Wonderful combo that.

Maybe this is my pedantry showing – I would say not THC alone, but cannabis in general. I like my THC at a low-ish level, and balanced out by the other cannabinoids and terpenes, for a full-spectrum entourage effect.

“Be your own boss!”

Many Christian sects also have female leaders. The Episcopal Church comes to mind as one of the bigger ones. The Southern Baptists would say Episcopalianism is not Christianity, though. Hell, I think that’s even their stance on Catholicism.

Oh, that’s not spit

Unfortunately there are just enough asshats there to taint the entire userbase. I find myself looking askance at any @lemmy.ml, also @hexbear - IMO it’s well deserved. I’d recommend another instance besides those if you want to be taken seriously.

It is absolutely disgusting and uncivilized…

… to cook with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup

If you have the one with cranberries, yes!

If you have one without cranberries, also yes!

That brings a whole new dimension to the T, but you know what, after being subjected to the green line more than a few times it entirely makes sense.

Never leave the vehicle! It’s for your own safety! We can’t guarantee your safety if you leave the vehicle!

I do still have Gmail, and a Pixel phone which I’ve since switched over to GrapheneOS. I signed up when Gmail was in beta many years ago, and for most of that time I thought it was great. (and I think I still even have the free 1gb of storage they threw at me.)

The article cites a feature called Personal Intelligence which for me was an opt-in feature, and I tried it for a day or so out of curiosity. It’s basically you formally agreeing to let them mine your emails and Google searches and have those inform/weight your Gemini responses.

I fooled around with it a bit, asked it about my search history, and it did do what it said it would do, but like all these LLM products it would straight up hallucinate and fabricate all kinds of things that never happened.

It creeped me out, even without the failures so I opted back out. (And yes, before the lectures come, I know they’re taking this data anyway and doing what they want with it without my knowledge. Google and I are in the midst of divorce proceedings, but I got so entrenched, that’s a very messy marathon of a process.)

The kicker is Google punished me for opting out by removing the automatic sorting of emails into categories that Gmail has been doing (and doing quite well at) for a very long time now without LLM. (E.g. updates, promotions, social etc., leaving the truly important stuff in the main inbox.) So that sucks, but it also forced me to find better ways to clean that up.

I haven’t got to the stage in our divorce proceedings where I switch to a different email provider yet. I’m dreading that, but maybe there are some FOSS tools that will make it not so bad. At the very least, I’ve managed to reduce exposure to Gmail by only interacting with that inbox using FOSS clients, and also using @ duck.com addresses for any new signups. I can recommend FairEmail for Android. I just downloaded the APK from GitHub, but you can also get it from the Play Store and on F-Droid.

Might sound crazy, but we might be able to link multiple vehicles together as needed for capacity so they’ll move as one!

Yeah the pensioners I know were definitely shaped by the last time it got this hard, and they were raised by people who experienced the depression… They will be perfectly happy living off Vienna sausage and toast or whatever other cursed preservative-laden calorie loaf lives in their pantry. (Store-brand potato salad once a month, as a treat.)

Meanwhile the cash will continue to roll in. They often have fantastic supplemental health insurance built into their pension from a retirement in the 00’s on top of Medicare. A policy so generous it can no longer exist. Would make a millennial’s eyes water. Those any younger could spontaneously combust upon viewing gam gam’s health allowances.

The smart ones have investments on top of all that, which taken alone could passively guarantee a comfortable life. Throw that bitch in a trust and - slaps the side - that right there’s a durable multigenerational wealth vehicle off a normal person’s very average career from 50 years ago.

You’re supposed to save them up. After a month or so that’s a decent meal!

The only real flaw with pasta straws is cross-contam’ing everything with gluten. Celiacs can go fuck themselves I guess, so that’s sorted.

But wait, what if you’re Italian?!

For everything Europe does 10x better than us, conservation of wilderness doesn’t seem terribly high on the list. I know it’s a mixed bag, attitudes are bound to vary, and there must be efforts, but it seems for the few countries I’ve visited the opportunity has come and gone. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Conservation is one of just a few unifying issues for everyone in the States, regardless of political persuasion. It’s a good litmus test for identifying the true psychos vs those who are just ignorant or misled, and also one of the few good things we actually have license to brag about as a country. We’ve done reasonably well for a very long time.

Now, though, the game has changed, and the forest service along with everything else is being gutted. I believe most won’t stand for it. It will be interesting as summer is starting, when the suburbanites can’t get their usual camp sites.

I’ll say this first, because I know this is a whopper of a comment from me, but it’s stuff you might not encounter otherwise: your perspective matters in this thread, and overall. I deeply understand the place your comment comes from, for real. We need people like you, and people like you have caused me several times in my life to examine what I’m doing and change my behavior. I will not call you extreme, because, honestly, it is not, and I will make every effort to engage in good faith, with you and others. I expect the same in return though.

I know a lot of hunters and do some hunting myself. In my area, hunting is an old tradition and, though I feel it’s on the decline, everyone knows someone who hunts, and (if they eat meat) has eaten wild deer or turkey or fish that’s been harvested locally.

