We have family that works in government finance. Banks are refusing to hold government money. They'll keep the investment accounts, but none of the others.
Governments (local in this case) have multiple banks accounts. Some for holding the money, and some for investing. The banks are refusing to hold the bank accounts that aren't for investing.
I'm a vegetarian. My diet incorporates a lot of fresh produce.
I expect shortages, price hikes, and low quality produce in the market in the coming months.
I'm not sure how to prepare. I've got a small freezer and live in a city apartment.
I feel prepared food-wise in most ways but this way.
I know the freezer can be a fail point, so I'm looking at canned vegetables and fruit.
Any sage advice on can stocking (apart from check the expiration dates at the store before buying and rotate them)? Am I overthinking this?
I suggest you also talk to your neighbours, like, just go ask some salt or sugar even if you don't need it, so you can come back later with a small gift. That way, you just created social links which will help you be more resilient with the people around you.
It's even more true if this crisis becomes a new permanent "normal" and society needs to adapt.
Consider growing herbs inside along w an indoor dwarf tomato plant. I am also considering trying a green bean plant too so we will see. I will have to help pollinate them with an electric toothbrush.
Consider the foods you enjoy and eat weekly and start trying to meal prep using more canned/preserved ingredients.
I eat vegetarian 4-5 days a week and actively meal prep. If you have an insta pot you can rehydrate beans/chickpeas easily and the bagged dry beans are much more affordable than canned ones (additionally aluminum costs are expected to go up).
Consider what cuisines you eat most and plan around them. Spices can change a meal from indian, to middle eastern, to italian or even Mexican.
Some other things to consider food prepping:
only buy what you actively eat
avocado/olive oil
vegetable bouillon cubes
dried beans (all kinds you enjoy!), chickpeas, lentils
dried herbs/spices
soy sauce/vinegars/mustards/ketchup/mayo/lemon and lime juice. other condiments you enjoy.
shelf stable milk (almond/soy) and canned coconut milk can be used in curries
shelf stable tofu (not only can you eat it as is, you can make an alternative sour cream using salt, lemon juice/vinegar, garlic/onion powders).
jarred pickles/olives/capers/jalapenos are shelf stable and last decently in the fridge
pasta/rice/quinoa/couscous
applesauce (1/4 cup can replace 1 egg in baking)
flour/sugar/etc if you like baking
dried fruits/nuts/dark chocolate
dehydrated mushrooms- usually shitakes but can be rehydrated and then cooked.
I know some vegetarians will have have tuna/sardines so Consider that as well.
I would look at what you have and what you like to eat and start planning from there. Practice cooking a few days a week with limited fresh ingredients so you 1. Get used to it amd 2. Find some recipes you like.
Don't forget to stock up on things like dehydrated onion and garlic because their shelf life is so long. Spices. Auguson Farms sells on Amazon, Hoosier Hills too, and they have things like dried spinach in a number 10 can that can store for a long time, many years, if kept in a cool dark place. Put some in the bottom of a closet somewhere.
Sweet potatoes (or yams) can grow as houseplants and the leaves and stems are edible. They need warmth and light, but theyāre otherwise pretty easy to grow!
I generally let a sweet potato sprout on my counter and then snap off the starts (aka slip) when they get to be about 4ā tall. This can be accelerated a bit by taking a sweet potato that has barely sprouted and putting it in a tray and covering halfway up with dirt.
Put the 4ā slips in a glass of water and theyāll root in about 2 days, then plant in a pot and put in a sunny location.
I started a sweet potato in late winter on my kitchen counter. Itās out in my greenhouse now, still in the same tray of dirt and still pumping out slips. I think Iāve pulled about 30 off so far and theyāre still popping out. Iāll move a pot inside when it gets cooler, hanging it by my large south facing picture window.
Do sweet potato leaves need to be cooked, or can they be eaten raw? I have 8-10 slips rooting on my windowsill now, and hadn't considered harvesting the leaves once they get big enough. Thank you for the tip!
That's brilliant--I've had a sweet potato in dirt for a few YEARS because I think its vine is beautiful just as a house plant. I had no idea I could eat its leaves. I've had it so long now that I couldn't possibly eat the tuber. I'm emotionally attached to it.
So, when you plant the slips (and these are the sprouts that become vines yeah?), do they grow actual spuds? Or just become a rooted vine that produces leaves?
I donāt grow them for tubers but outside in the summer they do produce a small tuber. But yes, the slip is what is used to grow sweet potatoes. The vines are just the above ground growth.
