Tootfinder

This John Catsimatidis guy can just F right off. If he cared so much about the birds he could have sent trucks to have them taken away... of course.. good luck with US Border agents letting birds in that have been exposed to Avian Flu and have an active CFIA cull order on them.
I feel bad for the people who feel so connected to the birds themselves. Some people simply won't understand and I feel sympathy for them. But the owners of the ranch have always known better and they have used this to raise money and increase their profile.
And now we get the crocodile tears as the adults have finally taken over.
I hope this is the last we ever hear about Universal Ostrich.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/livestory/bc-ostrich-farm-decision-scoc-9.6968394

Saturday, March 15, 2025, may have seemed unremarkable to most Americans.
But in time, history will remember it as Black Saturday
—the moment the United States ceased to function as a constitutional democracy.
For the first time in modern American history, a sitting president openly defied a direct federal court order
—and nothing happened.
No intervention. No enforcement. No consequences.
A legal ruling was issued, and the White House simply ignored it

Black Saturday: The Day the United States Ceased to Be a Constitutional Democracy
Black Saturday, March 15, 2025, will be remembered as the day the U.S. ceased to function as a constitutional democracy. A sitting president defied a federal court order, proving that judicial authority no longer constrains executive power. This is not a warning—it is confirmation that democracy has already collapsed.

I had 12 weeks of parental leave for each of my children. (Six of those were paid by my company, and 6 by Washington State. In the US, this might come across as bragging but functional countries will be shocked at how little it is.) My partner fed them, because we had the privilege of being able to breast feed, so I took care of diapers, tummy time, and what other things I could.
I learned about elimination communication (EC). We used cloth diapers, for ecological reasons but also because they can help with potty training later. With EC, it was relatively easy. I actually only had to change dirty diapers a few times. I was available, so I could pay attention to our babies. I could learn their body language. Both of them rarely cried because we knew what they needed before they had to cry about it.
When I was forced back to work, the EC thing fell off. We continued to use cloth diapers for a while with our oldest, but it became too hard with our youngest. We had to switch to disposable diapers because of the overhead.
There have been so many wasteful things we've done because we don't have space to do the right thing. Having kids is both isolating and overwhelming. To maintain sanity, you just have to take short cuts when you don't have time or help.
Before kids, we used to really enjoy cooking together. We would start from basic ingredients and work our way up. We made pad thai, squishing tamarind paste from pods by hand. Even after having kids, my oldest and I would collect acorns from the tree down the street and crack them together. The other day we all cracked acorns we had collected for the first time since moving over here (and I made some Dotori-muk. We've also started making bread together again.
Kids really love making and processing food. There's a sensory element to it, which, if you don't have kids, is actually a really big thing kids need. But there's also a social element to making food together. They just behave better when we do things like that. It's almost like there's some kind of evolutionary incentive for kids to *want* to help. Go figure.
I've really been wanting to make seitan as we try to reduce how much meat we eat in our house. Even that meat consumption is partially about convenience. It's relatively cheap and easy to throw a bag of chicken wings in air fryer, or some ground beef in with pearl couscous in the instant pot, and just have low effort food home made food. My partner is vegan. I used to eat mostly vegan at home and only eat meat on occasion, usually eating out. But it just takes more mental energy to cook without meat. It's an easy protein, and our kids are picky.
These threads, and a few others, all connect back to a single thing. When we can slow down, we can be more careful and thoughtful. We can be mindful. We can make decisions that are better for the environment, that account for climate change. When we are under pressure, when we are tired and overworked, it's just harder or impossible to be careful and mindful... and that's exactly the point.
At a time when the survival of our species depends on our ability to slow down and be mindful, we are more stressed and overwhelmed than ever. Because, if we had a chance to slow down and think, if we could make good choices, we would make choices that would destroy the industries at the core of the global order. To slow down, as we did at the beginning of COVID, is catastrophic for "the economy." Of course it is.
When an industry runs out of room to expand by driving efficiency, it must increase demand. If demand is already fulfilled, it must create waste. The more pressure there is on the population, the worse decisions people make, the more they waste. Waste is the point. We are in an existential conflict. If we do not destroy this system, if we cannot simply slow down and think, we will be destroyed by it.
I think about the microplastics from those diapers, the methane from them rotting (not captured in the municipal biogas digester, but released directly into the environment), the little plastic containers of everything, all the opportunity costs of the carelessness inflicted on us to survive, and I wonder, "is any of this really worth my time in the office? Did I really produce so much more value doing my work than when destroyed in order to allow me to work?" Of course not, because the invisible hand, in it's infinite wisdom, has shuffled away that cost. The cost of our family thrashing is borne by society, we are a burden on everyone, while the value of my labor is internalized to the company.
How much of your "carbon footprint" should belong to your employer? There can be no capitalist solution to the climate crisis because capitalism is the crisis.
#ClimateCrisis

'Don't even consider' Microsoft?
To digital natives, Microsoft's IT stack makes Google's look like a model of sanity. A millennial does battle with Redmond's enterprise tools and comes away reeling.
[…] Probably the single most common argument against switching to Linux is the absolute non-negotiable requirement of many organizations to have Microsoft Exchange. […]
🤦

To digital natives, Microsoft's IT stack makes Google's look like a model of sanity
Comment: A millennial does battle with Redmond's enterprise tools and comes away reeling

CFO Palantir talking about how they're working to make the various data streams of surveillance efficiently useful and remove the needle-in-a-haystack anonymity we have previously enjoyed. Awesome.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/opinion

Well, that was interesting and curious. I clearly have no idea how anything works any more (not news, even to me). In an abundance of caution, I just changed my GMail password yet again, and two seconds later Dropbox said I was signed out. Maybe a coincidence but a) I've never been signed out of Dropbox like that before and b) the timing is a smoking gun.
It's all so creepy and invasive these days.

hiv_transmission: HIV transmission network (1988-2001)
A set of networks of HIV transmissions between people through sexual, needle-sharing, or social connections, based on combining 8 datasets collected from 1988 to 2001. Metadata includes test results of several diseases, as well as demographic variables such as age, ethnicity, and gender. Networks come in two flavors: egodyads and altdyads. Egodyads are the network among study-participants and their direct partners. Altdyads are the…

Graffiti written on sand. I think there’s a metaphor here struggling to get out…
#photography #graffiti

There's so much more to this too. Like, I have so much more time and space to consider these things. I mend clothes, when I can. I fix electronics. Part of that is having the privilege (of time) to be able to do that. How many things are broken, wasted, whatever because of all this pressure on people?
It makes the waste of the ultra rich even more stark. They have the time, the privilege, to not waste. They have the capacity to reduce their impact more than any of us, and yet they choose to use more than all of us.

Undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea disrupted internet access in parts of Asia and the Middle East, experts said Sunday,
though it wasn’t immediately clear what caused the incident.
There has been concern about the cables being targeted in a Red Sea campaign by Yemen’s Houthi rebels,
which the rebels describe as an effort to pressure Israel to end its war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
But the Houthis have denied attacking the lines in the past.

Red Sea cables are cut, disrupting internet in Asia and the Mideast
Undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea have disrupted internet access in parts of Asia and the Middle East. Experts say the disruption began early Sunday, but the cause remains unclear. There are concerns about possible targeting by Yemen's Houthi rebels, though they have denied cutting cables in the past. Microsoft announced that the Middle East may face increased latency. NetBlocks reported degraded connectivity in countries like India and Pakistan. The affected cables are managed by Tata Communi…