“Enjoyment” over killing animals is something I’ve never heard expressed by any hunter. If someone did (and I can only speak for myself and my community) they would be treated with immense suspicion and shunned. If I can be blunt and frank, it is a shallow and ignorant take on the activity. I’m not trying to put you down by saying that, but it is true. I would encourage further examination of what you think you know of this topic. I can’t force it though. You retain the sovereign right to remain ignorant, it’s fine, for real, but that will cause people like me to disengage and we’ll go our separate ways. You will have more success advancing your view if you choose to learn more, though. But again, I get it, that is the more challenging route and I wouldn’t blame you one bit for choosing not to. No harm, no foul, for real.

That actually may be the one part of hunting that we don’t enjoy.

I enjoy being in the woods.

I enjoy hiking into the woods while it’s dark, and witnessing the changes as the sun comes up and the animals awake.

I enjoy the exercise aspect, and also nerding out over gear.

I experience satisfaction over being able to feed myself and people I care about in this way. This is related to the closeness to this food, being able to close that loop myself without any help from a middleman or needing to ship bananas 3000 miles and what have you. Knowing and participating first hand in the entire process of getting that to the plate satisfies the “sustainable foodie” part of my brain. There is also connection to the land on which you live, which is hard to explain and must be experienced.

The actual killing of the animal produces complicated emotions. “Enjoyment” isn’t one of them. It’s also .001% of the process. Regardless, I go to tremendous lengths to ensure that the process goes as quickly, smoothly, and painlessly as possible, and other hunters I know also do this. This is heavily pushed. Ideally, when that moment comes, the animal does not detect you at all and it happens so quickly they do not even clock what happened. They experience no suffering or even discomfort, that is the goal, and that is what modern, humane hunting is. It’s many times more humane than anything that happens every day in nature. Mistakes unfortunately do happen sometimes, that is an unfortunate reality, so we must plan for that too, have backup plans and backups for the backups, and the tools to do so. This activity requires a certain level of maturity and thought which is not for everyone.

In my state, hunting regulations are informed by the science of wildlife biologists, and limits and rules are designed to enhance the animal populations they apply to. All healthy, reasonable people who spend time in the woods love wildlife on a very deep level, and we all do what we can to protect that natural resource, so they are there for generations to come, hunter or not. It may seem counterintuitive, but sometimes this includes population control. Bag limits and dates change year to year, and we do our best to follow the rules, keep up with new information, and understand the consequences of everything we do, the tools we use, every decision. The ethical modern hunter is a partner to the conservationist and the wildlife biologist, and is an important part (but not the only part) of keeping wild ecosystems alive and in balance, in spite of humanity.

This perspective is likely different from your own - I’m well aware of that. Hopefully you can take something from it. Hunters are not all elmer fudd. Those are not hunters - that is the consensus now. Our Fish & Game folks (the only “good cops” IMO) love to slip cuffs around those types and send them to jail. Those people do still exist, and we hate it, because they show up in the news and give us a bad name. There are thousands more people like me, but you won’t hear about us. So and so two towns over who bought a hunting license online and tries to follow all the rules: not on the news. My own uncle who accidentally killed two turkeys instead of one, who immediately self-reported to F&G because he cares and has integrity? Also not on the news. Doing things the right way is relatively uninteresting.

You may have seen those images of the mountains of buffalo skulls made by white colonial settlers as they raped and killed their way through the West. That is not hunting - not as I know it, not as even my grandfather knew it. It is barbarism in its purest form, basically genocidal and psychopathic, disgusting, a black mark in history, and the American buffalo is still struggling to this day because of these horrendous acts that only humans are capable of at scale.

A more uplifting story I would encourage anyone to look into is that of the Wild Turkey in America, and how they were brought back from the brink, thanks to the cooperation and ingenuity of wildlife biologists in most of the 50 states. That one was mostly due to habitat loss rather than overhunting. (A surprising number of people don’t know this, but nearly the entire Eastern half of the US’s forests (like 90%+) have been subject to complete deforestation at least twice during our history, for industry. You can find pictures of the denuded landscapes - places that are now protected, healthy forests - and it is distressing.) Anyway, the wild turkey program was so successful, hunting is now part of that story.

https://www.audubon.org/new-york/news/how-wild-turkeys-made-49-state-comeback

Could this reverse the curse of Harambe?

That may all be true, but choosing to allow them does create a precedent for automated “unmanned” enforcement of all kinds, which I’m not exactly ok with personally. It is usually terrible for privacy as well, as there’s no guarantee how that data is handled or where it goes.

There are many issues with the area where I currently live, but I would consider the blanket ban on automated enforcement a big plus. It doesn’t mean traffic enforcement can’t be high-tech; it simply means that a citation cannot be issued by an automated system - a human needs to witness the violation, interpret the severity, and personally write and deliver the ticket to the offender.

Speed cameras can also just be implemented very poorly sometimes. The outcomes you cite only happen if the implementation is sound. If corruption in policing already exists these systems can create an opening to exacerbate it. For example, I used to live in a city that had used cameras for so long, the stretches of road covered by them were common knowledge to speeders. The cameras did shape behavior but only in the specific zones they covered. The local police relied on speed cameras and red light cameras so heavily, they served to substitute for in-person enforcement activities instead of augmenting them. That led to the police basically forgetting how to even do traffic enforcement very much at all. They would say “look how much revenue we’re collecting!” at press events, but in reality they were using it to disengage, which created a palpable feeling of lawlessness on the streets. All of that put together led to worse issues than before the cameras were installed, even for things that weren’t related to traffic laws at all.

So was the first horse

I have a human-powered one. Cuts just as well, and lawn-mowing days are leg day