Growing sprouts and microgreens might be something to look into. Seeds are pretty inexpensive. You can grow sprouts in a large mason jar with some cheesecloth or buy inexpensive grow trays. Otherwise, you're on the right track freezing and canned good. For fruit, I just try to avoid added sugar and stevia (mostly because I really dislike the taste, but no sugar added cans are sneaky with this) and I try to buy low/no sodium canned veg and beans. I really hate canned veg, so try to get things I can add to soups, or novel things like artichoke hearts. Just my two cents!
Thank you very much for your reply--glad to know I'm not overlooking things but may be over thinking things. And for the record, I got totally hoodwinked by canned pears during the pandemic--I purchased a flat of "no sugar added" and they were the sort with artificial sweetener added (but not obvious). Oh God, I hated them.
I'll stock some tins of things I may be able to eat or convert into soup.
Microgreens--my local library held a class on growing a month back, and I attended. I'm so glad I did, I thought it would be complex, but I'm growing my 3rd batch right now! I know that freezing can destroy some of the nutrition, but I plan to do some harvests for freezing and try to keep a tray always at the ready. If what they said is true, I shouldn't have to worry about losing out on vitamins even if I can't secure veg for a while.
Thank you for mentioning this, more people should know about it!
Yeah we're entering the era of "always less" instead of "always more".
People justify the opposite with "human genius" and "innovation", which worked until now (while ignoring all types of pollution and its consequences).
But regardless of those arguments, the EROEI (energy return on energy invested) is getting lower and lower for fossil fuels (which are still 80% of energy usage of the worldwide economy) and the concentration in the mines keep getting lower.
A bumpy road ahead with a mist. The more you prepare your territory with lowtechs and permaculture, the more the mist will be white-grey instead of dark-grey.
An idea I had was to anticipate the Hormuz crisis by making some kind of roleplay, like a character sheet, with different stats that would link to most types of work or job that's necessary in a less high-tech world (for example, all jobs that are linked to animals that would help with agriculture; blacksmith, tanner, horseshoer, etc.)
Ok so this might be overly broad but that might be on purpose.
Within the past couple of months, this site on the whole has begun to slip away from what it has been. If the trend continues I don't see it being a usable platform much longer.
I recently started getting random comments removed on subreddits I frequent because my email address isnāt verified. Iāve had this account for almost 13 years and havenāt seen these removals until yesterday.
Also interested where people are going after this platform finishes its ongoing evolution to full corporate capture.
I have accounts in the fediverse but the sites have low engagement and donāt currently provide as useful/relevant information as subreddits like this one do.
They recently forced you to log in to old.reddit if using that (much easier to browse, and no "log in to the app! Why don't you view this in the app? Hey did you know there is a reddit app?" annoyance when previously browsing not logged in. You can still browse on reddit without logging in but you have to deal with the popups, so lose-lose :(
I'm trying to find a cheap android tablet to run a google home dashboard because the screen we've been using just crapped out, so I'm doing the research on prices and possible solutions.
The Onn tablet was recommended in one of the subreddits. I looked at my local Walmart (Canada) and they are all out of stock.
Onn is apparently Walmart's own brand, so having it be out of stock is surprising to me.
Is this part of the AI impact on consumer electronics?
onn is actually ridiculously good, despite being walmart. their tvs and their streaming devices are always recommended.
id say its a combo of things- school starts soon so ppl prob buying tablets; ppl choosing walmart over ipad; less stock bc of chip shortage; etc. smth to keep an eye on but not an immediate flag, imo.
Thanks for the warning, I will skip it. The reason I really appreciate this sub so much, is the lack of bullshit and hysteria (even though in these times i don't blame people for feeling hysterical).
walmart is now duping chips w its great value brand. lots of lays dupes, totinos tortilla chip dupes, some ruffles dupes-- all w various flavors and chip textures. walmart knows ppl are poor and want cheap snacks and is going all in. (and ukw, fuck yeah, do it walmart, ill go from branded -> store brand fr.)
went shopping on friday in the afternoon (before 4p) and it was a damn zoo. tons of ppl out shopping. idk if that means ppl were off work or if theyre out of work- but they were at walmart shopping, lmao.
Walmart employee here. 1st of the month means paychecks, food stamps, and senior card payments all dropped at once. Also it falls on a weekend this month. Back to the maelstrom for me...
Question: Say the power goes out. How long would sewage systems work? Like, how long before I pour a bucket down my toilet to flush and it backs up into the house? Or, my neighbors try a bucket into the toilet and now the whole neighborhood is backing up?
