Hilariously I thought it was nuns at first glance

Just some good ol Fediverse fun. Don’t forget there was also that period of retro meme templates, and everyone was posting like peak circa 2009 memes

Maybe I’m just projecting here (I almost definitely am) but if you grow up pushing your peers away as a defence mechanism, it becomes very easy to keep doing that as an adult, especially if you didn’t realize that you were doing it to begin with.

Its a hard path once you’ve realized this and want to improve it about yourself, but its a very rewarding path to take. I wish you luck on this new journey that you’re undertaking!

But if not drinking cocktail why cocktail shaped and named?

Could be 10 people making 50k a year in a shed with a couple of managers making more. Whether that’s a just a warehouse or actually making widgets or some such that’s easily a profitable business with a million or so in revenue. Or just a small shop with a handful of minimum wage employees. Maybe an office cleaning service? Some business models can be perfectly stable with a million or so per year in revenue

You ever do something and realize you actually kinda enjoy it? I have a feeling that’s the case. He was probably already an avid hiker when he started too since that’s a crazy bet to take on without any real prep

So it’s honestly something I’ve been noodling about for a while, which is how to manage a soft landing from the current capitalist system given the overall trend of population decline and how capitalism as it’s currently structured can’t handle a sustained decline like we’ll eventually be looking at.

The best vision I can come up with (and this is US-centric since it’s what I know best of course) is to first expand Medicare to all, next expand SNAP/Foodstamps benefits to all, then expand the housing assistance programs to all. Somewhere in there a universal pension and later on a universal income. This would decouple working class folks’ everyday and long-term needs from the wider economy. Basically eliminate the micro-economy so that the macroeconomy can do whatever it will do without too much pain for everyday people

Its a reference to a viral post from reddit

Something something not all boomers. There’s selfish rich people in every age group. In the case of Boomers they happened to be born at the same time as a ton of other people, so they became the most influencial voting block (and later the wealthiest voting block because of the political influence) but of course many boomers are absolutely struggling financially, getting screwed over by the same ladder pulling that younger folks are getting screwed over them

With the projected population decline, the inflationary effects of creating money in order to pay pensions could actually be beneficial

The cat would get upset if not left a chair to sit at during family gatherings, so at one the cat took over a relative’s seat and was unhappy there was food left there

That too! I honestly enjoyed all 6 of the Curious George movies! The Molly from Denali movie was pretty cool too (at one point the mom who flies a small plane professionally has to explain that she isn’t qualified to fly the helicopter into the blizzard to save a friend who’s trapped on the mountain!)

Oh yeah I’ve put some mice out of their misery after getting mortally maimed by my cats.

But I’m thankful that the worst police encounter I’ve had was some idiot officer investigating my house because I have playground equipment in my yard and they found a nonverbal toddler unaccompanied across town (smallish town) so therefore I must be connected in some way because I’m clearly a parent? Idk what their thought process was but when the town’s elementary school has about 300 students (I did a rough count at the last event they ran out of curiosity), spending an hour investigating the first parent you see seems like a very inefficient use of police resources

Does ACAB include former-detective Monk and Shawn Spencer?

Seriously if anyone has kids, have them watch some of the shows on PBS Kids. Most are far less annoying than the slop Disney’s been producing for the 2-6 age group, and all are far more educational.

Like, Daniel tiger is annoying but at least teaches good stuff (I’ve literally referenced it while teaching my kids something to help reinforce), but there’s some really good shows on there like Molly from Denali, Alma’s Way, Hero Elementary, Wild Krats, and Carl the Collector. Better paced, better animation and a million times better writing, plus they all happen to be shows from different human perspectives than just a random talking mouse or talking dog teaching a corporate-approved malaise

The entire show is written so lazily it’s just another form of slop. I have a paw patrol book we got at a garage sale where one windmill at a windmill farm stops spinning because one of the blades broke causing a power outage, so they use a surf board as a replacement blade and the day is saved. Literally not how any of this works and they could’ve spent 5 minutes researching windmills and made an actually educational story but instead they went for slop.

