I never understand why someone would feel offended by something like this. I doubt many people are riding public transit to make new friends. Most seem to want to be ignored there.

I’m of bear-like physique and I assume to a lone woman on a train car that has no clue who I am, potentially intimidating. Likely, I’d expect neither of us would pay each other much mind. If she decided to get up and move to an empty car, it probably still wouldn’t dawn on me right away why she moved, as I’m minding my own business. If I did realize, why should I be offended though? If anything, it’s a good strategic move on her part. She’s not there to get to know me, and she’s darned well not there to potentially get to know me in a negative way, no matter how slim the chance of that could be.

Should they require separate cars? Of course not. But I don’t see how it could be seen as ant-man. If your first thought is to be seriously angry at someone for not trusting a stranger, to me, that pretty much proves them right.

Fun free and quick unique thing at the airport to have fun with while you’re already there:

When you are at the airport in Terminal C. There are two places where four walkways cross. I guess the architects thought it would be fun if they created an echo chamber. So if you stop in the dead center and speak it echoes and scares everyone around you. It’s a lot of fun so try it when you are passing through the airport. They are located near C14 and C45. If you don’t know they are there, you will walk right past them.

Open: As long as the airport is open. Location: Intersection near gates C14 and C45

I wouldn’t put money on it myself. I don’t say it as an insult even, it just has such little to do with daily life here that any knowledge they did have quickly falls into the “lose it” of “use it or lose it” memory.

I won the school geography tournament twice and watch lots of history documentaries and even I struggle to remember countries that came into being after the mid 90s when I finished highschool.

But my point wasn’t to bring up how ignorant people here are, just that we have not in any type of recent history ever prioritized Europe in any way that is very beneficial to Europeans. If it is something we consider to not impact us, I don’t think many worry about it.

We’re at a place where a third of us want to be good global citizens, a third want to burn everything down, and a third just want cheaper goods and services, and this time around that last third felt the arsonists were going to give them that enough to elect them.

Thank you for the article. It really feels like the future is unpredictable right now. It feels like it’s come out of nowhere, yet this has also been the endgame of a large group of people that have worked on this for decades.

As a modestly educated American, I understand it would be tone deaf to tell you what you should do in this thread, so I will just give you a first hand account of what it is like here.

1 - As an American, I no longer trust America to keep me safe. This goes doubly true as a liberal and as someone whose best friends are LGBT.

2 - The proposed Republican agenda includes dismantling our education system and rebuilding it as more ethnocentric. I can confidently state that already, probably half my fellow citizens could not point out any continental EU country, possibly besides Italy since it is on half the pizza boxes. If people here can’t even point out France or Germany on a map, how much do you think they really care about you?

Treating us as anything you can rely on with any certainty right now seems insane to me. If you think we’ll be anything more than someone that only bothers to call you when they want something from you but then is always too busy when you need something from them, then you are going to be in for a bad time.

If anything, the sane ones here may even need to rely on you again In the near future, depending on how bad things actually get.

I usually see if I can get it from Amazon since we already have Prime. Rock Auto is typically cheaper on the actual part price, but the shipping almost always puts it over Amazon’s price for me. I use Rock Auto to confirm part numbers though, as it’s easier to see a big list of them than the Amazon page giant results mixed in with their “recommendations.”

Even the smallest owls have to stay fierce!

It was hard to post today, but I told myself that I still wanted to try to give you guys what I could, so I put up some of the best I had in my stash of posts.

I try to keep politics out of it, but as I focus on habitat preservation and animal protections, it’s hard to stay totally out of it.

I do have stuff ready to start Owl of the Year. I was going to do a preliminary round this week, but I’m going to let people deal with their emotions for a couple days, I think.

To anyone feeling nervous by the results, know I care about of all you guys, and most of the people I love are potentially affected as well. Anyone who cares about nature is always welcome to come and enjoy the owls with me.

Different job, but same scenario. I hook things up to a machine, run it an hour, swap the next units in, repeat until done. Sometimes there’s other stuff to do, but the basic job is mostly waiting.

Somewhere between suburban and rural Pennsylvania here. I think it was about 2 hours the time voted for Obama’s second term. Another presidential election was about an hour. Presidental elections have lines outside of work hours because nobody gets off to vote. Non-presidential elections are a few minutes to maybe a half hour tops.

