memfree @ memfree @beehaw.org

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307

Joined

2 yr. ago

@aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me a spider's web with a red light that attracts male fireflies to come have a good time at the web bordello

I basically agree with you, but I took it as both a warning to Democrats to stay vigilant and as permission for Republicans to abandon Trump.

That's it. Audubon sucks. I was immediately reminded of a recent Vox story on How the most powerful environmental groups help greenwash Big Meat’s climate impact

The National Audubon Society, the beloved bird conservancy organization, rewards regenerative ranchers with its seal of approval in the form of a label that reads “Grazed on bird friendly land” and “Audubon certified.” Such beef can be purchased at about 250 retail and online stores.

Then there's how Massachusetts Audubon pretended it was going to chop down its trees so it could continue NOT cutting them to get paid to preserve them for carbon-offsets. Propublica:

However improbable the idea might be of a conservation group actually permitting the removal of so much timber, Mass Audubon officials said they had simply followed the state’s rules in claiming that the society could heavily log its forest.

Then there's E & E News (politico) discussion of Audubon's internals:

The organization’s former president and CEO, David Yarnold, resigned under pressure in 2021, following POLITICO’s reports of widespread staff dissatisfaction at Audubon, especially among workers of color and the LGBTQ community (Greenwire, April 21, 2021).

An external audit later substantiated some of those claims, and pointed to widespread cultural problems. “Nearly all of the women we interviewed and many of the men commented that implicit bias toward women and people of color is prevalent at Audubon,” the audit found (Greenwire, May 6, 2021).

Refugio Mariscal, a former geographic information systems analyst in Audubon’s Great Lakes regional office, said that management at the national level had “almost gotten worse since Yarnold left.”

“I would say as a person of color, there’s still a lot of issues that Audubon needs to deal with,” he said.

Mariscal left Audubon in January for a job at another environmental nonprofit. He said workplace issues at Audubon, plus better pay at the new job, factored into his decision.

“The general culture within Audubon is not very welcoming to staff,” he said in January. “They seem to have a tough time letting go of their old ways of doing things.”

I used to have ducks. They LOVE eating slugs. Alas, they also love eating gardens. ;-)

Save your egg shells until they are dried out (microwave if you are in a hurry) and give them a quick buzz in the blender or food processor. This should give you a gritty powder that will hurt the slugs, thereby discouraging them from going wherever they find it. Diatomaceous earth would also work (probably better, but that's be a purchase instead of a freebie). Dust the plants with either and circle them with a large fat ring of the powder.

My grandma would have said to put out beer traps, but my understanding is that such traps need to be situated well enough to drown the slugs because otherwise they will escape.

Edit: here you go! https://www.learningwithexperts.com/gardening/blog/organic-slugs-snails-control

Ouch! I hope no one minds that I left the publicly available info intact. No actual names or anything scary like credit card numbers were in there.

platform tip

Not tip. Something else. Given how much they are getting off each exchange, I feel like tipping is not needed. I checked a few recent donations and took a picture. The most recent transactions are on top.

When someone donates, any tip is excluded from the Beehaw contribution and the Beehaw part is listed. Immediately above it two fees are subtracted from the Beehaw donation: A 'stripe' fee and a 'Host' fee. So Beehaw never gets your actual donation and the Host always gets a cut.

Edit: attached image shows how a $10 and a $50 donation is each charged as well as showing part of a more recent $10 donation with slightly different stripe fee.

making bean burgers

Oh no! Just buy them! My better half is vegetarian, which means I started mostly cook meat-free because it is easier than making two meals, but now I'm just in the habit of not eating much meat. Our bean-burger experiments were never worth effort. We use fake-beef veggie crumbles for casserole-type recipes and big frozen packs of Beyond Burgers (Impossible is also good) if we want an actual burger. For chicken, we'll buy some unbreaded seitan/TVP substitutes, like these examples.

I have the same problem with egg substitutes, so we're still eating eggs -- but from happy-seeming chickens we can visit. The hard part for me is cheese. I'm waiting for lab-grown cheese, but for now I can't match the flavors of actual cheese.

Given that Israel has nuclear weapons, they wouldn't be 'sitting ducks', but I don't want to see a nuclear war starting in the Middle East. I doubt it would stay contained to the area. I fear that Russia would back Iran and counter -- or at least threaten to -- with Russian nuclear weapons, which would get the U.S. or our allies back into the mess but escalated to the whole world at risk instead of just a small contested sliver.

I would love to see a workable path to a two-state solution. Experts have spent their lives working towards that goal and it still hasn't happened. I totally blame the government of Israel for not figuring out a peace with Palestinian residents back in the 1970s, but here we are. Bibbi makes everything worse and his public falls for his 'strong man' shtick just like Americans fall for Trump's version. Sitting in the U.S., the best election choice I can make for the sake of Palestinians is to vote Harris. Beyond the election, there is room for letters, protests, and boycotts, but the problem is mostly with Israel's government rather than with anyone in the United States.

In terms of who to vote for in the U.S. presidential election, 3rd parties are spoilers. The U.S. voter is wasting their vote if they stay home or vote 3rd party.

Politicians are notoriously evasive, and this particular interview sounded more straight forward than most. Okay, most the honest ones, anyway. I mean: it's easy to say "Read my lips. No new taxes" or "Free IVF" if you've no legitimate plan to fund the government, but if you're not going to make stuff up for the sound bite, you almost have to be evasive. Robust and well considered plans are made by experts and a politician trying to promote a good plan has to boil it down to a couple nebulous basics. Doing anything else means you either bore the audience OR skip a contingency or other minutia such that your critics call you a liar.