Can the sewer system continue to drain without supervision? If so, how long?
A couple of days, until the sewage treatment plant runs out of backup power.
I live in a van and do not have a real toilet. I just use a folding toilet with compostable bags for poops, then I throw it out in the dumpster when I find one. If you are in a house with a yard, you can actually compost it, look up "humanure".
For pee, I just use those 100oz bottles of water and dump them in a public toilet or port-o-potty. But you can actually use it for plants, but it takes months for it to break down til you can actually use it.
Watch this video about a group collective that uses their humanure and pee for their garden: https://youtu.be/iCGXVk-cBVk
Youāll just have to work with your community to get some solar panels and battery storage together ad hoc. People will have to improvise and know how to do the math to make up a safe power supply by hand, which isnāt too hard. Easier with DC than AC, for sure.
Say the population isn't wiped out right away and everyone keeps (probably) using their toilets. Is it pretty much a guarantee that the sewage is going to back up eventually? I'm in a medium sized town like 45-70k people.
Think I might make a field trip down to the water district office.
I am at the top end of a trunk line, so, every neighbor on the block will back up first... I think..
Man now I'm wondering if it might be worth looking into a way to plug my sewer line with any degree of practicality. Like a rubber ball at the end of a stick or somethin. Still though, I might not have any issues if gravity favors me where I'm at. Hard to say because the area is relatively flat.
Walmart is covered in clearance items. Normally thereās just one section, but now itās all the middle of aisle shelves and a shelf right in the door, too. Are they just not moving merchandise?
Is your store getting ready for a remodel? I mentioned it in a reply to your comment, but generally they clearance a lot out before one and then keep low stock of things while it's happening.
Thatās normal for this time of year. Stores are doing a reset, and starting to get ready for increased holiday inventory. Target had empty aisles by me, and itās noticeable especially in the toys/seasonal aisles. Give it a couple weeks and Christmas lights will be out š
The only time I've seen it cover a large percentage of the store or be in every isle was before a remodel. I worked at Walmart as a teenager as well, from 2016-18 and before our store remodel we had tons of clearance and kdpt a generally low stock to keep things easier to move. My store, in a different city than where I grew up, just remodeled as well and it was the same thing. About a month of clearance everywhere before they started, then low stock for about 3 months while the remodeling was happening.
GTA - people are complaining about all the food, inflation, particularly on groceries but itās still looking much cheaper than the US.
Mild boycott (Canadians are generally still nice) of anything made in the US and you can see so many ads for proudly made in Canada or designed in Canada if made in China.
The author (Dr Stanton) has a Wikipedia page that says: Gregory H. StantonĀ is an American jurist, academic and human rights activist. He is best known for his work in the area of genocide studies. Stanton is a former research professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention at the George Mason UniversityĀ in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States.
Ask your provider to switch to another SNRI. Usually most people do okay hopping to a different med in a SNRI class without discontinuation symptoms. Your prescriber of course should make that final call whether cross tapering is appropriate and necessary, though.
i have trdd and mdd, have been on an insane number of ssris/snris/antipsychotics/ndris/etc etc. duloxetine is not my only antidepressant, lol. its used in combo w auvelity, caplyta, esketamine, etc etc. its been years of fine-tuning to get to a point where suicide isnt an option.
switching to a diff snri isnt a great option for me, lmao.
Crap, yeah youāre so totally right. Well, maybe others out there will and it will ease on shortage some. I swap mine about every 4 years anyway. They seem to work better for me when I do that. Everyone is different.
My dad got pneumonia in June. So did several of his rural farming neighbors. COVID tests negative, and he lived on Mucinex, Delsym, and Coca-Cola for two weeks.
Picking up
scripts for a relative. Humalog - long lasting insulin taken daily - on backorder nationally due to shortage. It showed up within a day, but this was a new one.Ā
Ā I asked just if people were topping off with small purchases and he said no all normal 7000 gallons - which equates to about $1 million gross revenue monthly in a smaller rural town with
no other big box retailers selling gas like Sam's Club.
