fireweed @ fireweed @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

There are native grasses that can be kept as maintained lawns, such as blue grama (although the recommendation is to cut it a little taller, 3-4"). It's not going to be emerald green like Kentucky blue, however if you live in a dry area with watering restrictions your lawn will be the greenest on the block for sure!

"I'm not a bigot; I used to be a liberal but then some strangers said mean things to me on the Internet so now I'm conservative"

This is what you sound like.

Except most grass, especially border areas like front lawns and street medians as well as corporate-owned lawns like around a drive-thru or suburban offices, gets zero use. It's one thing to have a dedicated play area in a yard or park that's cut grass; it's another thing to have the entire property as cut grass.

Everyone in my neighborhood has large cut grass lawns. There's mostly retired folks here are very few children. I spend a lot of time outside yet can literally count on one hand the number of times I have seen people out in those yards for a purpose other than cutting the grass. If you're not going to use it at least let the dandelions grow so the bees have something to eat!

Okay, but even in an efficient system there's still a waste product. My point wasn't to compare-and-contrast trade-offs, simply to acknowledge that every form of energy generation has them to some degree. Plus nuclear still requires a mined resource, and again, mining is an environmentally damaging activity. Just because something is better than alternatives that doesn't give it a free pass.

Obviously I reuse my canning jars, but I still had to go out and purchase my starting stock. At $1.25 a jar it's not a cheap endeavor to get into.

Barring a major technological breakthrough, all current means of energy generation have significant environmental drawbacks. Even among the "renewable" energy generation there's problems: hydroelectric destroys river ecosystems, nuclear produces radioactive waste, solar and battery systems require mined materials (and become toxic waste at the end of their lifecycles), wind turbines kill hundreds of thousands of birds and bats annually, etc. Meanwhile rather than solving environmental and climate problems at their sources, we're relying more heavily on powered solutions, from electric vehicles to de-carbonization systems, while also needing to use more electricity to combat the ill-effects of climate change (e.g. more air conditioning in the face of warming summers). If we're gonna start turning the boat around on environmental issues we need to dramatically reduce our energy consumption as a society. Instead we're mining bitcoin and barrelling headfirst into an AI "revolution"...

Agreed, there's a lot of issues with municipal compost currently. Ensuring cleaner compost output is important for making sure the end product is usable especially for edible crops, but in the meanwhile my understanding is food waste etc produces fewer greenhouse gasses when allowed to decompose via compost rather than in a landfill. Plus using municipal compost has to be better than the farms that are contaminating the soil with PFAS-laden biosolid fertilizer.

I would love to see increased standardization in the food industry limiting the possible sizes and shapes of containers (such as glass) making them easier to wash and reuse as-is. On the home front, for example, it's ridiculous that I have to go out and purchase brand-new Mason jars for canning instead of being able to reuse a store-bought salsa jar. But more importantly on the commercially-processed food front, standardization would make reuse easier by ensuring that containers do not have to return all the way to their original company; that way a jar used by a raspberry jam company in the Pacific Northwest bought by a customer in Florida could go to a local orange marmalade company for reuse rather than having to travel all the way back to the PNW.

I think should also start seeing a lot more compostable products. We're already getting there somewhat with paper replacing plastic in shipping, but more products need to be explicitly labeled as compostable, and more municipalities need dedicated compost pickup and processing facilities. It's insane that we've created a soil-to-landfill pipeline for nutrients.

I was not under the impression that glass recycling penciled out (as in, it costs more to recycle than make new). My area crushes "recycled" glass and uses it to cover landfills (which is better than having it inside the landfill, but it still leaves the consumer system).

This was cross-posted to "usauthoritarianism"

Otherwise I wouldn't really care, but like wtf. Of all examples of authoritarianism/fighting the system, feeding a parking meter? What is this, anarchy for infants?

I assume it's shorthand for "pays for"

My understanding is most shorthand/euphemisms nowadays seem to originate from tiktok's strict and sometimes inscrutable censorship rules. Maybe this is one of them?

Edit: apparently this was a case of text-to-speech gone away. I prefer my head cannon of tiktok trying to censor conversations about anyone who "pays for" an elicit service.

Eh, I'm not sure how I feel about this one. Parking is a huge thorn in the side of transportation reform, and ensuring parking turnover is actually pretty crucial to a functional transportation system. On-street parking is public right-of-way that could be a bike lane, enhanced bus stop, street seating for restaurants/cafes, parklets, drainage swales, large medians for trees, wider sidewalks, the list goes on. However we don't get these nice things because "wE NeEd ThE pArKiNg SuPpLy." Except often you'll find that there would be sufficient supply to remove the parking on even just one side of the street if turnover were higher, and turnover is not higher because people are abusing the parking. Things like store employees parking all day in spots meant for customers, people using on-street parking to avoid more expensive lots at the destinations they're actually visiting (like entertainment venues), etc. Have you ever encountered a parking meter that would only let you put in 2 hours of money even though you need the spot for much longer, and you had to run out mid-way through whatever you were doing to feed the meter? That means you were probably not the intended user for that space and you should have found longer-term parking elsewhere. Maybe that store manager that runs outside every other hour to feed the meter rather than use an all-day parking lot (but that's a three-block walk away and this parking is right here!!1) or taking public transportation (because that's beneath them) would rethink this behavior after an expensive ticket. Point is, I'm not sure helping people skirt parking regulations is fighting the system or standing up for the little guy.

