any race or nationality in particular without inflicting massive self-damage. Literally everyone is guilty of it.
haha no. such a huge claim requires substantial evidence - and you left yourself an easy out. Many cultures practiced slavery, true. Most cultures? Maybe an argument could be made. All?
ALL?
That requires substantial evidence there’s absolutely nothing supporting it.
Now I get it, the easiest way to debase your enemy’s righteousness is to drag them down to your level. But you don’t get this one shitbag. Slavery isn’t universal. You just want it to be so it makes you feel better about your premise.
Since you’re the one making the claim that not all cultures have a history of it, I’ll leave it to you to find me a single counterexample of a culture that never practiced it. But even if that should exist, I think there’s certainly overwhelming evidence that it was extremely widespread and common practice on every single continent at some point in history.
Why is it so important to you that “almost all cultures” practiced slavery? What does that do for you?
At the risk of repeating myself: “they practiced slavery” isn’t an argument you can just throw at any race or nationality in particular without inflicting massive self-damage.
It doesn’t absolve the inherent evil of the institution. No amount of “well billy and tommy did it too” makes it right, kiddo.
I never claimed that. But I’m still waiting for you to find me a single example of a culture that never practiced slavery.
So… Now that you have multiple examples, what then sport? Will you reevaluate your flawed premise and integrate new information that refutes your logic, or will you just piddle along with the flawed reasoning that got you here?
Yeah it’s hard to have a good faith debate about a post that wasn’t made in good faith. Anyone who’s being intellectually honest wouldn’t try to equate these company mascots.
Only the picture. There was an actual Uncle Ben who was a rice farmer. And an actual Aunt Jemima making pancake mix. Both were born into slavery, both had white corporations exploit them. Uncle and Aunt are also both titles used in the Antebellum South for older house slaves trusted by the family.
From 1946 to 2020, Uncle Ben’s products carried the image of an elderly African-American man dressed in a bow tie, which is said to have been based on a Chicago maître d’hôtel named Frank Brown with the name “Ben” being a possible reference to a shrewd rice farmer from Houston. In 2020, Mars told Ad Age, “We don’t know if a real ‘Ben’ ever existed.” According to Mars, Uncle Ben was an African-American rice grower known for the quality of his rice. Gordon L. Harwell, an entrepreneur who had supplied rice to the armed forces in World War II, chose the name “Uncle Ben’s” as a means to expand his marketing efforts to the general public.
I’m not making a statement about the post, but “it’s just shit posting” is a reeeeaaal good way to turn this place into a nazi bar. Not calling OP a nazi, just saying that this argument right here is chum in the water for them
Mia, the Land o Lakes butter maiden, is actually rather interesting, at least the modern version they got rid of. The artist was a member of the Red Lake Chippewa and the design included traditional Ojibwe floral motifs. Yeah, it needed to go, but it wasn’t the worst by a long shot.
I just love the idea of a native american being iconfied for… butter.
like, wow, that’s so very, very native and authentic - butter.
I get it, it’s the land-o-lakes, minnesota, and they take butter fucking serious folks, they make it, they eat it, they sculpt it, so yeah, they’re REALLY into butter… but why the stolen iconography? why associate the native americans, who didn’t domesticate cows, with butter of all things?
like what the actual fuck was the line of thought?
Your thoughts are interesting, but I always presumed it was just a simple tribute of sorts. Like you said, Land-O-Lakes, beautiful, natural scenery of America…accompanied by a beautiful Native American woman.
Now take the product itself, like you said, make it make sense. Ehh. Maybe you just can’t. They wanted a mascot & instead of a smiling cow or potato, they chose a woman. Sex sells!
cultural appropriation sells. it’s not just any woman kneeling serving up the dairy products, nah… keep telling yourself it didn’t mean anything, maybe one day you’ll believe yourself, but make no mistake, they wouldn’t have put a white woman kneeling there.
