Omg omg I got a bulbasaur at build a bear and I was kinda embarrassed about buying it for myself and stuff but there weren’t any other kids in the store or shoppers for that matter and the girl helping me said she was glad to here it was for me as she collects some plushies and has her own bulbasaur.
Well she was almost done stuffing him and then I noticed that you can put scents in your bear and fucking love cotton candy and the girl basically car salesmen style sold me on the scent pad and asked where I wanted the scent to go
And I didn’t know where it should go but she herself being quite the plushie enthusiast was like “you’re gonna hug him a lot right? may I reccomend right here” and pointed to his forehead
So I was like “awe cute yeah that sounds good” (my bulbasaur is totally stuffed mind you and I even had her make him extra firm )
and then the girl rolls up her sleeves and was like “alright bulbasaur! Here we go! I apologize in advance but this is gonna look very inappropriate!”
And she fisted my super full bulbasaur all the way to her elbow saying sorry to him and to me over and over again. It took her several tries to get the scent pad in place since my bulbasaur was so stuffed and she looked like she was straining and saying “I don’t know why they didn’t think about this design more, so many parents are gonna complain about this one day, I know it”
So all in all this was the best build a bear experience I’ve had since I was a little kid and I love my fat, cotton candy scented, anally inclined bulbasaur to pieces
I WORK AT BUILD A BEAR AND EVERY TIME I HAVE TO STUFF ONE OF THESE BASTARDS I HAVE TO ALSO PREPARE MYSELF FOR TWO THINGS: FIRST, I HAVE TO PREPARE MYSELF FOR PUTTING THE STUFFING TUBE INSIDE OF ITS ASS. RAWING BULBASAUR. “RAWING BULBASAUR” IS NOT A SENTENCE I THOUGHT I’D WRITE ON THIS LOVELY CHRISTMAS EVE NIGHT BUT HERE WE ARE.
SECOND: I HAVE TO PREPARE MYSELF FOR THE CHILD PURCHASING THE ANALLY INCLINED POKEMON ASKING ME, “why is it in it’s butt?”
LIKE I DON’T K N O W BUT IT ISN’T MY FAULT AND I CAN’T VERY WELL SAY I’M “RAWING BULBASAUR” IN FRONT OF A CHILD AND PARENT COMBO BUT EVERY TIME I LAUGH AND SAY, “that’s just the way it is” WHILE I FORCE STUFFING INTO THE POOR TOY’S ASSHOLE AND ASK MYSELF HOW MY LIFE CAME TO THIS
when we got bulbasaur my manager looked at me, looked at its anus, and said she was sorry.
this is the life I, and build a bear employees everywhere, must lead.
If I go to Build-a-Bear I’m getting a bulbasaur
I have one and I suggest getting a voice thing in it as well because it sounds like it is protesting the prostate exam it’s going through the whole time.
i really hate it when people say you shouldn’t use the computer or watch tv before going to bed and instead you should read a book because you need winding down time or you won’t sleep. ha ha good one do you know what happens if i start a book before bed?! i end up fucking finishing it that’s what
@in-all-conscience objective fact is called fact because its fact, not your butthurt feminazi opinion
Jumping to blame women for a bridge collapse when there’s no reason to believe that they were responsible for its collapse is misogyny. That’s not an opinion. Also the screenshot is fake news: the construction team was not female-led (and appears to be almost entirely male) and the engineering team was not all-female. Even if they were, there’s no reason to believe them being female had anything to do with the bridge collapsing. I don’t know the exact percentage of bridge collapses in history involved all-male design teams, but I’m probably going to guess well over 95% of them. And there’s no evidence that women who choose STEM fields are less capable than the men who do, in any aspect of them.
I’m not even a feminist. I’m just not a dumbass.
if the team was led by a woman, then women can’t build bridges
if the team was led by a man, then building bridges is hard.
I mean the huge problem with this line of attack is that obviously in this case it’s embarrassing to have to walk it back if it turns out the bridge was designed and constructed by men, but more generally what are the implications if it turns out that male-constructed buildings fall down more often? Presumably people aren’t going to start telling men to get back in the kitchen where they belong, in which case the collapse wasn’t the issue in the first place, it was just a flimsy excuse to push the usual traditionalist agenda.
The existence of social pressure and sometimes explicit affirmative action programs for women because the low numbers of women in presitigious bridge-engineering jobs is evidence that any particular woman selected to be a bridge-engineer might be less capable than a man.
One could as easily tell a just-so story in which more men follow the path of least resistance and become engineers while women face additional challenges from social pressure, meaning that the quality of female engineers who stick around exceeds the average in the field; ultimately this kind of pontificating is useless unless it’s backed by concrete data, but it’s always tempting to seize the latest news story and use it to hit people.