With 38 square meters on average per person, London homes are even more cramped than those in New York City

Maybe Londoners have more roommates/family members living with them? Given the "per person" part of this statistic.

You're taking the meme way too seriously. For one, drugs aren't a standard treatment for ODD. From the Mayo Clinic:

Treatment for oppositional defiant disorder primarily involves family-based interventions. But treatment may include other types of talk therapy and training for your child — as well as for parents. [...] Medicines alone generally aren't used for ODD unless your child also has another mental health condition.

You're going to need to be more specific what you mean by "your argument"

I posted this in another thread for this meme:

Fun meme and all, but I somehow doubt the author has much experience working with children. Some kids are genuinely little terrors, in that everybody around them tends to have a bad time in their presence (adults, peers, and usually, the kid themselves). "We live in a society" and all that, so not being able to function within that society (especially as a minor since they don't even have the option of living off-grid in the woods as a hermit) is, sorry to say, a problem.

This is also a gross misrepresentation of ODD as defined by the DSM; here's a snippet of the diagnostic requirements (emphasis mine):

A pattern of angry/irritable mood, argumentative/defiant behavior, or vindictiveness lasting at least 6 months as evidenced by at least four symptoms of the following categories, and exhibited during interaction with at least one individual who is not a sibling:

Angry/Irritable Mood

1. Often loses temper
2. Is often touchy or easily annoyed
3. Is often angry and resentful

Argumentative/Defiant Behavior

4. Often argues with authority figures or, for children and adolescents, with adults
5. Often actively defies or refuses to comply with requests from authority figures or with rules
6. Often deliberately annoys others
7. Often blames others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior

Vindictiveness

8. Has been spiteful or vindictive at least twice within the past 6 months

There's also additional qualifiers such as for frequency (they're not pathologizing having a bad day or two).

So no, your "eat the rich" and "ACAB" laptop stickers are not going to get you slapped with an ODD diagnosis.

Fun meme and all, but I somehow doubt the author has much experience working with children. Some kids are genuinely little terrors, in that everybody around them tends to have a bad time in their presence (adults, peers, and usually, the kid themselves). "We live in a society" and all that, so not being able to function within that society (especially as a minor since they don't even have the option of living off-grid in the woods as a hermit) is, sorry to say, a problem.

This is also a gross misrepresentation of ODD as defined by the DSM; here's a snippet of the diagnostic requirements (emphasis mine):

A pattern of angry/irritable mood, argumentative/defiant behavior, or vindictiveness lasting at least 6 months as evidenced by at least four symptoms of the following categories, and exhibited during interaction with at least one individual who is not a sibling:

Angry/Irritable Mood

1. Often loses temper
2. Is often touchy or easily annoyed
3. Is often angry and resentful

Argumentative/Defiant Behavior

4. Often argues with authority figures or, for children and adolescents, with adults
5. Often actively defies or refuses to comply with requests from authority figures or with rules
6. Often deliberately annoys others
7. Often blames others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior

Vindictiveness

8. Has been spiteful or vindictive at least twice within the past 6 months

There's also additional qualifiers such as for frequency (they're not pathologizing having a bad day or two).

So no, your "eat the rich" and "ACAB" laptop stickers are not going to get you slapped with an ODD diagnosis.

The headline completely buries the lede by making it sound like this is an article specifically about Austin, rather than the entire housing market.

In the U.S., our houses are meant to perform contrary roles in society: shelter for today and investment vehicle for tomorrow. This approach creates a kind of temporal disjunction around the housing market, where what appears sensible for one generation (Please, no more construction near me, it’s annoying and could hurt my property values!) is calamitous for the next (Wait, there’s nowhere near me for my children to live!).

If homeownership is best understood as an investment, like equities, we should root for prices to go up. If housing is an essential good, like food and clothing, we should cheer when prices stay flat—or even when they fall. Instead, many Americans seem to think of a home as existing in a quantum superposition between a present-day necessity and a future asset.

Thank you, article, for finally spelling out the obvious paradox that is housing in North America. I don't understand why this isn't immediately obvious to everyone, but then again we live under the myth that perpetual growth is not only possible, it's vital to a healthy society.

It could actually go either way, based on the title:

Only half of South Koreans willing to marry; even less [than half] want kids

Or

Only half of South Koreans willing to marry; even fewer [South Koreans] want kids

I'm inclined to lean toward the second. "Even less than half" sounds a lot clunkier than "even fewer South Koreans," so it's not surprising other readers assumed the latter.

I'd be furious too, having such incompetent, out-of-touch advisors. This article alludes to it but others have gone more in-depth: Biden's advisors keep telling him the economy is great, the problem is messaging: the American people just haven't heard how great it is. Telling people struggling to pay their bills every month that they're better off than they were four years ago isn't messaging, it's gaslighting. His advisors should be telling him the truth, that the economy is only good on paper, that while the "haves" are living large the "have nots" are not only struggling, their ranks are quickly growing. Don't get me wrong, anyone who votes for Trump because they think he'll do better at economic issues is a moron, but history shows that a lot of people are going to go this route come November at the current pace of things. And Biden's advisors are just as moronic if they don't understand this.