i spoke to an allistic person who said their autistic classmate had a meltdown in class, during which the autistic classmate collapsed to the floor in the middle of the room, screaming and crying. they said it was "terrifying" and they were arguing for the autistic student to be removed permanently from the program.

when i asked whether their autistic classmate's meltdown was dangerous or merely uncomfortable, they said, "i felt like i was in danger!"

i understand that. but that's not what i asked.

"i shouldn't have to experience that."

yes you should, actually. that's life. upsetting things happen. no one should have to experience any discomfort. but we do. we get stung by bees and sunburns and headaches. we live in bodies in the world.

autistic people are human beings who have the right to exist in society, including during meltdowns. having one class of your entire semester interrupted by a singular meltdown is not anymore of an infringement upon your entitlement to education than having your class interrupted by a fire alarm or cancelled for a snow storm.

one of my peers once experienced a cardiac event 10 minutes into class. it was terrifying. it was desperately upsetting. i was contacted by the school and offered counseling afterward because i happened to be the one who managed the situation until paramedics arrived. no one should have to experience their classmate being hauled off in an ambulance, but it happens. everyone was worried about my classmate first and foremost, and then about me. no one blamed anyone, and certainly when my classmate happily recovered and returned to school, no one thought they should be removed from the program.

the difference being that people believe a disabled personal, especially with cognitive disabilities, in crisis are not experiencing something outside of our control, but instead that we doing something. that we are in fact making a choice to cause a scene, out of malice.

“spicy pillow” jokes aside, I think @flowerkrone​’s tags deserve a serious reply:

#my old phone looks like this on my shelf lmao #im too scared to touch it to throw it away #idk what trash this even goes into when its at this point

The pillow-shaped object here used to be the phone’s battery. It’s not a battery anymore. Now it’s a balloon full of corrosive, pyrophoric chemicals and hydrogen gas and it’s one puncture away from burning your house down. I am 100% serious. You should be scared to touch it.

But you gotta touch it, because you gotta get it out of your house before the pressure builds up to the point where the balloon pops. This isn’t going to happen soon – there is no need to panic – but it will happen eventually.

And, indeed, it doesn’t go in the ordinary trash. You put this in the ordinary trash and you’re gonna set the garbage truck on fire. Don’t do that to the garbage collectors, their job is hard enough already.

The first thing you need to do is get a fireproof container. The most common household item that qualifies as a fireproof container is a cast-iron cookpot with a cast-iron lid – often sold as a “Dutch oven.” Any other cooking container that’s unreactive, has a very high melting point, and has a lid made of the same materials will also work: enameled or stainless steel, Pyrex with glass lid, etc.

However: Do not use a pot with a PTFE-based non-stick coating. If the battery does explode, the fire will probably be hot enough to degrade a PTFE coating, producing toxic smoke. (Not that you should breathe the smoke from the battery fire either, but PTFE breakdown products are worse.) Do not use a pot made of aluminium or copper. The fire might even get hot enough to melt those.

Whatever container you use, you might have to throw away along with the phone, so don’t use your good Dutch oven for this. Go to a thrift store and buy a cheap one.

Once you have the fireproof container:

1. Gently pick up the phone and put it in the fireproof container. If possible, gently tape the phone to the bottom of the container to prevent it from bouncing around. Don’t put any padding in there, that’ll just make a fire worse if it does happen. Put the lid on and tape it shut.
2. Put a label on the container, something like “DEFECTIVE LI-ION BATTERY – FIRE HAZARD”.
3. It is now reasonably safe to move the container around. However, if the battery does explode, the container is very likely to leak smoke and get hot, so keep it in a well-ventilated area and away from things that will be damaged by heat. Don’t leave it exposed to the weather, either.
   
4. You need to find either a hazardous waste disposal site, or an e-waste recycler that will accept defective Li-ion batteries. I can’t help with that because I have no idea where you live.
5. However, your local fire department, if you have one, will probably be happy to help. Call their non-emergency number. Nothing is on fire yet, so this isn’t an emergency, but things that can easily start a fire are still within the fire department’s responsibilities. Tell them you have a phone with a bulging lithium-ion battery, you put it in a fireproof container, and you want to know how to dispose of it safely.
6. If the fire department tries to tell you this isn’t dangerous or it’s okay to throw it out in the regular trash (with or without fireproof container), hang up on them and write a cranky letter to your local government representatives, then keep looking for a proper disposal site.
   
7. When you do find a a hazardous waste disposal site or an e-waste recycler, call them and make sure they will take defective Li-ion batteries, before showing up. That’s also a good time to ask if they will let you have the fireproof container back.
   

Reblog to save lives.

[Image: A phone with the insides visible, including a battery that has inflated like a balloon. The photo is captioned, “Pillow :33”]

Reblogging because I would have had absolutely no idea what to do, either.

same thing for ai usage. Are you complaining about companies investing in ai over people, or are you just an inch of self preservation away from openly calling its users the R slur? Be fucking honest i see how you talk.

#i dont think ppl reliant on ai are inherently disabled actually. im disabled and i find that frankly offensive#ive received my fair share of brain damage but i can tell people who are outsourcing everything to ai are basically headshotting themselves#it is genuinely bad for you thats not said out of a desire to be intellectually superior to anyone.#it is said because i think purposefully lobotomizing yourself is bad for your health#especially when youre poisoning the earth air and water at unprecedented scale to do so#and purposefully sabotaging yourself is... uh... bad?

ok but you are doing the exact thing OP is talking about. what you are saying is false, reactionary, and deeply ableist! you are talking about "headshotting" yourself and "lobotomizing" yourself, that IS exactly what OP means by one inch away from the R slur!

none of this is supported by the science. the most shared studies about AI "brainrot" (and other lovely woke ways to call people brain damaged) are a microsoft survey where nothing was measured, and a MIT paper by some lady with an AI chatbots cognitive consulting startup.

the idea that AI pollution is especially bad compared to the tech industry in general is just blatantly false. the idea that it is in any way "unprecedented" is absurd if you know anything about datacenters in general, the tech industry in general, or industry in general. especially if you're paying attention to its effect on the global south. this is a drop in the bucket compared to cars, agriculture, plastic, literally anything else.

i am disabled. sometimes i rely on AI tools. that includes all the "evil generative AI" (to make todo lists, write boilerplate code, etc) but also the "good analytical AI" like speech to text. if i ran an AI image program 45 minutes a day for a month to make 1400 images, that would emit as much CO2 as a 3 mile car drive, or as making a single meatball of beef.

you're repeating ableist, reactionary propaganda that scapegoats AI as exceptional, and sweeps under the rug much older, worse shit caused by tech you like, like netflix and youtube. you don't have to do that.