Fuck leaf blowers. I don't care if they're quieter. The term here is "polishing a turd." They don't really solve any problems. They're not good at removing debris, but just blowing it to a place where someone else will deal with it.
Also... removing debris on its own is a dubious pursuit, since "debris" could also be termed "stuff that holds moisture longer and slows the effect of drying soil during drought conditions."
So I promise I'm not trying to be a dick here. While what you're saying is essentially reasonable, it's actually not true.
The amount of emissions in these small, wildly inefficient engines is considerably worse than even a large pickup truck. The reason is because emissions standards, including the introduction of catalytic converters, etc. don't apply to lawn equipment. The result is that these don't actually burn fuel correctly, and spew out lots of harmful pollutants in a way that even large ICE vehicles don't.
Like sure, there are larger sources of emissions, but I'm kinda in favor of making changes that would offer a large benefit proportionate to the amount of lifestyle change needed to make the switch. As in, making this switch would be easier than not. These emissions produce no benefit to us, and they cost us a weird amount of money to produce.
Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240430115700/https://apnews.com/article/superhuman-strength-lethal-restraint-police-b6ec5846ce18784ab99438eeb3f27eef
So this is a horrific stereotype, and it has an even more sinister historical precedent.
Back in the era of slavery (that is specifically in the US, the slavery of Africans abducted from their home countries), there were specifically slave "breeding farms" where slavers would commit massive amounts of sexual assault of captive slaves in order to produce slaves they selected by their own arbitrary metric for specific physical qualities... and to save on what can, again horrifically, be referred to as "import costs."
I'm not saying this "worked" or produced the results that slavers wanted. What I am saying is that this specific way of subjugating and dehumanizing people has had lasting effects in both perception of black folks and in the ways that systemic racism works.
VIRTUAL SPRING
Woman and man sitting in Adirondack chairs on their back porch as a leaf blower wails in the background
REEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Woman: The moment it’s warm enough to enjoy the spring, the leaf blowers start up.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Woman: Not only are they loud, they’re poisoning workers with exhaust, spraying dust, allergens and fecal matter everywhere, and spewing tons of CO2 during a climate emergency.
All to blow a few blades of grass off a driveway!
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Man: What you need are noise-canceling earbuds and birdsong recordings to re-create the joys of a suburbanized spring.
Softer REEEEEEE
Woman, wearing earbuds with birds tweeting around head: Ah, the late anthropocene…
People put so much energy into growing grass. Seeding, liming, fertilising, watering... so they can create endless, mindless busywork and destroy biodiversity.
Lawns were originally a status symbol. A "hey lol look at me I have enough land I don't have to grow food." Shameful that it took off as a defacto standard.
That's actually amazing. For real, thanks for sharing that. I love hearing about these decisions can have such a positive impact in our small corners of the world.
The fact that generative AI is being used as a means of large corporations consolidating even more wealth rather than attempting to free the working class from shitty, menial jobs shows that we're way the fuck off with how we conceptualize of "work".
This should be a good thing, but for lots of people this will suck.
Average household income in the US (I'm assuming that's where you are) are 75k before taxes, after taxes is 58k.
Rent is a national average of 2100 monthly, so, roughly 25k annually.
The average american household spends 270 weekly on groceries. That's 14k annually.
The average american household spends 12k on transportation annually.
The average american household spends about 10k on medical costs.
So -3K is what you're left with on average.
Accounting for only necessities, the averages mean that people can't afford to exist, let alone pay a down payment on an average house. 5% of the national average of 495,000 for a house is 24,750. If we're going off of averages is about 30k more than Americans make per household per year. And again in this case, since the average leaves us with a deficit of 3k just accounting for necessities, extending the timeline for savings doesn't do any favors.
So the CEO of Loblaws (the parent company that owns most of the grocery chains/stores in Canada) has very explicitly been engaged in price-fixing of groceries.
These people are stealing from us. It is correct to steal from them.
Fwiw I fully support your reasoning that TikTok in particular should be viewed as a source of particularly insidious propaganda at this moment. I've been tracking this for years and it seems very obvious to me.
However... when you're talking about Instagram you're talking about the company that offered the tools used in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
To me this is less frightening for public safety and more for reasons related to climate change, since this kind of industrial expansion will be less contingent on worker availability.
