Where else do you get mortgages?
I mean, technically you can contract a mortgage between any two legally able persons.
But I’d say a mortgage between private individuals is a rare exception.
Usually it is bank/credit unions, or corporations specializing in mortgages as their primary business. But I think you can lump most of those under the umbrella term. At least as far as their employees being able to just approve or deny you for personal reasons.
At my workplace, the made up numbers extend to the WFH ratio.
At first everyone was allowed to work as much from home as they wanted. Until internal agreements had been made.
Then they just set it to 50%. Arbitrarily. Because 50/50 sounds good, right? Can’t go completely wrong with 50/50 after all.
Then it turned out that only my regional headquarters does it. 15/16 regional sections and only mine enforces it fully. Everywhere else it is just an unenforced agreement.
Why? The regional boss thought it would be unfair toward the personnel that needs to work in person. The professional drivers. The cleaners. The clerks at the service counters.
Took them a year to go to 60/40 because they realized you cannot split a 5 day workweek 50/50 without having to implement all kinds of side rules, like alternating 3 and 2 day weeks.
And now it turns out no one gives a crap after all and everyone just does what they want until a teamlead is unhappy with you and looks at your office times to have a reason to admonish you.
Federal government agency, by the way.
Maybe the mortgage application was just not within approval guidelines. It is not like a bank clerk gets to arbitrarily decide by personal sympathy.
Maybe there is another side to this toxic macho “manosphere” you mention.
After all, as a baseline men are by nature predisposed and culturally conditioned to protect and be considerate to women.
Despite all lamentation, Chivalry is not dead for some.
So obviously the sanctity of a woman’s restroom is more highly valued than that of a men’s bathroom. After all, women are more vulnerable and more often targeted in that way.
So the debate tends to skew towards women spaces, as those are more likely to cause public discord if disturbed.
Rarely are men stepping up on the soap crate to defend their own spaces. Because after all, they are strong enough to take any number of “inconveniences” and disadvantages because to admit to struggling with them would be weakness.
I’m not saying it’s fair, or right, or how it should be. But maybe that bias isn’t always driven by hostility. Maybe it’s just that society still places more weight on protecting women, while expecting men to grit their teeth and deal with it. Even when those same men help reinforce that standard among themselves.
It doesn’t make the imbalance okay, and it doesn’t mean the outrage is consistent. But it might explain why all the noise gets focused on trans women. It’s not just transphobia, it’s the scaffolding of gender roles, still quietly deciding who gets defended, and who’s expected to tough it out.
It seems absurd to conceptualize a “chivalrous transphobe”. But we are all more than just one label.
I reckon we have reached that state for a long time.
The vast majority of people would have a pretty hard time without food logistics, utilities, medical treatments, pharmaceuticals. The list goes on.
All of which are provided by corporations of some form or another.
Something something about civilization being 5 warm meals away from collapse.
The local library is a disposable commodity; easily replaceable.
Krita works great for my occasional hobby project.
First experiment: pressing women into being scientists.
Success.
Second experiment: pressing scientists into women.
Failure. Called eugenicist, chased by pitchforks.
Curious. Same ingredients, different reaction. Something’s missing… maybe it’s pantsuits.
Why even bother with shouting if you have CHIM, just open the command line and put in tcl and tgm and no-clip out of there.
When I was like 7-9 I went on a “camping” trip with my football/soccer team.
Really, we were just putting up tents on the field we usually practiced at after some very tame river rafting.
It was the first time I was away from my parents. And I was inconsolable. I cried most of the night. To the point the supervisors offered to call my parents so I could talk to them. (And mobile phoning someone back then was not cheap),
In the end I just cried myself empty.
Because I was asleep so late, I slept into the morning and my “tent mates” pulled down the tent around me while I was sleeping.
So I woke up in drizzling rain, lying in my sleeping bag on a thin plastic sheet with no tent around me. While all my “friends” were in the club house having breakfast.
I did not stay in the soccer club long after that.