• 0 Posts
  • 85 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 25th, 2023

help-circle
  • Unfortunately most commercial farms aren’t putting in what they’re taking out, even with the industrial fertilizers. Most of the industrial fertilizers are just nitrogen, potassium, and phosphates, often as a liquid. You are absolutely right that you can’t take and never return; that’s why in pre-industrial revolution times, people would rotate fields between crops, and lying fallow/being used for grazing (where sheep, cattle, etc. were leaving free fertilizer) You also ended up with fewer years where all your crops got wiped out by a single pest, because you weren’t farming just one thing. Efficiency in farming–esp. monoculture–is great for profits, not so great for the land itself.

    Good news is that good water treatment plants will pull phosphate out of the waste water.

    Eh. High levels of phosphates end up running off fields into waterways, and then you get things like algae blooms. Waste water treatment plants will clean up runoff that goes into the sewers and storm drains, but it’s not really cleaning up entire rivers. IIRC, that used to be a much more significant problem; I remember water in rivers near where I grew up–which was all surrounded by farms–often had white, sludgy scum anywhere that the current was forming eddies. If I remember correctly the high levels of that white shit was due to worse regulations governing agricultural run-off.






  • Well, yeah, it would be.

    We would need to drastically increase taxes in order to have UBI for the poorest people in the US. Right now, across the board, all of us are paying some of the lowest income taxes since income taxation was introduced. After you consider things like the EIC, a lot of poor people have a negative tax rate. As it is, we’re running a budget deficit every single year, and most of that deficit is entitlement programs (I’m not using that in a pejorative sense) like social security and Medicare.

    (No, social security is not fully funded; people pay in far less than they end up getting paid back, and the system relies on a constantly expanding pool of people paying into it to fund the people that are currently drawing from it. To fix that, we would need to increase social security taxes, end the cap on those taxes, and probably set the retirement age higher.)

    Even if we took every single penny that every billionaire in the US had, that would fund the federal gov’t for something like eight months. Total. And then it would all be gone. (Plus the stock and bond markets would crater, but eh.)

    Yeah, we need to bring back the highest marginal tax rates for sure. And we need to increase corporate taxes and eliminate a lot of the corporate cash giveaways. But we also need to increase taxes on the middle class. I’m saying this as someone that’s at the lower end of middle class; I’m not paying enough in taxes for what i think this country should be doing for the citizens of the country. But man, if you told me my tax bill was going to go up by $8k, but I’d also get national single payer health care? And national public transit, and free public universities? I would cream my panties.


  • I have an earlier version of this (got it on sale from Costco, and it was the highest-rated model by Consumer Reports at the time); I love it. It’s not great for carpets, but it’s fast and easy for hardwood floors.

    Would I have bought it if it needed to connect to my cell phone? Absofuckinglutely not. Not in a million fucking years. It could have been the best goddamn vacuum in the world at sucking, powered by a miniature black hole, sucking dirt to the event horizon, and I still would have passed.

    I need LESS connectivity in my life, not more.



  • Not really; without the items that were seized, they don’t really have much of anything that would link him to the location, aside from some bad security camera footage that, IMO, doesn’t really look like him. Insisting that he needs an alibi is reversing the burden of proof; it’s saying that, unless he can prove he was elsewhere, then their claim must be correct. But they have so little without the evidence seized at the arrest that the case would be very thin.

    Look, if you asked me where I was when The Asshole Brian Thompson was shot, I’d have no fucking idea unless it was something that was a big enough deal that I noted it in my calendar. I don’t even remember where I was when 11 Sept. happened.



  • That’s an exceptionally dangerous claim to make; it’s going to cause people to further alienate people that are on the autism spectrum. When you look at the report that the US Secret Service released on mass shootings (I’d have to find it; I’ve got a copy saved somewhere), autism spectrum disorder is not listed as a factor, while things like divorced parents is.

    Perhaps you missed the part that said, “[Forensic psychiatrist Dr Iain Kooyman] found Prosper had an ‘extreme lack’ of empathy and remorse - something that could not be explained by ASD alone.”

    And, BTW, people on the autism spectrum lack effective empathy, not empathy. That means that a person on the spectrum has a reduced ability to understand what a person is experiencing or feeling, not that they don’t feel empathy when they do know.



  • HelixDab2@lemm.eetoLinux@lemmy.mlWindows doesn't "just work"
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    2 months ago

    Windows 11 LTSC

    I’m using Window 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC; the biggest issue I’ve had was that I couldn’t get my video card installed. I had to wait until there was an updated driver, a few weeks after I assembled my computer. Every time I tried to install the driver that was supposed to be the correct one, I got a BSOD.

    Honestly, I like 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC better than I liked the 10 Pro version that I had. And–compared to the only Linux distro I’ve used, Tails–it’s fairly straightforward. And yes, I know the Tails is kind of a pain in the ass, and it’s not fair to judge all of Linux against that. But i’m old, and cranky, and just want Win 3.11 back.



  • I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there really aren’t many countries in the world that aren’t founded on murder and oppression. It is not, IMO, reasonable to hold decendants responsible for the crimes that their grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, etc. committed, but it is reasonable to hold them responsible for what they’re doing right now.



  • That’s just a bad-faith, black-and-white view. Nazi Germany had the right to exist, but they didn’t have the right to invade other countries, exterminate Jews, Romani, gay people, etc. It’s not the existence of the state, or even the beliefs of the people running the state, but the actions that matter.

    You can be the most racist, homophobic, misogynist Christian asshole in the world, and as long as you don’t act on your beliefs, it’s not a problem.

    If Israel ceases it’s genocidal actions, and ceases treating Palestinians like sub-humans, then there’s no issue.


  • Oh my god, it’s so bad.

    “Soft tissue lengthens, relaxing muscles and ligaments. As the tissue relaxes, the Neodymium magnets increase blood flow to the area calming nerves and promote relaxation. VuVa™ are the only patented sets available with Neodymium magnets.”

    “Magnetic Therapy is based on the premise that all living organisms exist in a magnetic field, including the human body. The human body generates its own magnetic field. Therefore, the body can heal itself when electromagnetic energy is in balance.”

    It’s like those stupid magnet bracelets and elbow wraps, only for your vagina. It’s all woo.