Mind you, the whole push toward driverless vehicles seems insanely redundant as a concept, since driverless tech in the form of high-speed rail has been around for decades in an infinitely more efficient way than could ever be offered by personal vehicles.
My main problem with strict dietary rhetoric is that it doesn’t acknowledge the benefit of people eating vegan (or whatever) sometimes. Like it’s a good thing to get nutrition from diverse sources and there’s carryover benefit to the planet when doing this.
I’m not a vegan, but I eat a lot of plant-based meals and when I eat meat, because I eat less of it, it’s generally local and ethically-raised. Militant vegans will often turn people from making decisions like this, and I think that’s a shame.
I was a vegan for years. And I was careful about trying to get my nutrients. But I needed to eat so much more and I was lowkey tired all the time. When I started eating some meat again I felt ashamed of myself for not living up to the rhetoric. But it’s just silly to treat this as an all or nothing type thing. A person eating beans and rice one day and a small amount of beef in a stir fry the next is… not the same as a person eating fried chicken every day, and I don’t appreciate when anyone implies it is.
Jobs didn’t know shit. He made a bunch of predictions, some of them right, some of them not at all right. He just took credit for other peoples’ work, mostly Wozniak’s. The man was every bit the piece of shit Elon is.
This just sounds like straight up torture with extra steps.
No rehabilitation, no isolation of dangerous individuals from the general population. I’m decidedly anti-incarceration but at least there are arguments for it in place of something functional and just.
This just doesn’t solve any problems and adds some new ones. It sounds unbelievably cruel.
It’s worth noting that there are at present no heat-exposure safety rules at the Florida State or federal levels, so this basically means no protections allowed.
So that’s actually not true, but for reasons that I think are weirder and more interesting than anything implied by either side of this “debate.”
There are actually about 50% more women who have Y chromosomes than originally expected, and also: microchimerism seems to be extremely common in people who give birth, seemingly regardless of whether or not they give birth to children with XY chromosomes. But the genetic remnants of fetuses that have XY chromosomes stay in the body for many years (possibly a lifetime), and this has a fairly significant effect on genetic composition.
I get what you’re saying and I don’t totally disagree, but I think the main thing that I keep learning is that “biological sex” is just not actually a particularly meaningful concept.
Academics at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed a nationally representative sample of 100 non-federal acute care hospitals – essentially traditional hospitals with emergency departments – and their findings were that 96 percent of their websites transmitted user data to third parties....
But of course we all know that the big manufacturers don’t do this not because they can’t but because they don’t want to. Planned obsolescence is still very much the name of the game, despite all the bullshit they spout about sustainability.
But also, most modern earbuds usually sound quite good. Quality in general has become such a bizarre moving target, but here’s my take: We’ve become so used to constant improvement at the expense of satisfaction. I can barely notice the difference between 1080p and 4k. In my mind they’re both “good quality” and therefore I’m satisfied. Same goes for audio quality. I’ve used a few pairs of earbuds and they have sounded “good.”
As a culture, we need to stop with throwing away of perfectly good devices, because it’s extremely harmful to the planet’s occupants.
You can also sideload epubs, borrow books from libraries on Overdrive and read articles online, etc. It’s way easier on the eyes than screens that rely on refresh rates (which also make them better to use before sleep), they have long battery life. And it’s a lot lighter than carrying books around.
They have a lot of advantages over other platforms for reading.
Also… even barring hanging out with literal nazis, if your whole fucking thing is trying to deny human rights to vulnerable segments of the population, you’re a piece of shit, even if you are actually “pretty liberal” otherwise.
I’m so sick of hearing about this irrelevant piece of shit and everyone who makes excuses for her.
I have said it before and I’ll say it again: this issue exists to stir up controversy. Very few people can ever be professional athletes, but lots of people suffer as a result of the hostility generated by this debate.
Also, very few people talk about trans men in sport. There’s no real justification for excluding trans men from sport other than fragile egos of male athletes being scared of being outperformed by an afab athlete.
Also also, if we’re making the argument that people with higher exposure to testosterone for a short duration in their life have increased athletic performance (which to be clear is kind of true but not actually relevant for all trans women), then I have to remind you that anabolic steroids can benefit athletes for up to a decade, which is exactly much fucking longer than these drugs remain detectable in an athlete’s system.
Also also also, professional sport is stupid and doesn’t deserve this much attention. It certainly shouldn’t be allowed to stir up this much hate toward regular ass trans folks just wanting to live their damn lives, but it does have that effect.
