Yes and no, if you scambait hard enough your number can eventually be added to a blacklist for larger scam organisations that bought your data for use in multiple scam attempts.

In my experience that has really cut down on the calls.

In 2020 the department of human services accidentally posted my personal phone number on a list of support services for people experiencing housing or food insecurity. This number was then circulated by every major news source in my state. I couldn’t change my number at the time because I had no legal ID (still don’t… Can’t figure out how to get ID without ID, but I have a new number now at least) at first I didn’t really notice the ratio of spam calls to genuine calls for the wrong number (ie, people calling my number because they needed housing/food) . I just remember getting 40+ calls a day at many stages.

But as the actual number for the food relief service was circulated, I eventually stopped getting genuine calls and I was getting 3-5 scam calls every single day.

After a year of scam baiting, I was getting 2 a week.

Now, I’ll do something online that requires sharing my current number, within a few hours I get a scam call because my data has been sold, but I bait the heck out of that first call and I usually don’t receive any further calls which suggest my number was blacklisted by a larger scam organisation, and I won’t be hassled until my data is sold again as a new item.

It’s hard to avoid getting your number on scam lists when the largest health insurance company, and the second largest telecommunications company in my country both had major data breaches where millions of customers identifying information was accessed and sold to scammers…

Nah, I’m just a person with leaky tits.

You do anyway without piercings.

The nipple isn’t technically one hole, it’s kind of like a porous sponge. After all, mammary glands are just mutated sweat glands, it’s a series of holes connected to a series of ducts.

So a lot of people find when lactating that it can spurt in crazy directions from unexpected parts of the nipple.

The number of times I find myself plugging the iron in behind the TV and then holding an old Amazon box against the wall and juggling my pants while I iron because I’m in a rush and that’s the available outlet plug and space.

That’s fine, that’s what we want you to do.

We use the purely platonic conversation to get a sense of what level of compatibility there might be. Something physical, something more, what are we feeling.

Sometimes the companionship of a conversation is enough and we’re both happy to say “this was a lovely chat, bye, have a nice day”

But occasionally… “thanks for chatting to me, hey I don’t suppose you’d want to come over one day and check out the recreation prop kittyhawk my brother and I are building? I’m stuck in the shop alone on Saturday if you’d like to keep me company and tell me more about old airplanes.”

The first pride was pretty wrathful.

The female condom has two rigid rings, one in the sealed end that sits under the cervix, and one at the open end.

The ring at the open end is designed to hold the condom open and give the penetrating partner a nice big safe target to make sure the penis/toy/whatever goes inside the condom and not accidentally between the condom and the vaginal wall. This ring also provides some minor protection to parts of the vulva due to its size.

The internal ring is much smaller by comparison, and is not that much larger than a diva cup. The internal ring of a female condom is a similar size to a “soft cup” menstrual cup, it’s a little bit smaller than a contraceptive diaphragm.

If it has 3.5 stars on Google, and 90% of the bad reviews are from people with white sounding names complaining of poor service… You’re in for some fucking delicious food from a proper family owned Chinese restaurant!

Dogs aren’t cops, dogs are brainwashed by cops. Dogs are essentially trafficked victims of police. The dog just wants to be a good boy, it’s not the dog’s fault the pigs have been teaching it to nark on bullshit.

Exactly! I have a genetic illness that caused congenital deformities and injuries and disability later in life, starting around my teens thanks to puberty.

From an early age my relationship with work was distorted because I found myself trapped in the gap between two pathways. I was obviously capable of work, with the right treatment and support I had a lot of potential. But I was disabled, and I required expensive supports and medical intervention, and under the public healthcare system there reaches a point of disability and limitations in capacity that you are written off by the system. Shoved in a residential group home, given a pension below the poverty line, and expected not to try. (genuinely, we’re expected not to try, if someone on a disability pension works a job, they can loose their pension, which is many cases is also tied to housing and access to medical services)

I’d flip between the two systems, I’d have a great few months with regular access to treatment, I’d get a job plan from the dole office, I’d sit through work readiness courses, I’d be getting healthier and looking forward to working and being a good little contributor to society. Then I’d hit a waiting list for my medical care, my health would slip, I’d be re-assessed by the welfare department and deemed too disabled to work, my job plan would be shredded and I’d get a pension support plan. Then I’d get to the top of the wait list, resume treatment, and get back to getting to work.

