They also went north to Canada in the Calgary region.

Many of the early Mormon leaders fled to Canada and Mexico during the early 1900’s to avoid being arrested for bigamy and rape.

Gently shaking the grinder while pushing down on the button?

Changes the grind time from 20 seconds according to the directions to 3-4 seconds.

My poor neighborhood coyote passed away (old age we think). Now I have cats roaming around my neighborhood again. I hope a new coyote moves in soon. The cats are annoying.

I might have missed it but did nobody mention Raki?

Anise seed flavored…gag…

“Teacher numbers are falling”

Teacher’s leave because of lack of pay and a bad working environments. Then schools decided to save money by not backfilling the position.

“provisions and resources seem to be”

cutting teacher resources = more money out of pocket for most teachers for their students. Another reason teacher numbers are falling.

“widespread delinquent behaviour has been reported to be on the rise,”

When parents lose hope and are struggling to survive what’s the point of pushing education? When a teacher loses parental support, student behavior is one of the first things to get bad.

"and it seems like they’re refusing more and more to enforce the rules on such behaviour, but if you turn up with the wrong haircut or wearing trainers, all hell breaks loose. "

Admin and teachers are at a loss on how to reverse the student behavior trend. Without widespread parental support their hands are tied. So they find often focus on “coming down hard” on negative external trends they can identify, the so-called “gang-related” activities.

Been decades since I quit a job. When I was first starting out I quit a job every year or so for pay raises etc. I ran through like 5 jobs in 6 years.

Then I started to get somewhere professionally and layoffs became more normal. I have been laid off 3 times over the past 20 years.

First time because my new boss was making a run for CEO and I knew all his dirty laundry. So I got laid off with a massive severance package that gave me most of a year vacation + benefits. The NDA that came with it was hilarious given that they were illegal in the location. The in-house lawyer was my lunch buddy for years and had a bit of fun with it.

Second time a new CEO decided to do a massive reorganization to “improve efficiency.” The company started hemorrhaging money immediately and I was on the first wave of layoffs with most of the rest of my department. It didn’t help that a year before in an all company meeting my boss decided to call me out for my lack of enthusiasm in front of everyone. Since he pressed after I suggested it was not a good idea to ask and he would regret it, I told him the strategic error of the major decision he had just announced in a short concise argument. He was not amused, but he couldn’t do anything then because he had pressed me for my opinion. Needless to say, I was on the short list for layoffs after the company got totally fucked over by his decisions.

The last one was a panic when a massive recession hit their industry (totally predictable). They laid me off and essentially handed me my own fully established business. 2 weeks later my company was legal and I had a sit down meeting with them to discuss their “inventory issue”. Aka I cut a deal burn through their inventory so they wouldn’t firesale it and dump it on my customers. They essentially paid for my startup costs then bailed when I was just starting to make money. I still have a bit of a soft spot for them and their extremely well-timed stupidity.

It’s not that much when you consider the same production in the open field environment would take 10x the land area.

I have been in a bunch of those greenhouses. It looks almost like snow when you get up on the hills.

BULLSHIT!

That about sums up that article.

Determining causation is often stymied by little things like ethics. This is where correlation becomes the “best guess” to avoid ethical quagmires.

For example much of our medical science often starts out based upon correlation studies. Eventually indirect evidence can be used to confirm partial causation.

He’s noodling for a catfish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noodling

My wife and I are looking at retiring to Mexico. My wife has dual citizenship. It looks like I can get permanent residency relatively easily through a couple of options.

The healthcare is steadily improving and still within a quick flight to the U.S. if needed for a specialist. It’s also a lot cheaper than the U.S.

The food, it’s Mexico. It’s amazing.

And stole a red stapler.

The mechanisms by which civilizations grow, stagnate, collapse and recover have fascinated people since at least the ancient Greek philosophers.

Civilizations initially grow because they make life better for the average citizen. Cooperation leads to more reliable food and more babies survive to make more babies.

After some time some stressors on the civilization lead to widespread conflict. Historically this have been linked mostly to famine and plagues. Economic instability can also lead to a civilizations segmentation and conflict. The “fall of civilizations” is historically the segmentation of large civilizations into smaller entities as people rally around a local leader who promises them the “right” things.