Signal releases their own self-updating apk on their site, and this release doesn’t use Google services for push notifications. There are legitimate reasons why publishers sometimes avoid f-droid.
Also there’s Molly, which is a signal fork that allows database encryption; or Session, which doesn’t require a phone number for account registration and is decentralized. Both of these forks have repos that you can add to f-droid.
I do understand the hesitance to use a platform that has its infrastructure in the US, but I will say that international compliance with the US is a problem even if the infrastructure is located elsewhere. Session is a really promising option, since it’s decentralized, and I’d love to see more people using it.
I need to pirate this book thats over 1000 pages. I already have the pdf but I really want a physical copy and the book costs too much for me. Even if I have to buy a bunch of ink (the book has no pictures) and even if I wear out the printhead before the job is done, it’s still going to be cheaper to do this. My printer has...
Getting an e-reader that allows for sideloading is probably the easiest and cheapest workaround for this problem. You can often get them used for quite cheap. It doesn’t give the physical copy, but is more than likely a better reading experience than trying to print out volumes yourself.
Then you can also “borrow” digital books from libraries, among other things.
Or, for that matter, you could just go to a library in person.
I have no problem with creating drm-free copies of ebooks, and absolutely hard no on stealing from libraries.
But I wasn’t even saying that. I’m just saying borrow and read the books as per the usual method from libraries. Libraries are awesome and there to be used. I love that public and private funding still gets directed toward the free sharing of media in libraries, reducing (not erasing) the actual need for piracy through their existence, especially for books.
Now what I’m betting is that this is for an overpriced textbook, in which case by all means create copies and sideload them onto an ereader that allows this.
Although the spectacle of influencers flaunting their affluence has long been a staple of social media, there are signs that audiences are growing tired of it. Experts say “influencer fatigue” is wearing on young people who crave authenticity as inflation rises and achieving a stable livelihood becomes increasingly...
This just means the next wave of influencers are going to appear to be “regular people.” There’s no such thing as neutrality or authenticity on communications platforms that exist to sell advertising space.
Former Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines was among more than a dozen college athletes who filed a lawsuit against the NCAA on Thursday, accusing it of violating their Title IX rights by allowing transgender woman Lia Thomas to compete at the national championships in 2022....
Fuck it, let’s just abolish competitive sport until people can calm the fuck down about their stupid games. Maybe we could make the world better in general if we funnel some of that sporting money into something that isn’t totally pointless.
I support trans rights. I also acknowledge that this specific issue materially affects almost no one, and yet it’s one of the flashpoints of some of the most rabid transphobia. And I also acknowledge that given the current regressive laws that are taking effect, it would be infinitely more constructive to focus on… I don’t know, access to healthcare or anti-bullying policy.
Basically no one gets to be a professional athlete. Leagues have not grown in proportion to the population, and even before that, the dream of being a professional athlete was very unrealistic. Professional sports are inherently classist in that you must have consistent access to equipment, facilities, and a bonkers amount of time to devote to a (for almost everyone who tries) fruitless pursuit.
Nothing is better because of professional sport and basically no one gets to do it anyways. It seems like a deliberately divisive issue that is basically meaningless.
On the other hand, this specific reaction seems maybe like people are mad that college is stupidly unaffordable and athletics are a way to access college. Seems like post secondary education reform might be the better solution but wtf do I know.
Hearing is be-leafing: Students invent quieter leaf blower ( hub.jhu.edu )
"Don't Be Weak and Gay," a Missouri GOP Candidate Tells Voters in a New Campaign Ad ( www.them.us )
Responsive Design Go Brrrr ( sh.itjust.works )
Myth of 'superhuman strength' in Black people persists in deadly encounters with police ( apnews.com )
Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240430115700/https://apnews.com/article/superhuman-strength-lethal-restraint-police-b6ec5846ce18784ab99438eeb3f27eef
Why there is so much communist propaganda on lemmy?
Even from people that never lived in a communist state...
Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led company fires entire Python team for ‘cheaper labour’ ( www.hindustantimes.com )
Google layoffs: The company plans to set up a new team in Munich, Germany which would act as "cheaper" labour, the report claimed.