I’m so glad they didn’t get rid of early voting after COVID, but I wish the drop boxes were around for more than a few hours on 2 weekends. I like dropping it off rather than trusting the mail, but they’re only open 8-5 on weekdays and 10-2 on the last 2 weekends.

Intensity is a good word to describe that element. I feel the show is willing to bump off characters, but 2 of the leads have survived too many close calls and it lowers the stakes a good bit.

The individual that showed up with the surprise faction really threw a wrench into things that I enjoyed though!

I don’t recall how I heard about For All Mankind, and I never see it mentioned very much, but I have had such a great time watching that.

It’s an alternate history of the space race from the 60s onward, and it’s so exciting to watch what could have been. Each season jumps forward a decade, so the advances in missions and tech keep leaping forward.

If you grew up thinking we should be pioneering space by now, you will probably enjoy it.

With as much Russian Kool-aid America has drank at this point, I feel the country as a whole is still doing a lot to help Ukraine. I can get behind a plan for The West to take a more active role, but I would rather see that be lead by NATO or a European coalition that having the US go in with guns blazing. I don’t feel any county, including Russia, as far as the actual citizens at least, will benefit from a Russian success. With so many parties that should be concerned with the outcome, I’d rather see the US remain in a supporting role to put to bed any accusations of this being some kind of colonialism.

While this is somewhat of a bad take IMO, I looked up this guy and while he is a Republican, he has been steadfast in his support for Ukraine, and even has a very based official website discussing what aid is going to Ukraine, and as part of his committee duties has worked to come up with planning to ensure Ukraine does not give in to Russia and insists the US should increase aid to Ukraine.

From the Proposed Plan for Victory in Ukraine:

Ukraine needs the longest-range variant of ATACMS, F-16s, and sufficient quantities of cluster munitions, artillery, air defenses, and armor to make a difference on the battlefield. … A path to victory for Ukraine will require (1) providing critical weapons to Ukraine at the speed of relevance, (2) tightening sanctions on the Putin regime, and (3) transferring [$300 billion of] frozen Russian sovereign assets to Ukraine.

This strategy will ensure Ukraine is able to make the needed advances on the battlefield to force Putin to the negotiating table. If Ukraine doesn’t negotiate from a position of strength, there can be no lasting peace.

Russian forces have committed countless war crimes in Ukraine, including executions, torture, and rape. Russia has also kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children and sent them to so-called re-education camps in Russia and occupied Ukraine. Those responsible for these crimes must face justice. If Russia is able to conquer more of Ukraine, millions more innocent civilians will be subject to a similarly horrific fate.

The rest of the document is biased Republican garbage, bashing Biden and other rhetoric, but it is a plus to see there are at least some Republicans (2 others worked with Turner on the Plan for Victory) supporting Ukraine, despite some questionable motivation. This gives me a little bit of hopefulness that if Congress doesn’t remain under Democratic leadership that Ukraine may still manage to keep getting support.

Again, I’m not going to cheer for this guy, but I will give some credit where it’s due that he isn’t following the MAGA crowd in trying to drop support to Ukraine and allow Russia to get away with things. I don’t think the US actively escalating things is going to benefit anyone, but continued supply and support efforts still seem very crucial.

It’s funny, as I typically do not like attention, especially from strangers.

I do like researching and teaching people things though, so it is really fun to hear people say “wow, I never knew this was that interesting” or when they ask me questions I don’t know the answers to and I end up reading about something I never thought to look into. I got asked some especially good questions this week, and it was a lot of fun coming up with good answers to share, so we all got a little smarter together. Fun stuff!

Lol I ask myself this all the time!

Just hit 3200 this week, and I get maybe 1-2 posts a month not from me. I get so excited when someone else does one!

I only started posting daily because I really love what I share, so I’d be sourcing all the stuff just for me. If you’re doing this as a job, you’re going to burn out. I try to post 3 or 4 things a day and have a week or 2 of posts built up in a drafts folder for slow news days or days where I feel like crap and I can keep it going. That’s a labor of love though. If it’s something I wasn’t all in on, it would suck to do all that work for free.