I didn’t start a “real job” until I was 24, it was a call centre gig and I near killed myself trying to do it.

It wasn’t even hard. It was a true 9-5 (no overtime, no bullshit) and you mentally didn’t need to bring any of it home with you. It was easy for me, but my body decided it was too much. My health suffered and it took years to fully recover, with me barely pulling myself together here and there for gig work in between being bounced on and off the disability pension system.

The whole endeavour was far more expensive to tax payers than a system like UBI. Processing my case 70 times because the disability support, and employment support eligibility requirements are so strict and the lines between streams so black and white took a lot of administrative resources.

I’ve been in my current industry for 10 years this November. I work part time, 12-20 hours a week depending on my health. I’m highly successful in my field because I’m working within my body and mind’s means and playing to my strengths. I’m a whole person with a life outside work and I bring that range of experiences to my job, enriching what I bring to my organisation - which is good, because my job is a mutual exchange between me and my employer, it’s not exploitive towards me the worker, which further prevents burn out for me.

But we exist within the capitalist system of funding and our wages are set by the department of health and human services. I make $34,000AUD a year and it’s not enough to survive.

But if I work any harder my body will not survive.

I’m asking to do what I can do for my community, while living a safe existence… Not being forced to choose between litteraly breaking my back working for someone else’s greedy profit, or starving in a tent (though realistically, a lot of people are doing both)

Yeah, nah, Tamworth. We have our own branches of country music down here mate.

Blak Country is a seriously cool branch to explore if you’re curious about how Australia has interpreted US country music into a localised sub-genre. Swap your mouth organs for a gum leaf and add some yidaki riffs for extra bass.

Okay, you do you.

In Australia, most larger chemist’s sell peri bottles in the antenatal section, near the breast pumps and maternity pads.

They also sometimes sell cheaper, less pink, peri bottles in the OT/home aid section, or in the ailse with the laxatives and enemas.

You can definitely get them on Amazon. I also find them occasionally in the toiletries section of Muslim grocery stores, and occasionally Asian stores, near the buckets, stools, and tabo cups.

I don’t have any fancy suggestions, because much like you, I often went DIY. Because of my skin condition I’ve always needed a bidet, so convenience and utility was my draw, the fact I had to carry it with me everywhere my whole life since adolescence.

Pretty sure when I was first taught to do it by my chronic care nurse I was just using hospital peri-bottles. For a while I just carried a 50ml syringe in my bag and a bottle to draw water from.

But at some point (probably around 12 when I joined Scouts) I found these “bidet bottlecaps” at hiking stores, and I remember a time when I just had these bottle caps everywhere and would have plastic bottles with hair ties on them in random purses (I’d put a hair tie around the bottle to remind me it was not drinking water anymore) the brand name I’m seeing pop up is CuloClean, but I mostly see cheap screw on no-brand ones near the register at camping stores.

Now days I mostly DIY them with a lighter, a q tip and a pin.

Just take any plastic bottle lid, heat it up with the lighter to soften the plastic, use the q-tip to push the soft plastic to make a “nipple”, you’re basically trying to make the bottle lid resemble a baby bottle. Then take the pin and make a ~1-2mm hole in the side of the nipple. It’s a good idea to sit down and hold the bottle and see how you’re planning to aim the stream so you can plan where you want to angle the hole you’re making in the lid.

I’m glad I found this method, because I like the little 250ml bottles of Quench Juice, they squeeze easy, hold just the right amount of water, and fit really neatly in all my purses (and the juice is nice too, lol). But the lid was never compatible with the bidet bottle caps, so now I DIY the existing cap of whatever bottle I prefer.

But in either case, you need to have a second, unaltered bottle cap to swap out after use, so the bottle is water tight for storage again. (though, you can always leave it empty and just refill immediately before use, then empty it completely afterwards)

Buy physical media from independent production companies. Pirate whatever Disney, Netflix and Amazon are cranking out.

I think we just need tiny sinks in stalls, or rather, all public stalls should be designed as semi-ambulant stalls.

Growing up as a crutches user (hip deformity) I didn’t fully comprehend that the standard stalls don’t have sinks in them. I kind of knew they didn’t all have sinks, but I didn’t think too hard about it, I sort of assumed the reason most people flushed then came to the main public sink was to use the mirror or dryer.

I got to used to filling my personal bidet at the sink, using it, and washing it at the sink, all behind the privacy of a closed bathroom door.