Global English is a thing of beauty; academics writing on EU law use infinitives, prepositional verbs, and abstract nouns in ways no native speaker would countenance, but which everyone assumes is normal because other people do it.
Lots of Institutional Nouns are capitalized in ways that aren’t unintuitive, but still look funny (Member States is a big one, I think this conforms with the EU’s own usage).
“Consist in” is really popular. Nobody seems to have heard of “consist of,” despite it being more common (IME) among native speakers.
So is “in respect to” instead of “with respect to.”
You get a lot of terrific usages that make sense, but are super un-idiomatic, and that on closer digging reveal the idiom of the native language of the writer, or an imperfectly translated word. Sometimes you can reverse-engineer these by, say, looking up the Spanish equivalent in Google Translate and finding an alternate English translation of it. Sometimes you just get a sentence whose meaning is clear but whose syntax is a horrible pretzel you have to unpack to make it work properly.
And of course the punctuation is all over the place because every language has its own conventions for things like commas, and nobody thinks to teach standard academic prose style when teaching foreign languages.
(This can also result in weirdly informal usages, phrases like, “so that
means that there’s a big difference” where native writers of formal
English would go straight to “resulting in a significant difference.)
My favorite today was a hypercorrection (hypertranslation?). Some thoughtful Spaniard, who recognized many of the patterns distinguishing our language from his own, wrote “specifically stablished” instead of “specifically established.” Perfectly logical! Also wrong.
All of it just reminds me–it’s really not our language anymore. It hasn’t been England’s language for centuries now. But it doesn’t even belong particularly to English-speaking countries anymore. Places where it’s the working language in a polyglot population, like the EU and India, are making it their own, and new and internationalized varieties of English suit the needs of their speakers, not the needs of Americans or Brits or Australians. English may hold its dominance as a global language for a little while yet, but it will be less recognizably English the longer it does so.
The EURO-conversion was used by retailers to raise prices. Aldi, however, reacted with the biggest price reduction of its
corporate history. As a result, it was able to double its profits.
Paragraph edited for clarity – the original is on page 17.
Imagine that – taking market share by improving service and prices.
EDIT: Mind you, some of Walmart’s failure is absolutely because the government has put bars on the free maket that made it illegal for them to succeed:
With organic growth close to being a mission impossible for hypermarket operators
due to stringent* planning and zoning regulations
Soon faced with
rapidly mounting losses, Wal-Mart’s management resorted to staff cuts and closures to
reduce its above-average personnel costs. Due to strict worker protection regulations,
however, making surplus workers redundant can be a complicated, lengthy and costly
affair in Germany – a cumbersome fact of life for its German competitors, but, obviously,
terra incognita for Wal-Mart Germany’s (mostly) American executives
* Stringent is explained elsewhere in the text and it is, indeed, stringent.
Beautiful article. My favorite parts:
– The leading retail strategy in Germany is “hard discounting” which offers a very narrow selection of high quality products at “rock bottom” prices. Aldi rules at this and hard discount retailers control a third of the market. In the UK etc this accounts for less than a tenth of the market. This is the polar opposite of Walmart’s “sell literally everything” strategy. – Germany has zoning laws that favor smaller buildings. This works in favor of hard discounters because they offer a narrow selection and minimalist shopping environment. Compare to Walmart’s “browse an entire warehouse and grocery store then eat at one of several restaurants” model. – Germany has antitrust/fair trade laws that forbid merchants from permanently selling goods below cost. This is Walmart’s favorite strategy famously observed in the gallon-jar pickle campaign. – Germany only allows retailers to be open for 80 hours per week, compared to 196 in the UK, 96 in the Netherlands, and 144 in France. – Walmart refused to recognize the outcome of the collective wage negotiation process with their German unionized employees and were “completely surprised” when said unions promptly organized walkouts in 30 stores. They were probably surprised because of their millions of US employees, only 12 are known to be unionized. This gave Walmart a “union basher” rep in Germany where unions are influential and popular. – Walmart tried to pull their “hire a ton of employees and give them shitty part time hours so we don’t have to give them full-time benefits” but worker protection laws prevented this and Walmart was forced to compete on product margins and services rather than recouping losses by shafting their employees. Aldi was able to match their prices cent for cent, but offered better service and more value. – Walmart repeatedly defied German antitrust laws like “You must provide your balance sheet and annual profit/loss statement” and “You must provide a bottle/plastic refund system for products you sell.” None of the other leading German retailers had a problem sustaining growth and profit while complying with these laws. – Germany put some dude from Arkansas in charge of the acquisition. He didn’t speak German. Anyone who’s spent time with Germans can imagine how well this probably went over.