So what’s happening right now - a shit ton of stressors.

Birth rates are negative in most industrialized nations. This indicates that on a widespread basis, globally people do not feel that they have the resources to raise kids.

Climate change is triggering serious fears of famine. This is why denying the obvious heat increases is so popular. “Oh no, it’s not the hottest and dryest summer on record. Our crops are hunky doey.”

Plagues - Well COVID happened and triggered a lot of widespread fear. That disease is still seen as a curse from the supernatural for most humans instead of a biological inevitability was made crystal clear.

Wars - stealing someone else’s resources looks pretty good when you fear there is not enough resources to go around. “It’s too hot in the U.S. to grow crops, let’s invade Canada and steal Greenland!”

So humans are doing what they have always done when stressed. Look for someone who looks like a “strong leader” who can make things right in their world again.

Please, small penises require an F350 at least. A F450 for a penis so small you need to tie a string to it to find it.

I am self-employed running my own business. Honestly other than about 4 weeks of harder work, I am basically on my own doing whatever I feel like.

When I retire, well I have an idea for another business. I would need to relocate someplace tropical and hire 2 or 3 people to work for me. I doubt it would ever make much money, but it would be fun.

I got curious about the Houthis and found few things interesting.

They control the region where around 80% of the population of yemen lives - about 34 million people.

Saudi Arabia has around 35 million people in the country.

Houthis have around 500,000 active military (plus lots of fighting experience) and another 1 million that they have put through training recently. They also have developed some pretty strong drone and missile capabilities from Iranian assistance. I also suspect Russia has been finding a way to sneak in some tech they have learned in Ukraine to them as well (Wagner group etc).

Saudi has around 250,000 active military mostly reliant on U.S. tech that has taken a severe beating recently from Iran.

If it comes to full out war, the Houthis on paper potentially can beat the shit out of them. This is no small fringe group. Its a small nation.

This sounds impressive, unless you know all the steps to making a successful hybridization in tomatoes.

Step 1: Tomatoes are mostly cleistogamous (self-pollinate before opening) and perfect flowers. So the anthers need to be removed 2 days before bloom. The exposed stigma is usually marked and covered to prevent cross pollination.

Step 2: Pollen is collected from flowers of the “male” parent by vibrating the shit out of them over a test tube about 3hours hours after opening (depending on humidity). The pollen remains viable for a few days after shedding in refrigeration (longer in liquid N).

Step 3: On the 2nd day the pollen is applied to the stigma from the test tube. The pollinated stigmas are marked again.

Step 4+: successful pollinations begin to swell. Plants are pruned/trellised carefully. This ensures they develop well off the ground with less pressure from diseases and pests.

This robot does the first part of step 3. It’s arguably the least time-consuming and easiest part of the entire process. Its sort of interesting but not a time saver.

Also hybrid tomato seed is a huge value market, but it’s not a huge volume in the grand scheme of things on the production side. The COGS is a negligible part of the process. Its a 97-99% gross margin crop last I saw the numbers. The seed companies can easily afford to pay more for the COGS. Higher pay + shorter hours = higher success rate by hand pollination. Paying double for the workers for 1/2 the day and then sending them home has a much higher success rate and is cheaper overall.

Most of the cost of developing new varieties is on the research side. With cost running as high as 30-40% of the annual sales to constantly develop new varieties or add in yet another resistance to a plague.

A few days ago when I was converting an old windows desktop to Linux I hit Google on accident (Firefox default).

On the first page I got 2 traditional search results. They were links to AI slop sites. The entire rest of the page was full of useless crap.

DDG NoAI site seems to help.

I have cheap paperbacks from the 1960’s and 70’s I bought at a second hand bookstore in the 90’s on my shelf.

They are fragile and yellow but still sticking together on my shelves and for when I want to reread them. It helps that I live in a region with low humidity.

Hell I gave a few books I inherited from my great-grandmother from 1910-1920. They were on decent paper but not the best quality.

Most of my cookbooks are 40-50 years old now and they are pretty beat up but still in reasonable condition.