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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • fireweed@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzBlood Meal
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    2 months ago

    There are vegan blood meal alternatives out there to resolve this exact conundrum.

    But the reality is, unless your plants are being grown hydroponically in a sealed warehouse or similar, chances are real good that they are feeding on decaying animals (either directly or indirectly) whether you like it or not. They’re mostly insects and annelids and such, but still animals.

    I think the issue for vegans is more about whether animal slaughter was involved in making their fertilizer. Dead pillbugs in the soil is just nature doing its cycle of life thing.




  • fireweed@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzCentipedes Don't Fuck
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    3 months ago

    Sooo are centipedes like fruit flies and not engage in any real form of sexual selection, or is the female going around judging the fuck out of every jizz pile she encounters?

    “Mmm-mm, look at that poor viscosity, obviously from a low-quality male. This one on the other hand: deep color, firm texture, nice and sticky… clearly produced by a male with the superior genes I want to pass along to my offspring.”



  • fireweed@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzCats
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    3 months ago

    Obligatory “wet food is much better for cats if for no other reason than the moisture content”

    Cats are apparently one of those species that’s used to getting most of their fluids via their prey, and can be bad at drinking enough water when fed a dry food diet (in my experience this is highly dependent on the individual cat: some are “picky drinkers”).


  • This appears to be a case of “best practices” that’s perhaps so good it’s excessive when put together. I’ll try to explain as succinctly as I can.

    As you can see in these two examples, having the pedestrian crosswalk to a bus stop raised where it crosses the bike lane is a standard design. The floating bus island reduces bus-bike conflict and speeds up bus time by removing the need to merge in and out of the travel lane. Meanwhile it also preserves the protected bike lane and, depending on design, gives folks waiting for the bus a nice space not immediately next to automotive traffic to sit/stand. However this design introduces potential pedestrian-bike conflict, especially in urban contexts where road space is cramped, visibility is poor, and/or people exiting the bus or moving from the sidewalk to the bus island do not have a lot of space and may unexpectedly (from the perspective of bike riders) enter the bike lane. Rushing to catch a bus that’s about to depart especially can cause people to have blinders and suddenly enter into the bike lane without looking because they’re too focused on the bus. For accessibility reasons it’s best to have the path across the bike lane raised to sidewalk level but only for the duration of the crossing (otherwise you end up with people walking or even standing around waiting in the bike lane).

    Finally there’s the fragile political alignment of people on foot and people on bicycles; these two groups should be allies in the fight against car dominance but our road and even recreational systems have often pitted the two against each other: it’s very common to hear pedestrians especially complain about near-misses with bicycles, particularly on shared paths (“I was walking my dog and this speeding cyclist appeared out of nowhere and almost ran us over!” “I was riding my bike and this inattentive pedestrian’s dog abruptly jumped into my path and I had to swerve to avoid them both!”). Reducing conflict between these two groups of road users to keep them allied is critical for political reasons in many places, and this means slowing cycling speed near the conflict zone (via the speed bump) while also keeping the conflict zone reduced to just one or maybe two specific crossing areas (indicated by the elevated crossing).

    All the above seems like overkill in the example cited above because these “best practices” were designed for cramped urban environments, such as major automotive corridors with multiple lanes through city centers that recently had a lane or two converted to bike/bus/ped infrastructure via a major “road diet” or bus enhancement project. But here there’s a huge bus island, an extra wide bike lane (because it’s for two-way use), great visibility, the waiting area is on the bus island rather than the sidewalk, etc. so while these best practices probably are still effective, they aren’t as necessary for reducing bike-ped conflict as in other contexts. As to why there’s no speed bump in the automotive lanes, the bus island itself may provide sufficient traffic calming by breaking up the monotony of the roadway, and most importantly, a speed bump would greatly reduce comfort of bus riders. Speed bumps are not meant as “punishment” to one form of transportation or another; they’re a tool that’s only rolled out to solve a specific issue.

    I hope this helps explain why this spot is designed as it is, and why this is a poor example of “unfair” road design.



  • There’s a huge difference between losing your temper when controlling a digital go-kart versus a real-life one-ton vehicle.

    It’s a good first step that you recognize this is a problem, but it needs to be followed up with actions you can take when it occurs. In the case of driving, if your impulse is to follow the driver who pissed you off, you need to get off the road at the very first safe opportunity (a side street, a freeway exit, a parking lot, whatever) to give yourself a chance to cool down and both mentally and physically distance yourself from the situation. It doesn’t matter how much of a jerk the other party is (again, unless they are actively putting people in danger, in which case you should be pulling over to call emergency services); when you’re on the road the only thing you should be concerned with is your own behavior. There is zero justification for escalation; you are not teaching the other person a lesson, you are putting people’s lives at risk over a minor slight.

    I used to work in transportation and you wouldn’t believe the horror stories. Please don’t underestimate how quicky and easily road rage situations can turn ugly; it’s never worth it.



  • This response is literally road rage. (Given the discussion about literally vs figuratively elsewhere in the thread, I genuinely mean literally).

    Road rage is dangerous for you, the other driver, and other bystanders on the road. Please reassess how you respond to perceived aggressions and slights while driving. The only time you should escalate is if another road user is actively putting others in harm’s way (e.g. DUI) and even then the best course of action is probably calling your local authorities for them to handle the situation. If the situation is not severe enough to warrant a 911 call, your focus should be on de-escalation (before it turns into a situation that is).



  • Once upon a time you could entice youngsters to the countryside with promises of low cost of living, but then rural housing got super fucking expensive super fucking fast during the covid years. Like sure, maybe rural housing is still cheaper than suburban/urban housing (although this is HIGHLY location-specific), but gone are the days where you could buy a pretty nice house (or an iffy house on a sizable chunk of land) for less than the down payment on a house in a “desirable” area. You might be able to convince a middle-class 30- or 40-something American to live in the middle of nowhere in exchange for a good house they’re able to pay for in cash with change to spare (and with it the opportunity to retire a decade or so early). But once rural housing started needing mortgages to afford and buyers still had to deal with crap like bidding wars and sparse inventory, where’s the draw? At least in my state (Washington) rural housing inventory is finally going up and prices are starting to come down (although monthly payments are still at near-record highs if you need a mortgage), but it’s going to either be many years of incremental decline or a very sharp, very painful crash to return rural housing affordability to how it was.



  • Perpetual growth in a finite system is impossible, and anything that relies on perpetual growth to function is doomed to eventually fail.

    For instance: social services that rely on perpetual population growth (especially youth population; e.g. Japan/South Korea), companies that rely on perpetual increase in users (most publicly-owned companies; e g. basically every social media company ATM), industries that rely on perpetual advancements in technology (e.g. industrialized agriculture, which constantly needs new ways to fight self-induced problems like soil depletion and erosion), housing as wealth generation (to be a wealth generator it has to outpace inflation, but at a certain point no one will be able to afford to purchase houses at their inflated prices no matter how over-leveraged they get; e.g. Canada). [Note that these are merely examples where these issues are currently coming to a head; they are by no means special cases, they’re just in a more advanced state of “finding out.”]

    In other words, a lot of the modern world, in both public and private sectors, is built around a series of ponzi schemes.