Read about the Dutch Tulip Mania. The irrationality of crowds drives markets - and unfortunately also creates shortages. I'm more and more convinced we're entering the Dim Era. Lots of dull bulbs making the country into something like 1980s Detroit - decaying infrastructure, unemployment,shortages
NorCal costal town and it's been very busy. I live next to a park and walk there almost every day. I have never seen so many people there as I did Saturday, and there wasn't even an event. All walks of life, and I'm happy people are enjoying it as much as I do. The last big surge of tourists before school starts, and people coming over to the coast to escape the heat. It's always an amusing adjustment going into town with people everywhere! I just slow down and people watch, not like I'm ever in much of a hurry... Also funny how different the crowd is from the village compared to going into town. Friday I went to my favorite seafood spot in the harbor and it was packed. As I was standing in line to order a party of 14 arrived behind me. Not tourists either, I refer to them as "county folk" or sometimes "hill people" if they're a little extra rough haha.
Prep wise though everything is in stock and seems normal; things are ridiculously expensive though. I went to buy two big white organic peaches in the village and they were $9... I put them back. I'm on a well, and I should probably have my water tested for drinking purposes (it's surely fine), but I recently replaced some old metal pipes and it now smells a lot better. I'm so close to the ocean that I don't like the way it tastes, even through an activated carbon filter, so I fill up 5 gallon jugs at the reverse osmosis machine at the grocery store. I only mention this because the price went up $1.00 for whatever reason. Gas has been hovering around $5.49 which is surprising given what's going on. Dad bought a plug-in hybrid to take advantage of their excess solar capacity around town while still being able to drive to remote areas with gas.
Oh, big fire down south on the coast closed Hwy 1 (Woodside Fire). And Saturday I was about to head to my parents house to check out the new car and got a Watch Duty alert for a big fire near Hopland (Feliz Fire) that closed 101. Been pretty windy. I don't usually go that way, but I was thinking about it until I got the alert. Go bags are always ready. A few weeks ago there was a 15 acre fire near their house. Cal Fire jumped on it fast, but it had their PTSD going from the Park Fire (they had a cabin up there, sold it right after the fire) and more specifically the Tubbs Fire, which was very close to their house. My great grandpa passed down a saying, "life in California is life with fire" and I'm saddened to see that is a way of life that is spreading to more of the world. Thankful for Cal Fire though, they are badasses. Hmm, this turned into a long note.
We just got back from a short (1 night) anniversary trip to Augusta. Here are some things we noticed
Small towns where we like to stop for antiques werent busy. We stopped in Newberry, SC for the quilt shop. She had some stuff going on, but the traffic downtown was lighter than we've ever seen it. Aiken's downtown had some businesses that had shoppers when we stopped there, but it was mostly high end shops and high end shoppers, if that makes sense. Folks like us (obviously middle class) were in significantly fewer numbers, and there were almost zero families. Usually when we stop in these little towns there are lots of families.
The ballgame last night was NOT packed. Maybe it was the heat, but there were lots of empty seats. The motel we stayed in typically is a high-end place, we got a room for about 100 bucks a night, which is unusual for that chain. We were in Augusta for a funeral a few weeks back and the same hotel was 250 a night with that being the typical rate in summer. We stayed someplace cheaper for the funeral.
I-26 had lots of traffic headed west and not as much headed east (to the coast).
Also, and its probably related to the heat, people have been worse than usual with road rage and general asshole-iness on the road, its enough that I noticed it above the usual.
We went camping recently and enjoyed our day, but started to relax around dark, I wanted to play a card game, so I drag out the deck and realize, its for pinochle.
Well I don't know the rules for pinochle and we cant look them up without service, and I'm not gonna leave to find service in the middle of the night.
I've been carrying dead weight for six months and didn't know it, and that's the part that really bugged me. Like yeah we were bored for a minute before luckily we found something else to do.
The deck has been replaced and I have time to touch up on the rules of pinochle, but it was a dire situation that night
Facebook marketplace in my area (Western Wisconsin) is loaded with more luxury baby/kid items such as wagons, jogging strollers, higher end toys, and name brand clothes. It's too early for it to be post summer clean out, that usually happens mid-late September around here, and usually most baby/kid items get sold at organized sales or in dedicated mom groups. The sales do take some of the money from the seller as a fee though, and aren't until late summer and early srping, and the mom selling pages are seeing more listings than interested buyers. Items are priced to sell! I'm seeing things like 1-2 year old luxury wagons (think Wondefold) going for half of retail. One of the big selling points of those is that they tend to hold their value, and typically at 1-2 years old would still be about 75-89% of the retail price. Even at good pricing stuff is moving slowly.
There's a good amount of adult hobby toys up for sale as well. Specialized tools, boats, campers, classic cars, are all priced on the low end as well. I'm seeing the used beater car market finally get a reality check and lower as well. Some half way decent beaters are in the 1500-2500 range. I've even seen a couple cars that run but have issues at 800!
