Yeah… That’s just unnecessary to put a dog at risk like that, whether service or otherwise.

Also, don’t work in a lab by yourself. Have a buddy, even if all they do is sit in a corner and scroll on their phone. Have someone there in case something happens.

In the best case, you’ve maybe wasted some of their time. In the worst case, at least you’ll have company in quarantine.

I don’t mean to imply your job with writing your thesis on it is easy, the proof needed would be no easy task.

But it’s hard to flip through a history book and stop on any page, and not find something on the page that’s harmful to nature.

Proving that it’s harmful would be the part that’s hard. Finding the occurrences of harm is easy.

Seems like an easy subject. Just saying.

I dunno why where it’s being used would be relevant… Unless horses are scientists

They do. Ever have “banana flavor” stuff that doesn’t seem to taste anything like a banana?

… well, it does, it just doesn’t taste like a Cavendish banana. It most likely resembles the tates of the gros michel.

It’s not lost forever. They have seeds in the global seed vault, and there’s a few small growers still producing them.

You can actually buy a box of them still. They’re expensive as all hell, but you can do it.

Get a few friends together and put some money into a pot, then buy a box and have a banana party.

At least it’s tasty blood?

Idk, I’m trying to find the silver lining here.

Fun fact, I read your original as tarp, and it made sense, and the plastic fish comment confused me until I went back and re-read your original post.

Everything is.

As someone who works in tech, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already.

Part of my job is to oversee and arrange in some capacity for licensing of digital products, especially office 365, and I can count the number of people who have a copilot subscription on one hand, out of nearly, if not more than 1000 users across various clients.

I know some are using competing products, mainly chat GPT, and I don’t always have visibility to that, but still… The rate of adoption and the speed at which all of this is being developed and invested into… Does not bode well.

Well, money is only as valuable as we think it is, and what goods or services it can be traded for.

The money itself carries very little value itself, only what we assign to it, or associate to it.

If the economic system based on the currency currently in use collapses, the money you have won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.

It keeps working because the insurance/bank systems are evaluating things on the merit of the lender and their business plan. Anyone can make a decent business plan that will pass muster if you fiddle with it long enough. And the individual company/organisation that is defaulting on these are a dime-a-dozen. Since the failure of the loan goes down with the ship (and company), even if the borrower’s ask for more money tomorrow, as long as the request is coming from a different company/organization, the banks evaluate based on the organisation that is requesting the loan, not the leadership’s failed previous attempts from other businesses.

Incorporated companies have limited liability from their owners. While the owners operate as agents of the business, ultimately the business itself is liable for their decisions. They don’t bear any responsibility. So their actions are based on what will get them, personally, the most value extracted from the business, not based on what’s good for the long-term success of the company itself.

The banks, and/or the insurance companies.

In the case of the banks, the money isn’t real and never existed in the first place.

The fiat money system is pretty fucked when you understand it.

At worst they take the “loss” and at best, they get bailed out by public dollars.

Pick whatever fits your ideals.

I generally feel like leveraged buyouts for numbers into the billions are just inside jobs for those selling.

Stay with me for a sec.

So the seller makes a closed door deal with the “buyer” to funnel money back to them personally after the sale is done. So in this case, say, they commit 3.6bn to the “buyers” and pocket 3bn for themselves. Almost the entire purchase is leveraged, with the expectation that it will become unsustainable and go bankrupt shortly after the purchase.

The buyers don’t really give a shit, they’ll write it off, collect whatever they can from insurance, etc. They didn’t really want to company anyways, so they let it fold.

The money they took home from the deal with the seller is entirely theirs, the company bears the weight of the debt and the consequences of defaulting on the debt, so the execs that made the move are basically free and clear.

Everyone wins, except, you know, the poors who work at the purchased company, the banks, who don’t give a shit, and insurance people, which… Nobody gives a fuck about them…

At the end of the day, the execs of the purchasing company get rich, the sellers get rich, and that’s the fucking point.

If the sellers instead just closed up shop, they would get maybe a fraction of the money they would from selling it, mainly in selling off assets… It would be a pittance compared to this scheme.