So basically Walmart rolled up to Germany and tried to play its usual game of “buy out entire supply chains, sell products below cost until competitors are dry, then use their market reach to demand bulk orders from suppliers at near-zero margins, all the while keeping stores open 24/7 to maintain a huge pool of redundant part time workers at minimum wage with no benefits to reduce operating costs and further subsidize more supply chain buyouts” and the heavily unionized, aggressively antitrust, worker protection, high value low price German market laughed in their dumb weasel faces and sent them packing.
Meanwhile, Aldi, who has been commanding the German market while complying with all these regulations, has been expanding seamlessly into the US and has owned Trader Joe’s since 1979, which sells twice as much per square foot as Whole Foods.
This article is a beautiful demonstration that the only reason shitty companies like Walmart keep biting us in the ass in the US is because our leaders refuse to put them on a leash.
And not only that, the capitalism works better when there are strong anti-trust, strong worker protection, and strong market controls in place. More small businesses providing better goods and services for cheaper because they’re actually competing instead of doing like Walmart and burning capital until they force the local competition out of the market.
Some of the Viking reenactors I know are giving it up because of the unfortunate association with far-right groups. I do not blame them for doing this, as I am sure it’s quite upsetting to be mistaken for a neo-Nazi. I support people doing whatever they have to to avoid this.
However, I am really bothered by the idea that there’s something *morally correct* about ceding your passions to supremacist groups. I am deeply uncomfortable with the praise such people have gotten for “doing the right thing”. You know what that’s saying? It’s saying that racists can point to whatever they please and go “it’s ours now”, and *by your own standards* you have to give it to them! Not only did you build the most exploitable loophole ever, you’ve practically drawn them a map!
I do not wish to acquiesce to neo-Nazis in any other context, and I’m not starting now. Hate groups do not get to set the standards for my communities. I’m genetically disabled and engaged to a Jew, and I *delight* in the middle finger my presence in Viking reenactment holds up to Nazi ideology. Like hell I’m going to go “oops, my bad, this actually *does* belong to you!”
It doesn’t. It doesn’t get to. History belongs to goddamn everyone, and in fact *making people think it doesn’t* is one of the great tragedies of racism. I sincerely believe that connecting to shared human heritage is one of this world’s foremost delights, and supremacist groups do not get a say in how I express that.
This is literally something /pol/ knows and exploits.
Maybe the pendulum swings and white people wave to stay in their lane and can *only* play vikings. Stranger things have happened.
In what other ways does /pol/ exploit this? I can think of a couple.
Think the ‘It’s Okay to be White’ thing from a while back. Clearly a /pol/ op and everyone knows it’s a /pol/ op, but knowing it’s a /pol/ op gets people to overextend and say that everyone saying it’s okay to be white is a far-right white nationalist.
Or Pepe memes, for that matter.
Honestly, I’m not expecting the left to die on this hill, or on any of the others, but I would like to see them fucking fight on one for once, instead of immediately retreating to the next one the moment some asshole starts to climb it. Make a goddamn stand for once and say ‘no, you can’t have this, this belongs to us/everyone’ instead of immediately ceding ground and then claiming anyone who didn’t run away with them fast enough is just another enemy pursuing them.
Make a goddamn stand for once and say ‘no, you can’t have this, this belongs to us/everyone’ instead of immediately ceding ground and then claiming anyone who didn’t run away with them fast enough is just another enemy pursuing them.
I know it’s poor forum etiquette to quote something only to shout “FUCKING THIS”, but…FUCKING THIS
I keep seeing that post of a particular nation of native folk who willingly gave up the swastika because the nazis had ruined it. And everyone congratulated them, which I understood. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the world had to. That symbol was used by nearly every culture under the sun. Now, I don’t really think there’s any need for white folks to use a swastika what with the whole history of it, but I feel it’s a similar thing. Folk from southeast asia, india, certain parts of the middle east, all use the swastika in some form or another as a religious or cultural symbol. there’s no need to demand people give up on every piece of art or media or history that some piece of shit nazi decides to grab a hold of. We didn’t give up wagner because hitler liked it and thought it was super deep.
Yes! I was thinking about this regarding Norse paganism too. I actually know a couple of pagans who have stopped using Norse symbolism (Mjolnir, etc.) in solidarity with antifascist movements. That’s their choice, and I understand why they feel the well has been poisoned, but like…I don’t think a religious minority being pressured to give up their deeply felt traditions is something to celebrate.
This this this.
Nazis are very good at appropriating their own cultures, and I really hate how the standard reaction to them doing that is to go, “OK, I guess that’s a Far Right Symbol now. Put it down everyone, it’s tainted forever now.”
It’s especially damaging because a lot of things this happens with are culturally and/or historically important. I feel like a lot of people are being robbed of things that they should have access to, that it would be beneficial for them to have access to, that matter to them and their communities, because some people decided that those things aren’t worth protecting from the clutches of the far-right.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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