Remember when Obama said you'd get to keep your doctor? He was trying to summarize explaining that Affordable Care would not mandate what doctor you could use, but what he didn't say was that Insurance Companies would continue to be able choose what doctors they covered, so Obama's critics said he LIED about keeping your doctor. It was NOT a lie. It was just Insurance companies doing what they always did.

Harris said she would support Israel but the war had to end. If Israeli/Palestinian strife has gone unsolved for 50 years through all sorts of Presidents, I don't expect any U.S. election to change what goes on over there. The U.S. could theoretically stop aiding Israel as it commits genocide, but the realistic outcome of that would be neighboring countries committing genocide on Israelis, and since that's the basic reason the country was invented... maybe that's not the best outcome either. It has been a mess for decades, and I'm not blaming Regan, Carter, Trump, Putin, or Tony Blair for any of the mess with Gaza.

Harris said she would not ban fracking but her values have not changed. I suspect this is because she's come to see no one banned horses when car came along, and no one need ban fracking if there's a better alternative. What she did not specify was the carrots and sticks she might employ to get us to which alternatives. That's fine with me because the tech is changing and the outcome is more important than the method.

Harris said she would enforce laws regarding immigration AND she wanted the tabled border bill on her desk so she can sign it. There's a bunch she could have said there, too, but my point is that again, she wasn't particularly evasive.

I, too, think Biden did a great job as President -- especially given the constant pushback he got from Congress and the corrupted Court. It frustrated me that the public didn't notice or care, but I could see from the polls and negative press that there was no way Biden was going to get re-elected, so I was living in despair for our future until he dropped out. With Biden out of the race, the public is paying attention to the race again, becoming aware of the crazy Trump/2025 "agenda nobody asked for", and (if we're to believe the polls) becoming more interested in voting for a new face. Yay!

Have hope! But also, if you can volunteer to talk to potential voters, do that too.

If your schedule is too tight to volunteer, or if it is physically/emotionally too much, consider at least talking about her in a positive way.

If that is too much, maybe at least, at least mention that you're hearing lots more support and enthusiasm than even when Biden won, so you are going to be very suspicious of claims that Dems 'steal' elections. Yes, Trump is still supported in the boonies, but more and more suburbs and cities are increasingly wanting Harris -- you know, the places with most the people.

You can adjust them, but it is better if you get them adjusted wherever you bought them because they know how to do it properly. In particular, the spot where they touch your nose might get sore, and maybe moreso on one side than the other. That'd be a sign to get them adjusted. Some people even have one ear slightly lower than the other, needing an adjustment to the arms.

Glasses have an optimum focal point so your glasses were meant to be a particular distance from your eyes and over adjusting might change that. On the other hand, the change is going to be so small that it probably only matters to the people selling glasses rather than the wearers.

Reminds me of the incident in February where a waymo tried to get through a bunch of street revelers, and their response was to set it on fire. From the old pcmag story :

San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson noted that it had tallied 55 incidents where self-driving vehicles had interfered with rescue operations in the city.

Edit: unrelated to above quote, pc mag also says:

In some cases, residents have put orange cones on the hoods of cars, which makes them temporarily immobile.

(see also the autopian story it references)

Reminder that Palantir is the same company whose bosses are deep in bed with AmericaPAC -- which got big write-ups (link is to one comment, but you can read more there and lots of places) because Elon Musk is gathering voter data seemingly for that PAC to target swing state voters with canvassing efforts.

Water/sewer systems

This is early in the story so there will be more news later. The key piece reported on thus far is a 271-page document based on publicly available information about JD Vance and identified as “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES.” There's also a partial report on Marco Rubio, who'd been a potential VP pick.

The Trump campaign is thinking Iran is to blame.

I wish I'd been online yesterday to see this because it is way worse than just not working, so I'm repeating this whenever I see it brought up: They're targeting swing state voters (via in-person canvassers) to vote Trump. The key pieces are Palantir, which compiles data to see trends and 'insights' and a new FEC opinion that says PACs can work with candidates for canvassing. CNBC had a big article on it and states (archive -- emphasis is mine):

[...] users who enter a ZIP code that indicates they live in a battleground state, like Pennsylvania or Georgia, the process is very different.

Rather than be directed to their state’s voter registration page, they instead are directed to a highly detailed personal information form, prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age.

So that person who wanted help registering to vote? In the end, they got no help at all registering. But they did hand over priceless personal data to a political operation.

“What makes America PAC more unique: it is a billionaire-backed super PAC focused on door-to-door canvassing, which it can conduct in coordination with a presidential campaign,” Fischer said. “Thanks to a recent FEC advisory opinion, America PAC may legally coordinate its canvassing activities with the Trump campaign — meaning, among other things, that the Trump campaign may provide America PAC with the literature and scripts to make sure their efforts are consistent.”

The America PAC raised more than $8 million between April 1 and June 30, according to FEC records. It has received donations from veteran investor Doug Leone, cryptocurrency investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and a company run by longtime venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, according to FEC records.

They also quote the NYT in saying Lonsdale is one of Musk's political confidants -- which is interesting because he's at Palantir which was you'd think of as his old buddy Peter Theil's gig. Palantir sells info. As long as they get good info, we can expect them tailor the perfect messages to win over swing states voters, because those voters are (unintentionally) telling them exactly how to do it.

A low allergenic dog would probably thrill your kid, and even if it didn't, I'm betting the adults in the house would quickly fall in love. I'd avoid Schnauzers because they are harder to train (they're smart enough, but will test whether they should actually listen to you or not -- whereas Basenjis are hard to train because they aren't that bright). Wheatens and other similar terriers are likely to have similar stubbornness issues. Maybe an Irish Water Dog or Lagotto Romagnolo? I don't know those breeds but I see them listed as low-allergy. I hate to link to reddit, but their LR sub says they really are pretty safe.