All they need to do is find someone they can buy out the morals of, to complete the deal. This is surprisingly easy in the corpo world.

Yep. Ever since I saw the garden in the back yard, which occupies about half of the back yard, I wanted to make a vegetable garden with raised beds, eventually enclosing it like a greenhouse in the long term.

I’ve been too busy and my money has been to scarce trying to pay enough to live here that I haven’t made any progress on achieving that goal. It really doesn’t help that lumber prices went though the roof around the time we moved in, so I can’t even really afford to buy the wood I would need to make the raised beds. And I don’t want like 6" or whatever raised beds. I’m thinking more like 3 ft. I don’t want to have to crawl on the ground or even really bend over to plant/tend/harvest whatever I plant. So it’s not going to be a small amount of wood that I’ll need.

Then I need to figure out how to find the time to attend to it, when I should plant/fertilize/harvest, how often I should tend to the plants etc… There’s a lot I don’t know about what it takes to maintain a veggie garden. I’ll get there eventually, or I’ll die trying.

Between “freeing” the slaves, only to aggressively rebrand them as criminals (eg, guilty of (verb) while black), and the wage slavery many of these companies are happy to engage in, everything has been pretty well cooked for a while.

If they brand you as a criminal and force you into a position of working as a slave, then your food, accommodations, and everything is provided for you. This is “classic” slavery where the slave owns nothing and the slaver provides everything, controlling what is, or isn’t allowed, provided, acceptable, etc.

If they don’t (or can’t) brand you as a criminal, unless you’re from a rich family, you end up as a wage slave, where you make just enough to scrape by, often sharing accommodations with others to afford the landlord’s rent, never owning property of your own or building any level of wealth through property ownership… You don’t make enough to have a vehicle worth anything, nor anything else of any significant value. You’re “free” to choose your slaver, and they let you pick which landlord you pay homage to… The main difference here is that you get to “pick” your oppressors, and now instead of the slaver providing everything for you (food, clothing, accommodation), you have to figure that out for yourself.

The difference is honestly quite small IMO. And when you look at it objectively, you find that a large majority of people are still in slavery in some form or another.

Look around you and realize that “middle class” is pretty much no longer a thing. You’re either poor and a wage slave, very poor and/or criminal and a literal slave, or you have enough money to be “independently wealthy” being a landlord or one of the slavers.

They’ve built a system that can only sustain most people at a level of poverty that affords then no ability to escape from that poverty, while the owners and shareholders, landlords, and bosses of the world, sit on their asses and collect the fruits of our labor.

Thank you kind stranger. I will look into it.

The only heartbreaking part is that before we moved in there were perennial flowers planted along the edge of the garden, I guess it was a flower garden for the previous owners, and I’m not sure I can save them before I go scorched earth on the rest of the area.

My current grass is patchy, I’m certain there’s little or no nitrogen. I’ve been meaning to pick up a small bag of clover seeds and at least augment my lawn with them to make it a bit more green at least.

I’m fortunate that I was able to get a battery electric mower for my home shortly after moving in. So there’s no inconvenient gas fetching and mixing, just a pair of bigass fuck off batteries that live on the charger between mows.

The real problem is that we have a garden in the back that I want to set up as a vegetable garden and I just haven’t had time to do the work and it’s currently over run with weeds. I’ll get to it eventually. I’m planning on killing everything currently in the garden with some kind of weed killer, not sure what yet exactly, but I’ve seen some places recommend a soap/brine mix that seems effective. Then cover it with that black landscaping/gardening fabric so shit doesn’t grow for a while, if that’s successful, build raised beds and fill them with fresh, untainted soil and grow veggies there… It’s going to be a project and I have no idea how I’m going to find time or money to do it, but the way things are going, I can’t afford not to do it.

Anyways. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk. I guess?

Frick. I moved into a house from being in apartments for many years and I have to say, lawn and Garden work, suuuuucccckkksss.

I hate it. I have too much to do to deal with your… Growth.

Can I replace my lawn with an emo lawn so it cuts itself?

In my experience, Plex struggles with the same. Depends on the series.