The native cultural influence is pretty strongly interwoven in the fabric of Minnesota. It’s very possible the thought process was just that the locals associated that image with their state, just like the brand name.
The Anishinaabe and Dakota have had major influence on the state and that’s been recognized more in recent history with the renaming of certain places back to their native name, like Bde Maka Ska.
Most of the naming in the metro(and the state name) comes from the Dakota peoples. The Anishinaabe were located more in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin so you’ll see the influence there. For example the town of Biwabik in the iron range which is the Anishinaabe word for iron.
Honestly if they could standardise the format the way monitors are named is S tier. All the major important specs right in the name, super easy to compare or find what you’re looking for
I generally don’t try to correct shitposts, but for some reason this one annoyed me because it’s only sort of true and the real truth is more interesting.
Shakespeare’s observation (from Cymbeline) explains why attempts to alleviate the pain of disease, injury or simple surgical procedures by producing unconsciousness are almost as old as civilization, although the techniques were crude. Most involved ingestion of ethanol and or herbal mixtures, but ‘knock-out’ blows to the head and bilateral carotid artery compression (carotid derives from the Greek for stupor) are also described. These methods were impossible to quantify, and the best that can be said of many is that they were harmlessly ineffective, but that is obviously not the case with head trauma or obstructing the flow of blood to the brain. Hypnotism, introduced as ‘animal magnetism’ or ‘Mesmerism’ in the latter part of the eighteenth century (depicted above), can be effective in susceptible individuals, but such people are relatively rare in developed societies.
Most of the herbal mixtures were devised in Southern Europe or the Orient where plants with active alkaloids (e.g. opium) are indigenous, but one called ‘Dwale’ appears in medieval English texts. Although a number of drugs used in modern anaesthesia have their origins in substances found in plants those early concoctions are irrelevant to the development of effective, drug-induced anaesthesia. It stems from discoveries made in Britain during the latter half of the 18th century, the time of the ‘Enlightenment’. However, di-ethyl ether, the first agent to be demonstrated successfully in public, was originally synthesized (by the action of sulphuric acid on ethanol) in the thirteenth century. There are early reports of it producing both pain relief and loss of consciousness, but such observations were not applied clinically for centuries - examples of a recurring theme: clinical use of the effect did not follow until long after its original observation.
And it isn’t even really true about using a gas as anaesthesia:
Davy’s ‘Researches, Chemical and Philosophical: Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide’, published in 1799, describes two major effects of its inhalation: euphoria (he coined the term ‘laughing gas’) and analgesia (it eased the pain of his erupting wisdom tooth). Davy suggested inhalation of nitrous oxide during surgical operations, but this was not acted upon (that recurring theme again) though a slightly earlier event may indicate possible explanations. In 1784 a London surgeon, James Moore, published a description of nerve compression in producing numbness for limb surgery – most people have experienced this effect after falling asleep while lying on an arm. The method was used successfully for an amputation performed painlessly by John Hunter, the ‘father’ of modern surgery, yet there is no record of a repeat. Was it fear of complications, inconsistency of effect, or simply that minds were not yet attuned to the concept of surgery without pain?
Davy went on to work at the Royal Institution in London, giving demonstrations of nitrous oxide and other discoveries of the age. In 1813, another scientist famous in later life, Michael Faraday, joined him as assistant and studied the inhalation of ether. He published his findings, which included soporific and analgesic effects, in 1818, but one subject had taken over 24 hours to recover full consciousness. Such an observation provides another explanation for failure to implement important observations – the difficulty of quantifying and controlling their effects.
Then:
The story moves to the USA, specifically to Hartford, Connecticut on 10 December 1844, when Gardner Quincy Colton, a travelling showman, gave a demonstration of the latest discoveries, including inhalation of nitrous oxide. In the audience was Horace Wells, a local dentist who had mastered the art of using new materials to make dentures, and had sought ways of easing the pain of first removing the patient’s own rotten teeth. Here was a prepared mind, and Wells realized that he might have found a solution when a young man (one Samuel Cooley) who had inhaled the gas injured his shin without any apparent discomfort.