Y’know how they could’ve written it to be more educational? Maybe one of the windmills had a motor issue and the power flickered due to the frequency being off, so they first go to the substation and switch off the power flow from the wind farm to just pull in from other sources, then they repair the windmill motor then restore the connection from the wind farm. Its still lazy, it doesn’t teach much but it at least doesn’t teach kids that if they see a stopped windmill to panic that there will be a power outage.

There’s also literally an episode where the paw patrol gang influences an election. The villain was set to win the local election so the paw patrol gang goes into an advertising blitz to drown out the bad guy’s underdog (hehe) campaign but it’s all okay because the Right Person won the election! I saw this one while my kids were spending time with their trump voting grandparents

Every time my daughter asks for Paw Patrol I say “nope we’re not watching copaganda” and I look forward to whenever she repeats that to people. When the kids are older I’ll probably explain to them about slop vs quality shows. Like, I’ve learned things from the kids watching Curious George, like what should and shouldn’t go into compost bin or to just use a pair of pliers when driving a nail so you don’t risk hitting your fingers. I want my kids watching shows that actually help them understand the real world, not just slop that’s made to mesmerize them with pretty colors and catchy lines then turns around to sell them a line of merch

Idk you should see how they treat any mice they get their paws on…

Funny thing is, big tiddy goth girlfriends sometimes turn into big titty wives who make your wardrobe look dark and colorless in comparison! I should know I married one!

Its an interesting prospect, but realistically it would be comparable to eating wild boar and maybe comparable to wild fish?

Livestock populations that are bred and raised for human consumption are heavily monitored for health while they’re alive, mostly by the farmer and companies they contract with (and the USDA and Farm Bureau has some involvement in the farms overall production process), and at the meat processing facilities the USDA (and CFIA in Canada) are heavily involved with actual staff on site every day monitoring the health and safety and with the power to stop production if they observe a single thing out of place that poses a danger to food safety. Plants don’t want to have production stopped so they will invest heavily in mechanical and workforce resources to maintain an acceptable standard of cleanliness and limit the potential for contamination. We’ve really already got a pretty dang solid understanding of the risks and tolerances in our existing food chain of beef, pork, poultry and fish.

Wild animals need to be tested for disease before they can be safe for consumption. Deer hunters know this all too well, especially during Chronic Wasting Disease and similar outbreaks. We also don’t have the industrial scale apperatus yet for processing felines for human consumption. I’m sure small butchers can work with the meat since they rely on humans rather than machines and assembly lines, but it would also take time to ramp up demand. Of course the real challenge is trapping thousands of feral cats per day for human consumption. With cattle you know where the herd is, you can load 30 head onto a truck in just a few minutes (assuming none of the cattle get crafty and escape) and be off.

At a scale of thousands or tens of thousands per day (and this is a really small number in the scope of meat production just in the US. The company I work for has individual meat processing plants as clients that kill tens and hundreds of thousands of cattle per day!), you’re looking at farming cats, not just culling feral populations. So ultimately you’re trading farming one animal that’s been selectively bred for centuries to be the perfect meat source to another that’s been selectively bred for centuries to be good companions and good vermine catchers

Is it even meat we’d want to eat though?

Also the easier solution is more TNR and more education and resources to help prevent dumping unwanted cats.

I worked with a shelter for a bit which specialized in feral cat populations. They would work with local landowners and municipalities to trap feral cats and engage in both TNR and they would separate out friendly cats to adopt out. They also worked with a local community college’s vet program to run an annual spayathon, with low cost spay/neutering services available, giving veterinary students valueble experience and helping reduce cat populations.

With enough funding such projects can be successful, but its ultimately a numbers game since one mother can have a litter of 5+ kittens every year, and those 5 kittens can have litters the next year and so on, so it takes a lot of hands on work trapping, spaying/neutering and releasing and maintaining that progress indefinitely to make a dent in the local popupation. There’s always going to be a few cats you never catch who keep the population going, so you have to limit their impact on the overall population