When I had my hip surgery and no longer needed semi ambulant stalls, or disability access stalls, and it was just so inconvenient to fill and rinse a bidet bottle in a regular public bathroom I stopped using it.

Then a few months later started using the semi ambulant stalls again so I can use my bidet, because it turns out my lichen sclerosis doesn’t like public toilet paper and I was getting really bad infections.

But yeah, personal bidet bottles are great, but they require a tap near the toilet.

Some public sinks are easy to fill a bidet bottle, but a lot aren’t, you physically can’t fit a bottle under the taps and because bidet bottles aren’t common it can feel embarrassing to fill it at the public sinks. Disability stalls almost always have a proper tap and sink for washing toilet aid devices.

Do this with a regular onion, especially if you’ve already got one in the pantry trying to sprout. As it grows you’ll get onion greens that work just like scallions in any recipe. Let it go to seed, now you have infinite onions, but depending on your local climate and luck, leave your original onion bulb to winter, and shoot again, and it has probably split into new bulbs, so you’ll probably get 2 new onions from the plant, plus onion greens, plus seeds. Eat one bulb, and leave the other bulb to grow more onion greens.

I’ve never bothered using the seeds, I just keep a bulb or two in the pot. Been 5 years. I still buy onions if I want something like onion jam or French onion soup, where I need like 1kg of onions. But Ive never had to buy scallions, and I’ve got onion flavour all year long through onion greens (you can dehydrate them, and freeze them really easily too, to store them when you have more than you can use)

I also highly recommend throwing peas into a large tray of soil. Litteraly just grab a bunch of aluminium foil disposable oven pans if you need to, stab some holes in them with a knife, an inch or two of soil, some dried whole peas or fresh garden peas, a sprinkle of more soil or just a wet sheet of kitchen roll/paper towel on top.

You probably won’t get peas, but you’ll have tons of pea tendrils for salads. On my balcony it’s the only “salad green” I’ve had any luck growing. I have a pretty black thumb. I can’t even manage to sprout chia seeds without them moulding, and I’ve never been able to grow mint despite broad casting mint seeds directly into my garden, urging the gardening gods to spite me with weedy mint but no dice.

When I buy peas, 4/5ths go in the fridge to eat, the other 5th gets planted, and I’ll get ~10 dishes from the tendrils vs 1 dish from the peas. Nutritionally the peas have more protein, but lentils are cheap, salad is expensive, so this works for my budget.

I keep having this glitch where I’m stuck in the opening scene with the jojo cubicle. I’m supposed to get a letter telling me I’ve inherited a farm but that hasn’t happened yet, anyone else got this bug?

Food I cook is starting to taste more and more like my mother’s cooking. Moving out of home I always assumed my mums poor cooking was down to technique, boiling the brussel sprouts, steaming the peas until they were grey, water frying everything. As soon as I learned to cook properly it was amazing how much flavour everything had. Letting things brown fully, using oil, not overcooking everything.

But recently, no amount of skill can save the sad veggies sold in store.

It makes the hyperprocessed foods even more appealing when there’s nothing you can affordably do to improve the simple produce and staples. When potatos cost the same as Pringle’s, calorie for calorie (and they do, ) it’s easy to see why “just eat beans, rice, and in season produce” isn’t helpful advice - yes it’s frugal, but it’s depressing, and not as easy as it used to be. Why waste money on already rotting food that tastes bland when the same money can buy me a more nutrient dense food that lasts longer and tastes better?

I’ve got a few things growing on the 2m concrete slab my landlord calls a back yard, it helps having home grown spring onion, parsley and pea shoots to dress up a dish.

I’m a terrible gardener, I can’t even get mint to take. “grow your own” is thrown around too readily when people complain about produce quality. It’s not always an option, there is a physical skill, a cognitive skill, and resource requirements.

I feel like I can comfortably assume you are not European.

Are you thinking of ~10 more well known progressive countries with strong social policies, high GDP and strong economies.

There are 50 countries in Europe, many experiencing civil unrest, some who’s economies famously tanked in recent years, several that are currently at war with each other, dozens that are recovering from recent wars, terror and loss of territory or government control.

If we look at Europe as a whole and split the idea of a “functional” society into select criteria, then yes, we can point to individual European countries and identify the structures, policies and practices that make that country functional in that aspect of a society. But that dies not make “much of Europe” a functional society.

I stand by my statement that no one place on earth is fully functional, ethically and equitably simultaneously serving all its peoples.