No, you don’t understand… This isn’t a “the government is doing this to control people” kind of conspiracy

This is a “consulting firms like McKinsey have been quietly but openly pushing the idea of exploiting workers to keep them too busy to advocate for their interests for the last 50 years, using concepts such as corporate culture, surpressing wages, and most recently return to office” thing

It’s the investigative journalism kind of conspiracy

You forgot, it saves people 30 mins - 2 hours every day. What are they going to do with that time? Enjoy themselves? Advocate for their own interests?

No, clearly this cannot stand

You’re missing the meat. High prices, low prices - local business spends more locally. Their house, their meals, ideally even production (although largely it probably goes to the same place)

With Walmart, the manufacturing costs go to China. The minimum wage workers stay more local. The profits go to HQ. What goes to HQ leaves the area permanently, giving nothing back

Why the fuck is Gaetz not facing trial? How is he just getting a pass??? It blows my mind

I mean, beyond that, the practice is still around to this day

Here’s an article on chacas. They’re more local and personally managed, but they’re a textbook example of agroforestry

Here’s an article about the evidence the Amazon was intentionally cultivated

He’s an excerpt:

In 2013, community ecologist Hans ter Steege and colleagues were taking inventory of the vast diversity of the Amazon’s trees. The team sampled 1,170 scattered plots far from modern human inhabitants to identify more than 16,000 different species among those 390 billion individual plants. Then they noticed something odd: Despite that broad diversity, over half of the total trees were made up of just over 1 percent (227) of the species.

About 20 of these “hyperdominant” plants were domesticated species such as the Brazil nut, the Amazon tree grape and the ice cream bean tree. That was five times the amount researchers expected if chance were the only factor. “The hypothesis came up that perhaps people might have domesticated these species a lot […] which would have helped their abundance in the Amazon,” says ter Steege says, who is the lead author of the recent study.

To test this hypothesis, ter Steege teamed up with archaeologists to look more closely at the number of domesticated species in proximity to where there was evidence of pre-Columbian communities. “Indeed, the distance to these archaeological sites has an effect on the abundance and richness of domesticated species in the Amazon,” ter Steege says, noting that he and his team were able to plot a decrease in the number of domesticated species as the distance from archaeological sites increased.

The researchers also found that many of these domesticated species were identified far from the areas where they first arose, leading to speculation that humans transported them to cultivate elsewhere. Cocoa, used by some native peoples for beverages and in religious ceremonies, was first domesticated in the northwestern region of the Amazon, where researchers today have identified a larger genetic diversity reflecting more time established there. But today the species is most prevalent in the southern areas of the rainforest.

It’s not a particularly new theory, and the evidence fits the claims and practices of the surviving cultures - I think it just hasn’t caught on because of cultural bias. The Americas have a long history of sprawling empires and evidence of trade from Washington State to the Andes mountains.

Disease and outright genocide just destroyed most of these cultures, not because they were primitive (we have no problem praising their math and astronomy), but because they developed down a very different path

They also make touch vests, integrate with vibrators, and probably have even wilder accessories these days

There’s also this idea that maybe the Amazon was a food forest, like many places in the Americas

It’s not a regression, it’s an objectively better form of farming. Instead of cultivating the land, you cultivate the ecosystem. You plant the things you want frequently and cull the plants you don’t like over generations, and you have food everywhere all the time. The extra food supports critters and prey animals, giving you easy hunting. It’s a minimal work high reward farming style

The downside is you don’t get a lot of easily stored crops you need for cities and armies. And so you see both side by side - for example, the Inca would farm potatoes as taxes, which would be stored for traveling armies or disasters and sent back to the capital to support their higher population density

I mean, camo is like wearing a sports jersey as a shirt… Yeah, you’re not doing the activity, but it’s an expression of “this is my whole identity” that people don’t really think about too much. It’s still a shirt and/or pants

A robe is different. It’s not normal attire, no “accepted” gender normally wears a robe. It’s also formal attire, a Jedi robe is even the official dress attire for an established religion

Objectively, I agree that tactical camo at McDonald’s is equally ridiculous, but it just doesn’t have the same impact in context

I’m going to go out on a limb and say fedora silverblue or bazzite

Basic user? Use flat packs and enjoy easy graphics support, as well as all of the windows compatibility for gaming