…
Discussions led to an experiment the following morning during which Wells had one of his own teeth removed by a colleague, John Riggs, after Colton had administered the gas. Wells learned how to make nitrous oxide, and used it in his practice until he felt confident enough to demonstrate the technique at the nearest major medical centre, Boston. He gave a talk to a class of the Harvard Medical School and then administered the gas to one of them who, unfortunately for Wells, cried out when a tooth was removed. Even though the student remembered nothing Wells reacted badly (he was probably a manic depressive) to being dismissed as a charlatan and, although he continued to use nitrous oxide, he faded from the scene.
However, William Morton, who had previously been both Wells’s student and later partner, had helped with the demonstration, and was made of sterner stuff, recognizing that a ‘better’ agent was required. He was by then a medical student at Harvard and consulted, among others, his chemistry teacher, Dr. Charles Jackson. What part Jackson actually played in Morton’s decision to use ether by inhalation became the subject of great controversy, but there is no doubt that it was Morton who studied it, tested it in animals and then tried it in his patients. Having been successful with these trials he offered to demonstrate his method to Dr. John Warren, surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and was invited to do so on 16 October 1846. Before a large audience, Morton administered ether vapour to Gilbert Abbott before Warren removed a tumour from Abbott’s neck without any sign of distress. A new era had dawned.
Another fun fact is that using ether during childbirth was forbidden by church for a long time because bible specifically says that giving birth in pain is God’s punishment.
The IRS is actually testing a new system where they just tell you how much you owe/get, and that’s it unless there’s unreported income and such that needs to be corrected.
Yes, but previously all the big player opted into a middle ground goverment sanctioned “free file” system that made filing taxes free for most Americans from these companies.
Thr big players have recently opted out, so the IRS is now actually running the pilot this year.
I’m aware of this. This is the first time I’m aware they managed to get a pilot system and I think that shows great promise. Also, people are noticing more and more, and pushing back.
I’m not going to lie; there is a threshold where just being a complete tribal savage is easier than dealing with the beauracacy. If it becomes too time consuming, expensive, and stressful to do taxes, I will squat in the soon-to-be ruins of business real estate and hunt the local pigeon and duck populations to survive.
So you mainly want to avoid Intuit owned companies and H&R Block. They alone spent millions per year to lobby against easy and free filing for taxpayers.
Then there’s the ACTR (American Coalition Of Taxpayer Rights) who spend $100s of thousands a year lobbying for the same (and are made up by 14 members:
Edit: Started a post in /c/asklemmy to find out alternatives. Tax Act was my go-to company, but they’ve joined the ACTR at some point, so they’re a no-go.
Edit 2: Checking out some older reddit threads on the subject, FreeTaxUSA may be the best option so far. FreeTaxUSA are owned by Tax Hawk which is a member of the ACTR, however of all the ones i’ve checked so far, they are the cheapest (free Federal and $15 state), and at least they’re not one of the top lobbying companies like Intuit(Turbo Tax/Credit Karma tax services), H&R Block, or Jackson Hewitt.
It’s already like this with free tax returns. It just sucks you have to go through Intuit, because of their lobbying. The government is also counting on you to not properly doing your taxes. They want you to be lazy and pay more in taxes, for the convenience.
They don’t want to come after people who aren’t paying their taxes. They’re making it inconvenient to file, so poor people who don’t have time/ knowledge overpay.
You apparently misunderstood what I was saying. The IRS is testing a program where they tell you how much you get/owe, and that’s it unless you need to make changes like adding deductions or reporting unreported income.
And you’d have to be in a pretty high income bracket or run your own business for that to happen.
I make upper middle class money and keep all receipts and such, and I’ve never had my itemized deductions surpass the standardized deduction. But every year I enter all of it just to see.
