I hate killing plants, even when I know it's necessary. I had a maple sapling growing in my yard too close to my little rowhome; wrong tree, wrong location. I dug it up.
I put it in a pot. Help. What do I do now? Anyone want a baby maple?
Financial constraints to living & working in Washington, D.C. likely define & reinforce the community of people able to stay long enough to achieve senior positions, leading to a policy-making community distinct from the American public.
So what? "Misperceptions & blind spots among decision makers may occur, in part, because their lived experiences primarily reflect those from communities with the resources required to maintain influential roles."
@Sheril Looking forward to reading this later on. It's definitely true that I could not, as a fresh MPA with no family money or support, have gone to DC to pursue my career – and my program was so DC-centric. And when I got there, the lower level staffers were all out of central casting, for sure. Found considerably more (but nowhere near enough) diversity in the NYS legislative staff than I saw in Congress.
How can I, as an adult American, get better at geography?
Today @berz schooled me when I wanted to discuss genocide in Tigray, but I guessed incorrectly the country it took place in (Ethiopia). Yes, I have difficulty distinguishing countries in Africa, and no, I'm not proud of it.
@skyfaller I have similar problems, not even just with Africa but with much of South America and eastern Europe – primarily because I have no interactions with them, so holding those map spaces in my head is nothing but an abstraction, and the abstraction goes away when I stop thinking about it. But that's true of many things.
Unpopular opinion here. Yes, meteorologists only get it right about 60 percent of the time when it comes to Nor'Easters. However, in their defense, they are usually incredibly hard to forecast for the I95 corridor. Temperature differences, the jet stream, etc, make it tough to call the storms more than three days ahead unless they are true monsters.
That said, I think science should 'catch up' to the impact of global warming. They're still working off average temperatures from decades ago.
@dancinyogi The challenge with modeling the weather is that the reactions have changed – so the same inputs don't produce the same outputs, which confounds modeling. I was recently involved in an argument over whether to use the past 30 years of data, which actually eliminates a lot of more severe events, or 50 years, which captures some extremes from the '70s that we've forgotten about.
@skyfaller@vfrmedia Useful to know about! Wasn't aware of WPM. I currently only have three typewriters – two operate, one I've been carrying around for more than 40 years with the thought that someday I would restore it, but probably I won't.
@StanWonn@GayOldTime Oh yeah I get that, and I know games cost about that much, it just felt like for a screensaver it was a LOT. My first Mac in 1995 was $4K, and we waited a year to buy the printer because that was another $1000.
I've been thinking back to that vulnerable age of 11 and 12. Before I pushed myself to join the dance team, I was shy. For those 2 years, I'd take home the list of extracurricular clubs to join. Yearbook? Too many popular kids. Debate? Too many smart kids. FBLA? Too many popular AND smart kids. Geeky Stacy would never fit in, so she joined nothing. But then, I joined the dance team. Despite that, I was still geeky Stacy inside, though (still am!)
@dancinyogi It's interesting because I don't think we had any of those options in junior high (now called middle school). I turned 12 after 7th grade started. Sports and orchestra/band; I don't think there were any after-school clubs until high school.
@dancinyogi It'll probably be the last one, but I've driven exclusively stick since 1985. Greater Philly now, but most of those years were upstate NY, where a little extra control in the snow was not a bad thing.