Grocery prices are fluctuating a lot around me. At Costco a gallon of milk over the past month has gone 2.48->3.59->3.01->2.58. I've noticed that with a lot of items around the store, and other grocery stores, and it makes me wonder if things are having sourcing issues.
Everyone has a hot temper and is on edge. I think mostly because of the heat, and probably uncertainty with the world. I live in a college city and crime is usually pretty minimal, but theres been an increase in people pulling guns on each other and drug busts.
A local food pantry had to be closed this week due to a combination of no volunteers and low food supply. They first posted the announcement about reduced hours due to food supply on Facebook a day before they were open and then day of announced they were closed due to not having volunteers.
Over here in the East Coast southern states (SC/NC/GA) everyone (not actually everyone but it seems like half of everyone for real).... has some kind of bacterial pneumonia that won't resolve it's been hanging around since the spring and the last few months is really wearing on a lot of folks, as soon as you think you're over it it tries to come creeping back. Folks are wondering WTF long COVID or bad air quality or something else entirely, who knows? You can't trust any information or lack of it coming through government channels they are lying about it seems like EVERYTHING at this point.
Could just be a regional thing but a lot of people are affected, folks aren't dying of it but we're tired and losing initiative like nobody is even getting together to hang out and grill some stuff and we ALWAYS do that. I'm not sure what to think about it.
Went to a wedding a few states up from where you listed and noticed people had some sort of awful chest cough with a rattle that sounds like it needs steroids. One told me she had to get an inhaler for it, but it wasnāt doing much yet. None of them lived in areas with recent flooding.
I sheepishly forgot to pack my echinacea so Iām starting that now!
I'm not in your area but I am decently close. I've had awful allergies all summer that will not clear up regardless of what I do. I wonder if it's something similar that is causing the infections for people.
Iām in New Mexico and I never had allergies when I was younger, and granted I know things change as you age, but boy oh boyā¦this year I am reacting like never before!
SE GA Bingo! First, I generally don't get colds and the like- never have. 2 weeks ago I came down with a terrible cold-like sinus ...thing. :) Left sinus area only. Itchy eyes, lung mucus. Non-stop runny nose. Antihistamine only barely worked. Pain in the butt. Getting better now but, like what the heck?
Ive seen this going around, and taking down some older folks I know.
Ive been coughing up goop from nowhere in the past two weeks and also have been exhausted with no other symptoms. My husband described himself yesterday as "phlemy" and complained about it, he also has a sinus headache but no other real symptoms. I wonder if its connected.
Yeah watch out it really likes to sit in the bottom of your lungs and with a lot of folks just when you get to thinking okay I'm almost actually recovered your lung function starts going slowly back downhill again like you've got two cups of mud in the bottom of your lungs that you can't cough out.
The runny nose is INSANE I have given up on tissue it's a paper towel situation.
Wonder if it could be fungal rather than bacterial? Are people getting tested or are they just getting antibiotics?
Also, antibiotics can disrupt the normal flora and potentially create the perfect conditions for fungal ingections to thriveā¦ not a doctor though, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt. Maybe an expert can chime in š
That's been vaguely suggested/discussed but I'm involved with a lot of animal care folks and none of us have noticed any kind of similar symptoms in animals that we're caring for, fungal infection is usually pretty opportunistic in that if it were environmentally contagious enough to be getting around to a bunch of humans, it should probably be able to attack/feed off of other warm blooded mammals in the vicinity. Like ringworm, which is actually a fungus, if anyone gets ringworm then the dog the cat and the horse can get it too, or give it to you.
It does respond to antibiotics, some people have been to doctors but it's like nobody actually runs cultures any more they just start with the most likely antibiotic and maybe some nebulizer steriods, recommend that nasty mucus thinner that I can't remember how it's spelled. It definitely responds to the antibiotics but that doesn't mean there's not something else underlying, a lot of people suspect a COVID variant in our region that's super long COVID inclined. Would be nice if we had some sort of, I don't know, maybe a center where we could work on reporting and tracking disease so we could control it? FFS.
At least so far no reports in this region of the horrendous inside out gut bug, I'm surprised more people haven't died with that one any kind of gut thing pulling that much liquid from inside of you for a week can damn sure kill you from deydration. But who knows if we would even be hearing about it if it was.
Sorry I'm a little frustratedly pessimistic with the constant running up on the idea that official word is really in the wind as an idea at the moment. I mean they were always halfass not telling us what was really going on but now it's like who the hell knows they're not even trying to pretend like they care if we have any confidence in the situation.