Israel fears ICC will issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and other top officials ( www.nbcnews.com )
No-so-silent Spring ( files.mastodon.online )
https://mastodon.social/@jensorensen/112352503805738131
Woman and man sitting in Adirondack chairs on their back porch as a leaf blower wails in the background
REEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Woman: The moment it’s warm enough to enjoy the spring, the leaf blowers start up.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Woman: Not only are they loud, they’re poisoning workers with exhaust, spraying dust, allergens and fecal matter everywhere, and spewing tons of CO2 during a climate emergency.
All to blow a few blades of grass off a driveway!
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Man: What you need are noise-canceling earbuds and birdsong recordings to re-create the joys of a suburbanized spring.
Softer REEEEEEE
Woman, wearing earbuds with birds tweeting around head: Ah, the late anthropocene…
What is the most well thought out, inoffensive, post you've seen get down voted?
It's movie night. You don't know who's coming but you have to pick a movie everyone vibes with. What do you choose?
Generative AI could soon decimate the call center industry, says CEO ( www.techspot.com )
The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco ( newrepublic.com )
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14962209...
ByteDance won't sell TikTok, would rather pull it from the US ( www.androidauthority.com )
Sorry commies, capitalists beat you to landlord hate! ( lemmy.dbzer0.com )
It's a grocery chain in Canada and this is marvelous. ( lemmy.world )
Bird watching ( lemmy.world )
What a TikTok Ban Would Mean for the U.S. Defense of an Open Internet ( www.nytimes.com )
Global digital rights advocates are watching to see if Congress acts, worried that other countries could follow suit with app bans of their own.
Mercedes becomes the first automaker to sell autonomous cars in the U.S. that don't come with a requirement that drivers watch the road ( fortune.com )
Batterules ( sh.itjust.works )
Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal - The Verge ( www.theverge.com )
Microsoft will now urge you to ditch local accounts on Windows 10 ( www.xda-developers.com )
So much for free speech on X; Musk confirms new users must soon pay to post ( arstechnica.com )
Progress! ( lemmy.world )
VPN by Google One is shutting down for good ( www.androidauthority.com )
SD cards finally expected to hit 4TB in 2025 ( arstechnica.com )
DeSantis OKs law forbidding local governments from setting heat-exposure rules for workers ( www.orlandosentinel.com )
It’s worth noting that there are at present no heat-exposure safety rules at the Florida State or federal levels, so this basically means no protections allowed.
Somebody managed to coax the Gab AI chatbot to reveal its prompt ( infosec.exchange )
We'll refactor this next year anyways ( programming.dev )
96% of US Hospital Websites Share Visitor Data with Google, Meta, Data Brokers, and Other Third Parties, Study Finds ( www.theregister.com )
Academics at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed a nationally representative sample of 100 non-federal acute care hospitals – essentially traditional hospitals with emergency departments – and their findings were that 96 percent of their websites transmitted user data to third parties....
Fairbuds are Fairphone’s proof that we really could make better tiny gadgets ( arstechnica.com )
But of course we all know that the big manufacturers don’t do this not because they can’t but because they don’t want to. Planned obsolescence is still very much the name of the game, despite all the bullshit they spout about sustainability.
Kobo announces its first color e-readers ( www.theverge.com )
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/14277930...
JK Rowling, Joe Rogan and Elon Musk are fuming over Scotland’s hate crime law ( www.politico.eu )
It was no April Fool’s joke....
Transgender athletes face growing hostility: four tell their stories in their own words ( www.usatoday.com )
The National Court orders to block Telegram in Spain ( www.gearrice.com )
Trying to pirate a physical book. Where do I get thinner printer paper?
I need to pirate this book thats over 1000 pages. I already have the pdf but I really want a physical copy and the book costs too much for me. Even if I have to buy a bunch of ink (the book has no pictures) and even if I wear out the printhead before the job is done, it’s still going to be cheaper to do this. My printer has...
'Influencer fatigue' is real and young people are getting tired of it ( www.yahoo.com )
Although the spectacle of influencers flaunting their affluence has long been a staple of social media, there are signs that audiences are growing tired of it. Experts say “influencer fatigue” is wearing on young people who crave authenticity as inflation rises and achieving a stable livelihood becomes increasingly...
College swimmers, volleyball players sue NCAA over transgender policies ( apnews.com )
Former Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines was among more than a dozen college athletes who filed a lawsuit against the NCAA on Thursday, accusing it of violating their Title IX rights by allowing transgender woman Lia Thomas to compete at the national championships in 2022....