Check out the !fedigrow@lemm.ee community if you want to discuss the growing pains here. It’s mainly us crazy dedicated few talking about growing our communities.

Very interesting. There seems to be a lot of rules, but they all at least make good sense and look after the birds.

What do you do with what they catch? Is it mainly rodent and birds, or do they catch stuff like rabbits or squirrels that people eat?

I’ll share a comment I left on another post a few weeks ago because I think the message is important. It’s my own story of how people can change, and also comments from someone more directly in the eyes of current extremist supporters. I got a few downvotes for being naive or overly sympathetic in some opinions, but I still stand by my opinions.

Will I be skeptical of conservatives after this election? Of course, since I was well before the MAGA era. Will there be some people I never associate with again? Of course, since some really revealed themselves to be bad people. But most really just seem ill informed or unable to relate to things beyond their own spheres of influence. But just as people were mutable to become this way, they can get out of being this way. It’s up to each person though to determine what level of effort they’re willing to put into it though.

If things get worse after the election, I may harden my stance, but I’m still hopeful for now. Most of my loved ones though are liberals and gay people though, and when push comes to shove, they will always win out with me. I won’t condone hateful behavior and people can get lost as long as they’re going to do things to spread that crap, but if they decide to be receptive and compassionate again, they need people that will be there to receive them back to normalcy.

Margaret Killjoy was recently talking on one podcast about mutual aid during the recent hurricanes. She was talking about how her neighbors probably have starkly opposite views as she does as a trans anarchist, but she believed that in a situation like this where it could mean life or death, that they would be able to set differences aside and work together for their mutual benefit.

She also went on to say that she didn’t hate them and wish them any harm, she just wished that they would stop holding on to hateful and hurtful beliefs.

Most of my family and my girlfriend’s families support just about all of this MAGA crap, but I don’t know if I could call a single one of them a bad person. Some of them treat me differently in what I feel are very obvious ways, but I don’t believe any of them would let me suffer on purpose. They all seem to not have problems sympathizing with people or situations they are personally familiar with, but with concepts that they are unfamiliar with, they can find them unimportant, and develop bad takes on those things.

As my family is almost all conservative, I was raised that way, and until my later 20s, I had a lot of the same beliefs. As I met more people, learned more things, and developed opinions of my own, I am now mostly the opposite person I was. I can see how wrong I was about just about everything.

I feel it’s ok to hate the beliefs, and dissociate with people while they hold those beliefs, and especially while they act on those beliefs, which includes giving power to those pushing those values on others. I don’t think we should turn our backs totally to them as people though, if that makes sense. If they were hurt, I would still help them. If they needed something, I would help them to get it. If they want me to meet them somewhere in the middle ideologically, most likely not. But it’s part of my humanity to not leave someone to suffer just because they’ve got some dumbass beliefs.

You have every right to associate or not with whomever you wish. You can believe the opposite of people and think they are wrong for what they believe. But I think most people are inherently good. Some make it much harder to keep that belief, but I don’t think many are lost causes or irredeemable.

Can you actually buy raptors? I was under the impression they were all caught wild, and then had to be released after a certain time period.

I did see though when I looked up “wild take” that means removing pre-fledged birds from the nest. They can’t be sold though.

The state regulations I pulled up said out of state birds could be brought in, but not released. Do people just import birds from other countries with poor rules?

Summit is a wonderful app, and the dev is super helpful. Can’t recommend Summit enough.

It isn’t perfect, and there are a number of reasons content can leave. I know a few of my favorite channels have had issues dealing with content getting pulled due to things like it having certain World War 2 imagery in historical context, or analysis of music theory of modern songs for having too many seconds of copyright music. People can also delete their accounts and things will disappear. Some is also just plain pirated content.

But for how much content there is on YouTube, the vast majority stays there, at least compared to more traditional media. Many things I’ve been watching lately have been over a decade old. It really helps in repairing older things for finding lessons on things that haven’t changed much in recent years.

As for privacy, we’re all at least moderately tech savvy people here. We know we’re dealing with an advertising company here and what that entails. That doesn’t thrill me, but that’s the deal to get the content. Google does make at least some data available to view and delete, so that’s still a bit better than most places tracking us.

While there is room for improvement, I still feel it beats most everything else legitimate on cost vs what you get.