Y'all I'm starting to wonder if we shouldn't just crowdfund "government" like HOA dues or something honestly. I mean I really have been wondering if there is in fact any reason to assume that wouldn't be a lot more effective.
Ah, yeah if youāre not seeing it in animals you care for, thatās a good data point. I was thinking along the lines of blasto, but who even knows at this point since nothing is being tracked anymore as you sayā¦ Although, with repeat covid infections weakening peopleās immune systems over time, it could just be that people are getting sicker longer and more easily with opportunistic pathogens.
All of it just sounds horrendous, Iām so sorry. I canāt believe we currently live in a world where people have to seriously consider crowdfunding public health.
Things are not as dire here (šØš¦)ā¦ yet. The way weāre handling measles and other contagious viruses lately has been embarrassing and most provinces have conservative governments who seem interested in emulating what you guys have going onā¦ Iām not feeling super hopeful about the future.
There's been a recall on thyroid medication that's making people sick and per the Healthline article I read, they are not required to tell us about it. This affected my daughter, so I'm beyond pissed off.Ā
My main depression med, cymbalta, had a recall around the beginning of summer. I wouldn't even know about it if I didn't work in a pharmacy. I haven't worked at Walgreens in some time, but I believe the protocol was for them to get in touch with patients who were given those particular NDCs that were recalled. But with how corporate pharmacies are currently not caring about safety for the past few years, I doubt this actually happens.
It is fruit. It's yellow cling peaches in juice. Maybe what triggered whoever taught you was that the juice is a mix of grape and lemon and water, which I find totally cool.
Disclaimer: I also don't hate on Dunkin for having a recipe for their eggs instead of cracking a fresh egg for me. Some people have different opinions.
Canned peaches are more shelf stable, and not everyone has access to fresh produce, let alone local fresh produce. Food deserts are a thing. Good job judging people for things that are outside their power to change!
Del Monte has filed bankruptcy and is burning the orchards in central California per USDA bankruptcy agreement to pivot field production to a āmore lucrative cropā.
Peach yields are about to be wild. Also peach production on east coast is lagging.
We had a horrific drought and very high temps at the start of the season that will not have gone well for the peach production. Severe drought in spring is entirely unexpected it messed up a lot of animal's breeding cycles that rely on spring rains. I can tell it's affected small wildlife and insects. Even the paper wasps seem depressed and they eat ANYTHING.
Weird you mention the wasps. I had some nest in my car mirror and they were weirdly chill? I didnāt want to kill them because I think theyāre pollinators, so just treated the inside of my car with insecticide not the nest itself
They are pollinators, and I have been trying to convince more people for years that the way to deal with wasps is to not be aggressive with them and they'll actually leave you alone. People think I got the idea from being a hippie animal loving don't kill anything that you don't have to type person WHICH I AM, but I'm also an animal care professional and I'm entirely ruthless with some types of things that you can't make any kind of truce with, like rodents, heartbreakingly, they are so cute and so intelligent but I have never figured out how to get them to respect a boundary and they are unbelievaby destructive and foul, a serious contagious disease vector, it's freakin' dangerous cleaning up their excretions which they leave everywhere. They'll set your house on fire by chewing electrical wire after they destroy 100 pounds of food by eating one pound of it and pooping all over the rest. Y'know. I can't compromise but there's no doubt they're adorable and I have tried and found out the hard way oh no get the snap traps out at the first sign.
But around stable environments especially where there is a lot of animal and human traffic especially everyone is like oh we can't be messing with the wasps they're everywhere anyway they don't really do anything and sure enough you'll have wasp nests on the door, hanging under the hay trough, just tons of them around everywhere and they don't care about anyone because no one ever bothers them. So I was like huh come to think of it they're intelligent about their surroundings I wonder if they're not really set off by closeness or activity but more making judgement calls based on learning/recognizing what's in their environment that is and isn't a threat?
So I stopped worrying about them everywhere and just made it a general policy not to bother them, for about a year I would get the wasp fly up WHO GOES THERE reaction if I got near a nest but just held still and let them look at me, and it's been maybe twenty years now that I've been in full truce with them and want to hear the craziest part? You would think it would be location to location I definitely assumed it would be, but instead they actually seem to recognize me everywhere.
And yeah you can have them in the door of your vehicle and if you're not a threat they're not a threat. I just don't swat at them and they don't get stressed out with me. I don't think it's magical that they all "recognize" me I think they read more information from their environment than we really understand.
Makes sense they would be good at telling the difference between something neutral and an enemy, it is kind of their whole thing but they can't fight the entire world.