Advanced user? Learn to do things in pods/containers or distrobox, it’s easy even if the quick start docs aren’t great (I can find my cheat sheets if anyone is going down that road)

Pro: most stuff just works, and it’s harder to config yourself into a corner you have to research your way out of

Cons: normal Linux install guides need to be modified a bit, it’s not hard but you do have to learn how to do it

You know, since the world has totally lost the plot at this point, maybe we should have more fun with it on the way down

Maybe we should be cosplaying at legal proceedings and refusing to elaborate

I’m just imagining someone ranting and raving about the evils of drag shows to an audience with someone dressed like a Jedi…

I doubt it… You know how there’s companies to boost your SEO? There’s companies that do literally the opposite - you pay them to bury things on the Internet. It’s a service basically exclusively for the rich… There’s no money to be made doing this, if a company does it after an exposure they get a brush with the Streisand effect. But if you’re rich…want the wrong face to come up on Google images? Don’t want pictures of your house? Want people to find the wrong address for you? You can pay to make it happen

I knew a guy who used to do that. This sounds like their techniques - they start by using legal threats to hopefully get the host to take stuff down, and if that doesn’t work they then generally use SEO techniques to fill the first 2 pages with misinfo

Sounds to me like a nervous billionaire offered “their guy” to help with the situation

The Germans, circa '40 FTFY

Ah, I was very confused where that was coming from

Ultimately, insurance is a bucket of money we all pay into to help the few who go through an emergency

Obviously you need administration to handle the bureaucracy and make sure no one is stealing from the emergency pot fraudulently

That being said, what I take exception to is the profit. Why, the ever loving fuck, is it ok to take more than your costs for this? Why is money intended for the public good funneled up to the ownership class?

Pay your people, pay out the coverage. The rest of the money has no business leaving the pot… Not to run ads, or to lobby lawmakers. Definitely not to end up in an unrelated person’s pocket.

It’s a case for a government run entity if I’ve ever seen one

This just feels like someone gearing up for more drone regulation to me. We’ve had them for years, they’re not expensive or hard to use, and suddenly there’s a whole bunch of them near an airport and the media loses their mind?

It feels contrived

What are you talking about? This is about CO² to produce the hydrogen from methanol and H² as a greenhouse gas through extending the life of methane in the atmosphere

Probably because the more aggressive the timeline, the more willingness to fight rather than just adapt

Personally, I’d like to see more of a transition - maybe a tax that starts small and quickly scales into something crazy over the course of the decade or something else to heavily motivate early compliance

This isn’t nothing though, it’s mostly just late. Paris did something similar and is already reaping the rewards

It makes a difference - corporations move and adapt slowly. They now know in 10 years, the ICE market will probably be completely dead in big chunks of the US market, and if they aren’t competitive by then they’ll lose a lot of market share

It’s not enough to sell electric models by 2035 - they need to be established as good electric manufacturers by then. It’ll push them to move the electric transition forward, either giving up on hydrogen or speeding up their plans

It’s not the greatest timeframe, but it’s not nothing

Finding the right words to get apathetic people to care

They’re both based on the same source material - various mythological creatures and real animals with a twist

I used to think Pokemon was super original - but a lot of it just seems they way because we don’t learn much about Japanese or asian folklore overseas.

Like take Magikarp. There’s a Chinese proverb about a carp leaping through the dragons gate (an actual waterfall) turning into a dragon (meant to describe how with diligence a common person could become powerful through the civil official exams)… The weak magic carp, if diligently leveled, can become a Chinese dragon that looks exactly like the ones they use in parades.

Meouth - a wealth giving cat, many asian shops have a cat figure with a gold coin for luck. And Persian is just a lioness (a bigger cat) with the same design.

Vulpix/Ninetails - nine tailed fox

Ekans - snakE. Arbok - kobrA. Pidgey - pigeon. Pigiotto, pigeot? Reminds me of fire, fira, firaga, firaja naming scheme from final fantasy

Hitmonlee and Hitmonchan - Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan

Noticably, most of these puns and references to actual people are not copied, instead it is things like wolves and mythological creatures

If anything, it’s the style of the art that makes them so similar - but copying aesthetics is how art grows and develops. It’s not like they were the first or only ones to copy the style either