If you’re one of the people who do, then you’re likely already have a tax accountant doing your taxes for you.
It’s a new "Direct file" pilot program. It will automatically calculate your deductions and credits, as they are not in anyway trying to “stop you” from getting them.
No it’s not. They’re testing out direct filing in 13 states this year, cutting companies like Intuit out of the equation for a giant chunk of the population.
Yeah. Where I live I get a message from our version of the IRS. They tell me how much taxes I’ve paid last year, and if I’m owed back taxes or if I owe more. If I don’t change it, I accept it. Easy.
That sounds like how it works in my country. Every year is just log in, take a quick look at the numbers, sign and send it away. Takes a minute or two and it just works.
Also, the IRS only escalates straight to jail if it’s incredibly obvious you’re intentionally committing tax fraud. If your forms are wrong they just send you a letter to fix it.
I wish more people were aware of this. One year I made a rather significant number entry error and should have owed a couple thousand more than I paid. I got a fairly routine letter later in the year asking me to correct the error. I had a little mental panic, reran the numbers, and filed an amended return. There was no pressure, you always have payment options, and they send you back another letter confirming the acceptance of the amended file. I understand that many people would have significant problems paying extra unexpectedly but unless you are actively committing fraud you are not an immediate priority for the IRS.
And if you can’t afford to pay it all in one go, they will work with you to set up a payment plan. If you can pay it off in 6 months it’s basically a non-issue.
Make sure you save all those letters, lest you resolve the error and get a letter several years later saying you owe $x + interest due to an error that you’ve already resolved. Because they don’t have those records digitally, apparently, and if you don’t have paper copies of every document involved you might just get to pay that penalty whether it was ever due in the first place, or even if you’ve already paid the penalty. Or get a lawyer.
Which is what happened to me the year before last.
Leave it to big tech to introduce the same exact product with less features while they gaslight you into believing it’s a shiny new product that you should be excited about.
Sure our product is made by Filipino children, and sure it pollutes pristine wetlands, and yes, it does unfairly contribute to an insanely skewed distribution of wealth, but think of the INNOVATION!
When I see “New and improved!!” all I get is “We have found a way to make more money, and we sure as fuck ain’t passing the earnings to you”, or potentially “We faced a lawsuit so have since begun to follow the smallest possible set of FDA guidelines the law allows for, making OUR product safer for YOU!”
This is hysterical! Like, actually high effort guide that’s content is insanely funny. I had a great time reading this. It’s honestly so high quality, I’m geeking out the fact someone made this, and made it so well.
That site lead me to a Pennsylvania coal region website with some old recipes and I love it. You can tell how old the recipes are when some (the bread recipes) say you should store your dough by a warm, dry place like a coal stove or how they require a large amount of ingredients but make multiple loaves of bread.
Ah, Zombocom. Good times were had at Zombocom. Great times, in fact. I met my wife on Zombocom. I even found my job through Zombocom. Hell, Zombocom found me my house.
Come to think of it, there isn’t a thing I have I don’t owe to Zombocom. Zombocom taught me a lot, too. I learned how to sew thanks to Zombocom. How to white water raft. How to program assembly. How to build a tent, light a fire. Zombocom taught me how to cook a meal, taught me Spanish, how to walk, taught me the waltz, and how to talk. Hey now… Zombocom taught me blacksmithing, and how to brush my teeth and make my bed.
I know, right? I ran across that on Hacker News one day and it’s changed my world. When I’m bored, I just hit that “Surprise Me” link and usually get some great shit.
Wilby introduced me to nonograms.org which has also changed my life.
How interesting… I swear I learn the most from the comments on my shitposts. Someone recommended a Studio Ghibli film the other day (Whisper of the Heart), another poster brought up some good songs, now you with this cool-ass shit. It’s a good week.
the point of the intellectual exercise, is given enough time and resources, the law of mathematical probability says all outcomes are certainty, not that something has already happened before, but it's a neat "trying to be smarter" posit
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