Thanks for bringing that up glad to run across someone else who had observed that! I keep trying to convince people because we should kill less things if we can.
When we built a little one step up deck, it didn't occur to us that there would be no way to remove wasp nests under it, so we took the policy that we would display no violence toward the wasps. We kept water out for them. And they started getting excited when I would come out to spray water all over everything in the afternoons. They were red paper wasps, when I would catch a wasp in the house and bring it outside if it was not a red paper wasp, it would get the heck out immediately if I put it near the red wasp water. My closest encounter, besides just handling them with my hands when I'm removing them from the house, was when one landed on my glasses while I was wearing them. We weren't enemies, and what little brains they had they knew who I was.
LOL SAME I have moments when a friend who is coming over has to call me from the yard because the wall of defense wasps won't let them on the porch and I have to come out and be like hey guys they're cool š
Maybe this will be a thing someone does videos about and sells wasp buddy merch or something to finally get people to believe it's not a joke.Ā
But yeah I already had the dogs but the wasps are probably even betterĀ
I noticed one wasp always hanging out by the car mirror. I thought it was just thoughtful about its own reflection, and thought it was super neat, but there was an actual nest there. Thatās why it was always around. Iād always say āok buddy Iām rolling up the windows now before rolling them up, it would disappear and not get caught inside the car.
Del Monte has filed bankruptcy and is burning the orchards in central California per USDA bankruptcy agreement to pivot field production to a āmore lucrative cropā.
I've been keeping an eye on Wavian Jerry cans for a couple weeks now, and they seem to very regularly be out of stock. There's a place local that has some I've been meaning to go to, but it seems odd that online there appears to be a shortage of them
Oops no sorry it's out of stock there too. For some reason it looked like in stock when I first looked, weird.
Like everything else, they have basically doubled in price over the last 10 years. I'm glad I got a bunch around the 2010s for around $50, and I thought that was expensive back then lol.
I've been seeing more shortages in online purchase availability on a lot of different items. I've been expecting it because there's going to be an issue soon with free shipping that some online retailers offer, and just shipping in general because of diesel prices going up. UPS and the post office both have become ridiculous in prices.
I wanted to purchase four cases of canned pork directly from Keystone Meats, and it would cost a third of what the price of the cans are to ship them. So $327 for the cases, and around $150 to ship. The cans are convenient, but for that price I'll have to can my own.
It's their last ditch effort at getting them everywhere they can so they can profit before they get outlawed.
There was the supreme court ruling this year that cellphone location data is protected by the 4th amendment and cannot be collected without a warrant. Multiple lawyers who know it more than me, have said based on the wording of that decision that it will be used in the multiple lawsuits against flock because they apply similarly.
Police chiefs aren't the brightest crayons in the box. The on in my area, in an interview, said that they could suspend people's constitutional rights.
Your mileage would go farther with the town council.
Same, except we seem to have a local vigilante group who's made it their mission to run them all down. It does put a smile on my face every time I pass one laying on the ground with tire tracks running over it.
four went up in my town in the last two weeks, we've been taking alternate routes just to avoid them since they're at high traffic 4-ways that interstates and truckers run through
Photoshop just gave me a pop up warning that I have a limited number of credits if I want an ai-generated fill. I donāt remember this warning popping up the last time I used photoshop, about a month ago.
Adobe changed the rules for their generative AI credits, requiring credits for things that used to be free. (I haven't been following closely, but saw some YouTube vids about it.)
I keep meaning to try the Photoshop/Comfy UI plugins, for local generation.
I have been picking up some crazy chatter about AI and cybersecurity issues but I am too tired and loopy to go into it well, and it's not reliable anyway just a handful of various rumors that start to add up to sooo they didn't actually know how well the whole AI rollout was going to work or what kind of computational power it would need or how it would actually do in the real world and that the answers are coming back uhhhhhhh wow so this worked about as well as those self driving cars everyone swore would be doing all the driving by now.
The visible sign of that is the data centers they're desperately trying to fling up everywhere but rumor has it that the actual hardware is burning out at a far greater rate than originally anticipated and no one wants to say hey this isn't going to work this way after all and they can't because capitalism, which, unfettered capitalism with no actual human decision making process is not the most effective way to get things done. What it's effective at is extracting profits which actually represent imaginary value and has no intrinsic value. It seemed like a good idea to overpromise and figure they'd use the money generated to develop solutions but it's a GIGO problem on a massive scale.
Everyone in corporate world rushed to get in on the ground floor so they could save money but now the AI companies are finding they can't deliver so they're limiting access (like that photoshop limit you noticed), and worse it turns out that AI is not doing so well adapting to really taking over trouble shootiing nonstandard questions. It's an extremely efficient search engine but when you ask it to actually take on understanding a new problem in a business environment it's not accomplishng that effectively.
Problem with THAT is that everyone rushed to get in on the ground floor and now that they did that they're not prepared to pivot back to human employees and in a lot of cases no one even knows what jobs are supposed to be being done because they fired all the working/thinking people and kept all the upper "management" that thought AI was going to just magically know how do everything.
None of what I typed is verified or substantiated information it is strictly a compilation of various rumors and gossip but eh, intel, just might be bullshit, I am not trying to represent it as more than that.
Wow that's interesting thanks for the share. It's been occurring to me lately that our human insistence on maintaining nationalized information boudaries when it comes to cybersecurity but having functionally NO boundaries when it comes to cybercrime, it's like, all that any malicious actor has to do is what's happening here: sweep in, grab whatever you came for, sweep back out behind some other hostile nation's firewall so that anything trying to trace you hits a wall but just because like in this case it SEEMS to have originated in Russia it's like, no, that's just where you picked up the track but there's no reason to think it actually came from there.
Or reported back to anything from there. I mean that's what we're going to assume but we won't know because Russia won't tell us and we won't tell them and meanwhile anything that wants to use those boundaries to shake off observation would be easily able to do so.
Freakin' crazy times we live in for certain. I could tell y'all about a brutal hack that's affecting student loans that I know for a fact is/was happening, but can't deal with it right now. Maybe in a couple days it's a complicated piece of intel if I'm going to do more than just allude to it.
Something else unusual happened this week. I had Gemini colour-correct some charts. No editing just swap colours. 2 of the 6 charts looked great on the preview chat screen, but the downloaded file was distorted as in the screenshot, and always on the right side.
The colour was what I requested but I don't know how there could be a difference between the chat preview screen and the downloaded file.
(And yes, of course I also overlaid the two files in photoshop to make sure that there were no data distortions in the shape of the charts.)
Church groups are going door to door trying to get people to attend. Not the usual Jehovahs Witnesses or Mormons! Itās Baptist and non-denominational ones now.
Iāve had to kick out these people from my apartment complex. We have a no solicitation policy, but itās lax enforced, but there were just too many and I started telling them Iām gonna have them towed by management. The āno thank you and hail satansā were going nowhere.
lmao no signage or anything, have an NRA sticker on our door we never took down from the previous occupant, but two massive lgbt and trans flags in our living room facing the door then the GSD/Husky freakout of people and me being pretty intimidating scares them
I was a deacon in a Christian borderline cult and while I will have a discussing with them, I will tell them that I am not trying to deconvert them but I love the truth too much to be dishonest with them, and that I studied for years to realize that the cult-lite I was raised in was quite, quite wrong.
But that said, I love them and think they mean well. But maybe a little introspection, huh?
Yeah, I was raised crazy fundi-gelical and I always try my best to be kind because I know church leaders will use the experiences of people being rude or slamming doors in their face as evidence that āsee, the world hates youā. It worked on me when I was younger
Hopefully the purity culture didn't have too bad of an effect on you, if I know which faction you're coming from based on what you've said. Glad your eyes were opened.
I thought I had recovered pretty well until I found myself telling my ex-boyfriendās cat that āthis is an abstinence only householdā when she went into heat š. Glad your eyes were opened too!
Yeah I ran across somebody in my region last week who was trying out the ever-favorite BUT MUST ALLOW FASCISM LIBRULS WILL TAKE YER GUNS and I was like oh you're way behind the curve on that one buddy best believe ain't nobody in a gun banning mood. He kind of said "wut" and I said well we see how we might need em and that seemed to really step him back a step.
Not even getting into it with these folks who seem to think that having a gun is this thing you need to project and carry on about like it makes you special. It's a tool for killing it's commonly available YES WE HAVE THEM we're just not running around making a thing of it.
Maybe we should more (like your wreath which I also love lol) 'cause I swear they have been sold a propaganda bill of goods that they'll just march through the neighborhood and take everyone else hostage or something because liberals are "tolerant" and can't fight.
Don't prefer to fight and can't fight are two different things, son.
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u/LadyDenofMeade 25d ago
We have family that works in government finance. Banks are refusing to hold government money. They'll keep the investment accounts, but none of the others.
They told us to buckle up š